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Facebook Introduces Video Chat in a Partnership With Skype

July 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

It’s a way to connect with friends other than just posting messages, said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, who announced the service on Wednesday here at the company’s headquarters. Facebook’s foray into video chatting comes a week after Google introduced Google+, its latest and most serious challenge yet in social networking. That service, which had its debut last week in a limited test, includes video chatting for up to 10 people in an area of the site called Hangouts.

To a certain extent, Facebook is playing catch-up. The new Facebook service does not allow for group video chats, for example. It also is not available on mobile phones, unlike Skype’s ordinary service. At Wednesday’s event, Mr. Zuckerberg also announced that Facebook now had 750 million users worldwide.

Details of how the new video chatting will work are posted on Facebook’s blog. It will be available to all users in the next few weeks, the blog says.

For Skype, the partnership with Facebook is a chance to give its service greater visibility beyond its 170 million users. Recruiting some of Facebook’s users as potentially paying customers is undoubtedly a crucial motivation.

Making calls from computer to computer through Skype is free. But people who use Skype to call landline or mobile phones must pay.

Facebook’s alliance with Skype expands an existing partnership between the two companies. Their cooperation started last year when Skype let its users connect with their Facebook friends from Skype and get news feeds.

Last month, the partnership grew when Skype added a Facebook contacts tab and let Skype users send instant messages to their Facebook friends and comment on their friends’ status — all without leaving the Skype window.

Microsoft is closing in on its acquisition of Skype for $8.5 billion. The purchase, announced two months ago, will give Microsoft a bigger footprint in online communications, an increasingly important business aimed at both consumers and corporate customers.

Microsoft, through its Skype acquisition, will also strengthen its ties to Facebook. Microsoft invested in Facebook in 2007 and provides search results.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a31be69a51a7e6693a0d52725f6047fe

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Watching a Trial on TV, Discussing It on Twitter

July 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

“Now I know it is our duty as American citizens to respect the jury system,” said Ms. Grace, who selected juries in her past life as a prosecutor. “But I know one thing: as the defense sits by and has their champagne toast after that not-guilty verdict, somewhere out there, the devil is dancing tonight.”

Thanks in large part to Ms. Grace and her cable channel, HLN, the viewing public was captivated by Caylee Anthony’s death and Casey Anthony’s trial to a degree that has not been seen in years, even drawing comparisons in some quarters to the O. J. Simpson trial. Thanks to social networking Web sites like Facebook, members of the public reacted to every moment of the televised testimony in real time, driving even more coverage on national morning news programs and on local newscasts.

“The O. J. trial may have had broader media attention; however, social media platforms were not in place at that time, so the collective echo chamber has been unprecedented,” said Brent Idarola, a Frost Sullivan analyst who follows social media.

The trial, Mr. Idarola said, raised a question of whether “this makes for a good case against cameras in the courtroom.”

Most trial watchers, it seemed, suspected that Ms. Anthony was responsible for her daughter’s death. As the verdicts were read on Tuesday, Facebook, Twitter and other such sites were flooded with reactions from viewers expressing their disbelief and outrage. Some Twitter messages openly wished for Ms. Anthony’s death.

The collective skepticism about her innocence and shock over the verdict all but guarantees that the case will remain fodder for tabloids and traditional media alike. On Tuesday evening, CBS News rushed to complete a prime-time special about the case; ABC News flew Terry Moran, an anchor, and Dan Abrams, a legal analyst, to Orlando in time for “Nightline.”

Ms. Grace has been a guest almost every morning on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” leading the charge against Ms. Anthony, whom she disparagingly calls “Tot Mom.” HLN covered the trial much more extensively than any other channel, and was rewarded with record-level ratings; by July 1, five weeks into the trial, it was garnering 1.2 million viewers at any given time of day, even more than the normally first-place Fox News Channel.

On Tuesday, Ms. Grace bitterly concluded that, “In the end, Tot Mom’s lies seem to have worked.” The channel quickly scheduled a weekend special called “Justice for Caylee.”

James Poniewozik, the media columnist for Time magazine, wrote on Twitter that the lesson of HLN’s trial coverage was a lesson shared by cable news over all: “The reward goes to those who pick a side.”

CNN said that from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday, when the verdict was read, its Web site registered one million live-video users, 30 times as high as the site’s previous four-week average.

Ray Valdes, an analyst with Gartner Research, said the real-time reactions to the trial and the verdict reflected the gradual adoption of the Web as a primary mode of communication throughout the day.

Services like Facebook and Twitter “are the modern-day equivalent of the office cafeteria, a local bar or the coffee shop,” Mr. Valdes said. “Those venues have diminished some in modern times and to some extent been replaced by social media.”

Before the defense lawyers headed to the restaurant, Terrace 390, they criticized what they called the media’s bias against their client.

“I think we should all take this as an opportunity to learn and to realize that you cannot convict someone until they’ve had their day in court,” said the lead lawyer, Jose Baez.

Ms. Grace took offense. The lawyers attacked the media “like we had something to do with it,” she said. “We didn’t have anything to do with it. This was all Tot Mom.”

Ms. Grace then went live outside the restaurant, where another anchor, Jane Velez-Mitchell, interviewed passers-by about their fury at the jury’s decision. Their fury had extended even to the restaurant, which was harangued by online commenters, prompting the posting of a disclaimer on its Twitter account and on its Web site: “We would like to remind everyone that we do not dictate who walks through our doors.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f1c244a9cb56d659426d576c0ba18861

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DealBook: In I.P.O. Price Debate, an Investment Giant Weighs In

May 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

You might recall that about a week ago, my colleague Joe Nocera wrote an intriguing column about LinkedIn’s initial public offering, in which he said that the bankers who underwrote the deal “scammed” the social network company by pricing it too low, lining the pockets of its investor clients.

I countered two days later, arguing that the bankers, at worst, made a mistake, but that the I.P.O. price might actually have been correct given the outsized interest in social networking companies.

Over the weekend, a new entrant waded into the I.P.O. pricing debate: BlackRock, the giant money manager.

In a letter to British securities regulators, which was reported in the press over there, BlackRock said it was worried that investors, not companies, were getting the short end of the stick. While BlackRock’s letter was unrelated to LinkedIn’s offering, the investment firm suggested all the same that the I.P.O. process had grown unfair because banks have been intentionally overpricing companies to garner higher fees.

We are concerned that companies are appointing advisors based on indications of valuation that are unrealistic. …

We are concerned about the structure of incentive fees which maximise your returns for the price achieved on the first day of trading rather than at some, more distant date, e.g., six months after float. Such fees do not represent an alignment of interests between us and seem to drive increasingly aggressive behaviour from syndicates.

BlackRock’s view runs counter to Joe’s argument that investment bankers underprice I.P.O.’s so that “money could be diverted to favored investors.” In fact, it’s the opposite viewpoint.

Clearly, there are many ways to look at the process. As one retired banker e-mailed me, “We never make everyone happy. We are supposed to, at the conclusion, make sure all sides are equally UNhappy.”

Perhaps that’s unsatisfying. But it’s true.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=206c63f4c99e72dbb19bb032b4a66108

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Google, a Giant in Mobile Search, Seeks New Ways to Make It Pay

April 25, 2011 by Leave a Comment

But there was a problem: searching on a phone was less than ideal. It was hard to type on small screens. And most irritating for Google, which brags about its speed on every page of search results, was that Web pages were slow to load on phones.

So Google started a project it code-named Grand Prix. In six weeks, engineers revamped mobile searching and hatched plans for new ways to search on the go, by talking or taking photos instead of typing.

The stakes were high. Mobile phones could be a huge new market for Google. Or they could provide an opening for a competitor to pounce, or obviate the need for a search engine altogether. If people on phones could go straight to apps for information, why Google anything?

Today, Google says mobile searches are growing as quickly as Web searches were at the same stage in the company’s early days, and they are up sixfold in the last two years. Google has a market share of 97 percent for mobile searches, according to StatCounter, which tracks Web use.

Now that it dominates the field, Google is throwing its burly computing power and heaps of data at new problems specific to mobile phones — like translating phone calls on the fly and recognizing photos of things like plants and items of clothing.

“I feel like a parent the second time around feels,” said Amit Singhal, a Google fellow who works on search. “You saw your first child grow at an amazing pace, and here we are with our second child, mobile, growing at the same pace and showing the same signs.”

Google has been slow to seize some newer Web business opportunities, most notably social networking. Investors have criticized the company for dragging its feet when it comes to figuring out how to make money in new fields.

But mobile is an exception. Last year, Eric E. Schmidt, then the company’s chief executive, said Google’s philosophy was “mobile first,” meaning it would build products for phones at the same time as versions for PCs.

“This is the place that Google is essentially betting its future on,” said Karim Temsamani, Google’s head of mobile advertising, a role created in September.

Still, Google has not consistently followed the mobile-first mantra, and some analysts, including Colin W. Gillis of BGC Partners, say it has not moved quickly enough to create new mobile products or ads.

“They’ve done a really good job of positioning themselves so they can’t get boxed out of the market,” Mr. Gillis said. “Now they just need to deliver some innovation. Let’s wring some revenue out of this platform.”

Google said in October that mobile ads were on track to generate $1 billion in revenue in the coming year. Mobile users can call a business from within a Google ad or receive coupons for nearby stores. They can take cellphone photos of movie posters to pull up a trailer. With new technologies like near-field communication, advertisers could reward customers with loyalty gifts for walking into stores, Mr. Temsamani said.

But because mobile ads generally sell for less than half the price of Web ads, Mr. Gillis said, “there’s just not a lot of profit left over.” Though Google makes Android software for phones, it does not make money from it directly because it gives it away to phone makers. Meanwhile, Apple makes money from its devices and from what appears on their screens, including its own ad network.

Still, the company’s approach to the mobile market is classic Google: take problems that computer scientists have been working on for decades, throw huge amounts of data and computing power at them and assume that if the resulting product is useful to people, it will eventually make money.

People can now snap photos of landmarks or wine labels to search for them using Google Goggles, speak to their phones using voice search and, on Android phones, translate spoken conversations between English and Spanish.

“We as an academic community would have figured this out, but we wouldn’t have been able to set it up on this kind of scale,” said Alexei A. Efros, an associate professor in computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon, referring to these kinds of technological feats. “That’s really the great thing about Google, the fact that it can do it on such a humongous scale and actually make it useful to the general public.”

Google trained its computers to learn spoken language based on troves of voice recordings. “Even if you’re from Brooklyn and you drop all your R’s when you park your car, it’s heard plenty of people from Brooklyn and it can do well,” said Mike Cohen, head of Google’s speech technology team.

At first, Google engineers thought people would talk to its voice search service as if they were talking to a person — “you know, it’s my anniversary, and I’d love to take my wife somewhere really romantic to eat, do you have any ideas?” — so it taught the service to filter out unnecessary words. But it turned out that Google had already trained people into thinking in keywords, so they knew to search “romantic restaurants” even when speaking instead of typing.

Goggles, the visual search tool, recognizes things that have strong visual textures, like a bar code, book cover or landmark. But it often can’t distinguish between a black cat and a black chair, for instance, or recognize food or plants, though Google is working with botanists to teach its machines the secrets of leaf-spotting. Google already has the capability to recognize faces, so people could theoretically snap a photo of a blind date and pull up an online profile, but it is not yet using that technology because it is still working out the privacy implications.

People can also snap a photo to translate a menu in a foreign country, and speak English to hear the Spanish translation. Someday Google hopes to be able to translate both sides of a phone conversation as it happens, said Franz Och, head of Google’s machine translation group.

Though the search results Google spits out might seem the same on phones as on computers, there are some behind-the-scenes differences.

For example, certain search results are ranked differently, with location factored in. Search for Wal-Mart on a computer and Google suspects you are probably looking for the e-commerce site or job openings. Search on a phone and Google assumes you are looking for the nearest store. Other search tools were built specifically for phones. Search for weather or stock prices and Google shows a scale, movable with a finger, to see results for different times.

Google says mobile search is not stealing time from computer searches. Instead, mobile searches spike during the lunch hour and evenings, when people are away from their computers. And while mobile users do search for simple things like weather and train times, engineers have been surprised at how many people also ask more complicated questions about business and politics.

“Mobile search is definitely going to surpass desktop search,” said Scott B. Huffman, who works on mobile search at Google and leads its search evaluation team. “The lines will pass, and I think they’ll pass before anyone thought they would.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2ec84d953f2f51f931cc5d8d5b974009

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Obama, Before Facebook Crowd, Presses G.O.P. on Budget

April 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment

In a town-hall-style forum with the 26-year-old Facebook chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Obama seized on a question about the House-passed budget to mount a long, withering indictment. The questioner, an employee of the social networking company, noted that some news media accounts suggested that the sponsor of the Republican budget, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, is “bold and brave” for proposing the deep spending cuts.

“The Republican budget that was put forward I would say is fairly radical,” Mr. Obama said. “And I wouldn’t call it particularly courageous.” He added: “I do think Mr. Ryan is sincere. I think he’s a patriot. I think he wants to solve a real problem, which is our long-term deficit. But I think that what he and the other Republicans in the House of Representatives also want to do is change our social compact in a pretty fundamental way.”

“Nothing is easier,” Mr. Obama said, “than solving a problem on the backs of people who are poor, or people who are powerless and don’t have lobbyists or don’t have clout.”

Mr. Obama’s critique in many ways echoed his speech at George Washington University a week ago, two days before the House passed the plan without any Democratic votes. There he first called for a more balanced approach for reducing deficits by $4 trillion in 10 to 12 years, with spending cuts and tax increases. But here he grew particularly exercised in contrasting his and Republicans’ visions for reducing annual deficits, with his energy and the enthusiasm of the estimated 1,200 mostly young people giving the event a campaignlike partisan air.

While Mr. Obama’s new energy in criticizing Republican policies has stirred supporters, it is infuriating Republicans even as he is calling for bipartisan talks with them to reach a compromise framework in time for Congress’s vote before July on raising the $14.2 trillion debt limit.

In a statement just before Mr. Obama’s appearance here, the House majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia, reiterated that if the president and Congressional Democrats “refuse to accept serious reforms that immediately reduce federal spending and end the culture of debt in Washington, we will not grant their request for a debt limit increase.”

Early in his remarks, Mr. Obama recounted the origins of the current debt, recalling the trillions of dollars added in the past decade when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress and cut taxes, opened two wars, and created a new Medicare prescription drug benefit — all without offsetting spending cuts or tax increases.

He joked to the billionaire Facebook founder that wealthy Americans — “people like me and, frankly, you, Mark” — should pay higher taxes to reduce deficits. But Republicans, he said, would further reduce taxes for rich taxpayers and corporations and cut deeply from clean energy, education and transportation programs “to make his numbers work.”

“I guess you could call that bold. I would call it short-sighted,” Mr. Obama said, provoking another burst of applause.

He said the Republican proposals to shrink projected health spending, by eventually turning Medicare into a voucher system and Medicaid into a limited block grant to the states, would not curb the rise of health care costs.

Mr. Zuckerberg, who posed questions to Mr. Obama from his employees and from Facebook users nationwide, as both men sat on stools in a cavernous hall, wore a sport coat and tie for the occasion, along with jeans and jogging shoes. But at the end he brought out his trademark hoodie, in purple, and presented it to the president.

From the Facebook campus, Mr. Obama headed to nearby San Francisco for the first of several fund-raising events over two days, including in Reno, Nev., and Los Angeles on Thursday.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b6dbe3d912655968d5a30a5ed027b454

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

Link by Link: A Wiki Takes Aim at Obama

April 4, 2011 by Leave a Comment

“WikiLeaks suddenly became a household name,” he said, and he thought, “Amid all of this bad behavior, there is a certain genius going on there.”

Last week, in an attempt to tap into that genius, Crossroads began Wikicountability.org, a collaborative Web site intended to create a database of freedom of information requests that scrutinize the actions of the Obama administration.

Many companies and organizations, including the United States Army, have seized on the Wikipedia model to encourage their members to build up information collaboratively. This seems to be an early effort to use the idea behind WikiLeaks, a repository of secretive or difficult-to-obtain documents, for a specific political end.

In much the same way news outlets have tried to harness social networking tools to improve their reports and then popularize them, Crossroads GPS is experimenting with a system of distributed accountability (or distributed opposition research, if you prefer).

“One of the advantages of the wiki platform that led us to want to develop the site,” Mr. Law said, is that you can “crowd-source both the information and analysis of the information.”

Crossroads GPS, or Grassroots Policy Strategies, is a political group conceived in part by Mr. Rove after he left the Bush White House in 2007. Because of its tax designation it is supposed to focus primarily on issues rather than candidates, and Mr. Law described how Wikicountability was concentrating on topics like health care and high speed rail. The organization was the vehicle for millions of dollars of ads during the 2010 Congressional campaign.

The fact that a conservative organization has adopted the wiki brand speaks to the widespread recognition of the collective power of a networked audience, whether for building an encyclopedia or scrutinizing a cabinet secretary’s travel expenses.

Mr. Law said it had not been hard to get people to work on Wikicountability. “Obviously WikiLeaks has a very bad brand among conservatives,” he said, “but Wikipedia is almost as mainstream as Facebook or Twitter.”

The site is clearly a work in progress: while it publishes new articles each day, they come from only a few contributors. It began with some documents that set the tone: a list of union leaders who were met in 2009 by the secretary of labor, Hilda Solis, and the production costs for an advertisement for Medicare featuring Andy Griffith ($404,000).

When it is working as envisioned, Mr. Law said, Wikicountability will have a community “of several dozen groups or participants,” who will either post material they have obtained from their own requests or analyze what others have put up.

Unlike Wikipedia, users must apply for editing privileges. “We would do some vetting” of applicants to become editors, he said, “a balance between complete openness and some management to ensure that the larger purposes don’t get frustrated by those who don’t wish the project well.”

“We have a point of view,” Mr. Law said.

Wikicountability is taking pains to distinguish itself from WikiLeaks, explaining that its policy is “not to solicit or knowingly accept for publication documents which disclose information that is classified, legally privileged or subject to the established statutory exceptions under FOIA.”

For now, Mr. Law said, the site has focused on educating potential contributors about requests made under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

“The first hurdle we are spending time overcoming is a lack of understanding of the FOIA process,” he said. “People automatically assume only journalists can file FOIA requests.”

Mr. Law said he hoped the site could draw attention to what he described as the poor record of compliance by the Obama administration; many of the articles on Wikicountability concern as yet unanswered requests for information from the government.

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, an independent nongovernmental research institute located at George Washington University, said he had questions about how committed Crossroads GPS was to running a site that would bring transparency to government actions. He said he thought its true motive might be to attract donors.

Still, he said, improved transparency required a “constant push to get the government to be accountable, a perfect storm of outsiders, reporters, interest groups (partisan or not), making common cause with inside reformers.”

He said that while he believed the Obama administration was genuinely trying to become more compliant on disclosure issues, the bureaucracy had been hard to move. “There is still huge gap between the really strong message on high and the actual performance of the agencies — that is mixed,” he said.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a52ee3110bedf3db8cd2b1dba4982b5d

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