Watching TV and doing Social Media

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Social gaming isn't just a diversion anymore

Can an online social game help fight obesity? Can it help businesses put a lid on ever-growing employee health care bills? That's the bet entrepreneur Adam Bosworth, a veteran of Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG), is making with Keas, an online service that aims to make exercising and eating your vegetables more fun -- or at least a little less painful. Despite questions about their overall efficacy, corporate wellness apps are proliferating in part because many investors are betting that the social-gaming wave popularized by Zynga (ZNGA) can be harnessed to fight obesity. Keas has raised $17.5 million from investors.
Read more at Fortune Magazine

Zombie followers and fake re-tweets

It is hard to overestimate how much the arrival of weibo has changed the dynamic between rulers and ruled over the past two years (in China). More than 250m Chinese internet users have taken to microblogs for many purposes, plenty of them purely recreational. But a popular pastime is to spread news and rumours, both true and false, that challenge the official script of government officials and state-propaganda organs.

Officials are requiring that users of the most prominent microblog service, Sina Weibo, register using their real name and identity-card number by March 16th. The other leading microblog, called Tencent Weibo, now also requires new users to register with their real name. Microbloggers can continue using nicknames as their online identities, as long as the weibo providers have their real-world identities on file.

It is unclear how much the real-name requirement will affect what microbloggers say. Indeed, it remains unclear how strictly it will be enforced, considering the booming market that already exists in microblog-related trickery. For mere pennies you can buy followers for your weibo account to make you look more popular (known as “zombie followers” because they mindlessly follow others). You can also purchase re-tweets and even comments on your posts.

Read more at the Economist

Taking the long view

Jeff Bezos impressive ability to identify and profit from the resulting disruptions means he is widely seen as the person best placed to fill the shoes of the late Steve Jobs as the industry’s leading visionary. Mr Bezos is convinced that rapid technological change creates huge opportunities for companies bold enough to seize them. “There is room for many winners here,” he says. As companies grow, there is a danger that novel ideas get snuffed out by managers’ desire to conform and play it safe. “You get social cohesion at the expense of truth,” he says. He believes that the best way to guard against this is for leaders to encourage their staff to work on big new ideas. “It’s like exercising muscles,” he adds. “Either you use them or you lose them.” Read more at The Economist

Twitter, the Startup That Wouldn't Die

Throughout its first five years of existence, Twitter always seemed on the verge of committing some excruciating form of startup seppuku. Now something freakish is happening in San Francisco. Twitter, which for years treated the responsibility of earning money as an annoying distraction, may be turning into a viable business. Read more at Business Week

Charlie Rose Talks to Zynga CEO Mark Pincus

You’ve said that play is the new TV. What do you mean by that? "For the last five or six decades, TV has been the one medium that’s connected the world, that no matter where you lived, no matter what your economic status was, you found a way to get a TV and to watch. In the couple of decades, the smartphone has the chance to be that new medium, and I think that games and play are the No. 1 thing that people are going to do." Read more at Business Week

Can Kinect Make Windows Cool Again?

The original Kinect helped make the Xbox 360 last year’s bestselling game console; Microsoft has sold more than 18 million Kinects since November 2010. It’s also inspired tinkerers to put the device to unanticipated uses, such as guiding robots and doing 3D modeling. With Kinect for Windows, Microsoft aims to coax professional developers and big companies to create apps that make Kinect as essential in the home, office, and showroom as smartphones are to those on the go. “This is a turnaround chance for Microsoft,” says James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research (FORR). “A chance for them to say this isn’t about video gaming, it isn’t about Windows, it’s about the future of everything.” Almost 350 companies are working with Microsoft on custom Kinect applications, says Craig Eisler, the general manager of Kinect for Windows. The device is being used in a variety of work settings, from Boeing (BA) sales offices, where it enables virtual tours for 737 customers, to a hospital in Canada, where surgeons use its gesture-recognition ability to swipe through CT scans without the risk of touching germs on a keyboard or mouse. Read more here

Encyclopedia Britannica: Halts the presses after 244 years

Say goodbye to the bound volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The reference book publisher says it will discontinue its print version and go solely online. It published the first digital version in 1981 and now updates the Britannica.com website daily, competing with newer players such as crowdsourced Wikipedia. Read more at Business Week

Slaves to the smartphone

For most people the servant has become the master. Not long ago only doctors were on call all the time. Now everybody is. Bosses think nothing of invading their employees’ free time. Work invades the home far more than domestic chores invade the office. Otherwise-sane people check their smartphones obsessively, even during pre-dinner drinks, and send e-mails first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

This is partly because smartphones are addictive: when Martin Lindstrom, a branding guru, tried to identify the ten sounds that affect people most powerfully, he found that a vibrating phone came third, after the Intel chime and a giggling baby.

Hyperconnectivity exaggerates some of the most destabilising trends in the modern workplace: the decline of certainty (as organisations abandon bureaucracy in favour of adhocracy), the rise of global supply chains and the general cult of flexibility.

Ms Perlow’s advice should be taken seriously. The problem of hyperconnectivity will only get worse, as smartphones become smarter and young digital natives take over the workforce. The faster smartphones become and the more alluring the apps that are devised for them, the stronger the addiction will grow.

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Linkedin: fastest and slowest growing job titles in America

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The internet is changing Chinese literature

Chinese people increasingly read books on phones, tablets and laptops. People under 30, who are most likely to own such devices, are the most avid readers, says Eric Abrahamsen, a Beijing-based publishing consultant. The result has been an outpouring of mass-market fiction, written (and read) on websites, not in print. Five years ago internet publishers were typically informal, back-room outfits, but Shanda, an online gaming company, seized the commercial opportunity and now owns most of the literary sites. It sells subscriptions by the chapter or book, by the week or month. Online novels start at around five yuan ($0.80) compared with 30 yuan for an average printed volume. Some of this online material makes it into book form. Print sales, dominated by the country’s 580 state-owned publishing houses, are now worth 44 billion yuan ($7 billion). But growth has slowed from 10% a year in 2007 to around 5%, according to Yang Wei of OpenBook, a market-research firm. Like many online start-ups, Shanda is not yet making money out of web books, although revenues are growing. Read more here

Kony2012: New Media Success Story or Cautionary Tale?

If it isn’t the most viral social-media effort in recent memory, the Kony2012 campaign—launched last week by Invisible Children to spotlight atrocities by Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony—has to be a close second. According to one estimate, a video created by the group and shared widely on Facebook and Twitter was viewed 80 million times in just five days. Some critics, however, say the Kony campaign is troubling for a number of reasons, including the fact that it is a glib and facile treatment of systemic problems in Uganda and therefore encourages meaningless “slacktivism” instead of real action. Is Kony2012 a sign of how powerful social media can be as a news distribution mechanism, a sign of how dangerous it can be, or both? Emily Bell (director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University) tweeted on how this is becoming the way news works now: “I am watching #Kony2012 ‘my 11 yr old:’oh I’ve seen that: I’ve already emailed it to my grade’.This is the new news cycle.” Read more here

Only 1 in 5 Americans believe journalists are “friendly” toward religion

19 percent of Americans feel like “reporters and the news media” are “friendly” to religion, a Pew study finds. 38 percent of the respondents thought journalists were “neutral”; 35 percent said they were “unfriendly.” Read more here

Apple’s vast TV ambitions

Apple is working on a sleek, futuristic television that it hopes will do to home entertainment what the iPod did to the music industry. Apple is also reportedly urging cable companies and media providers to redesign how consumers get TV programming. Read more here

The Pulse App Goes Local

With 13 million users, Pulse is the most popular news app. Its creators aim to stay No. 1 with a push into local and international content. Just as it does with articles from major publications, Pulse will display each local news story or deal as a colorful tile, and arrange them in horizontal rows for easy navigating. Pulse says the local news sites that participate will benefit from the extra traffic and exposure to millions of new users. “It’s definitely a way we see of growing and expanding our audience,” says Chris Appelgren, marketing lead at Bold Italic, whose San Francisco-focused stories attract 85,000 unique visitors a month. Read more here

Socially aggressive narcissism

Researchers have established a direct link between the number of friends you have on Facebook and the degree to which you are a "socially disruptive" narcissist, confirming the conclusions of many social media sceptics. People who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly. The latest study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, also found that narcissists responded more aggressively to derogatory comments made about them on the social networking site's public walls and changed their profile pictures more often. A number of previous studies have linked narcissism with Facebook use, but this is some of the first evidence of a direct relationship between Facebook friends and the most "toxic" elements of narcissistic personality disorder. Read more here

Teenagers Now Texting 60 Times a Day

According to a new report by the Pew Research Center, the average teen texts a whopping 60 times per day. Nearly two-thirds of teenagers interviewed said they texted with friends every day—almost once every 15 minutes they were awake. Read more here

Google Begins to Scale Back Its Scanning of Books From University Libraries

Google has been quietly slowing down its book-scanning work with partner libraries, according to librarians involved with the vast Google Books digitization project. But what that means for the company's long-term investment in the work remains unclear. Google was not willing to say much about its plans. "We've digitized more than 20 million books to date and continue to scan books with our library partners," a Google spokeswoman told The Chronicle in an e-mailed statement. Google isn't saying whether it has pulled back from its longstanding goal of collecting all of the world's knowledge. Some of its digitization efforts have shifted to Europe. Much of the company's public focus lately has been not on mass digitization but on how to use individuals' data to create more focused advertising and online browsing. Meanwhile, a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought against it by authors' and publishers' groups drags on. Read more here

New Google Play combines apps, music and books

Google on Tuesday unified its digital entertainment offerings into a single cloud-based destination called Google Play. Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore are part of this new online emporium. At play.google.com, you can store all the music, movies, books and apps you've previously bought through what had been separate Google stores, or visit the site to fetch new content. Google Play is available on the Web and on Android smartphones and tablets. Inside Google Play, you can store up to 20,000 music tracks or purchase new songs from a catalog now north of 8 million tracks. Google Play also has more than 450,000 Android apps and games available for download, and more than 4 million eBooks, which Google claims is the largest e-book collection anywhere. You can also rent thousands of movies. Read more here

Plans for 'TV Everywhere' Bog Down in Tangled Pacts

It was dubbed "TV Everywhere." But for many TV viewers, it has had trouble going anywhere. Nearly three years after Time Warner Inc. and Comcast Corp. kicked off a drive to make cable programming available online for cable subscribers, the idea of TV Everywhere remains mired in technical holdups, slow deal-making and disputes over who will control TV customers in the future. Now some media executives say the effort, aimed at insulating cable television against a rising tide of cheap online video alternatives, risks getting left behind. Read more here

A Harsh Reality for Newspapers

Last year, researchers at the Project for Excellence in Journalism persuaded six companies that own 121 newspapers to share private data about the financial performance of many of their papers. And the findings were grim. On average, for every new dollar the newspapers were earning in new digital advertising revenue, they were losing $7 in print advertising revenue. A report that encapsulates the data and includes interviews with newspaper executives will be released on Monday. Read more here

White-space puts Wi-Fi on steroids

“White-space” is technical slang for television channels that were left vacant in one city so as not to interfere with TV stations broadcasting on adjacent channels in a neighbouring city. With the recent switch from analogue to digital tele­vision, much of this protective white-space is no longer needed. Unlike analogue broadcasting, digital signals do not “bleed” into one another—and can therefore be packed closer together. All told, the television networks now require little more than half the frequency spectrum they sprawled across previously. White-space should help to solve the bandwidth problem that has begun to plague wireless networks in general—as more consumers download films, television episodes and other video offerings wirelessly from the internet, instead of receiving such fare from their traditional cable, satellite or over-the-air TV broadcasters. Apart from easing bandwidth problems, white-space could lead to a wireless revolution even bigger than the wave of innovation unleashed over a decade ago when Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other wireless technologies embraced the unlicensed 2.4GHz band previously reserved for microwave ovens and garage-door openers. Some insiders even talk about white-space offering a “third pipe” that will rival cable and telephone broadband for access to the internet. Others see it as a cheaper alternative to today’s mobile-phone system. How soon before individuals can buy $100 white-space routers for the home? The consensus view is 2015 at the very latest. http://www.economist.com/node/21536999

NPR introduces new Ethics Handbook

Today, NPR is introducing staffers to a new Ethics Handbook that has been in the works for more than a year and illustrates how the organization is taking steps to safeguard against some of the ethical dilemmas it’s faced in the past. The handbook makes clear that “it includes little in the way of ‘new policy.’” Much of the guidance in it stems from best practices and case studies shared in other ways throughout the organization, such as years of columns from NPR’s ombudsmen. The case studies let staffers know who to contact when they have ethical questions. Several sections of the handbook advise staffers to seek guidance from NPR’s standards and practices editor, Stu Seidel, who is also deputy managing editor. NPR recently appointed Seidel as standards and practices editor to help oversee the creation and implementation of the handbook. The handbook has a collegial feel, with guidelines not rules. And it doesn’t get into specifics about the consequences staffers could face if they fail to follow the guidelines, Smith said, because each ethical dilemma has to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Read more here

Amazon's Hit Man

Physical book sales have been flat for a decade and are starting to get eclipsed by e-books. According to a recent report by the Association of American Publishers, sales of adult paperbacks and hardcovers fell 18 percent between 2010 and 2011. Amazon could be an unstoppable competitor to big publishing houses. If history is any guide, Bezos, who declined to comment for this story, doesn’t care whether he loses money on books for the larger cause of stocking the Kindle with exclusive content unavailable in Barnes & Noble’s Nook or Apple’s iBookstores. He’s also got almost infinitely deep pockets for spending on advances to top authors. Even more awkwardly for publishers, Amazon is their largest retailer, so they are now in the position of having to compete against an important business partner. Bezos and his minions will, characteristically, gauge the success of their new publishing effort over the long term. They are likely positioning Amazon Publishing for a world that is still a few years away, in which a majority of books are distributed electronically. In that world there could be even fewer traditional bookstores than there are now, and Amazon may look a whole lot more appealing to prominent authors. Read more here

Who does Google think you are?

A Google tool that's been available since 2009 but which few people know about lets users see what the search giant has inferred about them based on the websites they visit. Try searching "ad preferences manager." It should be the first link. The results can be spot on -- or wildly off the mark. They're based on a "cookie," a file placed by Google (and many other companies) on each computer browser to track how its users surf the Web. Google actually knows far more than browsing histories, though. It knows what people write in Gmail messages, what YouTube videos they prefer and where they go with an Android phone. Historically, Google's privacy policies forced it to cordon off some of its most important data sources from each other, so the profile of a given YouTube user was totally separate from her Gmail profile. It was a schizophrenic view of the world. Starting in March, Google will be able to pull together everything it knows from its disparate products. Read more here

study finds newspapers most trusted news source

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark commissioned a survey of Americans’ trust of news sources. Among the findings: Newspapers are the most trusted source of news for most respondents, but that’s not exactly something to crow about: Only 22 percent overall called newspapers “very credible” for reporting on politics and elections. Cable and networks news are a close second with 21% saying they are very credible. (A Gallup poll last fall found 55% of Americans distrust the media generally.) Read more here

'The Daily' 100,000 Subs - Ceiling Or Just A Start?

News Corp. unveiled The Daily with much fanfare a year ago, with Rupert Murdoch himself on hand at the New York launch event for the ambitious iPad-only newspaper. The News Corp. chairman set the bar high from the start, saying The Daily would have to pull in 500,000 paying subscribers to be viable, given its weekly operating costs of $500,000. On its one-year anniversary earlier this month, the company announced the publication had amassed 100,000 paid subscribers to date, making it the third top-grossing iPad app in the iTunes Store last year. It’s now the top-grossing app. Still, the paid subscribers level to date is well below the half-million goal set by Murdoch last year. Read more here

Gannett Plans Paywalls For Community Papers

The country’s largest newspaper publisher plans to create online paywalls for scores of local community newspapers nationwide, according to Gannett Co. community publishing president Bob Dickey. As with other newspapers' online paywalls, Dickey said that visitors to Gannett’s 82 community newspaper Web sites will be able to see a certain amount of content for free -- probably in the range of five to 15 articles. After that, they will be asked to buy a monthly or yearly subscription for the digital product. Earlier this month, it offered early retirement to 665 community publishing employees, in what could be the largest reduction in the company’s workforce in several years. Gannett Co.’s total revenues have declined from $8.03 billion in 2006 to $5.24 billion in 2011 -- a 35% loss in five years. Read more here

How Storify And Pinterest Are Cultivating The Wild Web, And Why Social Media Will Civilize The Internet

Pinterest gives people the ability to curate photos on various online pinboards easily and quickly, and to follow pinboards curated by others. Instead of asking users to set up their own account from scratch, Pinterest users can login with their Facebook or Twitter accounts. Integration, rather than direct competition, with the giants of social media appears to be the strategy, and it seems to be working. Storify does something similar. Not only does the “social story-telling” site allow users to login in via Facebook or Twitter, it allows them to curate stories or events on the web using Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and various other social media and news sites. Rather than seeing the internet devolve into the lowest common denominator, we’re seeing the rise of social-cultivation online. Read more at Forbes

Why Twitter Ties Resemble Airline Hub Maps

NPR talks about new research showing our Twitter ties are different than most of us imaginehere.

Is Twitter a Publisher?

Is Twitter a publisher and distributor of information like a newspaper, or is it just a dumb pipe like a telephone network? Lawyers in Australia seem to believe that a case could be made that Twitter is a publisher, like a newspaper, and therefore it can be sued for defamation as a result of a single tweet. That may be a stretch — especially in the United States, which has legislation that protects online commentary from such lawsuits — but it highlights the difficulties that Twitter could have as it tries to expand around the globe and into different legal environments.

 But the real-time information network is unlike the phone system in many other ways, some of which could be very relevant to such a case. For example, the phone company doesn’t normally listen to conversations and delete or block the ones that it doesn’t like — but Twitter has explained that it routinely blocks users and also deletes tweets for all sorts of reasons, including illegal behavior of various kinds. Doing this, some lawyers argue, makes the company a lot more like a newspaper publisher than a phone network or dumb pipe.

In countries like Australia and Canada, meanwhile, there is very little U.S.-style protection for any website or service that hosts defamatory content, which leaves Twitter open to actions like the one that was recently filed in Sydney. 

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Radio Ads Are Coming Back, and the Presidential Run Will Help

According to a report released Friday by the Radio Advertising Bureau, revenue from radio advertising last year was $17.4 billion, up 1 percent from the year before. Automotive companies, the largest category of sponsors, made up 26 percent of spending. It was the second year of growth for the industry, after three down years. Spending in 2010 was $17.3 billion, up 6 percent from the year before. But the market is still down 18 percent from 2007, when ad revenue was $21.3 billion, according to the advertising bureau, whose data is collected by the accounting firm Miller, Kaplan, Arase & Company. Read more at the New York Times

Open to Government Control

Might that Amazon Kindle in your hand be a threat to your freedom? said Husna Haq in CSMonitor.com. That’s what Jonathan Franzen, the acclaimed author of The Corrections and Freedom, suggested at a book festival last week. Sounding a “battle cry against e-readers,” the best-selling novelist railed against digital books, saying they’re “not for serious readers” and that their impermanence might even open the door to Orwellian censorship. If books are on e-readers and not on paper, he said, their texts can be changed or deleted by some central authority—a situation “not compatible with responsible self-government.” It may sound paranoid, said E.D. Kain in Forbes​.com, but Franzen has a point. To ban or burn books, authoritarian governments have to hunt down every copy. But a digital text originating from some external source “simply has to be turned off.” Without ink on paper, it’s that much easier to make “Ray Bradbury’s nightmare” a reality. Read more at The Week

Radio Holds Steady For 2011

The tentative recovery in radio advertising sputtered to a standstill in the last part of 2011, with total ad revenues declining 2% to $4.5 billion, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau. This follows earlier year-over-year increases of 3%, 1%, and 2% in the first, second, and third quarters, respectively. Thanks to the earlier quarterly increases, the radio industry still saw an overall increase in full-year revenues, with annual growth of 1% to $17.4 billion. The fourth-quarter decline can be attributed, in large part, to the absence of political advertising associated with 2010’s midterm elections in November -- already cited by a number of broadcast radio groups as a factor in weak period earnings results. Read more here

Forbes Among 30 Clients Using Computer-Generated Stories Instead of Writers

Forbes has joined a group of 30 publishers using Narrative Science software to write computer-generated stories. The New York Times revealed last year that trade publisher Hanley Wood and sports journalism site The Big Ten Network also use the tool. The company has a long list of stories they can computerize: sports stories, financial reports, real estate analyses, local community content, polling & elections, advertising campaign summaries sales & operations reports and market research. Read more here

Ad Industry's Overall Favorite Media Brand

Facebook, Twitter and Google may dominate the trade press and the blogosphere, but one of the most traditional media brands -- ABC -- is the most powerful in the hearts and minds of advertisers and ad agency executives, according to an annual survey of Madison Avenue’s perceptions of the media they do business with. The study, which surveyed thousands of advertisers and agency executives, is conducted by Advertiser Perceptions, which is to the ad industry what J.D. Power’s annual awards are to the automotive industry. ABC’s ranking as the most dominant “overall” media brand is a composite of all of the individual attributes that AR surveys the ad industry about, and it replaces last year’s champ, Meredith. Not surprisingly, ABC ranked No. 1 in “brand strength” among broadcast network brands for the second year in a row. Among “digital” media brands, an ascendant Facebook toppled Google from the top position in “brand strength. Read more here