iMore reports that Google may make four times the ad revenue off of their use in iOS than they do from their own Android platform. Apple wants to change that. Apple has already begun intermediating search queries though Siri, effectively cutting Google out of the valuable identity information associated with those searches. Next up is that other large data components on iOS, maps.
According to a new AP-CNBC poll, 57 percent of Facebook users say they never click ads or other sponsored content when they use the site, with another 26 percent saying they hardly ever engage in such activity.
While the company makes money, in part, simply by displaying sponsored content, user clicks are a critical part of an advertiser’s calculus when gauging how effective those ads are and how much they’re willing to pay for them. In the first quarter, Facebook generated 82 percent of its $1.06 billion in revenue from advertising sales. In the company’s online IPO pitch to retail investors, CFO David Ebersman says the company is working to make ads “more relevant, more social, and more engaging” as it looks to grow.
And while Facebook has been able to decrease its reliance on sponsored content (down from 98 percent of sales in 2009), the hopes of expanding the company’s e-commerce footprint also faces public resistance, the poll shows. A majority of participants (54 percent) said they wouldn’t feel safe using the platform for financial transactions like purchasing goods or services. Only 8 percent said they would feel extremely or very safe in doing so.
This does not bode well for the long-term future of the company as a public entity. For my part, I'll occasionally click ads to investigate a product more, but I can't remember the last time I've actually bought something off that first click-through.
And "liking pages" allows me to enter contests and keep informed on a particular entity or activity, but usually I find those items in my newsfeed as opposed to clicking over.
There may, in fact, be too much stuff in my newsfeed for me to keep tabs on everything I want to. I don't really need to read the latest Farmville news from friend A, yet the ability to opt out is more work sometimes than its worth. It ought to be an opt-in policy (e.g. if I sign up for Farmville, I ought to be asked if I want to see my friends' activity there, rather than have to go back to my settings to opt out.)
What you'll end up with is a fad: a huge, lasting fad, but a fad nonetheless, with little opportunity to expand beyond its current capacities or abilities. People will get bored.
I think Facebook has plateaued, although that plateau could last a long time. There are some 900 million users and seven billion people on the planet. There's room for growth there.
Zuckerberg probably waited a year, maybe two, too long to issue an IPO. He'll make a boatload of money but the funds to invest in some kind of expansion into some new territory were needed last year: Facebook could have, for instance, partnered with Google to develop a true competitor to the iPad and promised an huge user base with its audience. It would also have prevented Google+ from getting underway-- which has been underwhelming anyway-- and given Facebook a genuine e-commerce stream.
As it was, they took forever to come out with an app for the iPad which is basically just the Safari browser with the Facebook logo slapped on and a pretty shoddy app at that (again, you have to opt out of things like location services and chat.)
My suspicion is that Facebook is a one-trick pony, and that the IPO is a recognition that they've done about all they can with it, and it's time to cash in their chips.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is casting Mitt Romney as a greedy, job-killing corporate titan with little concern for the working class in a new, multi-pronged effort that seeks to undermine the central rationale for his Republican rival's candidacy: his business credentials.
At the center of the push — the president's most forceful attempt yet to sully Romney before the November election — is a biting new TV ad airing Monday that recounts through interviews with former workers the restructuring, and ultimate demise, of a Kansas City, Mo., steel mill under the Republican's private equity firm.
"They made as much money off of it as they could. And they closed it down," says Joe Soptic, a steelworker for 30 years. Jack Cobb, who also worked in the industry for three decades, adds: "It was like a vampire. They came in and sucked the life out of us."
The ad, at the unusual length of 2 minutes, will run in five battleground states: Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Colorado. The campaign declined to describe the size of the ad buy though it's in the middle of running a $25 million, month-long ad campaign in nine states. A longer version of the ad was being posted online Monday.
What President Obama can do that numbers don't is put a human face on the suffering that Romney and Bain Capital created. Following a decade of weak job growth since the dotcom bubble burst, Obama can neatly tie vulture capitalists to the job insecurity that plagues the United States working classes.
It's this simple: there once was a mutual loyalty betwixt an employer and an employee: it was for life, or at least as much of life as could possibly exist. Spending 25, 30, 40 or even 50 years working for the same company was not unusual, and neither were retirement parties where the worker's longevity was celebrated with a gold watch and a nice pension.
Factories didn't shut down and jobs didn't move to China. People belonged to unions which protected them from this kind of economic servitude, a job that was constantly under threat. People were fired only for cause and not because they were caught up in a market contraction.
In return, people put in a 40 hour week and if there was more work than could be done in that time, another hand was hired, because it was cheaper than paying double overtime.
Quality products were manufactured. We made things that were inexpensive but not cheap.
You could point to any number of things that contributed to the loss of these opportunities: automation, the expansion of the workforce over the decades, the exploitation of economic inefficiencies, or most likely, the combination of all three.
Worse, if Bain and Romney didn't do it, someone else would have, and in a heartbeat. Thing is, none of them is running for President, and if we want to send a message, if the electorate really wants to show its frustration at people who skim the cream of profits off a company before making it deal with less than 80% of its income in order to manage its future, this is that chance.
No one in America...well, very few of us...want to deny anyone the opportunity to make money, even to make as much money as they can. There are limits, however, something a radical capitalist would turn blue in the face trying to deny.
Taking capitalism to its extremes, we would find the most efficient organizations would make nothing and earn as pure a profit as they can.
We call those "investment banks." And in truth, this is where capitalism and democracy have their toughest battles, for democracy is about equal opportunity and the corporatocracy is about protecting opportunity for those who already have it.
And ain't that the story of America in a nutshell? From the Revolutionary War, where only wealthy land-owners had a say in governance, through the civil rights movement, which finally broke two hundred year old ceilings on opportunities, and to today, where the corporatocracy is reforming in bribery and graft-like political activism, America has paid lip service to equality in favor of restoring an aristocratic rule.
That has to change for this nation to have any chance to survive. If President Obama can make this case, that change is inevitable and that we must be that change we seek (and not just sloganeer it, as seemed to be the case in 2008) then we can start down the road of altering our futures for the better.
I do not envy those who are just leaving the cocoon of family and school and staking their claims to the world. You have a lifetime of hard work ahead of you, and if you've been smart, you've paid attention to the news and to events around you.
The one gift that President Obama may have given this nation that may be beyond measure was the activation of the political instincts of an entire generation of kids who might merely have grown into unintentionally ironic hipsters, poised merely to comment and not commence.
Check out Chuck Todd, NBC's chief White House correspondent, openly speculating that President Obama is going to embrace same-sex marriage because he needs money from gay people. "Gay money in this election has replaced Wall Street money," he reported. NBC's David Gregory agreed. For some reason, neither man seemed to think this theory reflects poorly on the president.
Then the conventional wisdom shifted. Observers were basing their guesses on the fact that HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and Vice President Joe Biden had both made statements in support of same-sex marriage. The same-sex-marriage supporters who praised these developments were as quickly dismayed when the White House walked back Biden's statements, insisting that like Obama, Biden's views on the subject were still "evolving," a euphemism that seems to mean they'll favor either marriage equality for gays or discrimination against them depending on their moment-to-moment judgments about what's best for them politically.
Sounds like Mitt Romney's position!
Obama tricked anti-war voters into thinking that he wouldn't order American troops into battle unless there was an imminent threat to America or a declaration of war from Congress, then went to war in Libya, violating the War Powers Resolution, even though neither condition was met.
(CBS News) NEW YORK - It's a stunning revelation in the foiled plot to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner: The triggerman chosen by al Qaeda was actually a double agent who was working for the CIA and Saudi intelligence services.
He delivered the explosive device to U.S. intelligence officials and provided information on the whereabouts of Fahd al Quso, the senior commander of al Qaeda's wing in Yemen, who was killed in a drone strike last weekend. It's an intelligence victory, but it came with a cost.
U.S. intelligence officials faced a difficult decision. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was looking for a suicide bomber. The target: an American jetliner. The only way for intelligence officials to ensure they controlled the plot was to have their own agent volunteer to be the bomber and then hand the bomb to the CIA. The tradeoff: They would lose a source penetrated deep inside the organization - but they would save lives.
There is a balance that needs to be struck when battling terrorism. Indeed, there are several balances to be struck, from the balance of individual freedoms versus the safety of the citizenry to trading a deep cover source to save lives.
Long-time readers of my writings know that I am foursquare against violating individual rights for gaining temporary security and safety. Terrorism is a transient war, at worst, and at it's best, it becomes almost a thing of parody.
This is not to disrespect the families and co-workers of those who have died in any terror attack anywhere, but apart from a few bombs lobbed at ships and Hummers and one or two lucky strikes on American soil, Al Qaeda has hardly made a dent in our collective-- and I stress, collective-- day to day lives.
You want to understand what real terror is like, talk to anyone who lived in Belfast during The Troubles.
Wars against concepts like drugs, or poverty or terror are wars that cannot be won in a traditional sense, but the nomenclature of "war" helps keep the public supporting it. A war against poverty will not eliminate poverty but it can help those who need a hand, and so long as we don't morph "poverty" into "the poor," as the Republicans have, then we might actually have a working society.
Similarly, a war against terrorism is never going to end terrorism. Even if we wipe out Al Qaeda's operative abilities, there will be other terrorists around, and it won't take long for terrorism to spread once more.
A war against terrorism justifies any number of atrocities, but just focus on the fact that under the Bush Doctrine, we've announced to the world that we will march into any nation if we feel they are harboring some nebulous terror group that might have a grudge against us and be willing to act on it.
We've long had the ability to do just that, but until 2001, we've felt it important to respect the sovereignty of most nations, even if we have broken with that vow on occasion, even publicly.
The war on Iraq and, to a lesser extent have demonstrated even that important restraint can be violated willy-nilly now.
Parallel to this new wrinkle in America's posture is a willingness to look inward and harass and even kill American citizens whom we feel might bear us ill will and act upon it. The more we learn that disrespecting civil rights and individual sovereignty abroad bears few repercussions, the more likely we will turn those guns domestically.
After all, look at what two reasonable men have done since 2001. Now imagine someone far more ideological sitting in the White House. It has happened-- John Adams-- and it will happen again. If you think there isn't a possible outcome where a staunch anti-family autonomy President doesn't sit with a Congress willing to do his dirty work, then you have to re-read American history.
Had the underwear bombing been successful, I have no doubt there would have been increased security measures put in place in US airports, from doubling the number of body scanners and pat-downs at airports to who knows what. We would have lost even more civil freedom in the illusion of safety.
So is sacrificing a deep covers friends, allies, and possibly family, is sacrificing a fount of intelligence gathering, worth that price, a little more freedom?
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The face of Indiana politics for nearly four decades, Republican Sen. Richard Lugar is battling for political survival against a tea party-backed GOP challenger who says the senator has become more interested in compromising with liberals in Washington than representing conservatives back home.
You read that right, folks: conservatives have been "compromising" with us.
If you don't think this spells the death of the GOP, I'm not alone in that opinion. Other Republicans seem to acknowledge this.
A Greek political party leader who has vowed to rip up the terms of Greece’s international bailout was handed the mandate to try and form a government after Antonis Samaras of New Democracy failed to forge an agreement.
“This is a great moment for the Left, a great responsibility for me,” Alexis Tsipras, whose Syriza party placed second in May 6 elections, told President Karolos Papoulias in Athens today. Tsipras aims to forge a coalition of “leftist” parties that would overturn current bailout policy.
Greece’s Parliament is split down the middle on whether to renege on the terms of the two bailout agreements negotiated since May 2010. With the risk increasing of instability in Greece, the epicenter of the debt crisis, policy makers in Europe urged Greek leaders to quickly agree on a new government.
Austerity measures work only when you can't increase income. If you have a job and owe a lot of money, it's easier to cut your expenses temporarily than it is to go in and ask for a raise. Austerity measures stop making sense when you can take the money you have (or borrow) and get a better economic return on it than you would by holding the line on expenditures.
That might, and I stress, might, make sense for Greece, whose income has been stagnant for years and who hasn't shown a capacity for growing its way out of debt. A balance of careful investment targets coupled with some moderate shifts in spending might buy that nation enough time to get itself out of trouble.
But take a nation like Spain, which is already lurching towards default: here's an economy that was vibrant and growing before the worldwide housing bubble. Indeed, up to 2005, Spain created over one-half of the net jobs created in all of Europe, and was poised to overtake Germany in leadaing the EU in per capita income.
You know the rest: it's the same story as here in the States. Cheap lending rates, people bought and flipped houses they couldn't afford as they were goaded on by the same nefarious criminals as our Wall Street firms employed.
Shouldn't Spain be spared the austerity whipping? Apparently not, although to be fair the EU has put out signals that it may be more lenient on terms with Spain.
Elected, Sarkozy showed himself to be a canny political card player. There was, for example, “l'ouverture” – Sarkozy's carefully-targeted effort to dismantle the Socialist Party by recruiting some of its brightest lights into Sarkozy's new right-wing government as ministers and senior officials. This cut the Socialist Party's leadership off at the knees, demoralized its membership, appropriated some of its best talent, reframed Sarkozy as a big-tent president who would govern for all the French – and left him perfectly free to pursue his policies exactly as he intended to do, validated by some of his most dangerous opponents. Demonstrating, as has occurred many times in politics in many countries before and since (in Britain, in the fate of the Liberal Democrats, for example), that weaving opponents into your team is an excellent way to defeat them.
However, the collapse of the world financial bubble and then the socialization of its losses (one of the greatest transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich in world history) removed the raison d’être of the Sarkozy presidency. In this, it can be said that France dodged a bullet. The country was lucky that it elected Sarkozy relatively late in the era of the madness of the rentiers. He didn't have time to turn France into, say, Ireland or Iceland. And so France was spared the worst. Sarkozy then attempted to reframe himself as the opposite of himself, but it never rang true. He was never a credible “social market” builder.
Despite his best efforts, Sarkozy could not wheel France around into a mini-America fast enough before the people realized what happened. Vive la France et les Francaise!
Sarkozy leaves behind a mess of xeonophobia, of angry workers and young people, and at best a muddled political party with a flimsy and loosely-knit message to oppose the Socialists.
This sentiment has repercussions far beyond the French borders, of course. As a member of the EU and with Sarkozy one of the most influential figures in that Union, the anti-austerity forces can now point to France as a main reason why attempts to shore up flagging economies by imposing "order and discipline" (read that as tax cuts for the rich and services cuts for everyone else).
Indeed, the concurrent elections in Greece, which brutalized the political centre, reinforce this perception.
Que la France va, ainsi va l'Europe. And as Europe goes, so goes America. Think about it.
After all, it was the French Revolution that truly brought power to the people (the American Revolution brought power to the people who were wealthy white land owners, but that changed after the French Revolution filtered through Europe) which toppled dynasties and empires up and down the continent (eventually) and it was Europe's reaction to the Great Depression that eventually saw America get Social Security and other social programs designed specifically for the working classes.
(CBS News) After bowing out from the Republican presidential race Wednesday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is no worse off than he was before he ran for president, says CBS News Chief Washington Correspondent Bob Schieffer. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, will likely have to deal with some of Gingrich's less-than-complimentary "sound bites" about him for the remainder of the campaign.
"Gingrich knew from the very beginning that this was a long shot, but he also knew what a lot of other Republicans know, that there are many, many Republicans on the right side of the party who simply don't like Mitt Romney, who don't believe that he is one of them, a true conservative," Schieffer told Charlie Rose Thursday on "CBS This Morning."
So basically, all Newt did was drink beer, take bus rides and give performances. Just living out the rock star dream, I suppose.
Oh. And throwing bombs. Never forget the bombs. The question becomes: what kind of damage has he inflicted on the Romney campaign?
I mean, it's not as though had Newt played nice all primary season long, Mitt would have jumped out to an imposing lead over Obama, and certainly there's plenty of time between now and the election for Obama to jump way ahead of Mitt and annoint his second term.
Newt, however, certainly put a damper on any reasonable attacks Romney might have attempted:
He (ed. note: Gingrich) [...] mercilessly condemned Romney as a man who “can’t be honest,” who “looted a company” and who “doesn’t seem capable of inspiring positive turnout.”
Calling the guy you're about to throw your considerable weight behind a boring, thieving liar is going to leave a lot of raw material for the Obama campaign to construct commercials around.
And you have to know that the Obama camp is dying to pick a fight with the right wing, particularly the uberconservatives, because of their dilletantist demeanor in his first term. He won't want to just beat them, he'll want to stomp a mudhole in them and then do a Mexican Hat Dance around the hole. Using Newt as their conduit will merely serve to make it that much sweeter, despite the fact that Newt all but agreed with the President on the Ryan tax plan.
Still, it was fun to have Gingrich to kick around: Callista's whore diamonds, bouncing checks, the revelation that any hotel room he stays in must have access to two bathrooms, no brown M&Ms in the candy dish...ok, I made that one up, still you get the point.
His withdrawal from the race and Schieffer's revelation that he was half-hearted to begin with, cast a whole new light on Gingrich's candidacy. It points out a positive and a negative.
The positive, of course, is that he was at least realistic that he was tilting at windmills and behaved accordingly. The negative is he disrespected the American (and particularly, Republican) electorate and mocked them with his very presence in the race and his lack of seriousness and discipline in committing to the office.
In a sense, he pre-ordained his failure by ordaining his levity.
“Last year at this time, this very weekend, we finally delivered justice to one of the world’s most notorious individuals,” Obama said. Then a picture of real estate mogul Donald Trump appeared on the room’s television monitors. The president last year delivered a scathing roast of Trump, who flirted with running for the Republican nomination and claimed he had solved the “mystery” of Obama’s birth certificate.
Obama also took a shot at the Republican congressional leadership, whom he thanked “for taking time from their exhausting schedule of not passing any laws” to attend the dinner.[...]
“[Mitt Romney and I] both have degrees from Harvard. I have one, he has two. What a snob.”
The crack drew a thumbs up from former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who was in the audience. Santorum dropped out of the presidential primary campaign earlier this month. He had called Obama a snob for encouraging young Americans to attend college.
And there was a luscious, scrumptious video joke ("voke"?) of a faux-campaign commercial put together by Romney, using Air Force One...
It's not even May yet. We have six months more of this crap...sorry, Seamus...still to come, but it's nice it kicks off with a few laughs.
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