Social-driven news site True/Slant, which Forbes acquired in late May, is heading for the trash heap. In a blog post on Thursday, True/Slant writer and reporter Neal Ungerleider said "the site, unfortunately, is winding down operations at the end of July." Effective June 1, True/Slant founder and CEO Lewis Dvorkin was expected to join Forbes to lead all editorial areas at Forbes as chief product officer. And while some on Thursday said the shutdown was expected, that wasn't at all clear upon news of Forbes' acquisition in May. Going forward, "The small True/Slant team ... will now be working side-by-side with talented and dedicated journalists at Forbes Media," said Dvorkin at the time. Forbes representatives with knowledge of True/Slant's fate could not be reached for comment late Thursday. Since its founding last summer, True/Slant has relied on independent journalists -- known as "knowledge experts" -- who are assigned to specific topics, including politics, culture, sports, business, health, science and food. Each contributor got a dedicated page to feature their work with the goal of attracting a network of highly engaged followers. Pages also feature headlines from around the Web, which contributors select themselves. Presently, True/Slant has more than 300 contributors whose work is divided into 18 topic areas, Dvorkin said in a open letter in May. Dvorkin also projected that "a record" 1.5 million unique users "will have visited our site," in May. Alluding to future plans, Ungerleider said in his blog post on Thursday: "I hope to rejoin some former True/Slanters at a new -- as of yet disclosed -- project." From December 1996 to April 2000, Dvorkin served as executive editor of Forbes magazine. More recently, he started consulting for Forbes in April of this year. In his new role, Dvorkin is being expected to create and implement new editorial initiatives, as well as re-imagine Forbes.com and the magazine itself. For months prior to Forbes' acquisition, True/Slant had been engaged in second-round fund-raising, according to Dvorkin. He also said Forbes Media was an original investor in True/Slant. True/Slant was just the latest "new media" acquisition for Forbes, which has undergone painful transitions in the face of rapidly changing market demands. Last November, one month after it was forced to cut 100 jobs -- from both the editorial and business side -- Forbes acquired FlipGloss Media. Santa Monica, CA-based FlipGloss helps publishers -- including Variety and Scripps Networks -- and advertisers create and distribute interactive, magazine-style content packages, which are designed to increase user engagement and ad performance. After leaving Forbes, Dvorkin joined AOL as senior vice president of programming, where he was responsible for news, sports and network programming. At AOL, he is also credited with helping to launch top gossip site TMZ.com. During his career, Dvorkin has also served as Page One editor of The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at Newsweek, and an editor at The New York Times.
Drawing further attention to the white-hot social gaming sector, Zynga on Thursday said it raised $150 million from Japanese wireless carrier Softbank. The partners also announced plans to develop and distribute social games in Japan via a new Zynga Japan joint venture. Along with the obvious opportunities to expand its user-base, the Asian enterprise will allow Zynga to "gain insights from the Japanese market," said Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga. Based in Tokyo, Zynga Japan will attempt to tap into the country's renowned passion for gaming and technology, while leveraging Softbank's mobile and Web technology to produce new social games. "We share the same vision as Zynga in social games and look forward to working together to create a social game powerhouse," Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of Softbank, said in a statement. San Francisco-based Zynga creates games like "FarmVille" and "Mafia Wars," which have thrived on social networks like Facebook, as well as among early mobile app adopters. While Zynga has taken issue with Facebook for limiting the ways it can contact users through the social net's notification system, the two companies recently reached a deal to partner for at least the next five years. By all accounts, Zynga is trying to decrease its dependence on Facebook, however. In May, it announced a partnership with Yahoo to offer its games throughout the Web portal's network including the home page, Yahoo Games and Yahoo Mail. Softbank is well known for investing in technology companies, including a 40% stake in Yahoo Japan. Driven largely by the popularity of gaming on Facebook, the social gaming market is witnessing mega-deals almost daily. Just this week, News Corp.'s IGN Entertainment debuted a social gaming network dubbed MyIGN. Also this week, reports emerged that Google is in talks with the makers of popular online games, including Zynga, to create a social network to rival Facebook. Citing unnamed sources, The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported that the search giant is in discussions with Electronic Arts' Playfish and Zynga, and had been with Playdom. There were also reports two weeks ago that Google has invested at least $100 million in Zynga, which has benefited from Facebook users' love for gaming more than any other company. Walt Disney, meanwhile, just agreed to acquire two-year-old social gaming site Playdom for $563 million, which followed Electronic Arts' acquisition of Playfish for a reported $300 million late last year.
A group of four Facebook users who sued the site earlier this year for allegedly violating their privacy have withdrawn their case. The one-sentence notice of dismissal, filed with the U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif. last week, didn't give a reason for the decision. The papers specified that the withdrawal was without prejudice, which means that the plaintiffs theoretically can bring the case again. This lawsuit stemmed from Facebook's decision late last year to change its privacy settings to reclassify a host of information as "publicly available." At the same time, the social networking site also changed many of its default settings to share-with-everyone, sparking concern that people who reviewed their settings quickly and accepted the defaults were inadvertently sharing more data than they had intended. The consumers had filed suit against Facebook in February, alleging that the new settings were "confusing and materially deceptive" and lessened their privacy. Facebook simplified its settings in May, but the consumers said in court papers that the company's move only worsened matters. Earlier this month, the social networking site asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the consumers had not suffered any harm as a result of the revised privacy settings. Facebook is still facing privacy lawsuits from other users. At least three people have sued the company for allegedly sharing information about them with advertisers through referrer URLs. In addition, the company is embroiled in privacy litigation related to "instant personalization," a feature that automatically shares users' names, photos and other data with three outside companies -- Microsoft Docs, Pandora and Yelp -- unless users opt out.
Gawker Media has settled a copyright infringement lawsuit by Eric Dane and his wife Rebecca Gayheart stemming from Gawker's posting of a sex tape made by the couple, according to court papers filed this week. Full details of the settlement -- which was arrived at through mediation -- are not known, but the clip no longer appears to be available on Gawker's properties. Lawyers for Gawker and the actors have not yet responded to Online Media Daily's requests for comment. Dane and Gayheart sued Gawker Media for copyright infringement last September, shortly after the company posted edited versions of the 12-minute tape on its blogs. Gawker posted around four minutes of the video on the Defamer blog on Aug. 17 with the headline "Dane's Anatomy: McSteamy, His Wife and a Fallen Beauty Queen's Naked Threesome." Gawker also posted an "uncensored" version on Fleshbot the following day. The Defamer version had been viewed around 4 million times as of last month. Late last year, Gawker won a preliminary skirmish in the case when U.S. District Court Judge George Wu in Los Angeles ruled that Dane and Gayheart would not be entitled to statutory damages -- which could have been as high as $150,000 -- because they hadn't registered the video with the U.S. Copyright Office before the clip appeared on Defamer. That decision meant that even if Gawker infringed on the couple's copyright, the actors would be limited to recovering non-statutory damages. That figure could include whatever profits Gawker earned as a result of the video.
As one might assume, local business directories are benefiting greatly from the mobile boom. In March, the number of mobile subscribers accessing business directories via mobile phone increased 14% year-over-year to 17.3 million users, according to new research conducted by comScore and released on Thursday by the Yellow Pages Association. The increase even outpaced the 10% growth in the number of mobile media users who browsed the mobile Web, used applications or downloaded content during the same time period. "Mobile offers significant opportunity, both for consumers who need convenient and reliable sources of local information on-the-go, and also for local search providers that are making this content available in new and innovative ways," said Neg Norton, president of the Yellow Pages Association. Mobile browser was the most common access method for users, with 10.8 million subscribers in March 2010, and 21% year-over-year growth. But even as the browser remained the most used mobile feature for access, apps grew at a more rapid pace with 42% year-over-year growth -- totaling 4.1 million subscribers in March. ComScore also found that mobile media attracts a highly desirable consumer segment for advertisers. Indeed, mobile usage of business directories unlocks a younger, wealthier user base. According to the report, 58% of mobile media users are 34 or younger, while, over half have a household income in excess of $75,000. In March, the number of people accessing business directories on a mobile device at least once per week increased more than 16% year-over-year to nearly five million. Mobile users also access content that is attractive for many advertisers, comScore found. Mobile users who access business directories are three and a half times more likely as the average mobile media user to access women's magazine content, health information, real estate listings, and job listings via their mobile devices. Meanwhile, as local mobile grew by double digits, local searches on personal computers saw single-digit growth year-over-year. Searches on Internet Yellow Pages and portal sites increased 4% to 444 million in March 2010, or 5.3 billion annually. The overall universe of core web search -- where users search for any kind of information on a major Internet search portal like Google or Bing -- increased 8% to 15.4 billion searches in March, or 187.3 billion annually.
Adobe Systems has filed a patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for technology that could make rich media applications (RMA) easier for search engines to find, index and rank. Web developers have complained for years about the additional work that must go into making content created in Flash discoverable by search engines. The patent application describes an annotation-based function that will make RMA content more discoverable by search engines. GoRumours.com points to the application that notes programmable links to the crawler identify the content in the Flash page. Annotating parts of the Flash content creates a timeline that helps the search engine identify parts of the Web site, according to David Harry, SEO-Reliable founder. "The annotation tells the search engine the parts of the Web site to crawl, so it doesn't need to go through the entire site," he says. "It's about defining pieces of the Flash file. It doesn't give you full textual capability, but it makes it easier to define things." The technology described in the patent aims to help developers that have had to create entire text versions of Flash make it easier for search engines to identify content. It's like putting an alt tag in an image, Harry says. "Google probably told them, we don't want to crawl your whole bloody file," Harry says. He points to a portion of the patent that reads: "A prior attempt to make such rich Internet applications more compatible with the aforementioned search engine technologies has been to shadow a rich Internet application with a HTML version of the application. Such a technique suffers from the obvious disadvantage of requiring duplication of effort in coding the actual rich Internet application as well as the shadow HTML. While the search engine can't read Flash, so flags or annotations in the code tell the search engine what to index and rank, it appears the technology might already exist in the current iteration of Flash as an action script to annotate a specific Flash movie, according to Tanya Crawford, Web developer at Verve Developments. But it's not cost effective because Web developers can do the same thing with Ajax. The same thing means directing search engines through signals and annotations. Adobe has no intensions of pulling back on Flash development. During the Google I/O 2010 conference in May, Google CEO Eric Schmidt asked Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen for the key technological innovations Flash will bring Google TV. Narayen admitted the company continues to work on 10.1 Flash to improve key issues like battery life and performance. Aside from Google TV, Adobe plans to support Android applications, too.
Deal seekers searching for money-saving offers through mobile coupon platform Shooger will soon have BlackBerry as an option to clip and save. This week the company made it easier to search for deals on the iPhone, handsets running Android, and the company's Web site, but the company has plans to tie in searches on PC, too. The clip-file-and-save coupon app geared toward local and national specials relies on Google Maps and other technology to pinpoint location and deliver the goods. Consumers can set perimeters -- adding a city, ZIP code or street address -- and change the radius to find retail offers from 1 to 100 miles. The search results sort based on location by category, merchant or keyword and sort offers. Consumers can share deals with friends on Facebook and Twitter. Matt Myers, chief marketing officer, Shooger, says there are more than 100 million monthly Google search queries for deal and coupon-related terms. Shooger offers about 100,000 local and national deals from 50,000 merchants searchable by categories such as Restaurants & Bars, Home Improvement, Travel, Automotive, Dentists & Doctors and Sports & Recreation. The majority of people carry phones everywhere they go, and simply showing the screen to take advantage of the deal transitions the sale from online and into the store. "We're working toward the ability for consumers to create an account and save online searches, linking them to the phone application," Myers says. "The offers found on the consumer's PC will show up on the phone. Location is the first step, but we will link that to other information in the future." Google has also begun to take advantage of coupons. Google Tags, for example, allows small and medium-size businesses to pay a $25 flat monthly fee to promote services on Google Places. There companies can place coupons and photos of other business-related information, making it easy for mobile consumers to find local stores. Searches on Google for Printable Coupons increased 67% compared with the prior year, according to Coupons.com, which earlier this month reported surpassing more than 1 million downloads of its iPhone and Android coupon applications. Representing 20.8% of the U.S. population, 46.4 million American consumers now use online coupons -- up from 40.2 million in 2008, according to Coupons.com. The company estimates that of the 46.4 million online coupon users, 12.9 million do not read any part of the Sunday newspaper -- up 18% compared with 10.9 million in 2008. Mobile and location, the first step in targeting mobile services to consumers, will link to a series of triggers that advertisers can expect to tap, including links to mobile social graphs and profiles. A variety of industry experts participating in the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford suggested the industry should continue to move in that direction. During a Tuesday panel, Jules Maltz, principal at Institutional Venture Partners, told attendees that startups designing mobile applications now have an opportunity to make a profit. Proving that point, Sunil Verma, co-founder and COO at MobClix, admitted the mobile ad exchange serves up about 7 billion impressions monthly, working with about 10,000 application developers to gain revenue through clicks, rich media and video. It will become all about the data for mobile advertisers as more companies provide incentives for consumers to trade information for discounts. But who owns it? The demand for mobile data has skyrocketed more than 110% on a compound annualized growth, but the revenue generated remains between 15% and 20% -- which provides a huge gap for carriers, according to Bill Diotte, chief executive officer at BroadHop, which sits between the application and carrier to support the flow of information and monetize the assets of the carrier.
Sooner or later, every small business in the marketing, advertising and media world gets screwed by one or more of their clients. The days of operating on a handshake backed by the full faith and credit of the individual extending his/her hand have evaporated. But even if you have it on paper, lots of things can keep vendors from getting their just rewards -- from options being canceled in a change of ownership to larger companies counting on you not coming after them in court because it would cost more to collect than what you are owed. Getting screwed can take a variety of forms: such as in the search/interviewing process, collecting ideas from candidates eager to get your assignment, not hiring the candidate, but later implementing his/her ideas. The next time you ask a vendor for ideas about how they would expand your business and they refuse to give you specifics, this is why. Vendors often get screwed with equity deals that are affected by changes in ownership or dilution -- or simply never honored because when startups cash out, there is a strong tendency to think that since they took the biggest risk they should get ALL the rewards, and the contributions of the supporting cast that helped achieved that payday are either minimized or marginalized. "We can't get there without you ..." suddenly becomes: "Thanks for your help; here's some lunch money." Taking on a new client is a risk for a small business that has to devote considerable resources to quickly learning all about its new client, their competitive set (perhaps their entire industry segment) and their real needs (versus their perceived needs). The fact that you aren't aware of or didn't disclose how dysfunctional your company really is only adds to the burden of producing quality deliverables. Making vendors navigate the political and territorial hotspots to try to deduce information that should be freely surrendered eats up time for which vendors get no compensation. The usual justification for screwing a vendor is: "We didn't like your work." To which you should be ready to answer: "Really, for how long?" Letting a vendor invoice you month in and month out, assuming everything is going smoothly, is truly gross negligence on your part. If you don't think a vendor is producing, tell them RIGHT now, and give them a chance to explain why. You may discover it is because you or someone in your organization is not doing their part, making it harder or impossible for the vendor to perform. Some clients are notorious for not paying small vendors in a timely fashion. Why not? You like to get paid by your clients on time -- why screw your vendors? They have fixed costs associated with running their businesses, even if they are sole practitioners. Let's take a look at the math. You pay a small business $5 k a month. So do four others. Here is how much they are really making from you: Set aside to cover taxes $1,500 1/5 of office rent: $500 (major city) 1/5 of healthcare coverage: $300 (and that is on the low side if they have families or employees) 1/5 phone calls, materials, transport to see you, other general overhead: $200. So of that $5k check you write, the vendor actually makes about half that. And they don't get a bye from their landlord or phone company or healthcare provider because you delay their check for 60 days. Or worse still, decide after have you accrued four or five months of invoices to not pay them at all. When you screw a small business you may think they have little or no recourse to try and collect what you owe them, especially since taking you to court is not a productive option. And perhaps that was once true, but the Internet provides an easily accessible forum for pissed-off vendors to trash you just like tourists slam hotels that overpromise and underdeliver. Finally get a mention in TechCrunch? Who do you think is anonymously savaging you in the comments section? Wondering why comparison sites are giving your firm two instead of five stars? Can't understand why a prospect is giving you the cold shoulder? They might remember a comment someone made in a discussion group about what assholes your company is to work for. Get a call from one of your directors asking why this angry vendor is sending him registered mail outlining how you screwed him? And those are just the easy ways to get even. With a little imagination, a small business can make your life a living hell, especially if they are pissed off. Just like personal relationships, lots of business relationships go bad after a honeymoon period. It happens; that is life. But when it does, be honorable in how you end the arrangement. Be clear why you are firing them and pay all past due invoices. After all, that is how you would want to be treated if you were on the other side of the desk.