January 2012

The opposite of evil: Google named best place to work in America

Google has a new weapon in the intense war for engineering talent in Silicon Valley: The search giant was named by Fortune magazine as the best place to work in America.

Google capped a year when it hired about 7,000 people, the most intense growth spurt in the search giant's 13-year history, with perhaps the pre-eminent human relations title in corporate America, moving up from fourth to first on Fortune's annual pecking order of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. "Employees rave about their mission, the culture, and the famous perks of the Plex," Fortune wrote. There's no doubt that there are substantial perks to working at Google -- ranging from the new 40,000 square-foot park that the company built for its employees at its Mountain View headquarters last year, to the fleet of electric Chevy Volts and Nissan Leafs that Googlers can check out for free to run errands at lunch time. But the search giant says it won the Best Place to Work title not because it focuses on perks, but because it focuses on people.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Awards Funds to Extend PBS NEWSHOUR Election Coverage to Diverse Audiences

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced funding for PBS NEWSHOUR to support NEWSHOUR Open Election 2012, a public media initiative that will enhance the program’s election coverage and better inform diverse audiences about important election issues.

Through a $420,000 grant from CPB, NEWSHOUR Open Election 2012 is utilizing crowd-sourcing technologies developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) and Mozilla to enable citizen volunteers to translate and caption 2012 election coverage into dozens of languages, as well as for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. These technologies will make election news, speeches and debates more accessible for diverse audiences, helping to increase their understanding of, and engagement in, the political process. PBS NEWSHOUR will launch the translation and captioning project during President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address on Jan. 24.

Cellphone makers can expect poor reception in 2012

Cellphone makers are set to struggle with slow sales growth this year as a weaker global economy discourages consumers from replacing older handsets.

Fourth-quarter results are likely to show the slowdown under way. Apple's long-awaited iPhone 4S and Samsung Electronics' new, broad offering were likely the exceptions in an otherwise lackluster Christmas holiday season. "The blowout quarter that Apple will report will show they are still the one to beat, while in the Android (operating system) camp ... only a strong brand like Samsung can stand out," said Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi. Apple, ousted as the world's top smartphone maker by Samsung in the third quarter, could regain the No. 1 spot as consumers rush to buy the latest iPhone. It had been 16 months since the previous model went on sale.

FCC Releases Proposed Media Ownership Rules Changes

This document solicits comment on proposed changes to the broadcast ownership rules. In addition, this document solicits comment on certain aspects of the FCC’s 2008 Diversity Order that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit remanded and directed the FCC to address in this proceeding. This document solicits comment also on potential changes to the FCC’s broadcast attribution rules.

The FCC must receive written comments on or before March 5, 2012 and reply comments on or before April 3, 2012. Written comments on the Paperwork Reduction Act proposed information collection requirements must be submitted by the public, Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and other interested parties on or before March 19, 2012.

Sprint pushes its wireless network for smart grid

Not all cellular network traffic comes from our cell phones and gadgets — a growing amount will come from machines using these networks to communicate (Internet of Things), including the utilities that provide you with power and water. On Jan 19 Sprint announced that a variety of smart grid vendors will be using its wireless networks to provide connectivity, including smart grid network firm Silver Spring Networks, building automation company Power Insight, meter maker Itron and substation networking company Lanner Electronics.

ComScore Study: A Third of Ad Impressions Are Never Seen

ComScore has released its first ad-verification tool since acquiring AdXpose for $22 million last August. But perhaps the more interesting piece of the company’s announcement was its claim that some 30 percent of ad impressions on the web never actually meet up with an eyeball. The comScore statement, which was part of a larger study by the online metrics company, wasn’t exactly a disinterested observation. ComScore is hawking a new measurement tool, Validated Campaign Essentials (vCE), that it promises will provide marketers with a data-rich view of the performance of their campaigns from a trusted third-party source. There is a growing consensus that digital advertising, whose targeting abilities were supposed to eliminate waste in marketing campaigns, is still very much a work in progress.

New Stats: 2011 Libraries’ Digital Checkouts Up 133% Over 2010

New stats from digital library distributor OverDrive show that library patrons checked out 35 million digital titles* in 2011, up from 15 million checkouts in 2010. A few more data points from OverDrive:

22 percent of all checkouts are now made via mobile devices
1.6 billion book and title catalog pages viewed, up 130 percent from 2010
99.5 million visitor sessions, up 107 percent from 2010

*Note: Digital titles means e-books, audiobooks AND digital media. E-books are not broken out separately here. In October, OverDrive reported that 12 million e-books were checked out between January 1 and September 30, 2011 -- up 200 percent over all of 2010.

Facebook Actions: Building Up The Database Of You

Back in September, at its annual f8 developer conference, Facebook announced that it would be opening itself up to data from other apps, like Spotify and Runkeeper. Called "Actions," the system would allow the other apps to pass information about what you were doing in their worlds--like what songs you were listening to or what workouts you had done--back to the social network, to be recorded on users' profile pages and displayed to their friends. At the time, Facebook opened the system up only to a few select partners. Today, the company announced it would begin accepting applications from any other service that wanted to be considered for inclusion in the program.

Over 60 other apps, that have been working with Facebook on the feature, will also now start sending their users' information to the social network--pending approval from individual users. Here's how the system works: Let's say you listen to a particular song on Spotify. That action, "listened to a song," gets passed back to Facebook (assuming you've given Spotify approval to do so). The action gets listed in your friends' Tickers, where all their friends' actions inside Facebook (like when they Like a page or comment on a picture) gets displayed in real-time. The action also gets listed on your Timeline as a permanent part of your history. (Though you can choose not to have that listed, or limit the people to whom it gets displayed.)

Tablet Users Spend 50% More Per Purchase Than Smartphone Owners

According to Adobe Digital Marketing Insights, tablet users spend over 50% more per purchase at online retailers when compared with smartphone visitors, and 20% more when compared with traditional laptop and desktop visitors.

Adobe analyzed roughly 16.2 billion online transactions from 150 top U.S. retailers in 2011, finding that the mobile market has quickly become a lucrative cornerstone of the e-commerce industry. Tablet visitors to retail websites, the report concluded, are three times more likely to make a purchase than smartphone users. What's more, tablet visitors spent an average of $123 per purchase in 2011, the most compared with other devices and a figure that spiked during the holiday season. Desktop and laptop owners spent $102 on average, while smartphone owners spent just $80 per purchase at retail.

Revolution 2.0: Google Marketing Exec Wael Ghonim And The Facebook Page That Changed The World

A Q$A with Wael Ghonim.

A year ago--on January 25, 2011--a revolution broke out in Egypt. The world watched tens of thousands of protestors gathering in Tahrir Square demanding political and economic reforms and ultimately toppling longtime Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.

The date of January 25 was initially suggested on a Facebook page called "We are all Khaled Said." The page drew its inspiration from the case of a young man by that name who had apparently committed no crime, yet was pulled out of a cybercafé by Mubarak's police force and viciously beaten to death. The images of his beaten face sparked outrage among Egyptians at the level of political repression and corruption within the government and police force. Khaled Said inspired Egyptians to take their destiny into their own hands and overthrow the Mubarak dictatorship. Although the moderator of that fateful Facebook page was anonymous at the time, the world soon learned that it was the work of Wael Ghonim, a 30-year-old Egyptian-born marketing executive for Google, who was based out of Dubai.

As the revolution began, Ghonim was imprisoned by Egyptian state security. It wasn't until he was released that his identity as the Facebook page moderator was revealed. Overnight, he became an Egyptian hero. Internationally he became the symbol of the "Facebook Revolution" and was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. A Mideast business magazine named him the second most powerful Arab in the world.

In Wael Ghonim's new book, Revolution 2.0, he maintains that the January 25 movement in Egypt was a leaderless revolution. He details his experiences leading up to and during the Egyptian Revolution, and lays out the way revolutions might look in the future. Several weeks ago he started a political movement called "Our Egypt" aimed at getting the revolution "back on track." We spoke with Ghonim via phone from Cairo where a year later, he remains hard at work trying to improve the future for his people and his country.

Benton

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