A designer who alleges that she was libeled by Courtney Love on Twitter has won a round against the celebrity in court. Judge Aurelio Munoz in Los Angeles Superior Court denied Love's motion to dismiss the case under California's anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) law, which provides for speedy dismissal of lawsuits that aim to squelch people's right to speak about public matters. Munoz ruled that Love's tweets about designer Dawn Simorangkir didn't concern a matter of public interest, according to Simorangkir's lawyer, Bryan Freedman. Munoz also found that the designer was likely to prevail at trial, Freedman says. In March, Love allegedly made a series of accusations about Simorangkir on Twitter and MySpace. Among other statements, Love allegedly wrote that police in Austin, Texas "are more than ecstatic" to pick up Simorangkir because she "has a history of dealing cocaine, lost all custody of her child, assault and burglary." Simorangkir said in her court papers that Love's statements were false and defamatory. "Whether caused by a drug induced psychosis, a warped understanding of reality, or the belief that her money and fame allowed her to disregard the law, Love has embarked in what is nothing short of an obsessive and delusional crusade to terrorize and destroy Simorangkir," Simorangkir alleged. The problems between Love and the designer appear to stem from a contract dispute. Love allegedly commissioned more than $4,000 in custom-made clothing from Simorangkir, then refused to pay for the pieces, according to Simorangkir. Love argued that her statements were about a matter of public concern because she was trying to warn other potential customers to avoid doing business with Simorangkir. Love's lawyer says the musician-actress will appeal. "We simply don't agree with the court that it is not in the public interest to be allowed to speak out when one believes consumers are being ripped off," attorney Keith Fink says. The lawsuit against Love appears to have been the first libel case stemming from Twitter posts. Since then, however, at least one other such case has been filed -- a lawsuit by a landlord against an ex-tenant who allegedly tweeted that her apartment contained mold.
Say bye-bye to the last click as the de facto measurement tool. Tools are being developed that Forrester Research analysts believe will have an impact on the way that advertising allocates ad budgets across media channels, from online to offline. Forrester Research recently published a report titled "The Forrester Wave: Interactive Attribution, Q4 2009," focusing on what Analyst Emily Riley calls "the bleeding edge of an industry change." Online advertising has always held the promise of being the most accountable medium, but execs in the industry now realize models need to measure much more across many advertising channels. Riley says cross-channel attribution is so new that companies offering the metrics model and the technology comprise a "motley crew" from across the industry. Most of the "solutions" are not "fully baked and few of the companies offer a full service media buy, where the company does the measurement, analysis and reallocates the media buy," she says. Riley identifies financial services, travel, consumer electronics and telecommunications as industry segments leading the adoption of new metrics and technologies. She points to Allstate insurance as an example. Allstate offers many services, but different marketing groups support each with varying budgets. "They might be spending a ton of money for online media, and some of the campaigns might even overlap," Riley says. Using an attribution model allows Allstate to track back and monitor all the different ads people see that might contribute to the sale. This would enable Allstate to better understand the value of each campaign. For the model to work, the "nerdy" part requires the company to use the model to have "statistical significance in the data" and a "confidence level in the lift." The goal is to forgo giving credit to things that are not influential. "If you have a 1% or 2% lift but a 3% confidence level, it's not enough," Riley says. "A lot relies on regression analysis and algorithms. You need smart analysis and application to figure out the combinations that work." Companies offering technology and metrics include Atlas, ClearSaleing, Coremetrics, Theorem, TruEffect, Visual IQ, and [x+1]. Each continues to build out and perfect technology that measures influential points across advertising channels. The report suggests each company's strengths and weaknesses. "Optimizing the engine to the last click will get you to the wrong answer," says John Nardone, [X+1] CEO. "Getting the data together in one place to analyze it was a difficult process. We had to do a fair bit of technical development to do that." Companies that can't afford to make the investment in the technology can at least assign equal credit to each ad medium that contributes to the final sale, Riley says. Some marketers believe assigning equal credit across all "touchpoints" is a more reasonable way to assign credit, compared with the last click. Between 5% and 10% of marketers think about deploying attribution management across multiple media, but a larger number use attribution just in search, Riley says. Attribution is taking hold most quickly in the search industry, supported by companies, such as 360i and Range Online Media. Riley, along with Forrester Analysts Michael Greene, Nate Elliott, and Emily Bowen, lay out the technology and metrics for attributing all points across multiple channels. The report suggests the market is poised to embrace a fundamental shift away from last-click measurement and toward attribution measurement to provide credit across all interactive media types, channels and interactions.
Seeking to better compete with high-profile brands like Nokia and Apple, Taiwan-based handset maker HTC Monday unveiled its first global ad campaign. The cross-media effort -- being rolled out in 20 countries, including the U.S., in the coming weeks -- focuses on personalization, carrying the tagline: "You don't need to get a phone. You need a phone that gets you." Sound familiar? HTC's "You" campaign echoes Yahoo's recently launched "It's You" rebranding push centered on similar themes around empowering end users. A certain online video site was onto this idea a while ago, but that has not stopped others from making "You" a central part of their messaging well into the Web 2.0 era. Deutsch LA Inc. created HTC's "You" campaign, while London-based creative consultancy FigTree devised the phonemaker's new slogan --"Quietly Brilliant." The latter suggests the less prominent but crucial role the company has played in the launch of smartphones such as Google's first Android-powered phone, the G1 from T-Mobile, the T-Mobile myTouch, and the Hero launched earlier this month by Sprint. While HTC has little brand-name recognition in the U.S., that may be starting to change through HTC's collaboration with Google and the spread of Android-based phones. As of the second quarter, HTC ranked fourth among smartphone makers in market share -- behind Nokia, Research in Motion and Apple, according to Gartner. Its share increased to 6%, from 4% a year ago. Unlike Verizon's Droid ads that openly attack the iPhone, the new HTC campaign more subtly tries to distinguish its phones from the Apple device, which uses a proprietary operating system while its "Sense" mobile software is built on the open Android operating system. "HTC's whole design philosophy is very personal. They make phones where your experience is completely unique, so we think there is a connection between how people feel about their phones and how HTC makes them," said Eric Hirshberg, co-CEO and chief creative officer, Deutsch LA, in a release announcing the "You" campaign Monday. The brand push will kick off on TV Oct. 29 with a trio of national spots followed by six others focused on specific products. The 30- and 60-second HTC commercials will air against big events and popular programs including the World Series, NFL games, 30 Rock, NCIS Los Angeles, "Family Guy" and "Saturday Night Live." The digital effort will total 1.4 billion impressions including roadblocks, sponsorships and custom banner units on sites such as Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, AOL and Amazon.com. To emphasize the personalization idea, the online campaign will feature "smart" banners that feed customized, dynamic copy based on a user's location, time of day and weather. The ad blitz also calls for more than 400 outdoor digital billboard versions with variable copy based on weather, location, sporting events and other geographic landmarks tied to where the billboards are placed. Specific U.S. cities targeted for ads include Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. The campaign will also encompass countries across Europe, the Middle East and Asia spanning the U.K., Spain, Germany, France, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. An HTC spokesperson dismissed the possibility there might be any confusion among consumers with Yahoo's similarly tagged "It's You" ads. "They are both taking very different creative pathways and HTC believes their campaign will speak directly to the consumer about how they interact with and bond with their mobile device," she said. She added that HTC will take over the Yahoo home page for one day in November, running an ad showing people how to customize their HTC phone using the applications gallery on the left side of the site's revamped home page. Maybe Yahoo and HTC could have saved money and just combined campaigns.
A federal judge has rejected social networking aggregator Power.com's claim that Facebook aims to monopolize the social networking space by controlling users' information. U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose, Calif. ruled that Power's legal papers did not contain enough specific facts for the company to move forward with its monopoly allegation. The ruling, issued last week, marks the latest twist in a year-old dispute between Power and Facebook. Power allows people with accounts at a variety of social networking sites, including Orkut, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, to access all of their information from one portal. To accomplish this, Power asks users to provide log-in information at the various sites they belong to, and then imports their information. Facebook objects to this practice, and last year sued Power for copyright infringement for allegedly making temporary copies of Facebook's Web pages in order to extract information. In July, Power filed papers arguing that Facebook's claims should be dismissed and also alleging that Facebook was itself violating federal antitrust law as well as California's unfair competition law. Fogel not only dismissed Power's antitrust and unfair competition claims, but also ruled that the company had not adequately answered Facebook's accusations of copyright infringement. He gave Power until Nov. 21 to amend its papers. The company says it intends to do so.
U2 continues to play larger than life on its latest tour, and streamed its show live from the Pasadena Rose Bowl on Google's YouTube Sunday night. The concert began streaming live worldwide just after 9 p.m. PST Sunday -- but before the show U2's Bono told a French news agency in an interview that the band will play, but the focus should be on the audience for making history. About 1,600 people with general admission tickets stood in line to get good spots on the stadium floor when the gates opened at about 5 p.m., reported the Los Angeles Times. Nearly 100,000 people were expected to attend the sold-out U2 concert, but millions more took advantage of the opportunity to watch online. The massive technical challenge to stream the concert live on YouTube creates new opportunities for Google's video site. The bigger question becomes whether the site will take on sites, such as Justin.tv. The channel, youtube.com/u2, offers the opportunity to purchase U2's latest music, sign up for the newsletter, visit U2.com, and donate to Project (RED). It also streams Twitter tweets, and if the feed was any indication, U2Tube was a rousing real-time success. YouTube announced early last week that the stream would broadcast to about 16 countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Jim Louderback, Revision3 CEO, who will participate on a panel at OMMA Video Friday in Los Angeles, Calif., says the Internet was not designed to deliver real-time streaming media, but rather built to "store-it-forward." When it comes to video, many people believe picture quality is more important. But when streaming a band, audio is just as important -- sometimes more. Dropping a frame or two every now and then isn't a big deal, but fans immediately notice a hiccup in the audio. "To get audio and video to arrive at the same time you need a lot of bandwidth," he says. "It's not like television where the feeds are shared. If they are delivering a million simultaneous streams, every person watching has a unique stream being sent to them. If you have one million people watching, you have one million streams feeding from the content delivery network out to the homes." Revision3 streams live content from conferences, such as the Consumer Electronics Show, but not concerts. There are plans to cover more live events. It's not clear how many people actually tuned in online to watch the Webcast. As of mid-day Monday, YouTube had not released the number. "This was a big win for the YouTube community and U2 fans around the world," says a YouTube spokesperson. "We're still working to pull together the data around this event and will share those numbers publicly as soon as they become available." By Sunday night, U2's YouTube webcast became the No. 1 global trending topic on Twitter. The day of the event, "#u2webcast," "Rose Bowl" and "Bono" were three of top ten trends on Twitter. U2's YouTube channel views are closing in on 7 million, the number of subscribers roses10 times since last Monday, and the band's promotional video received 2.7 million views in less than a week.
Google Social Search officially rolled out Monday. People can test it in Google Labs, a section offering experimental search functions and other features. Google pulls publicly available Web content from a person's social circle through blog posts, status updates, tweets and pictures. The set of connections, or social circle, provides the network. Google says it's using a normal ranking algorithm to pick the content. There are three ways that Google pulls content to build a social graph. The search engine will source social content through public Google profiles and extended profiles, Google Chat buddies, and content in the Google Reader. Google's Search Guru Matt Cutts explains how the engine creates the social circle in a video on YouTube. "If I follow my best friend, and he's following five people, Google will add those five people to my extended social circle since it's likely some of those connections will be mine as well," he says. "A second way for us to add to your social circle is from your Google Chat buddies. If you have eight Chat buddies, we will add those eight Chat buddies to your social graph." Cutts says Google will not publish the list of Chat buddies. Google pulls them into the person's social circle so the engine can serve up their public information, too. The third way is to capture information through Google Reader. Subscribing to a blog in Google Reader allows Google to serve a post from the blog in search results. After the social circle is built, the information serves up in Google search query results at the bottom of the page when its algorithms determine the content will benefit the person searching. The social content, however, only serves up when signed into Google through Google Labs. Cutts says people have control of the content, and that things that are not public do not show up in the search results.
Verizon Communications had a nearly 30% drop in third-quarter earnings as AT&T and the iPhone ate into the telecom giant's wireless growth. Verizon Wireless added 1.2 million customers during the quarter (for a total of $89 million) compared to 2.1 million a year ago, underscoring the company's lack of hot phones to rival the iPhone. In contrast, AT&T last week reported adding 2 million customers in the third quarter and activating 3.2 million iPhones. Verizon overall posted a profit of $1.18 billion, or 41 cents a share -- down from $1.67 billion, or 59 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue rose 10% to $27.27 billion, slightly ahead of analyst expectations. Wireless revenue increased 24% to $15.8 billion, although the average revenue per user fell 2.2% from a year ago. Nearly one-third (30.5%) of the company's wireless revenue now comes from data charges, up from 25.1% in the third quarter of 2008. Despite its ad for the forthcoming Droid phone attacking the iPhone, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg did not rule out a potential partnership between the company and Apple. "We would be interested at some point in the future and they have thought it would be interesting to have us as a partner," he said during the company's conference call with analysts, without providing further detail. In the meantime, Verizon plans to release a dozen more devices in the fourth quarter including the Android-based Droid, the BlackBerry Storm 2 and a sequel to the BlackBerry Curve. It will also offer the Palm Pre early next year. In addition to AT&T and its exclusive deal for the iPhone, Verizon is also feeling pressure from competitors focused on price. T-Mobile USA Monday introduced a pair of new pricing plans: a no-contract Even More Plus plan offering a full unlimited service package for $79.99, and an Even More option, requiring a two-year contract for a subsidized phone and unlimited voice, texting and data for $99.99. However, Verizon's Chief Financial Officer John Killian told The Wall Street Journal the T-Mobile price cuts were less than anticipated and said there was little need to react to the changes. Even so, it would not be surprising to see Verizon and other carriers at some point roll out new pricing plans in response to T-Mobile to stay competitive in a weak economy. Last year, all of the major carriers announced $99 unlimited calling plans at about the same time. Sprint and T-Mobile have been most aggressive on pushing down pricing, however. Sprint's Simply Everything plan offers full unlimited services for the same price for $99.99, while its prepaid Boost Mobile service offers unlimited "talk, text, Web and walkie-talkie" for $50 monthly. Sprint also recently upped the ante through its Any Mobile Any Time plan, providing unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling to any U.S. wireless number on any network at any time.
Tech review publisher TopTenReviews on Monday announced the acquisition of the Consumer Media division of Imaginova, including Space.com, LiveScience.com and comics and genre-related entertainment news source Newsarama.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In turn, TopTen has established a TechMediaNetwork to incorporate these properties. According to TopTen, the network is presently responsible for 12.2 million unique visits a month. "We see strong potential for growth in traffic and revenue as a result of the synergy between the sites," said TopTenReviews founder and CEO Jerry Ropelato. The sites are expected to remain "fundamentally" the same, according to Ropelato. TopTen is a privately held review site covering software, Web services, consumer electronics and entertainment, which break out into roughly 350 categories. With Space.com, LiveScience.com and Newsarama.com, TopTen expands its coverage to include news and information about technology, science and comic genre entertainment, in addition to content about purchasing technology and entertainment products. The science properties currently syndicate original content to Yahoo, MSNBC, AOL, USA Today and FoxNews.com. TopTen will also make an effort to continue the relationships Imaginova had with the scientific community, including the National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, while expanding its technology and entertainment coverage. Last year, the Ogden, Utah-based TopTen raised a $6 million first round from Highway 12 Ventures and Village Ventures.