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The Mobile Patent Wars: Are We Ready for This to Go Thermonuclear?

Dan Rowinski — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:30:00 -0800

Everybody is armed, forces are deployed and the battleground is chosen. Let's get this thermonuclear war started.

2011 was the year that the major mobile platform providers loaded up with ammunition in the upcoming world war between Apple, Microsoft, Research In Motion and Google. Apple acquired patents from Novell while the "Rock Star" group of RIM, Microsoft and Apple won the majority of Nortel's patents. Google went big and bought everything that Motorola owned. We know all of this already. But, that was just the staging area. The real test will be in 2012. On Monday, the United States Department of Justice approved all of those acquisitions in one fell swoop.

Steve Jobs promised to go "thermonuclear" on Android over patent violations. That seems to be a dying wish that Apple is willing to pursue. Now that the big guns are out, what will be the consequence to the mobile ecosystem? Will the arms race force a détente, powerful patent portfolios canceling each other out? Or is this the beginning of disruptive lawsuits that ultimately becomes harmful to consumers looking for choice?

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Where the Guns are Pointed

We are going to try to make this as simple as possible. If you want the real grit on patent lawsuits, check out our coverage here or check on various patent issues.

For the first few rounds of patent battles, Microsoft and Apple fought a proxy war with Android and Google by bringing patent lawsuits against Android OEMs like Samsung, HTC and Motorola. The only company coming directly after Google over mobile patents was Oracle, based on its acquisition of Sun Microsystems and Android's use of Java.

Apple's cold war with Android focused on getting Android devices off the shelves in key markets. Both Samsung and HTC felt the brunt of Apple's lawsuits. Motorola has caught Apple's recent ire, with a new "anti-suit" filed this week in San Diego that accuses Motorola of using "FRAND" patents in lawsuits. FRAND stands for "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory." A patent is determined to be a FRAND if it becomes an industry standard. Motorola, as one of the founding fathers of mobility, owns a boatload of "essential" patents, many of which surround various implementations of "3G."

The blow-by-blow of patent battles is an onerous study. Trying to explain Apple's "anti-suit" against Motorola in regards to Qualcomm based-band patents is like trying to have a conversation about quantum mechanics underwater. In this discussion, the blow-by-blow is not the point. What it boils down to is the idea of essential patents. Motorola owns many of the industry standard patents and says that it will cap its licensing fee of these patents at 2.25% of every device sold. In a market that has billions of dollars at stake, 2.25% is a pretty significant number.

The troubling thing about Motorola's suits that have use the essential patents is that it could set a difficult precedent for the industry. The notion of FRAND is that companies do not bring essential patents to court because it is not fair or reasonable to impose fees on the entire industry on industry standard technology.

The thing about all the recent patent acquisitions is that every one of the major players in the ecosystem now own significant numbers of essential patents. Nortel and Novell patent repositories held significant numbers of essential patents, one of the reasons that the bidding was out of control.

This chart from Reuters was published in Aug. 2011 but still gives a pretty good idea of who is suing whom in the patent wars.

The question now becomes: what will be done with these patents?

The Cost to the Consumer

The primary concerns the U.S. Department of Justice expressed when approving the three acquisitions surrounded these standard essential patents (SEPs). For a breakdown of the issue, read the DOJ's full statement issued on Monday regarding the approval process.

There are a few key takeaways:

The division's concerns about the potential anticompetitive use of SEPs was lessened by the clear commitments by Apple and Microsoft to license SEPs on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, as well as their commitments not to seek injunctions in disputes involving SEPs. Google's commitments were more ambiguous and do not provide the same direct confirmation of its SEP licensing policies.

Apple's and Google's substantial share of mobile platforms makes it more likely that as the owners of additional SEPs they could hold up rivals, thus harming competition and innovation. For example, Apple would likely benefit significantly through increased sales of its devices if it could exclude Android-based phones from the market or raise the costs of such phones through IP-licenses or patent litigation. Google could similarly benefit by raising the costs of, or excluding, Apple devices because of the revenues it derives from Android-based devices

The DOJ noted that Microsoft and RIM's low market share makes it unlikely either company could bring lawsuits based on essential patents because it would ultimately prove unprofitable.

Where does this whole mess lead us? The DOJ's concerns are that patent litigation will lead to competitors extorting higher rates from each other, hence making it less profitable to be in the mobile business and more expensive for the consumer. While Motorola or other Android OEMs would love to block the sale of Apple products in certain countries, the real goal is to extract money from the iPhone maker. Apple has plenty of money and one of the reasons it is sitting on its pile of cash is to fight these lawsuits and provide a buffer to its profitability. Apple has the ability to have Android devices taken off store shelves and has done it with HTC and Samsung in the past.

So, what does thermonuclear patent war look like? Higher prices for consumers, the squeezing of the ecosystem in such a way that weaker companies die off, stifling of innovation because of regulatory or legal concerns and the slowdown of product releases that have the potential to shape the fundamental nature of how people live there lives.

Without Android, Apple would love to issue every man, woman and child in the world an iPhone, subsidized through the carriers. It can continue its iterative and boring product release schedule. Android would love to push the iPhone and its profit gobbling monstrosity out of the industry but then people would be deprived of the one splendid device that has come to define a generation.

Patent agreements, especially surrounding standard essential patents, are a cost of doing business in our modern industry. But, when business start taking innovative products off shelves and forcing competitors into bankruptcy, a line has been crossed. The industry now stands on the edge of a knife. With everybody armed to the teeth will they find a way to co-exist or will they fire their warheads to the detriment of all?

Top image courtesy Shutterstock

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Twitter Did NOT "Break" News of Whitney Houston's Death

Dave Copeland — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:00:00 -0800

MediaBistro's AllTwitter blog is claiming it has an exclusive on the Twitter user who "broke" the news of Whitney Houston's death a full hour before the mainstream media.

Here's the problem with the claim: the user, @BarBeeBritt did nothing more than simply ask "Is Whitney Houston really dead?"

It's been awhile since I was in journalism school, but the claim that @BarBeeBritt "broke" the story is not in line with what I remember learning there. What I remember is that you did indeed break stories by reporting them first, but that verb is crucial: reporting, as in going out, gathering and verifying facts as opposed to the act of speculation and information seeking with a flick of your thumbs.

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You can make a case that the next post about Houston's death, 13 minutes after @BarBeeBritt asked if Houston was dead, broke the news:

"omgg , my aunt tiffany who work for whitney houston just found whitney houston dead in the tub . such ashame & sad :-(," @AjaDiorNavy posted.

That was well ahead of the Associated Press's first post on the death, but it's still arguable whether the post qualifies as journalism and reliable news gathering.

I'm all for the social media-inspired, citizen journalism movement, but I'll also argue that telling a story first doesn't always mean you're telling it best. Take yesterday, when a widely-retweeted, self-congratulatory headline was making it's way around Twitter: "Whitney Houston Cause Of Death Revealed On Twitter"

Well, sort of but not really: again, the cause of death is speculation based on the tweet that she had been found in a bath tub. Any solid news editor will tell you that until an autopsy and toxicology report is completed, which could take several weeks, no cause of death had been revealed. We can speculate that she drowned. But, based on pills found at the scene, we can also speculate she overdosed, died, and then slipped into the tub.

There's no doubt that the news of Houston's death spread remarkably quickly thanks to Twitter. And consider that it happened during one of the biggest lulls in the newscycle, when audiences are typically not paying attention. But even Twitter's own analysis, as shown in the chart below, shows news of Houston's death only started to spread rapidly after AP had confirmed and reported it on its own Twitter account:

As a final aside, double shame on AllTwitter for using the misleading EXCLUSIVE headline, as if implying they had comment and an interview from @BarBeeBritt explaining what it was like to break the story. You have to scroll all the way to the bottom to realize the exclusive is simply they rewrote a Twitter release on @BarBeeBrit being the first to mention Houston's death.

"We've reached out for comment and will update accordingly," AllTwitter writes at the very bottom of its post.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

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Music Labels at Their Worst: Sony's Whitney Houston PR Gaffe

John Paul Titlow — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:28:13 -0800

As news spread on Saturday that famed singer Whitney Houston had died, millions of fans around the world did what is now customary. Well, first they tweeted about it. Then they went to one of the many sources of online music to reminisce. Whether by streaming songs from YouTube or Spotify or by buying tracks from iTunes, fans paid tribute to Houston on Saturday by listening to her music.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the depths of Sony Music's UK headquarters, the decision was made to bump up the price on those digital downloads. The reaction was swift and unequivocally critical. How could Sony capitalize on somebody's death? After initially staying silent, Sony apologized and changed the prices back, chalking it up to an error. A mistake indeed, but the notion that it was unintentional is hard for many to swallow.

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The trend is now quite familiar. When pop stars die young, fans buy up their music in droves. This was true when Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Kurt Cobain died, but it seems to be even more true today. Music purchases are now a few clicks or taps away and can be made without leaving one's home, or better yet, from the devices we all carry in our pockets.

When Michael Jackson died in 2009, sales of his music increased eightyfold and he topped charts around the world. Though her career was much shorter than Jackson's, singer Amy Winehouse had her album sales spike after her death last year as well.

The people who profit the most from the sale of recorded music know how this works. A popular artists dies, sales go up. In the past, record stores could increase inventory in the days following a singer's death. Today, inventory is infinite, so these posthumous sales spikes are even more dramatic. You'd think that would be enough for music executives.

From a business standpoint, increasing the price of Whitney Houston's records makes sense. If demand goes through the roof, why not capitalize on that? But that's a strictly profit-focused viewpoint. It ignores the fact that a human being has died, and that the people getting ready to shell out money for the work they created are, at least to some extent, in mourning.

The perception easily follows that the record company is trying to profit from both the deceased and the bereaved. Whether it's a wise business choice or not, the fact that nobody foresaw the PR backlash it would cause is pretty unbelievable.

These are the same people that, via the RIAA, sue music fans for illegally downloading music and desperately want draconian laws like SOPA and PIPA to be passed. Raising prices on a dead singer's music is a move that is bound to infuriate many and encourage others to seek out the material elsewhere, whether that be through less legal means or from streaming services that, no matter how you slice it, don't generate as much revenue as digital downloads.

The gaffe may or may not result in a perceptible impact on sales of Houston's music, the demand for which is very high right now. But given the sometimes chilly relationship between labels and fans in the digital age, it's amazing that they were willing to take the risk.

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[INFOGRAPHIC] Grammy Awards Generated 2.1 Million Tweets

Dave Copeland — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:00:00 -0800

TweetReach has a cool stream graph that takes all of the speculation out of who was being talked about when during Sunday night's broadcast of the Grammy Awards.

No surprise: Adele topped the evening's Twitter activity with 340,000 mentions. The official #grammys hashtag was tweeted 2.1 million times by 700,000 users.

"That's huge, bigger than other similar events," TweetReach founder Jenn Deering Davis said in an email. "Musicians have the largest followings on Twitter (Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Taylor Swift all have 10+ million followers), compared to film or television stars, politicians, brands, etc."

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While the sudden death of Whitney Houston may have prompted more people to watch the show (it was the second-most view broadcast of the Grammy's in history), it did not generate a significant amount of additional second-screen activity on Twitter: of those 2.1 million tweets, only 66,000 mentioned Houston.

According to TweetReach, the most-talked about artists during the 2012 Grammy Awards were:

Adele: 340K tweets
Chris Brown: 152K tweets
Nicki Minaj: 85K tweets
Rihanna: 81K tweets
Taylor Swift: 68K tweets
Whitney Houston: 66K tweets
Bruno Mars: 60K tweets
Foo Fighters: 52K tweets
Lady Gaga: 43K tweets
Katy Perry: 41K tweets

Each colored layer represents tweets about one artist. The spikes on the graph illustrate tweet volume throughout the show. You can also view an interactive version of the above chart.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

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Romney Falls Victim to Latest Google Prank

David Strom — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 05:58:53 -0800

First there was linking President Bush with the words "miserable failure" on Google. Then last year Rick Santorum fell victim to another Google hack. This week it is Mitt Romney and the escapades of his long-distance car journey with his dog strapped on his car's roof that has gotten the Internets in a twist. Try Googling (or Binging) just Romney and look carefully at the results, you will see one link that is out of place. Sorry, we aren't going to show it here.

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The best analysis to date of the situation was posted by Danny Sullivan at SearchEngine Land here. What I particularly like is how he goes into some depth as to figuring out why this particular link has risen so quickly to the first page of search results, "for a site that appears to have started around January 12." Using Majestic Site Explorer, last week he found that the site had more than 200 links from 67 unique sites. Today it is up to 250 links from 77 sites. It certainly helped when the site in question was mentioned on the Rachel Maddow show, and the current press reports in the past week have also put it back on the map.

Some people have called this anti-Romney page a "Google bomb" which isn't accurate, since the page actually mentions the word Romney. And unlike the anti-Santorum page created by columnist Dan Savage,which was a site with some depth about criticisms of the candidate, the anti-Romney site is just a single page with minimal text.

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Twitter Is The Latest Company To Admit It Uploads Your Address Book

Dave Copeland — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 05:20:00 -0800

Twitter has joined the list of companies making sheepish confessions that it uploads your smartphone's address book when you install its app.

Last week Path made a similar dicslosure, which was followed by changes by photo app Instagram to give users more privacy controls. And that led to a bit of discovery by smartphone users themselves that nothing is truly free.

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But Twitter, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, seems to be the biggest name to make a revelation so far. The company told the newspaper it is making changes to clarify policy for users of its app. The current policy does not clearly state that Twitter downloads the entire address book of users who use the "Find Friends" feature on the app, including names, email addresses and phone numbers, and stores the data on its servers for 18 months.

"We want to be clear and transparent in our communications with users," Penner wrote in an email to the newspaper. "Along those lines, in our next app updates, which are coming soon, we are updating the language associated with Find Friends - to be more explicit. In place of 'Scan your contacts,' we will use 'Upload your contacts' and 'Import your contacts' (in Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android, respectively)."

Users who have already had their data uploaded to Twitter's servers can remove their contact databases using the "remove" link in the fine print of the import contacts page on Twitter's Web site, Penner said.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

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Daily Wrap: The Domination of the Mobile Hardware Landscape and more

Robyn Tippins — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:04:00 -0800

Dan Rowinski investigates the dangers of the dominance of Samsung and Apple. This and more in today's Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

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The Dangers of Apple and Samsung Dominance

Apple and Samsung dominate the mobile hardware market. Dan Rowinski sees great dangers in the lack of hardware diversity. "If you are not making an iDevice or some type of Galaxy product, Apple and Samsung are squeezing you out of the market," says Rowinski, and he stresses the need for a strong number three to emerge.

[#Microsoft has such an opportunity here.] The Dangers of #Apple and #Samsung Dominance rww.to/x7lUMX #mobile #smartphones #OEMs
— Brad Dunshee (@mobileindustryu) February 14, 2012

Amazon Prime Needs More Digital Benefits

Jon Mitchell — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:29:00 -0800

Bloomberg has "three people familiar with the matter" reporting that Amazon has fewer than half as many Amazon Prime subscribers as analysts thought.

Prime is a $79-per-year program that offers two-day shipping on all orders, as well as streaming digital video. Analysts thought it had 10 million or more subscribers, but Bloomberg's sources say it's more like 3 to 5 million.

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That's a bummer for Amazon analysts and investors, who were already let down by its quarterly earnings miss last month. But Amazon Prime is right in the midst of changing drastically as a product, so it's too early to cast judgment.

What started as a convenient plan for shipping physical products has just in the past week become a competitive digital TV offering. Don't count out Amazon Prime yet. It's too important.

Digital & Analog Convenience

Amazon is all about convenience. It makes buying things so convenient that we do it more often. It's certainly more convenient than getting off our lazy butts and going all the way to a store. That was the first appeal of Amazon Prime; for $79 a year, you could add instant gratification to the convenience of shipping your purchases straight to your home.

But packing and shipping things is still expensive. It's dragging on Amazon's operating costs. Even though Amazon's fulfillment and distribution of its brown boxes are amazingly efficient, it's still working to shake up the way it ships physical products, including the possibility of opening its own stores.

Prime makes shipping more expensive for Amazon. But Amazon is building new digital businesses - with insignificant operating costs - and it's adding those benefits to Prime membership to make it more enticing.

Kindle As A Service

Kindle devices are Amazon's portable digital content stores. In addition to being a place to watch, read, listen and play, the Kindle Fire is a store where Amazon users can buy books, magazines, games, movies and TV shows (and anything else from Amazon.com, for that matter).

Prime membership has huge benefits for Kindle Fire owners, because they can stream its digital media straight to their devices. Last week, Amazon announced a deal with Viacom, adding 10,000 new videos to Amazon Prime from MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, BET, Nickelodeon and more. Amazon needs enticing content offerings to sell more Fires, and Fire owners buy more digital content (with no shipping costs). The Fire's Silk browser will load Amazon.com's whole store at blazing speeds, too, so Fire users can buy physical stuff from their couches as well.

That's why it makes sense for Amazon to add digital benefits to Prime membership. If it works out, as more Kindle Fires are sold, more Prime memberships will be sold, too.

Amazon's Poker Face

How many Kindle Fires have been sold? Amazon doesn't say. We know it ordered 5 million Fires from manufacturers, but it won't say how many of those have left the warehouse and arrived in the living room.

The annoying thing for us spectators is that Amazon is notoriously cagey about giving away real numbers. Bloomberg says its sources are anonymous because the numbers about Amazon Prime are private. No kidding. Amazon doesn't even admit how many Kindles it sells, even for the quarter that introduced the Kindle Fire and a whole new line of Kindle e-readers.

Instead, it gives us growth percentages. Kindle sales were up 177% over... well, whatever they were last year... over the 2011 holiday season. But Amazon is just getting busy disrupting the way products are bought and sold. As long as it's growing, no one should write it off.

Do you have a Kindle device? Which one(s)?

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How Developers Are Shaping the Future of Music

John Paul Titlow — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:15:34 -0800

That the music industry has radically changed in the last decade is a serious understatement. Technology has altered everything from the creation of music to its distribution, upending retailers, studios and business models across the industry. But it's not all bad news. Music isn't dying so much as evolving, and the landscape is already beginning to look quite different.

Not long ago, the professional music industry involved a complex but fixed set of players: artists, labels, managers, promoters and the like. Many of these roles have changed, but none have disappeared. They're joined by a new set of participants: tech giants, streaming services, social music startups and, perhaps most crucially, developers.

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Every stakeholder in this new (and still emerging) digital music ecosystem plays their own important role in the creation and consumption of music. But it's this new contingent of hackers and developers that appear poised to have the biggest impact on what music will look like in the future.

This weekend, coders and industry representatives gathered in San Francisco for Music Hack Day, a tradition that has spanned continents for the last four years. Like other hack days and hackathons, the event is dedicated to bringing developers together to build new things using the latest technologies and platforms. In this case, the focus is on music, so the toolkit includes everything from mobile hardware and homemade digital instruments to open Web standards and the APIs of services like SoundCloud, Last.fm, Spotify and the Echo Nest.

Noteworthy hacks conjured up in the past have included various software mashups between popular music sites, as well as things like invisible, interactive instruments that can be played in the air or on a surface. Some hacks are strictly Web or software-based, while others involve some tinkering with hardware, including LED lights, Nintendo Wii controllers and Kinects.

The most recent Music Hack Day spawned a total of 62 hacks. The list included a music search engine that queries multiple streaming services, as well as a Theramin made from two iPhones. One app succeeded in predicting Sunday's Grammy winners almost as effectively as Billboard did.

Some creations were simpler, such as a Spotify-based clone of the classic MP3 player WinAmp, a mash-up between iTunes and the Echo Nest's recommendation engine and a SoundCloud plugin for Wordpress.

Hacks ranged from the mind-blowing to the simplistic but useful, dealing with nearly every stage in the creation and consumption of music.

How Music Hack Day Helps the Music Industry Evolve

Music Hack Day was started in 2008 and hasn't stopped growing since. In the tradition of other hacking events, SoundCloud VP of Business Development David Haynes teamed up with experienced hack day organizer James Darling to create a music-specific event. The proliferation of APIs from various music-related platforms plus some of the other disruption going on in the music industry made the space ripe for some creative hacking.

"Weren't sure what to expect from it at first," said SoundCloud cofounder and CTO Eric Wahlforss. "It got off to such a good start that's now become sort of a tradition for the last few years. Music Hack Day is a big part of our culture."

For startups like SoundCloud, events like Music Hack Day yield creations that could one day find themselves integrated with the company's core product. The vast majority, however, will not. And that's okay. The event's value is of a much deeper nature, in that it fosters a developer community around music and brings a wide range of players into the same room, from independent coders to music industry representatives.

A side effect of this type of collaboration is that the entire industry is creeping forward. A few years ago, Wahlforss said, some record labels had no idea what an API was or how it was relevant to their business. Today, EMI has an API of their own. They, along with Universal Music Group, participate in Music Hack Day and are curious about much of the fruit it bears.

"If you speak to the labels today, they're all about API's and mashability of their content," Wahlforss said. "They're very on board with this trend, which is very exciting to see."

For SoundCloud, this spirit of hacking is something that plays a prominent role in the culture of the company and its growing team of developers. Modeled after Google's "20% time," the company encourages employees to use what it calls Hacker Time to experiment and build new things that may or may have any direct bearing on the official product strategy for SoundCloud.

The company also recently hired its first developer evangelist and is silently preparing a major announcement about its platform.

Pushing Music into the Future

SoundCloud isn't the only company pushing the boundaries of what's possible in online music. Innovation is all over the place, from Spotify's new third party app platform to the long and growing list of apps powered by the APIs from services like The Echo Nest, Last.fm, Bandcamp and several dozen others.

The open architecture of the Web, the proliferation of APIs and hacker culture have already made a notable mark on how people create, discover and share music, yet all of this is still very much in its earliest stages.

Twenty years from now, things will look even more different. The industry and ecosystem will move forward together, probably with a few players becoming obsolete along the way. Artists and sound engineers may lead the creative charge, but if what emerges looks and works radically different from what we have today, we'll have developers to thank as well.

Music Hack Day Photo by Thomas Bonte

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Zynga's Success Depends On Play

Alicia Eler — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:10:00 -0800

Today Zynga announced its fourth quarter earnings and 2011 financial results. Zynga now makes the top five games played on Facebook. Its non-GAAP earnings per share were five cents, or $37.1 million for the quarter. But even though it had a 59% gain in sales, it posted a loss for the period.

If Zynga is going to succeed, FarmVille has to lose its super uncool factor. And "play" must become a completely mainstream behavior that's as acceptable as buying $30 t-shirts at Urban Outfitters.

"We see [play as] a popular large-scale behavior, but we'd like to see play reach a level of search, shop and share, and we think the monetization opportunity will follow that," said Zynga CEO Mark Pincus. If Zynga is to succeed, it will be because the users make play as much a part of their daily routine as checking Facebook.

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For the fourth quarter ending on December 31, Zynga reported a net loss of $435 million, or $1.22 per share. It also incurred a huge expense in the fourth quarter amounting to $510 million, which was related to stock-based compensation from the IPO.

And daily average users (DAU) are not really on the rise.

Zynga had 54 million DAUs, which is up 13% from a year prior. But that number did not change in the third quarter; it was down from 59% in the second quarter and 62% in the first quarter.

Zynga launched 12 games in 2011, including four web-based games and eight mobile. In its S-1, Facebook revealed that Zynga games accounted for 12% of its revenues.

Its first hidden objects game Hidden Chronicles is currently at number two on Facebook. Dream Heights, one of its newer games, is expected to perform at rates comparable to a Web game.

Zynga is also working on diversifying its monetization strategies, introducing coins and "power-ups" to games like Scramble With Friends. CityVille was a top performer in Q4, and continues to do well on Facebook. Zynga Poker is also has one of the world's largest online poker games, and one of the top six games on Facebook. Zynga's mobile space is growing fast as well, with 15 million users.

Zynga also recently announced a real-world component to all those virtual goods. Last week, AllThingsD reported that Zynga signed a deal with Hasbro to develop toys and games based on popular Facebook games and characters. Finally, a link from the virtual world to the real world.

But everything on the Web depends on you, the user.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus says that "play" is the new TV. The reason TV got so popular? "It was free and accessible to everyone...and play is following a similar trend, only faster." Is it?

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It's PingFederate 6.6 Versus "Identity as a Service"

Scott M. Fulton, III — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:00:00 -0800

It's a demonstrated fact that as cloud application users find themselves logging on more and more often, they tend to oversimplify their passwords in an effort to avoid writing them all down someplace. It doesn't help that many IT shops' first course of action is to standardize identity around social networks such as Facebook, making these public repositories into the lynchpins of private networks' security strategies.

This morning's rollout by Ping Identity of a new point release for its PingFederate identity management system is an effort to reorient businesses that have already begun using public identity providers, around a centralized identity scheme that resides back inside the firewall. There, administrators can create policies that govern how users access privileged network resources, based on such factors as where they are, and whether they can also log onto - and authenticate themselves from - someplace else that's actually stronger.

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This latter concept is called authentication chaining, and it's one of three elements that Ping is touting in its new marketing push around "Adaptive Federation." Certainly being able to leverage authentication resources from Facebook or LinkedIn expedites the registration process for e-commerce sites. But the strength of that authentication is not enough during checkout, when a logged-in customer may have access to stored credit card data.

So what Ping suggests is a form of chaining that also incorporates a stronger, multi-factor authentication system such as PhoneFactor. An admin may then establish authentication rules that evaluate specified criteria ("Is this a remote user?") and, if the case is true, chain the process over to that stronger provider. If that provider is unavailable, or if something goes wrong, a separate rule may establish a failover identity provider - someone to trust in the absence of clarity.

"If you have users in multiple directories, and you want to be able to authenticate those users across those directories," explains Ping Identity technical marketing manager David Gorton in an instructional video published today (above), "you can actually chain those directories together." This way, after the user provides credentials, the newly enhanced PingFederate system will check them against each directory, until one is capable of validating those credentials. "If he doesn't get authenticated in any of those directories, he gets rejected," Gorton continues.

With the third added component, attribute aggregation, elements of a SAML assertion may be combined from multiple sources. This way, for example, when an enterprise stores its employee data in a database rather than Active Directory, PingFederate can collect elements from both sources and piece them together.

"This functionality makes virtual directory products unnecessary for attribute aggregation," reads a Ping Identity product guide released today. That may not be the best news for so-called identity service providers like Radiant Logic, whose RadiantOne Virtual Directory Server, released last July, manages multiple logons through a centralized console. Radiant and Ping had been partners since 2007 on virtual directory support.

Indeed, back in 2005, Ping CEO Andre Durand went so far as to call virtual directories and identity federation tools "natural product partners." But that was before providers started moving those virtual directories to the cloud, as services outside corporate firewalls. As the chart above from 2012 suggests, PingFederate remains firmly planted as a public-facing service inside the corporate firewall. While this move isn't enough to split the partnership, it does place the two companies on different rotational axes, if you will, with respect to where the federation takes place.

Ping Identity is holding a webinar on the new topic of authentication rules and chaining, this Thursday, February 16, at 11:00 am ET. Register here to take part.

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When Will Apple Peak?

Dan Frommer — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:30:00 -0800

Apple shares set another all-time high today, closing above $509 for the first time ever. The sky's the limit, it seems, as expectations build around Apple's new iPad, due next month, and on the heels of a crazy record holiday quarter.

And here's an amazing thing: Even with Apple's size and momentum, there's still plenty of room left for growth. In its most important markets - mobile phones and personal computers - Apple is still being dramatically outsold by competitors.

That in mind, it's also reasonable to ask: How long can Apple keep its streak alive? When will it peak?

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First, Let's Look Back

Apple's current growth streak just finished its tenth year.

After a few years of ups-and-downs after Steve Jobs re-joined Apple, 2002 represented its sustained return to growth. That was the first full year of iPod sales, an okay year for the Mac, and Apple brought in $5.8 billion in total sales, up 2% from 2001. (That said, it was still a pretty bad time for the tech and PC industries, following the dot-com bust.)

Since then, Apple has posted full-year revenue growth every year, now for ten years in a row.

In 2011, Apple reported $128 billion in sales, up 68% from 2010 - an accelerating growth rate. The weakest growth years were 2003 (16% growth) and 2009 (20% growth) - two "bad" years that most tech companies would love to have. The last two years have been nothing short of incredible, led by Apple's booming iPhone, iPad, and Mac businesses.

Still an Underdog

The crazy thing is that even considering how big Apple is, it's still a relatively small player in many of its markets, at least measured by unit sales. That is, there's plenty of future growth potential, just by convincing more people to buy Apple versions of the products they're already buying.

In the mobile phone market, for instance, Apple only represented 4% of global phone shipments in the third quarter of 2011, according to Gartner. (Its fourth quarter share will almost certainly be higher, as the iPhone had a huge Christmas, but still probably not more than 8% of the total market.) Rival Nokia, meanwhile, still shipped 24% of the world's phones in the third quarter.

In personal computers, despite record Mac sales over the holidays, Apple wasn't even big enough to make it into Gartner's top five worldwide vendor list. A reasonable estimate is that if you only count Apple's Mac sales, it represented about 6% of the PC market last quarter. If you also include iPads, Apple's share rises to around 19%. But even then, that still means more than 4 of every 5 PCs sold in the world are non-Apple machines.

So Apple's opportunity to keep growing is obvious: All it needs to do is to keep representing a higher share of sales in its key, fast-growing markets - smartphones and tablets. That, combined with new potential growth areas like TVs, should offset its shrinking iPod business and slower-growing Mac business.

But there are two big hurdles/risks that Apple is going to have to deal with:

Apple is a premium brand, and as much as Apple is defining taste in electronics and teaching more people to want to buy premium products, that's never going to represent 100% of any market. So at some point, Apple's addressable part of any market will hit its limit.

One of the key things that makes Apple successful is its narrow, deliberate focus, and its relative lack of bloat. Nonstop growth, even under the smartest and most efficient of leaders, challenges those traits.

So, When Will Apple Peak?

Barring economic disaster, it seems Apple is set to maintain yearly sales growth at least through the end of this decade. Its position in its current technology cycle - smartphones and tablets, and perhaps TVs - seems strong enough to suggest that Apple should be able to sell more stuff every year than it did the year before for at least that long. The main risk seems to be Google's Android ecosystem, which will challenge Apple's iOS in seemingly every market. But so far, Apple seems to be fine.

The bigger question is: What comes after that? Can Apple transform its iPhone and iPad into whatever comes after them, the way it morphed the iPod and Mac into its current lineup? And that's where the unknown is simply unknown. It's possible that sometime in the 2020s - if not sooner - Apple will have its first down year since 2001.

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A National Paywall That Works

David Strom — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:02:00 -0800

While the paywall experiment of the New York Times has received a lot of play in various online forums, one place where a working paywall - meaning that it is both making money for publishers and attracting traffic - is less well known, in the eastern European country of Slovakia. There an independent tech vendor called Piano Media has been successfully experimenting with its own paywall-based system of online publishing. Launched in Bratislava last spring, it gives subscribers online access to content from all nine of Slovakia's leading news sites. What's more, it does so for a single flat fee (less than US $4 per month, which is going up in March by 25%) that is paid after visitors have had a chance to sample a certain number of articles for free. Users can pay for their subscriptions by SMS messages.

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Slovakia is a country with less than six million total population, and the paywall story is covered this week in the Columbia Journalism Review by William Baker. It is a lesson that others should study carefully. Indeed, the model has worked so well that they have expanded into neighboring Slovenia (and often the two countries are confused by outsiders) earlier this year.

Here are some lessons learned from the experience:

Be a small fish in an even smaller pond. "Slovakia's biggest news publishers are much smaller than key players in other countries. They did not have billion dollar annual revenues to protect. This meant less institutional inertia keeping them from putting their trust in a small, untried company. It also meant that they did not have the time and spare cash necessary to create paywalls of their own," writes Baker. Slovakia doesn't have its own native language version of Google news, and there are few other news sources in the language either.
Spend a lot of time hand-holding skittish publishers. "Apple or Microsoft or Google are not getting into the business of spending two months meeting with the publisher and advising them how to do business. That's what we're doing," says Tomas Bella, the CEO of Piano.
Limit the number of total monthly comments. Yes, you have to subscribe to comment, that isn't all that special. But what is unusual is that your overall comments are capped each month. This has resulted in troll-free forums, and the publishers have thought that the level of Slovakia's Internet discourse has risen since after the paywall.
Challenge some long-held beliefs of publishers. Bella has had a chance to see that many assumptions about paywalls, or online publishing, weren't accurate. Many of his content providers have changed the way they post articles based on his actual observations, which has helped to boost traffic too.

Whether Piano's national model can work in countries with larger publishing ventures remains to be seen. But in eastern Europe, it appears to be working.

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Heroku Data Clips Make Sharing Results from Postgres Queries Simple

Joe Brockmeier — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:28:30 -0800

Heroku has added a data clips feature to its Heroku Postgres databases. What's that, you ask? According Heroku's Matthew Soldo, data clips are a "convenient way to share data inside a database."

Basically, the feature lets users of Heroku Postgres share a result of a SQL query via a URL. The results can be viewed in the browser, or downloaded in several standard formats.

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What's the point of the feature? Rather than sharing a static snapshot of a query, this allows users to see a live result of a query at any given time. (Data Clips can also be locked to a specific time, if preferred.) So, for example, this might be useful to share up-to-date statistics on current inventory or sales results.

The example given on the Heroku blog combs through Wikipedia entries and finds people in the English articles with the term scientist or artist.

Note that this is not a feature that's available via upstream PostgreSQL. Soldo says that the feature is built on top of Heroku's Web based administration tool. "Because PostgreSQL doesn't have a built-in webserver, this feature wouldn't be possible on the standalone database."

The feature is immediately available to users of Heroku Postgres. Note that clips do have a few limits. Results are limited to 10,000 rows and the clips will not refresh more than once every 60 seconds.

This looks like a pretty nifty feature. Is this compelling enough to consider using Heroku Postgres instead of a self-hosted PostgreSQL database, though? Would be curious to hear what other folks think about it.

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[Infographic]: LibreOffice 3.5.0 By the Numbers

Joe Brockmeier — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:02:00 -0800

The Document Foundation released LibreOffice 3.5.0 today with a fair number of new features. Question is, where are all those contributions coming from?

According to the infographic released earlier this month, the bulk of contributors are volunteers, but the majority of work going into LibreOffice comes from SUSE, Red Hat, legacy code from OpenOffice.org and volunteers.

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The core of LibreOffice consists of about 50 paid or volunteer hackers who contribute key patches and features and develop strategy for the suite. Outside of that, a "regular" group of about 100 volunteers contribute easy hacks, large patches and small features. Then you have a group of about 250 more volunteers that have contributed small patches.

The number of contributors, per month, seems to have dropped since the Document Foundation started tracking them in September 2010. This might be because little work or none is being imported from OpenOffice.org since its move over to Apache. Work is going on with the Apache project, but probably not a lot that would be carried over to LibreOffice at this point. However, the foundation says that it's an average of 80 active contributors per month, with more than 30,000 code commits.

The .0 release for any LibreOffice cycle (like 3.5.0 or 3.4.0) is considered a bit cutting edge, so conservative users might want to hold off for the 3.5.1 release. But if you want to check out the latest features in LibreOffice immediately, you can download it today for Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows.

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How to Conduct the Best Webinars

David Strom — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:04:00 -0800

I have done dozens of webinars over the past several years and have learned from the school of hard knocks as well as the best professional speaking experts what to do and what not to do. After seeing a press release from SAP talking about their experiences I thought it might be useful to share some of these with you as well. We last wrote on how to make better webinars last summer.

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Timing is important for live events. Most people avoid conducting webinars on Mondays or Fridays, because your audience isn't as engaged as the middle of the week. Also, if you are going for an American audience, try to do it in the middle of the day, say between 11am and 3p ET, so you can cover most of the time zones. While most webinars that I have been a part of are scheduled for an hour, try to make them shorter because of reduced attention spans.
Advance work is critical. SAP suggests that you start at least 12 weeks out before the actual event: that is probably excessive, but still you want to do some advance work in terms of promoting the event, booking your speakers, and making sure your content is ready. And make sure you start your meetings on time, too! No one wants to wait around while you fiddle with the controls or because a speaker is late. This means testing the visual and especially audio quality ahead of the actual event to ensure that you know how to operate all the various controls. The cheaper products tend to fall down when it comes to audio quality, but this is critical to keeping your audience engaged.
Yes, I said speakers, as in more than one. I find a world of difference between solo and even having a single guest on my webinars. You want to vary the tone and perspective and create a conversational tone between the two (or even three) of you. No one wants to hear a monologue, unless you are a late-night TV host.
Flog your internal customer lists and get the word out. Part of the advance work is promoting your event with as many different tools as you can: email, social media, links on your blogs, and so forth. Post the recorded play-back on your site and link to the slide deck on Slideshare.net. (Or if your provider doesn't have a mechanism to do this, take a look at the tool from Artic Fox we covered last fall.) Make use of a custom registration page to capture the leads and follow up with emails afterwards with these links.
Nix those bullet-point slides. In any event, don't produce slides that are just text and certainly don't read those bullet points. You want something more engaging. Use the camera controls if you have access to these to move around in your office studio, or vary between showing the speakers and your PC screens. It is okay to have one or two (such as an agenda slide at the beginning) but don't roll out lots of text.
Make your presentation engaging. Leave places in your presentation to solicit questions from your audience. If your webinar service provider has a polling feature, put up a couple of polls during the presentation and ask your audience for their perspective. Take questions from social media too if you can.

Good luck with your webinar, and feel free to share your own best practices here too.

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5 Digital Ways to Capture Real Valentine's Day Moments

Alicia Eler — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 12:45:00 -0800

If you are over the vintage-ified look of Instagram, Hipstamatic or Disposable but too lazy to make your own card or just stop by Walgreens (or some other convenience store) to buy one plus a box of chocolates, do not worry. If you have an iPhone and a few minutes, you can create a multitude of awesome, cheesy and kinda adorable photos of you and your sweetie, whether that sweetie be in the form of a human, a cartoon cat or an inanimate object.

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Valentine Cam is so cheesy that only one of the preselected glossy marketing photos from the app store felt appropriate to use here. Grab a photo from your phone or take a photo and use that. Then pick one of 12 free Valentine's Day backgrounds - like a giant teddy bear with a red heart that says "I love you," or a frame made entirely of red roses. Place your adorable picture in the middle.

Valentine's LoveCam is a slightly more sophisticated Valentine's Day app. Select your photo, and then either pick a picture from your phone or take one with your phone camera. Select from a variety of frames - you and your sweetie inside of a paint splatter, a Polaroid picture frame or a rectangle garnished by a background of neon colors. Then add a few elements such as flowers, candy or angels, which you can make bigger or smaller depending on how prominent you think it should be. Drop in an "I love you!" or "I'm in like with you!", publish the photo and share it via email, Facebook or RenRen.

Holiday Picture It is not just limited to Valentine's Day. Plus, there are strange goodies like eyeballs, Rocky Horror lips and random wigs. For those who want to go beyond the hearts, flowers and lovey-dovey imagery into something less Valentine's Day appropriate, try this app. Besides, cupids are way overrated, right?

Tom Letters is an app for the cat-lovers among us. The app serves up cute scenarios of two cats in love, coupled with sing-songy music and digital quotes. Like a pinball machine that's been fed an infinite amount of quarters, the digital LUV does not end. After one lovey-dovey message arrives, hit the checkmark and move on to the next digital pair of cats and quotes. Meowsers!

Cartolina is a beautiful alternative to these other, more pixelated alternatives. In the age of social networking and electronic interactions, it strikes that old-fashioned aesthetic that we love and try not to associate with the word "hipster." It is the only app on this list that isn't free (cost is $1.99). Cartolina works for any occasion, including Valentine's Day. To create your own cartogram, choose from a variety of designs, then customize the message and email or text it to a friend. Or, you can choose to post it on a friend's Facebook wall. It's like real paper. Almost. What's neat about this app, even moreso than the cards you can send, is the calendar. Instead of passively relying on Facebook to tell you when your friends' birthdays are, you can enter them into the Cartolina calendar.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Microsoft Will Try To Solve Social Media Hurdles For Advertisers

Dave Copeland — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 12:30:00 -0800

Microsoft used Social Media Week to launch a new advertising platform aimed at incorporating user reviews and comments into social media sites.

The company said People Powered Stories will be the first of several social advertising products Microsoft plans to launch in the coming months. The product's release comes at a time when there is growing evidence that people are more likely to purchase a product recommended by a friend, while simultaneously showing a reluctance to purchase products directly marketed through social networks.

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The announcement did not, however, make clear how exactly Microsoft will differentiate itself from similar services, outside of culling ratings posted on sites by Microsoft users. A pilot program targeted Windows 7 advertising at back-to-school shoppers, with Microsoft claiming PPS increased purchase intent by 6.3%, as well as helping boost "believability" and brand awareness.

In a blog post and at a presentation in New York, Jenn Creegan, GM for Display Advertising Experiences at Microsoft Advertising, said the company was partnering with Bazaarvoice to offer People Powered Stories. The platform will allow advertisers to "tap into Microsoft's highly social and engaged audiences across multiple screens and deliver relevant ads in a way that is targeted and more measurable than is available for social advertising on the web today."

The announcement was coupled with the release of a study Microsoft commissioned of 713 social media marketers.

According to Creegan's blog post:

The top two reasons advertisers invest in social media is to drive word of mouth and brand awareness (27% and 26% respectively).
72% of advertisers said measuring ROI on social media campaigns is too difficult.
Advertisers believe 65% of word of mouth misses the intended audience.
73% of those advertisers surveyed said they want to make sure the ratings and reviews they curate online reach their target audience (which is more than likes, tweets or any other sources the survey asked about).

"While we are still in the early stages of unlocking the potential of social advertising, I am confident that we are moving into a world where the impact of social advertising will move beyond a 'like' to a world where you can create and measure the value of social ads," Creegan said. "We believe that the People Powered Stories ad format is critical to continuing this movement and helping brands gain credibility and relevance with their target consumers."

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So, When Will Apple Peak?

A National Paywall That Works

Heroku Data Clips Make Sharing Results from Postgres Queries Simple

[Infographic]: LibreOffice 3.5.0 By the Numbers

How to Conduct the Best Webinars

5 Digital Ways to Capture Real Valentine's Day Moments

Microsoft Will Try To Solve Social Media Hurdles For Advertisers