Aiming to attract more big-brand ad dollars, Twitter and the Weather Company have a new deal to create custom content around weather-related Twitter activity.

Twitter users will be able to see video clips of local forecasts, severe-weather coverage or user-generated content. But instead of requiring a link out to other websites, users can view the video within the Twitter stream, using the company’s “Cards” technology.

It’s similar to Twitter’s partnership with ESPN last year, where Twitter users were able to watch instant replays of college football, tweeted out from the official ESPN account. In that case, Twitter sold ad space to Ford, who played a short promo clip for the Ford Fusion automobile before each sports replay.

This time, however, it’s Twitter’s first foray into having non-sports branded-content partnerships, aiming to appeal to a larger audience of Twitter users and advertisers.

“There’s nothing more real-time than weather, and there’s no better real-time communication platform than Twitter,” said Joel Lunenfeld, Twitter VP of global brand strategy.

The idea is that if everyone is talking about a big weather event — like, say, Hurricane Sandy — Twitter can hone in on that flurry of activity and use it to serve up relevant promoted content to users who want to see it.

The trick for Twitter and TWC, of course, is to convince big brands to open those ad budgets up to the type of marketing that Twitter is offering. Twitter’s claim here is that it will boost engagement and reach and increase audience size. But as with any relatively new ad medium, it’ll take some convincing to get the brands to come around.

The Weather Channel, for one, is obviously bullish on Twitter’s ability to sell. “You can only go in and talk about price and ratings so much,” said Curt Hecht, chief global revenue officer for The Weather Company. “The media buying community will see this as a different kind of innovating, leveraging another platform.”

I take it that we’ll see if that’s the case. For now, I’ll be watching for storm clouds.

One big piece of that was a marketing and branding campaign launched at the end of 2012 at Cisco’s annual meeting with financial analysts in New York. Crossing the Web, TV, print and augmented reality, it featured the slogan “Tomorrow Starts Here.” Its intent has been to inject the importance of networking rather than computing as the most important aspect in the narrative of the Internet’s next phase of growth.

It turns out that Cisco is not the first to use that slogan, and the one that got to it first is steaming mad. North Carolina’s second-largest college, East Carolina University, based in Greenville, N.C., announced today that it has sued Cisco in federal court — it didn’t specify which court — for trademark infringement.

“ECU has used the mark ‘Tomorrow Starts Here’ for over a decade, including in national advertisements and publications such as Forbes and Wired,” the university’s chancellor, Steve Ballard, said in a statement. “We feel it is essential to take action to protect that defining trademark of our identity and vision.”

I’m not a lawyer, but from what I understand of trademark law, one of its cornerstone principles is that if you’re going to register a trademark, you have to be willing to defend it when someone uses it without your authorization, or you essentially give them permission to keep using it. So these cases are pretty routine.

But to prove infringement, you also have to prove that the use of the trademark is likely to cause consumer confusion. ECU makes a stab at a case in its press release announcing the suit:

ECU’s trademark “Tomorrow Starts Here” is a university-wide brand that represents an overlapping field of goods and services when compared with that of Cisco. For example, research initiatives through ECU’s College of Technology and Computer Science have created products and intellectual property that are actively being commercialized. ECU is also a leader in the field of distance education technology that is heavily promoted through ECU’s global online education program using the mark “Tomorrow Starts Here.”

A university supporting technology research and a networking giant selling routers, switches and cloud computing gear? Does that confuse you? My guess is that Cisco and ECU will in time come to a settlement. Cisco is flush with cash, something universities always need.

Here are two example videos, first Cisco’s, and then a sample from ECU. You be the judge. Are you confused?

Update: I initially called the college Eastern Carolina University. Sorry about that.

An Australian federal court judge Thursday ordered Apple to pay a $2.29 million fine for potentially misleading consumers over the 4G capabilities of its new iPad tablet. Judge Mordecai Bromberg found that Apple deceived Australian consumers by claiming in its advertising that the “iPad with WiFi + 4G” could connect with 4G cellular networks in Australia, despite its incompatibility with the country’s sole 4G network.

Apple earlier this year agreed to offer refunds to Australians who purchased the device with the expectation of 4G connectivity, and adjusted its marketing to clarify that it does not support Australia’s 4G LTE network. But Bromberg said that is simply not remedy enough.

“I have no doubt that given the promotion by Telstra of the superiority of its 4G network, many purchasers will have felt decidedly short-changed, despite the fact that only a very small percentage of them took up the opportunity of a refund, offered by Apple on 28 March 2012 as part of the undertakings given to the Court,” Bromberg said in his order. “Beyond that, all that I am able to do on the evidence before me, is recognise that the wide-ranging reach of the conduct is likely to have resulted in many hundreds of thousands of consumers being exposed to Apple’s misleading use of the term ‘4G.’”

Reached for comment, Apple didn’t directly address the fine or Bromberg’s order, but it did concede that the iPad’s original branding needed an update to address differences in wireless terminology around the world.

“The new iPad supports many high speed networks around the world, including LTE in the U.S. and Canada and HSPA+ and DC-HSDPA in many countries,” Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet told AllThingsD. “Carriers do not all refer to their high-speed networks with the same terminology, therefore we’ve decided to use ‘Wi-Fi + Cellular’ as a simple term which describes all the high speed networks supported by the new iPad. The advanced wireless features of the new iPad have not changed.”

On Friday, the company agreed to pay A$2.25 million in fines and A$300,000 in legal fees to settle the case brought against it by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, though the presiding judge, Mordecai Bromberg of the Federal Court in Victoria, is unsure whether that’s a sufficient penalty. He has declined to approve the settlement until he’s told how many customers felt they’d been misled by the “iPad + 4G” branding Apple used in Australia, and learns more about the company’s finances.

“I don’t know whether we’re talking about a corporation that makes $10 million or $300 million,” Bromberg said. “How do I know that (the penalty) is meaningful for Apple if you don’t put before me any idea of what its financial position is?”

Apple says neither of those things matter. It argues that there was no loss to customers, because it has offered refunds to customers who bought the new iPad believing it supported Australian 4G, and that the fine for its behavior shouldn’t be based on its finances. But it provided Bromberg with the information he requested, nonetheless. Now Apple awaits his final ruling on the settlement, which should be issued within a week or so.

But more than one icon can be too many. At least, that’s the philosophy Twitter Creative Director Doug Bowman seems to espouse. Twitter will lose all superfluous branding images — like said bubble text and “t” icons — offering instead a single, iconic image: A redesigned little blue bird.

Think of it as a sort of brand consolidation, akin to Nike’s iconic swoosh. Instead of the disparate ways Twitter’s brand appears in public, it’ll be one bird, one logo for partners to use and the general public to see. It’s smart, too: Simplicity is a hallmark of brand building, boiling down a product into a single concept, captured in an image.

Simplicity is the key word for Twitter in the company’s maturation process. It aims to become a service that non-techno-savvy users can understand — just look at last year’s complete site overhaul.

Here’s a super-short video on just how simple the new image is: It is composed entirely from three sets of overlapping circles, chopped up to form the new image. Cute. And smart.

It’s not the iPad that’s been mislabeled. It’s Australia’s 3G networks.

In a brief filed with the Federal Court in Melbourne, Australia, this week, Apple — which last month agreed to notify consumers that its new iPad is not compatible with Australia’s 4G LTE network, and to offer refunds to early purchasers who feel they were misled by its branding — refused to stop marketing the device as “iPad Wi-Fi + 4G.”

Its argument for doing so? Many of Australia’s 3G networks can reasonably be described as 4G under international definitions.

“The iPad with WiFi + 4G is a device which performs in accordance with the descriptor ‘4G’ in terms of data transfer speed,” Apple argued in its brief, according to the Australian, which first reported on the document. “The descriptor ‘4G’ … conveys to consumers in Australia that the iPad with WiFi + 4G will deliver a superior level of service in terms of data transfer speed (consistent with accepted industry and regulatory use of that term), and not that the iPad with WiFi + 4G is compatible with any particular network technology promoted by a particular mobile service provider in Australia.”

In other words: No, the iPad with WiFi + 4G doesn’t support Australia’s true 4G LTE network, but it does support networks that are fast enough to be defined as 4G. So, no harm, no foul.

And as silly as that might sound, it’s technically true. When the International Telecommunications Union, which sets the marketing standards for wireless networks, expanded its definition of 4G service in December of 2010, it said this of the term 4G:

“As the most advanced technologies currently defined for global wireless mobile broadband communications, IMT-Advanced is considered as ’4G,’ although it is recognized that this term, while undefined, may also be applied to the forerunners of these technologies, LTE and WiMax, and to other evolved 3G technologies providing a substantial level of improvement in performance and capabilities with respect to the initial third generation systems now deployed.”

And if that’s the definition, Apple argues, then there’s no reason to change the branding on the “iPad Wi-Fi + 4G” in Australia.

It’s all semantics.

But will a court buy that argument? We’ll find out in May, when the case is expected to be given a full hearing.

(Image courtesy of Someecards)

By now, even the stodgiest companies have found their way onto Twitter. They have discovered it isn’t just another marketing channel with a funny name, it’s more like a conversation they need to join or risk losing influence over how consumers view them or their brands.

The service, which lets users send 140-character texts, or “tweets,” to people who have signed up to follow them, has proved to be an effective way to reach younger consumers and to help build a brand.

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The centerpiece of Ford Motor Co.’s online campaign for the 2012 Focus was a free Facebook page hosted by an orange-colored puppet that in a few weeks won over a new, younger audience for the once-stodgy compact.

Ford spokespuppet “Doug” drew crowds to online conversations and videos that starred him clowning around the new Focus. Doug inspired more than 43,000 Facebook users to click “Like,” the icon that broadcasts to friends a thumbs-up approval of a brand or product.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

That’s prompting marketing companies to develop new offerings that seek out more detailed information about Facebook fans, with the aim of sending targeted messages, offers and promotions.

Merkle Inc., Lithium Technologies Inc. and other marketing companies are helping companies build applications for consumers to download on Facebook, which will allow customers to access a company’s loyalty program, what promotions they might qualify for and check their points. In exchange, the consumer gives the company permission to access their personal information like name, gender and email address on the social-networking site.

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Here’s an internal memo, titled “Platform for Growth,” just sent out by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, in which he buries the lede by noting the business partner of content czar Arianna Huffington, Jon Brod, will move to work on its local Patch effort and MapQuest mapping unit full time.

General managers previously reporting to Brod will now report directly to Armstrong. Brod came to AOL from its acquisition of Patch, which Brod ran.

Second, AOL also elevated an exec as Chief Analytics Officer and head of something called Project Management Organization.

And, the company has further simplified its branding structure by moving some of its brands under the Huffington Post Media label, which it had already talked about doing. It’s essentially a streamlining of a previous streamlining.

Here is the email:

From: Tim Armstrong
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 08:29:19 -0400
To: Tim Armstrong
Subject: Platform for Growth

AOLers –

We spent the last week in France at the Cannes Lions Festival, which is a global meeting of the advertising community (the technology industry has CES and Cannes is becoming the “CES” of global advertising). After finishing Investor Day and the global company meeting two weeks ago, the trip to Cannes further underlined the opportunity we are starting to take advantage of — that content and brands are the next wave of the Internet.

Content, Brand Advertising, Video, and Local are going to be at the center of the web and mobile for the next decade and we have made bold moves to position AOL at the forefront of those areas. We have a powerful portfolio of assets as a company and by matching our people, brands, and marketplace-defining products, we will simply get stronger, better and faster.

We are going to further strengthen our content brand portfolio to put maximum leverage into key areas of growth. We are also investing in the leadership structure of the brands and the overall analytical framework we have as a company.

The brand portfolio simplification and investments we are announcing today come from our core strategy, the metrics of growth we see in the business today, and the expanding opportunities we see in the marketplace. Every brand metric was thoroughly reviewed and thoughtfully discussed to get to the list we are sharing with you today. There are a set of brands we will continue to run as stand-alone brands because they have built strong organic traffic, significant customer bases, and unique market positions. There is another set of brands that will gain usage, a larger customer base, and deeper content by becoming part of the Huffington Post platform.

We want to make this transition as simple and intuitive as possible for employees, consumers, and advertisers, so we’ve set up a link to the brand site to review the complete list of brands and USPs.

The AOL Huffington Post Media Group technology platform is the end result of a company wide effort combining the very best content, video, ad, and data technologies from the Blogsmith platform with the best technologies from Huffington Post platform — and we’ve been hard at work adding many new capabilities as well. This combined platform simply has no equal in the digital content space and features an innovative approach to coverage, with edit and tech teams working closely together, and a “hyper-efficient editor” model that enables editors and reporters to rapidly deploy all the tools available to create and disseminate stories. We have integrated in 5min video, AOL demand analytics, and AOL’s data platform deeply into the system, and we will soon be running all of the advertising through AOL’s ad platform. Editors are not silo-ed but empowered to quickly bring their stories to life — and to millions of readers. This leads to engagement on a massive scale, creating an editorial ecosystem with high-quality content, leading edge blogging, commenting, and social sharing capabilities that are easily scale-able and enable real-time speed and a more holistic approach to covering news and engaging audiences.

Here are some quick statistics on the benefits we are seeing in combining sets of brands and platforms:

· When we migrated AOL News to the HuffPost platform we saw significant increases in organic traffic with search entries per UV increasing 195% and social entries per UV up 142%.
· By combining Politics Daily with HuffPost Politics content, social interactions, which include HuffPost comments, FB comments, shares and re-shares, FB Likes, tweets, re-tweets, and email shares reached 3.3MM.

· Adopting Huffington Post style blogging in the Patch platform allowed us to sign up 5,000 bloggers in 2 weeks.

The goals of the brand and platform investments are the following:

1. Grow traffic and grow revenue with high quality experiences for consumers and advertisers
2. Be the leader in content CMS and CMS for Ads (Devil + Social)
3. Simplify the business process and increase profitability in each vertical area
4. Scale video and International
5. Create a culture of speed and transparency on all fronts

In support of the brand investments, we are also making people investments. The current GM structure around the content brands will report to me and I have met with all the GM’s to discuss each vertical opportunity. Local will be broken out as a vertical and is a space where AOL is in a leadership position. Jon Brod will focus full-time on AOL’s local efforts, including Patch and Mapquest. Jon is the co-founder of Patch and has spent the past few months successfully integrating the Huffington Post and AOL media. AOL local has a lot of exciting products coming out this summer and we will be connecting many of those products to our larger business.

We are also announcing a new position that will have a positive impact across AOL — the formation of a Chief Analytics Officer and Project Management Organization (PMO). Tim Lemmon, currently working in Ned Brody’s Advertising.com Group, is being promoted to CAO, reporting directly to me, and will oversee and drive analytics and project management on a company-wide basis. Data and analytics are key to our success and we will continue to look for Tim to provide fact-based guidance and executional focus for all of AOL. Tim’s current AOL Analytics team including Pricing and Yield Management will continue to report to him.

I’ll be holding a working meeting today at 11am EDT with the Sales team to discuss the new brand structure, the HuffPost platform, and the supporting org structure. The meeting information is available on AOL Today and anyone is invited to dial in if you are interested in learning more. Go AOL! -TA

In fact, the only place to really find the Palm brand these days is at the Palm.com domain, which, while festooned with HP branding, still includes “Palm USA” in its page titles. Evidently this is what HP meant when it said the Palm brand would “move into the background.”

Judging from Wednesday’s event, the storied Palm brand isn’t even a sub-brand of HP. It’s just a handle for a particular division of the company, though HP insists it’s keeping it around.

“Our future strategy is to continue to build the HP brand in the marketplace,” a company spokesman told me. “Palm is a great brand that is synonymous with mobile innovation and we are delighted to have it in our portfolio of brands allowing us future options.”

That’s a nice enough thought, though it’s hard to see HP ever reviving the Palm brand in the future–not after it’s rebranded the company’s products as its own and announced plans to use them to build “the largest installed base of connected users in the world.” If it succeeds at that, will Palm really be a future branding option? Doubtful.

In that sense, Wednesday’s event wasn’t just a showcase for some slick new webOS hardware, but a eulogy to the pioneering company that made it possible, the company that created the market for handheld devices and shaped that first early vision of mobile computing….

Eh, Oldsmobile was a great brand too, I suppose.

Certainly it doesn’t take a big leap to imagine Myte as a name for the the next iteration of the Palm Pixi, which is rumored to be smaller than its predecessor–perhaps even “the smallest smartphone ever.”

And Veer and Gyst? Who knows. Maybe HP’s branding team has been reading a bit too much Chaucer lately.

The Chinese entrepreneur makes equipment to mount GPS navigation devices onto car dashboards. The mounts are sold by U.S. companies under their own brands. Now, Mr. Yang is promoting his own line of dashboard mounts, with higher-end features, under his own label.

To promote his line, he has teamed up with two American partners who provide branding and distribution services—a tack many Chinese companies traditionally have balked at.

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Facebook confirmed that it expects to announce its 500-millionth user next week, and will mark the occasion with a new consumer marketing initiative called “Facebook Stories.”

Last week, BoomTown got wind of the effort–which will center on a variety of life stories from users about the impact of the social networking site on their lives–and asked Facebook about it.

The company said it was readying its launch for next week and put Randi Zuckerberg on the horn to tell me the story behind “Stories.”

“As we anticipated our 500-million milestone, and we wanted to find a different way to announce and celebrate it,” said Zuckerberg, who has spearheaded the site’s creation, in an interview this afternoon. “In the past, it’s been all about the numbers and milestones, and we realized we had never taken the opportunity to celebrate users.”

Getting to the 500-million mark, though, is a big deal for the Silicon Valley-based Facebook, which has been growing wildly over the last several years across the globe.

While the number has been widely expected to be announced soon, it will still be a big landmark in the history of the company.

Thus, a Web site within Facebook that is a visualization of some of the many kinds of consumer stories the company has collected over the years, but never showed off.

The stories will have two views–organized by by geographical location and by theme, such as “finding love,” “coping with grief” and “natural disasters.”

Facebook has seeded the selection with about 200 text stories it has, asking users again for permission to feature them.

But the point is to open the page up to all users to submit their tale in 420 characters, the same number as a status update on Facebook. The story can also be linked to the user’s profile.

Users can also “Like” stories, and the most popular will be featured. The site will also be optimized for the other devices, such as the Apple (AAPL) iPad and Amazon (AMZN) Kindle.

The site was designed by two outside firms, social marketing company Involver and JESS3, a design, branding and data visualization firm.

Zuckerberg, who said she would be adding her own story, said her favorite so far has been the story of a group that coalesced on Facebook to save an old theater in Kentucky.

But she is hoping for a varied collection that will appeal to, well, the soon-to-be 500 million people on Facebook.

“We really think by surfacing these stories, users can explain what Facebook is a lot better than we can,” said Zuckerberg.

Before the launch of “Facebook Stories” next week, you can start the tale-telling now here, using a newly tweaked form, pictured below (click on it to make image larger):

Announced along with a new, slimmer Xbox 360 on the eve of the Electronic Entertainment Expo during a special Cirque du Soleil performance said to be inspired by its technology, Kinect uses a 3-D camera and an array of motion sensors to track 48 points on the human body and translate them into in-game actions. Its official name, an amalgam of “kinetic” and “connection,” is intended to reflect that.

But like many brandings, “Kinect” is being met with criticism by some observers, prompting the inevitable “Kinect 4,” “you spelled connect wrong” and “should have called it the ‘Mii Too’” jokes. But as Stephen Tolouse, director of Xbox Live policy and enforcement at Microsoft (MSFT), noted in a blog post last night, Nintendo was widely mocked for choosing the name Wii, too.

“It’s interesting to me how much is put into a technology’s name,” Tolouse wrote. “I, like many others, decried Nintendo naming their new console the Wii. And yet look at how many units it’s sold. The trick is in the magic of the experience….”

Explaining his preference, Tolouse says, “I really like the name Kinect….Sure, it’s a made up word, and others have used it (try and find any pronounceable combination of six letters using the English alphabet that the Internet hasn’t combined). But I like that it isn’t something more common or mundane. The experience of using Kinect is deserving of its own descriptor.”

Expounding, Toulouse dissects the challenge of naming a new product, especially one already known by a code name: “It’s really hard when you have a cool ‘code name’ that lasts for so long to replace it with its true name, a name that it really deserves to communicate why it’s desirable. Code names are meant to be cool, as code names. True product and technology names are far more difficult. Marketing people get a really bad rap when they face a challenge like that and there’s often a lot of eye rolling and ‘what were they thinking’ that goes on. Coming up with these things is a high wire act with no net.”

“Windows Mobile 6.5 isn’t just a letdown–it barely seems done….[It’s] an OS that hasn’t been fundamentally changed in years, and which bears a strong resemblance to Windows Mobile 6.1, and a startlingly not-weak resemblance to PocketPC.”

– Gizmodo’s John Herman in “Windows Mobile 6.5 Review: There’s No Excuse For This”

If “Windows Phone” is to be the new designation for Microsoft’s mobile OS, the company can’t afford to have four-month-old Windows Mobile 6.5 muddle its branding. So the company is renaming it. The rumored moniker: “Windows Phone Classic.”

An obvious choice, I suppose, if it is indeed a choice–Microsoft (MSFT) refused to confirm this, telling me it hasn’t yet made any “final branding decisions” on Windows Phones 6.x; my sources tell me differently. But it’s entirely ironic given that the definition of “classic” according to Merriam-Webster is variously “serving as a standard of excellence,” “of recognized value,” and “historically memorable.” Windows Mobile 6.5 is none of these; well, it might be “historically memorable,” but if it is, it’s for the wrong reasons.

In any event, the rebranding is a wise move. As widely disparaged as it has been, Windows Mobile 6.5 is still widely used, particularly in enterprise. A December 2009 survey by Aberdeen Group showed 63 percent of respondents using the operating system, second only to BlackBerry’s 74 percent. Given that and the enterprise world’s general aversion to early adoption, continued legacy support of WinMo 6.5 is essential.

MySpace has apparently scheduled an all-hands meeting today, which one source noted is to talk about the new order and to rally the likely much dispirited troops at the struggling social networking site.

With the sudden firing of relatively recently installed CEO Owen Van Natta last week by News Corp. digital head Jon Miller, it will be up to the two new co-presidents he installed, Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones, to give MySpace employees a whole lot of reason to believe they can reinvigorate a site that seems woefully resistant to revival so far.

While the one-time trio of Van Natta, Hirschhorn and Jones did manage to stanch the traffic declines in their short and, in hindsight now, rocky, tenure over the last year and have worked to fix the shoddy plumbing, getting the water running regularly is nothing that will inspire anyone internally or externally.

But they do seem to know that, at least.

In any case, if BoomTown were there–and don’t assume I am not skulking around, boys–here are five basic questions I would want the new leaders to answer, including Miller, who is clearly the silent third partner here. (Bonus: I left out Facebook-related questions, as that would be too painful):

While it might be looking backward, exactly why and how was the decision to fire Van Natta made? Was the direction in which he was leading MySpace–related to the socialization of music and other entertainment content–the wrong one? And should those staffers he brought in, such as advertising head Nada Stirratt and many others, be prepping resumes?

What are the three top priorities for MySpace? A massive redesign? A rebranding? Perhaps spinning off as a kind of huge start-up from owner News Corp. (NWS) so it can live or die on its own merits and have more of a chance of attracting talent and encouraging innovation? And, if MySpace stays part of the massive media empire, what are the benefits of that now?

Is MySpace trying to keep its remaining users or bring in new ones? If the former, what will keep them? If the latter, what will get them to try the service (again)?

Do you really believe MySpace can once again be on the growth path it was once on, and can what has clearly become a tired brand be reborn? What are the precedents for such a situation–and you may not use Apple (AAPL) as the example, because there is no Steve Jobs present?

And, perhaps most important: Who’s really in charge?

Of course, that might or might not be a very rhetorical question, to say the least.

Until it is all settled, you can add more questions below in comments. Also, here’s that famous video clip from the movie “Animal House” to enjoy, which is still incredibly funny after all these years:

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

AppMakr was originally a side service offered by PointAbout, a technology consulting company based out of Washington, D.C. In its beta form, AppMakr listed a $2,000 starting price for aspiring app makers to sign up, in addition to the price to build the actual app.

But the company recently separated AppMakr into its own brand and lowered the price for build templates to $199 and $499, depending on whether app makers wanted to allow AppMakr to retain publishing rights, or claim its own branding and copyright.

PointAbout’s co-founder and chief operating officer Daniel R. Odio says AppMakr has since published 3,100 apps in the iTunes App Store, which lists over 100,000 apps and is expected to reach 300,000 of apps by the end of this year, according to a report from IDC. (A demo of how AppMakr works can be viewed here).

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“Now we aren’t typically the carrier that comes out and announces what we are going to be selling 12 months from now. Other carriers do that, and the media loves to speculate on what we are bringing to market. But what I will tell you is that over the next six months or so you will see devices like the Palm Pre and the Cousin on our network from Palm.”

– Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam, May 2009

Verizon has carried just about every smartphone Palm has ever built, so it was really just a matter of time before the carrier began selling Palm’s Pre and Pixi. According to Bloomberg, Verizon will be doing just that in the months ahead.

“Persons who decline to be named” tell the business news service that the carrier will announce the addition of the Palm smartphones to its lineup this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Both will boast enhancements beyond those currently offered; the Pixi, for example, will gain the Wi-Fi connectivity it sorely lacks.

Great news for Palm (PALM), which will obviously benefit from the sizable addressable market Verizon (VZ) offers, as I noted yesterday. While Sprint (S) has been a faithful partner for Palm, it is hemorrhaging subscribers and lags Verizon, the industry leader in the U.S.

As Morgan Stanley analyst Ehud Gelblum recently noted, Palm’s primary trouble has been its limited distribution through Sprint.

Said Gelblum: “We believe the single most important factor for Palm over the next year is the reach of its distribution network, which we expect to expand markedly in 2010 as Palm’s exclusivity agreement with Sprint expires, and the strength of its branding and advertising campaign, which has just been gutted, revamped and restarted. We believe both of these events should lead to market share gains, and ultimately margin expansion through greater scale.”

Reached for comment, Palm declined to offer one.

Today, a coalition of privacy groups, led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking the regulators to force Facebook to turn on its old settings. The complaint, and Facebook’s response, are at the bottom of this post.

I have no idea if the Feds will end up getting Facebook to do anything. But the privacy groups can still accomplish a lot without injunctive relief.

“What we’re going to do is drag Facebook into the halls of the FTC, and have them examine all of their policies,” says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, one of the groups backing the complaint.

That could certainly slow down the company. So could inquiries from European governments, which have become more inclined to regulate American technology outfits. Just ask Microsoft (MSFT).

The real concern for Facebook is if the private sector starts complaining. Recall that Facebook only reversed course on its ill-fated Beacon project two years ago after advertisers started questioning the program, which was designed to share your shopping and branding choices with your pals.

Since that debacle, marketers seem to have gotten comfortable with Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg has a real ad business now. And I’ve yet to hear a peep from big brands with second thoughts. But if the privacy blowback gets big enough, that could change.

Again, I don’t think the proposition that Facebook is offering its users–the opportunity to share every detail about their online lives with anyone with a browser–is an inherently bad one. There are lots of people who are comfortable with the notion.

The problem is that Facebook has switched course midstream. It started off as a site that limited users’ information to the outside world and now wants to invert that. But the switch has been badly explained, done in such a way that many users don’t understand what happened.

Facebook says this criticism is overblown and that lots of people do understand the switch. Spokesman Barry Schnitt says at least half of Facebook’s users have made changes to their privacy settings since the new rules went into place. Which means, he argues, that at least half of its users understand them.

Entirely possible. But Facebook now has up to 350 million users. Which means that tens of millions of users could be unaware of what’s going on. And they’ll only find out when their party pictures or baby videos or whatever turn up on Google (GOOG).

Facebook could easily solve this by clearly explaining that its “Share With Everyone” option really does mean everyone and–crucially–making it an opt-in proposition. But then adoption rates would shrivel, and the company wouldn’t be able to pull off its goal: Making as much of the site as public as possible.

This one isn’t going away anytime soon.

EPIC’s complaint, followed below by Facebook’s response:

EPIC-FacebookComplaint –

Facebook’s response:

We’ve had productive discussions with dozens of organizations around the world about the recent changes and we’re disappointed that EPIC has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them.

Facebook’s plan to provide users control over their privacy and how they share content is unprecedented in the Internet age. We have gone to great lengths to inform users about our platform changes, beginning with our July announcement; founder Mark Zuckerberg’s open letter to our 350 million users; our robust press and analyst outreach; the notice-and-comment framework for our new privacy policy; and simple customization tools for users.

We’re pleased that so many users have already gone through the process of reviewing and updating their privacy settings and are impressed that so many have chosen to customize their settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of Facebook’s user empowerment and transparency efforts. Of course, the new tools offer users the opportunity to decide on privacy with every photo, link or status update they wish to post, so the process of personalizing privacy on Facebook will continue.

We discussed the privacy program with many regulators, including the FTC, prior to launch and expect to continue to work with them in the future.

This week: A virtual visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Matthew McNeely and Sprout, the build-it-yourself Flash tool that lets anyone create customized Web site widgets.

Who: Matthew McNeely

What: VP of Engineering, Sprout.

Why: Sprout is a Web-based, WYSIWYG Flash editor that allows individuals and businesses to build customized content that can be embedded on their own sites. Sprout’s creations (known as “sprouts”) are also frequently incorporated into social media campaigns.

Where: Sproutinc.com (corporate bio); San Francisco, although Matthew says the team is “truly distributed,” as he lives in New Hampshire (analog); Facebook Fan Page (Yes, you can write on its wall); @Sprout (Twitter).

Who else: Slide; SlideRocket. But, “not too many that focus on branding the way we do.”

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: I grew up in Indiana, and, in the summers, I would de-tassel corn.

Has a Geek Crush on: I’m gonna get letters from all my Apple (AAPL) friends for saying this: Bill Gates of Microsoft (MSFT).

Gadget of the Moment: I finally got an iPhone, but I got it for $50, refurb.

Tech Wish: I wish I could build a sprout for my iPhone, but that means it would need to run Flash.

Fails at: I’m not a very good communicator, and every once in a while I catch myself closing up and not communicating with the [Sprout] team the way I need to.

Bio in 140 Characters

Shares a hometown w/James Dean. Picked corn until he got his first computer. Was a software engineer/consultant before moving to Sprout.

The Five Questions

What does Sprout bring to the table that others don’t?

At the most basic level, it’s about the speed. Before Sprout, you really needed to understand Flash and the sort of movie metaphor that it puts out in order to use it. Now, it’s much faster. If you know PowerPoint, you can use our product.

We also have a big push in the social networking space. That’s unique to us. If you are looking to put out a really rich media campaign on a social network, there’s no better service. You can also change things on the fly. Someone in the ad department can say, “Hey, this ad isn’t working.” And you can change it in five minutes, and it’s back up.

Who isn’t using Sprout, but should?

I can think of two examples. One would be, say, a yoga instructor who was also tech savvy. She could build up a quick shell of a Web presence with Sprout and sell it to other yogis who just want to give classes, but still have a nice, clean, updated Web site.

The second thing would be a porn sprout. That’s one industry that could really benefit from our technology, but just hasn’t yet. I mean, imagine, video clips and little libraries. We’ve seen some slightly suggestive things come across the bow, but no one has really gone all the way yet. I really hope you print that.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: A Sprout spokesman wanted to make sure readers knew that McNeely was kidding here, of course. Sprout's terms of service forbid such a use of its technology.]

Is there a formula for an attention-grabbing Sprout widget?

It’s different in every industry. Overall, a little animation and really good-looking graphics help. But, when it comes to engagement, we do have some idea.

It has to be contextually relevant [in the social media space], your friends should be fans of this Facebook page [for it to become popular], stuff like that. I mean, with good design, you can get someone like this guy from Des Moines who has basically cornered the market on real estate widgets.

Who should buy Sprout?

You mean besides Google? Seriously, though, we do work with Google (GOOG) quite a bit, and I’d love to see us become the small- to medium-size business ad-building tool for them.

Most real geeks have memories where they saw something new and said to themselves, “Dang, I love living in the future.” What’s yours?

My brother and I got this old North Star computer at this garage sale or something, and I programmed through the night to get this thing to predict, you know, randomize lottery numbers. I never won anything, of course, but I was just so enamored by it.

That kinda got me hooked into the notion that you can work on something and lose yourself in it.

The In Living Color Interview

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091204/almost-famous-sprouts-matthew-mcneely/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091106/droid-launch/ http://allthingsd.com/20091106/droid-launch/#comments Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:15:31 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=28348 Droid, Motorola’s most anticipated cellphone since the launch of the Razr in 2004, arrived at market today, to a warm reception by most accounts. Some 2,000 Verizon Wireless stores opened early this morning, many to lines–though admittedly, the lines are far shorter than those that accompanied the launch of certain rival devices.

According to News.com, 100 people or so lined up outside Verizon’s midtown Manhattan store last night prior to its midnight opening. And various reports posted to Twitter suggest there were queues at other outlets as well, though quite a bit shorter (see below; click to enlarge).

In any event, the fact that there are lines at all must be a welcome sight for Verizon (VZ), which has been looking for a strong rival to Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, and for Motorola (MOT), which hopes Droid will revive its much-diminished post-Razr cellphone business. As one Verizon subscriber eager to trade up to Droid told me, “it’s the best smart phone not made by Apple.”

With endorsements like this, Motorola should be working a bit harder on branding the device as its own. Right now, the Droid marketing push from Verizon Wireless is so overwhelming that you’d think CEO Lowell McAdam designed it himself. Why aren’t we hearing from Motorola as well?

“Droid is potentially a game changer for Motorola,” iSuppli analyst Tina Teng said in a recent research note. “Motorola now is no longer just emphasizing slick form factors, such as it did with its RAZR handset. The company now has focused on the hottest segment of the global mobile handset market–providing compelling smartphone products that are usable and expandable through third-party applications.”

That being the case, Motorola might want to do a bit more to get its name out there.

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