January 2012

Twitter, Facebook, Google endorse alternate online piracy bill

Eight of the largest Web companies have endorsed an online piracy bill offered by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) as an alternative to the unpopular Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart, Protect IP.

The OPEN Act would direct online patent infringement claims against foreign websites to the International Trade Commission (ITC), which would be authorized to order online ad networks and payment processors to sever ties with the rogue foreign sites. That approach drew praise from the Web firms, many of which oppose the provisions in SOPA that would require search engines and other sites to delete links to sites deemed to be "dedicated" to copyright infringement. The online community argues such a requirement would result in censorship online. "[The OPEN Act's] approach targets foreign rogue sites without inflicting collateral damage on legitimate, law-abiding U.S. Internet companies by bringing well-established international trade remedies to bear on this problem," said AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga.

Texting profits at risk as users look elsewhere

Text-messaging has long been a big-time profit generator for U.S. mobile operators, but they now risk losing these profits as consumers find cheaper ways to communicate.

SMS -- short message service -- is no longer all the rage, but it still generates an estimated 12 percent of service revenue for U.S. operators. Now, with many consumers turning to low-cost alternatives like iMessenger, BlackBerry Messenger and Facebook's mobile messaging service, operators like Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Sprint Nextel risk losing a steady, superbly profitable source of income. Customers using the new crop of messaging services must still pay for mobile Internet access, but the cost per message is much smaller than a monthly SMS service plan or per text charges, particularly as U.S. carriers charge both the recipient and sender. U.S. operators still carry a lot of text messages on their networks, but they are seeing warning signs ahead.

WLNY Owner Spinning Off LPTVs, Too

Michael Pascucci is liquidating all his TV assets. The North Palm Beach (FL) broadcaster who agreed to sell independent WLNY New York to CBS last month for $55 million is now selling the three co-located low-power stations to investors with ties to Hoak Media for $6.5 million, according to a Federal Communications Commission filing.

The facilities: WLNY-CA Mineola (NY), WLIG-LD Morristown (NJ), and W27CD Stamford (CT). The buyer — Local TV Media New York — is principally owned by two groups of investors: Rajendra Singh and family of Miami, and Columbia Capital.

Broadcast News Rebounds in 2011

In 2011, NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams averaged 8.76 million total viewers (up from 8.49 million in 2010), easily outpacing the 6:30 p.m. broadcasts on ABC and CBS. NBC Nightly News enjoyed its biggest year since 2006 when it averaged 8.8 million viewers per broadcast. ABC World News With Diane Sawyer took second place, closing out the year with an average delivery of 7.83 million viewers per broadcast. NBC’s margin of victory over ABC was 12 percent. All told, Sawyer’s ratings improved 5 percent from the year-ago 7.14 million. In a transition year, the CBS Evening News once again brought up the rear, averaging 5.96 million total viewers per night, an increase of 6 percent from 2010. Katie Couric hosted her final broadcast on Thursday, May 19, whereupon Harry Smith kept the anchor desk warm for a few weeks. Scott Pelley’s tenure began on June 6.

Sprint details first LTE launch cities, expansion plans

Sprint will launch LTE in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and six other smaller markets by mid-2011, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said.

He also went into a little more detail about how Sprint planned to grow its initial low-bandwidth LTE network into a big fat network the size of Verizon’s. Sprint will start out with a 5 MHz-by-5 MHz carrier in the PCS band, which will give it half the capacity of Verizon’s networks and most of AT&T’s networks (AT&T runs 5×5 MHz networks in some cities like Chicago). But Hesse said Sprint plans to re-farm spectrum in the 800 MHz band for LTE once it begins shutting down its outdated Nextel iDEN systems in 2013. That will double the overall capacity available, plus with new LTE-Advanced technologies, Sprint can bond those carriers together creating a single high-bandwidth channel. But Sprint’s long-term future is tied to Clear Channel which has spectrum in spades, particularly in the large markets. If Clearwire can get its LTE network built, it will be able to provide Sprint with gobs of bandwidth where it needs it most, the major metro markets.

Sprint put its investment in a partnership with LightSquared on hold as the wireless venture seeks an operating license from the Federal Communications Commission. “The companies have agreed to realigning our deployment timeline to coincide with potential FCC actions,” said Sprint spokesman Scott Sloat. Until approval is received, “both companies believe it is prudent to pull back on expenses,” he said. Sprint has agreed to network construction for LightSquared in exchange for advanced payments. Through the third quarter, Sprint received about $290 million from LightSquared, Sloat said.

'NewsRight' Launched By 29 News Outlets To Track Stories Online

The Associated Press and 28 news organizations -- including The New York Times Co. and The Washington Post Co. -- are launching a company that will measure the unpaid online use of their original reporting and seek to convert unauthorized websites, blogs and other newsgathering services into paying customers.

The company, called NewsRight, brings together efforts started by the AP and its partners in October 2010 to track the use of stories on websites, blogs and other Internet forums through what it calls the News Registry. NewsRight encodes original stories with hidden data that includes the writer's name and when it was published. The encoded stories send back reports to the registry that describe where a story is being used and who is reading it. The technology can even locate stories that have been cut and pasted in whole or in part.

Companies Struggle To Manage Social Media

A new report from Altimeter Group warns companies and brands about being overwhelmed by the proliferation of social media.

The study found global corporations are now struggling to manage an average of 178 business-related social media accounts, spanning Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Foursquare, among others. “Beyond coordination challenges, unchecked accounts and disparate customer interactions expose brands to a host of legal, compliance and fragmented brand-perception risks,” stated the report, authored by Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang. Social media has often been harnessed haphazardly for marketing, sales, customer support and product development. While 70% of businesses said social media efforts met company objectives, only 43% had a formal strategy to address how social will meet specific business goals.

10 No-Fail Brand Resolutions For 2012

These 10 resolutions are critical to the mind shift that must occur about how your brand, community, and profits are built, maintained, and expanded.

Recognize and respond to the reality that Facebook, Google, and Twitter are the NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox of the future.
Inspire and demonstrate rigor in the articulation of your brand purpose to create the emotional connection with your customers that will drive their social media engagement.
Explore and integrate how to offer your customers greater authenticity, transparency, and accountability to increase their loyalty and your profitability.
Interrogate and embrace how your brand can become more human, interacting with customers in a way that captures their attention, commands their interest, and inspires their loyalty.
Monitor and maintain the wide breadth of networks, platforms, and channels through which to bring your brand to life using a variety of media including text, video, photos, and podcasts.
Deeply accept and respond to the fact that your customers are increasingly driving your content distribution through their personal social media channels.
Identify and respond to the power of F-commerce (Facebook commerce) by expanding your e-commerce presence on the network.
Explore and act on what your brand and business will look like if it only lives in a smartphone in your customer’s hand.
Play with and apply the gamification of your product and service offerings, including rewards and incentives for customer engagement, loyalty, and sharing.
Internalize the fact that control of your brand must now be shared with your customers and offer them the personal attention, professional respect, and authentic interest appropriate to business partners.

Department of Energy Launches Initiative with Industry to Better Protect the Nation’s Electric Grid from Cyber Threats

As part of the Obama Administration’s efforts to enhance the security and reliability of the nation’s electrical grid, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced an initiative to further protect the electrical grid from cyber attacks.

The “Electric Sector Cybersecurity Risk Management Maturity” project, a White House initiative led by the Department of Energy in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), will leverage the insight of private industry and public sector experts to build on existing cybersecurity measures and strategies to create a more comprehensive and consistent approach to protecting the nation’s energy delivery system. The initiative will develop a “maturity model” that allows utility companies and grid operators to measure their current capabilities and analyze gaps in their cyber defenses. Maturity models, which rely on best practices to identify an organization’s strengths and weaknesses, are widely used by other sectors to improve performance, efficiency and quality.

What the Internet Means for How We Think About the World

A Q&A with Internet theorist David Weinberger. In this time of easy access to information, experts, and news, the last thing you would expect is that we are in the midst of a crisis in knowledge. But sometimes it seems that we, in fact, are, says Weinberger.

How's that? Weinberger says that on the day he sat down to write the prologue to his new book, Too Big to Know, three of the six front-page New York Times stories -- about topics as diverse as the Gulf oil spill, John Updike's archive, and soccer players who fake injury -- could have carried the subhead, "Knowledge in Crisis!" On the face of it, these stories do not seem to be about knowledge in any way, or even to be connected at all. But Weinberger says that at their core these stories are all about questions of how we store, organize, find, and apply knowledge -- questions that are changing rapidly as knowledge is increasingly stored not in paper or people's minds, but online.

Benton

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