3D printers are the new Tumblr.

– Aaron Levie, via Twitter

Former Kleiner Perkins Partner Ellen Pao sued Kleiner in May 2012 in San Francisco Superior Court over alleged multiple instances of sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation.

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But since Apple Inc. revolutionized mobile computing with the iPhone, no traditional PC maker has been able to thrive by becoming a major competitor in the smartphone market. And cracking the duopoly of Apple and Samsung Electronics Co. will require a huge investment.

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There’s no question that the market potential is huge. The photo/video category on iOS is the third most popular category, and hundreds of millions of people are capturing digital photos and video clips every day. Some people still want to print them on cards, t-shirts and other objects. But a fast-growing number are interacting with them solely on a screen, whether it’s a mobile phone, tablet, laptop or TV. The world of photography is increasingly moving from one of atoms, things we can touch, to one of digital bits, things we can’t touch. Companies are being forced to figure out how to monetize photos in a world of intangible goods.

With everyone running around taking, editing and sharing photos and video clips, the revenue should be flowing, right? Wrong. There’s a lot of “fool’s gold” in this industry. The easy part is attracting users, since photos have proven to be the most universal currency for driving social network virality. The hard part is figuring out how to build a vibrant business model around photos and video clips.

Here are the five distinct approaches that companies are taking:

1. Tangible Goods
   As the world goes digital there’s still a strong market for atoms-based personalized products with photos printed on them. It wasn’t that long ago that printing a photo on a pillow or wall-mounted canvas was impossible for the average consumer. But companies like Shutterfly and Snapfish have done very well selling photos printed on everything from cards and calendars to mugs and t-shirts. Last year there were about 30 million custom photo books sold in the U.S., double-digit growth from the year prior. The market for tangible photo products will always exist — but digital alternatives are coming, and could be quite disruptive.
2. Digital Derivatives
   Digital derivatives are enhanced versions of photos and/or video clips, and they are 100 percent bits-based. Examples include a filtered photograph, an enhanced video clip, an online photo book or a video slideshow set to music. The magic here comes with creating a sense of emotion through production value and storytelling. Similar to tangible goods, digital derivatives are products that were formerly nearly impossible to create for the average consumer without training, time and access to expensive tools. But now, with a few clicks, we can all create amazing photos and video slideshows that tap into peoples’ emotions and nostalgia in a way that a raw image or video clip rarely does. Because digital derivatives can carry much bigger emotional value than tangible goods (e.g. a movie-trailer-like recap of a recent family trip), people are willing to pay for such services and tools that can easily create and share their digital creations.
3. Peace of Mind
   There’s no question that photos are among our most precious possessions. But while they were once thought to be irreplaceable, that’s really no longer true — if you have them backed up in the cloud. What a feeling it will be when we all have the peace of mind that every photo that’s important to us, even those taken years ago using film, are safe and sound in the cloud and can be reprinted, reframed and re-hung, anytime we want. That sense of security is easily worth tens to hundreds of dollars a year, in my opinion, and that’s why consumer cloud services like Dropbox, iCloud, and Microsoft SkyDrive are sure bets for being profitable. For photo and video startups looking to compete with the larger horizontal cloud players, the key is focusing on the user experience, since that’s much harder for larger players that need to focus on other types of files in addition to photo and video.
4. Advertising
   Advertising may seem like an obvious way to monetize online personal photos and video clips, but it’s actually a very tricky business model for a pure-play online photo hosting and sharing company. The challenge is scale and context. First, you need a lot of page views or large news feed volume for an advertising business to work. So even if your business does intend to use advertising, it’s not the appropriate focus for the early days of your company, since Job Number One should be getting traffic. Second, if you’re lucky enough to get to scale, then it’s very difficult to implement an ad model that doesn’t freak out your user base. The issue is that people don’t generally want to see ads next to their cherished family photos.
5. Acquisition
   True, the hope of being acquired is a far cry from building a sustainable business model. But this long-shot approach is the most common I see from the dozens of photo and video-related companies that launch each month. There are enough high-profile acquisitions for companies with no business model that it doesn’t even seem that weird to have a photo business with no contemplated business model these days. However, for every Instagram — or even SocialCam — there are hundreds if not thousands of shelved photo and video companies.

To make money off of digital photos and video clips, you can either monetize the photos by selling tangible goods, digital derivatives or peace-of-mind cloud storage, or you can use the photos as currency to monetize your community through advertising. If none of those will make you enough money to sustain and grow your business, then you should hope that your technology, user base or scale will be strategically complementary to an acquirer that can gain revenue in one or more of those ways. The long-term industry winners will have a blend of these business models but, interestingly, there aren’t many examples of such companies today.

Brad Jefferson is the co-founder and CEO of Animoto, an online video creation service that empowers people and businesses to create and share videos using their own pictures, video clips, words and music. Follow Brad at @brad_animoto.

But the yearlong effort hasn’t got very far with the major U.S. cable and phone companies. A big reason: some of them have asked Netflix to pay for that access.

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The talks have faltered, they said. One person said talks took place as recently as this month but aren’t likely to be revived.

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The Silicon Valley car maker said Wednesday that it acted after discovering the potential problem in its own quality tests, and hasn’t received customer complaints.

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In a new push — dubbed the “Shift Plan” — Alcatel-Lucent aims to slash €1 billion in annual costs, sell €1 billion in assets and direct resources away from older products that will now be “managed for cash,” the company said in a statement Wednesday morning. It said its goal is to make Alcatel-Lucent cash-flow positive in 2015.

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Taiwan’s HTC has been trying to push a premium image, with its marketing efforts centered on its high-end One smartphone. Its decision to also venture cheaper with the Desire 200 priced at NT$5590 (US$167) is the latest indication that the low-end segment — once a domain left largely to feature phones and low-cost Chinese knockoff smartphones — is a growing force that major smartphone brands can no longer afford to ignore.

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As it seeks to play catch-up in e-commerce, Walmart Stores Inc. has concluded it doesn’t want to simply clone Amazon’s model since it also has to worry about supplying its stores.

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I think there’s unprecedented space now in journalism to really say things that you wouldn’t have been able to get in print, or at least a large audience for, even ten years ago.

– Michael Hastings, contributing editor for Rolling Stone and reporter for BuzzFeed, in a 2012 AMA on Reddit. Hastings died in a car crash in L.A. on Tuesday.

Shares jumped 4.1 percent to $45.09 after hours as adjusted per-share earnings topped the company’s expectations. The stock is up 15 percent since the start of the year.

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Glass Will Be the Next iPhone — But Today It’s A Newton

Google Glass is a “when,” not “if,” product. The prototype version of Glass that’s currently available to developers, known as the Glass Explorer edition, shows enough promise that we at Forrester Research think it’s just a matter of time until it takes off. However, its short battery life — as well as the limited Mirror application programming interface (API), which restricts app developers’ access to the device’s native hardware sensors — makes version 1 Glass more of a Newton than an iPhone. By that, we mean that Glass is very compelling, but extremely limited in its current form, just like Apple’s Newton was. Glass is continuously improving via over-the-air updates and new applications, though, and we have no doubt that in time, it will be the next iPhone — the next great platform for engaging consumers and workers.

Glass Extends Smartphones’ Utility With a New Interaction Model

Glass works like an extension of your phone: It tethers to a smartphone (iPhone or Android) for connectivity, and it takes the friction out of communicating, searching, sharing images and accessing location-based services by allowing users to complete these actions hands-free. Marketers who want to build Glass apps (known as Glassware) will find it technically simple but conceptually different from other types of marketing engagement.

The basic interaction model for Glass is via “timeline cards”: Timeline cards display content, such as text, location-based information and media; swiping forward and backward shows cards in the order they were created or used. You can think of it as a filmstrip — going backward shows earlier frames, going forward shows later frames — except that each frame or timeline card is a living object that can be updated. For marketers, this means thinking about your brand in the context of someone’s day — what essential information or utility can you provide, in what contexts, with just a few words or images?

Think about Glass apps like an SMS or MMS conversation: A series of asynchronous alerts that form meaning over time. It’s not like the screen-based sandbox of a smartphone app. Your Glassware coexists with other apps on the timeline and competes for a user’s attention. As with SMS, marketers will need to be extremely thoughtful about how frequently to send alerts or updates to a user’s timeline because it’s easy to cross the line between engagement and annoyance on Glass.

Marketers Must Seek Permission to Engage

Glass presents a challenge for marketers: Consumers will expect marketers to deliver contextually relevant, useful experiences, but marketers have imperfect tools and systems for delivering that relevance. Google’s policies instruct developers not to “use users’ personal information for purposes beyond the limited and express purpose of your application … without getting specific opt-in consent from the user. Don’t sell, rent, or otherwise provide a user’s personal information to any third party without getting specific opt-in consent from the user.” In other words, the Web-based targeting technologies marketers rely on have no place on Glass.

The good news is that because Glass apps are permission-based, if consumers invite you to engage with them on Glass, you’ll likely know who they are anyway — you probably have an existing relationship with them, and they trust you enough to invite you to engage with them on this intimate platform. Activities (such as being in a certain location at a certain time of day) will cue targeting, rather than cookie-based navigational history. These new schemes will coexist with industry initiatives already underway to measure and target across PC and mobile, using registration or personally identifiable information (PII) data (where a direct relationship exists) as the matching key or using device data and inference to make good guesses.

Marketers and third-party developers may be shut out of tracking users on Glass, but that doesn’t mean Google isn’t doing so. We expect Google to wield even more power over brands in the future, thanks to the insight it collects on users through Glass. Carriers gain more power, too — Verizon already sells aggregated data from mobile phone usage via its Precision Market Insights product. Because Glass tethers to the phone, even more data that can potentially be packaged and sold will flow through carriers’ networks. The bottom line for marketers: You’ll have access to plenty of data from Glass, but it won’t be through the targeting technologies you’ve come to depend on, and you’ll rely ever more on Google and its network partners to get that data.

Sarah Rotman Epps is a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, tracking the wearables market. Follow her on Twitter @srepps.

Testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, said the intelligence community, working in tandem with businesses, has “been able to connect the dots and prevent more terrorist attacks” using phone- and Internet-surveillance tools. “The events of Sept. 11, 2001, occurred in part because of a failure on the part of our government to connect those dots,” Gen. Alexander said.

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Midasplayer International Holding Co., the publisher of online and mobile games including the popular Candy Crush Saga, has hired banks to pursue a U.S. initial public offering, according to people familiar with the move.

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The company, which covers less than half the U.S. population with high-speed mobile Internet service, has teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Now, both Dish Network Corp. and SoftBank Corp. are showing keen interest in Clearwire’s huge stockpile of spectrum even as they battle for control of Sprint Nextel Corp., a majority owner of Clearwire.

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On Tuesday morning in Tokyo, Mr. Loeb’s Third Point LLC sent a letter from him to Sony Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai that reiterated the billionaire investor’s argument that Sony should sell a 15 percent to 20 percent stake in its entertainment arm, which comprises the company’s well-known movie and music businesses.

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We have a long list of CEOs who are asking to get in.

– Daniel Roth, LinkedIn executive editor, on its Influencers program

Sprint, which is Clearwire’s majority owner, said Dish’s tender offer violates corporate law in the state of Delaware, where Clearwire is incorporated. Sprint also said the offer violates the rights of both Sprint and Clearwire’s other strategic investors under Clearwire’s charter and under previous shareholder agreements.

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Mr. Musk, the billionaire behind PayPal and now Tesla Motors Inc., wants to sell his $70,000 Tesla electric luxury vehicles directly to consumers, bypassing franchised automobile dealers. Dealers are flexing their considerable muscle in states including Texas and Virginia to stop him.

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In April of last year, Brockton Retirement Board sued Google following its announcement that it would split its stock to grant a new share to existing stockholders via a tax-free dividend. The company would pay stockholders a dividend of one Class C share for every Class A share they own.

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In recent years, the Cannes Lions ad festival had already morphed beyond ad agencies and large consumer companies such as Procter & Gamble Co. to include technology giants such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. This week, more of the smaller ad-tech companies, some with initial public offerings in their future, will be mingling on the famous Croisette to woo deep-pocketed marketing chiefs and ad firms.

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Punished by third-party quality reports because of the difficulty of using its touch-screen multimedia system, called MyFord Touch, the auto maker will reprise tuning and volume knobs for the radio as it redesigns existing models, a top Ford executive said.

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Three months after Samsung debuted its Galaxy S4 smartphone at a flashy event in New York with a Broadway-style show, the Chinese company is trying to build up a similar hype for its smartphone launch event in London Tuesday.

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