After it announced layoffs of 520 employees and lowered its guidance to Wall Street, Zynga’s stock dropped precipitously yesterday, down 12 percent, to dip below $3 a share.

The decline put the market value of the company at just $2.34 billion, well below the once much-hyped hopes for the San Francisco-based online gaming company that has seen nothing but troubled times since its IPO. In fact, since its late 2011 public offering, Zynga shares are down close to 70 percent.

But perhaps more interesting is that, with $1.6 billion in cash and marketable securities, investors now consider the company to be worth just below $750 million.

In other words, about $350 million less than Yahoo just paid for the blogging platform Tumblr, which has substantively less revenue than Zynga.

That small valuation puts the company in an interesting position, as it seeks to move its business more quickly into the mobile space, as its Web-based business has fallen off more dramatically than expected. Simply put, mobile monetizes less robustly than Zynga’s Web offerings.

The slowness in moving its casual social games to fast-growing new devices, such as tablets and smartphones, has been at the heart of Zynga’s current troubles, forcing management to cut its staff by 18 percent in order to rationalize costs.

ZNGA data by YCharts

That has meant the slashing of its staff of more than 3,000 — which grew quickly via a series of acquisitions made in recent years — and closing offices in New York and Los Angeles to save money.

What happens next will be the subject of much speculation, given its declining worth, including whether Zynga might consider going private or if some other company might contemplate acquiring it.

Most sources close to the company think it is unlikely that its big owners, including venture firm Kleiner Perkins, will want to conduct any kind of dramatic transaction, given Zynga’s currently prone state. Said one person close to the situation, its eventual state will depend on how well the company manages to turn itself around.

Zynga confirmed it was laying off 18 percent of its workforce — which represents 520 employees — in a bid to reduce costs, as it seeks to drastically restructure its troubled business.

The move today will affect every part of the San Francisco social gaming company, cutting $80 million in staff costs for its 2,900 current workers. It will also include the closing of its offices in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas, as well as other infrastructure costs, adding to the total expense reduction.

Zynga continues to have big offices in San Francisco; Beijing, China; and Bangalore, India, as well as several small units across the U.S. (such as Seattle and San Diego).

Sources said that severance benefits will extend for several months and include some acceleration of stock options.

In addition, Zynga has now said in a press release that it is downgrading its investor guidance for the second quarter with results at the lower end of what Wall Street has been expecting.

After a rocky IPO and trying to cope with rapid changes in its core businesses, Zynga has been trying to refocus the company’s franchises and network on the shift to mobile and a narrowing of focus at the company.

That refocusing will now have a big impact on Zynga’s financial performance. For Q2, the company had previously said its “bookings” — related to sales of in-game virtual-good purchases and advertising — would be in the $180 million to $190 million range. Today, Zynga said results would now be in the lower half of that range.

In addition, its GAAP net loss for the quarter will be higher than expected, rising from a loss of $26.5 million to $36.5 million to a loss of between $28.5 million and $39 million.

All other metrics are expected to remain the same, including: Revenue ($225 million to $235 million); earnings per share (a loss of three to five cents); adjusted EBITDA (break even to a loss of $10 millon); and non-GAAP EPS (a loss of three to four cents).

Wall Street is not reacting well to the bad news. Zynga’s shares have dropped from 11 to 12 percent since AllThingsD.com broke the news of the layoffs. It is now at about $3 a share, giving the company a market valuation of $2.4 billion. Trading for Zynga was briefly halted, before the company confirmed the cost cuts.

Zynga is laying off 18 percent of its workforce — which represents 520 employees — in a bid to reduce costs and more drastically restructure its troubled business toward mobile, according to sources close to the situation.

The move today will affect every part of the San Francisco social gaming company and cut $80 million in staff expenses. Zynga currently has about 2,900 workers.

But the action will also include the closing of its offices in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas, as well as the slashing of other major infrastructure costs, adding to a total reduction that is likely to be much larger.

Zynga continues to have big offices in San Francisco; Beijing, China; and Bangalore, India, as well as several small units across the U.S. (such as Seattle and San Diego).

Sources said that severance benefits will extend for several months and include some acceleration of stock options.

(Update: Zynga has halted trading on the Nasdaq stock market pending news.)

(Second update: Zynga confirmed layoffs and cost cuts, noting they will complete them by August.)

The reason? Mobile — a business Zynga must conquer, despite its currently smaller prospects for monetization compared to its Web business.

After a rocky IPO and trying to cope with rapid changes in its core businesses, Zynga now must refocus the company’s flagship franchises and network on the shift to mobile and a narrowing of focus at the company.

In other parlance, this is a “right-sizing” of Zynga to reflect a more somber reality that these mobile businesses are not as large as its Web-based one that rode the startup to glory on the explosive growth of social networks, primarily Facebook.

Sources said the reason for the more substantive cuts now, after earlier ones last fall, is because the decline of its Web business has been more drastic than anticipated, while the rise of its mobile business has been slower than needed. That’s been especially true on Facebook, which was once one of Zynga’s key money-making partners.

It has resulted in a perfect storm of trouble for Zynga, which has struggled with its business since its public offering, as investors have scrutinized the longevity of the hits-based online gaming business. Despite the continued strength of some of its big properties, such as FarmVille, the life cycle of most casual games has been short.

Zynga has tried to fix the situation by moving to the faster-growing mobile space. In addition, CEO and founder Mark Pincus has tried to solidify its top management, as well as bring in more board help, to strengthen efforts to revive the company.

Zynga has already been on the cost-cutting path, closing less successful games and other more ambitious products that had enjoyed less than expected traction. For example, the company has “sunsetted” 18 games in recent months, as it has deployed more resources and development to mobile efforts.

Apparently, you can get media satisfaction — as long as you are online as opposed to offline.

According to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group, consumers accrue more value from their online media usage than from their offline consumption.

The new research report — titled “Follow the Surplus: How U.S. Consumers Value Online Media” — calculated that the average U.S. online user got a “consumer surplus” of $970, compared to $900 from offline media.

BCG defines consumer surplus as “the value consumers themselves place on a media-related activity or product over and above what they pay for it.”

The report looked at seven categories — books, radio and music, U.S. newspapers and magazines, TV and movies, video games, international newspapers and magazines and user-generated content and social networks.

The largest chunk of online consumer satisfaction came from UGC and social, such as use of Facebook and Google’s YouTube, which makes sense since the actual cost is nearly zero — making any benefit essentially digital gravy.

Books were where the least consumer surplus was online. That’s not a surprise, said BCG senior partner John Rose, who coauthored the report, but it is likely to change soon with the increasing popularity and proliferation of a variety of devices.

That’s double from three years ago, with the average consumer now owning 2.9 devices, such as mobile smartphones and tablets. It will increase to 4.1 in three years, said the BCG report. Also up, of course, is the number of hours spent online, which — in turn — dramatically increases the value of online media consumption.

Advertisers still have not caught up with consumers, of course. “The value is from the consumers’ perspective and not the advertisers’ perspective yet,” said Rose, in an interview. “The business models are still not in place to support what consumers already know they want.”

Gender is not an issue, with men and women both consuming about 12 hours a week of online content. But men listen to more music, while women prefer social interaction more.

Another interesting result, read the report: “By a margin of some five to one, U.S. consumers are more excited about the Internet’s potential rewards than they are worried about the potential risks.”

In other words, they like online media, they really like it.

That’s why, said Rose, the medium and the business model will evenutally come together.

“Different people will say different things about when it will come together and not if it will come together,” said Rose. “Advertisers have always found ways to create value, even if they have not done it yet with online media.”

There are lots of other interesting findings and charts from BCG, some of which are embedded below (click to enlarge them and the whole report can be found and downloaded here).

This week in Las Vegas, the new management team running Yahoo — including CEO Marissa Mayer — is at International CES to schmooze with big advertisers and convince them that Yahoo is the place to put large chunks of their marketing budgets.

One of the longtime selling points of the company is the sheer size of its audience, especially for the key money-making parts of the site — the homepage, Yahoo Mail and search.

But private stats from comScore show that those three areas have continued their longtime decline over the last year, in some cases dropping significantly. In November and December, for example, compared to the same two months a year ago, U.S. search was down 28 percent and 24 percent respectively, while mail was down 16 percent and 12 percent.

This matters a great deal, since the troika of homepage, mail and search have been the critical driver of the Yahoo value ecosystem for advertisers.

The impact of those drops is felt all over Yahoo, whose music, movie, games and travel site have also seen massive drop-offs in traffic year over year in those same months.

Stopping the decline is critical for Yahoo, since Mayer herself has underscored the need for size in her pushing for new businesses at Yahoo that are 100 million users in size and/or have revenue prospects of at least $100 million.

While this is a lofty vision, the reality of traffic falloffs on key properties is a vexing issue, especially since they remain its main source of revenue and also an important element in launching future products Mayer is promising will turbocharge the company.

It’s not that Yahoo is not huge, especially compared to most sites on the Web.

As one of the top Internet brands, according to a recent Nielsen report, the average number of total monthly unique visitors for the longtime Silicon Valley Internet company in 2012 was 141.6 million, No. 3 behind Google and Facebook in the U.S. market. Similar rankings were reported by comScore, which placed Yahoo at the No. 2 spot after Google, with 171.4 million monthly visitors in November.

But, for many years, traffic to those important consumer destinations of Yahoo has been on a clear and unstopping decline, statistics (usually from comScore) that the company nonetheless always dutifully puts in its earnings slides — see below — for investors to get some idea of the major and vexing issues facing the company.

That was suddenly ended in the last quarter with the engagement slide removed from Yahoo’s public deck entirely. Not all companies include such stats, so when I inquired as to why the company had made the change, Yahoo PR never returned my phone call.

But it’s not hard to guess the reason for the shift — the numbers were not good and they called more attention to Yahoo’s glaring challenge, which is getting users reengaged with its products by creating what Mayer has dubbed several times “delightful” experiences.

According to numerous sources, that has also been the case within the company too, with the new regime restricting an internal transparency initiative pushed by former Chief Product Officer Blake Irving that shared product performance numbers with the top 100 leaders at Yahoo.

And while it’s an interesting strategic choice, several sources inside the company this week urged me to get ahold of increasingly worrisome numbers from comScore — available to its private clients — comparing November 2011 to November 2012 and also December 2011 to December 2012 at home and work in the U.S.

So I did, getting the same stats from numerous sources — numbers that a spokesman for comScore confirmed were correct.

And, as promised, they are worrisome indeed.

In November 2012, compared to November 2011, the monthly unique visitors to the homepage declined 17 percent to 91.8 million from 110.9 million; Yahoo Mail dropped 16 percent (from 92 million to 77.7 million); and Yahoo search dropped 28 percent (from 93.3 million to 66.9 million).

Also off significantly for all three areas, often by one-third, were a plethora of other stats: Percentage of reach, total minutes, total page views, total visits and more.

One of the only bright spots for Yahoo was the relatively small Flickr sites, which were up 37 percent — 26.7 million versus 19.4 million — in unique monthly visitors year over year. The photo-sharing site — which has been getting a much-needed refresh — was also up in all other stats.

But Flickr — which Mayer (pictured here) has laudably touted and supported after years of inexplicable neglect — is not a money-maker for Yahoo, even if its return does burnish the company’s tech and innovation cred.

In December 2011 to December 2012, the homepage was more stable, gaining four percent in monthly uniques from 109.4 million to 114.2 million, but with other key stats both rising and falling. Total visits were up 14 percent, for example, while average minutes per visit was down 13.6 percent.

But the trouble for mail or search continued, off 12 percent (89.9 million to 78.7 million) and 24 percent (88.7 million to 67.4 million) respectively in monthly uniques, with similarly major declines in all other stats.

Mail recently got a refresh too under Mayer, despite some recent security glitches, so new stats will show if that will help stem the declines. Search is another story all together, with Yahoo in what can only be described as a dysfunctional partnership with Microsoft that numerous sources tell me Mayer is seeking to end.

The homepage, too, is undergoing a redo, with a design that has a decidedly more mobile and social feel, and pushing an ethos of Yahoo becoming a hub for content discovery. It is hoped the new look will boost traffic relatively quickly from its current downward trajectory.

To be fair, there can be lots and lots of reasons for these declines, although most of Yahoo’s competitors are, at worse, seeing a flattening of growth and not outright declines.

And sometimes Internet sites complain that services like comScore undercount, although Yahoo had previously used the firm in its public documents. More to the point, as multiple sources within the company note, the stats are directionally correct in that they closely track with internal Yahoo numbers.

Which is to say, traffic is going down rather than growing. That is clearly why Mayer has loudly stressed mobile since arriving at Yahoo, an area not included in these numbers that many sources said has strong growth to about 70 million monthly unique visitors via its apps and mobile-enabled Web offerings.

But unlike the homepage, mail and search — which push and pull traffic all over Yahoo and are responsible for most of its current monetization — mobile also makes very little money now. And Yahoo — unlike Facebook, which recently did — does not break out mobile results.

So, it will be interesting to see if the company does so when it reports fourth-quarter earnings on January 28 and also if it says anything about continued traffic declines of its traditional Web business in the period and the impact on revenue.

Still, there are lots of ways to counter declining or flat revenues, even with declining traffic — via cost cuts, efficiencies, charging more and selling assets (as Yahoo did in the last quarter). And Yahoo has ably managed to keep its operating margins growing over the years, despite both the declines in traffic and moribund growth in its revenue.

But the real and only fix is the drastic fix to existing tentpoles Yahoo has and the creation or acquisition of products that excite consumers and, therefore, advertisers.

It’s not an easy thing, of course, as well-known venture capitalist Ben Horowitz recently wrote in his blog about the need to focus on products over building and improving culture — one of Mayer’s other big initiatives at Yahoo.

Wrote Horowitz in what I consider one of the clearest articulations of what it takes to win for startups, as well as big companies like Yahoo:

“The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market. If it’s possible to do something 10X better, it’s also possible that you won’t be the only company to figure that out. Therefore, you must take the market before somebody else does.”

If you want to take a gander, here are some more of those old Yahoo quarterly engagement slides, which were recently eliminated from its presentations:

(Note: I reached out to Yahoo’s outside PR firm — since they do respond to queries — and also some company execs to get a comment on this story, but so far there has been none.)

They like her, they really like her.

Wall Street, that is, in regards to new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, assigning the former Google exec a clear premium.

And whether it is deserved or not yet from a pure performance perspective — we actually won’t know for several quarters ahead — the shares of the Silicon Valley Internet giant over the past three months have gone up 22 percent. The rise has taken place pretty much on the promise that she will finally be the one to deliver what no other Yahoo leader has done.

And that is, besides making the company relevant and innovative again: Getting Yahoo’s stock past $20 a share again.

That’s within striking distance now. Shares are at $18.40 today, close to an all-time high for the year. The recent rise certainly isn’t taking into account the results of the recent lackluster third quarter, which continued to show the worrisome downward trends — even though partial asset sales of the company’s Chinese Alibaba stake successfully masked the problems — in growth, engagement and overall profitability.

But Mayer’s confident I’ve-got-this tones on the earnings call itself — especially in pushing a mobile strategy that has not been put in place as yet in any substantive way — won over Wall Street investors, who apparently like how she sounds and, thus, are intrigued with what she might do.

While this kind of perceptual game will only get Yahoo so far, moving out of the teens in share price would be an important benchmark for the company.

The stock was last at that level in August of 2008. At the time, in fact, $20 a share was considered very disappointing, taking place after Microsoft dropped its $44.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo a few months earlier. Indeed, $20 was a big comedown from when Yahoo shares were above $43 in 2006.

The lowest price Yahoo shares got in recent years were $9.39 in November of 2008, just before then CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang stepped down.

Now the stock is close to double that sad trough, fueled in part by some cosmetic moves to improve culture by Mayer — including free food, smartphones and a promise to end the slow-moving decision-making at Yahoo.

There has also been a start of the promised multi-billion-dollar stock buybacks by the company, although Yahoo has been cagey about how and when it is purchasing. Also helping, more recently, is that several big hedge funds are buying into the story of hope.

Following in the footsteps of successful activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point, who is now on the board and is a major Yahoo investor, others like him have now joined in the party in a bigger way. That includes David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital and Chase Coleman of Tiger Global Management.

The thoughtful Einhorn, who is a friend of Loeb’s, has been in and out of the stock before, buying it on hopes that now ousted CEO Carol Bartz would be Yahoo’s savior and selling it soon after it was clear she might not be. He came back in February with three million shares, sold them in May, but now has upped his stake to just over five million more under Mayer’s regime.

More substantively, Tiger’s Coleman has grabbed 25 million shares (interestingly, he’s also upped his stakes in Groupon and Facebook).

Obviously, they must believe Yahoo is set to move upward, which all depends on Mayer. She’s made one critical stock misstep early in her tenure, by announcing that she was considering keeping the huge cash windfall from its sale of Alibaba stock and not giving it back to shareholders in some form.

That dropped Yahoo’s shares to under $15, but Mayer walked back that mistake and the stock has been climbing since.

For the year to date, it’s up almost 14 percent — a nice rise — although that pales in comparison to Apple’s 39 percent rise, Amazon’s 37 percent rise and, most of all, AOL’s 136 percent leap.

The comparison to the massive stock run that AOL has had, after CEO Tim Armstrong — also a former Googler — cut costs, focused units, sold patents and bought back stock, is often made. It’s perhaps apt, but arguably Yahoo has much better and fixable assets than AOL.

More to the point, Yahoo’s price-to-earnings ratio remains unusually low — it’s 5.6, compared to the S&P’s 14.2 average — which means that the entire business is severely undervalued by Wall Street.

It is if Mayer can create real value by actually staging the comeback she is already getting credit for accomplishing. She certainly has a lot of levers to improve results, from the stock buyback to finally making a deal to sell its multi-billion-dollar stake in Yahoo! Japan to making expense cuts to buying some innovative small start-ups to creating products that aren’t, well, lame.

Most importantly, Mayer has to stop the decimation of Yahoo’s once mighty advertising business, which makes up the bulk of its revenue, as well as improve its search monetization by rejiggering its heretofore dysfunctional partnership with Microsoft. (But, as I wrote earlier this week, she will not be making new search engines with Facebook.)

A gander at this chart of Yahoo’s declining quarterly revenue should give you a good visual of the problem with the core business:

YHOO Revenue Quarterly data by YCharts

And, indeed, Yahoo’s sales have dropped 29 percent since 2007, with typically flat display revenue and declining search revenue, which was once Yahoo’s crown jewel. While operating margins have risen over the years, very few point to the company as an exciting growth story.

And it still isn’t, although investors are starting to consider it a possibility. We’ll see as Mayer makes more significant changes in 2013, hopefully underpinning the stock’s recent rise with a true story of financial strides.

But, for now, giddy shareholders probably should not get too far ahead of themselves. Not that you can stop them: Mayer fan Eric Jackson is calling for Yahoo’s stock to be over $40 again by end of 2013.

Whether the Mayer premium can do pull off that particular investor miracle or not remains to be seen.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is now starting to unveil the flip side of free lunches and smartphones, with two employee-focused moves that are a little more tough love in nature.

According to several sources close to the situation, she has officially ended a longtime practice at the Silicon Valley Internet giant of giving most of the company the week off between Christmas and New Year’s.

While many Internet companies slow down in that holiday period and many are much looser about employees taking time off, Yahoo is one of the few that closes down the company, except for essential staff. (LinkedIn also currently offers a rest week to employees.)

Eliminating the rest week is probably a long time in coming and many at the company have long thought it should be eliminated, since it has been paid time off for Yahoo’s 12,000 employees.

“Yahoo has a lot of work to do, so there’s no time to rest,” said one staffer in a common sentiment.

That said, from a financial point of view, the rest week practice does have positive implications for Yahoo. Besides compelling staff to burn off a week of vacation in the current quarter and not carrying over those costs into the new year, there are also cost savings in terms of keeping its facilities going.

No rest week aside, employees are also about to experience an even bigger change soon, as Yahoo’s HR department prepares a new plan to evaluate the efficacy of its staff.

Under Mayer’s plan, sources said, there will be new measurements of performance instituted, based on a variety of benchmarks and evaluations, in order to better understand who the best employees at Yahoo are.

Once that is complete, the company is likely to begin cutbacks on compensation for the bottom 20 percent, including moving them out of Yahoo entirely. The company has suffered many rounds of layoffs over the years, which hurt morale badly due to the often haphazard nature of the cuts.

Mayer is aiming to make the process more organized; she talked about this performance-based system in a company meeting in September. At the time, she noted that employees would be judged on four “Cs” — culture, company goals, calibration and compensation.

In a follow-up memo and meeting, Mayer told staff about this process:

“Moving forward, we will have both annual goals and quarterly goals that we will all commit to, track, and grade ourselves based on … We will then cascade the goals down through the company at the department, team, and individual level …”

What she was talking about is similar to an employee evaluation method used at Google — where Mayer spent her entire career before becoming Yahoo’s latest leader — using an elaborate series of data points to judge how individual employees are doing.

In other words, Yahoos are about to get graded on a very clear curve.

It began: “Yahoos: A lot has happened since I last talked to you.”

You can say that again!

Yesterday, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson sent out an email to the troops in what appears to be an attempt to soothe the company, which has been under a lot of stress, including more high-level exec departures, board changes and more. More importantly, the Silicon Valley Internet giant is nervously waiting for a restructuring expected to hit within weeks, and also has been unnnerved by Thompson’s aggressive legal attack on one of its key partners, social networking site Facebook.

Unfortunately, the memo didn’t say much, except vaguely but definitively referencing that even more tumult was coming.

After noting that he had been making a “deep dive” into the company after getting there at the beginning of the year, Thompson said that he was focused on “what makes Yahoo special and what doesn’t work.”

The plan then? To get the company to be “aggressive and lean forward,” because “real change is coming.”

Rut-roh.

(In a related move, but not noted in the memo — which several sources said was linked to all the uncertainty around the expected restructuring and also high costs — Thompson also cancelled Yahoo’s annual global sales meeting, which was to be held for about 1,300 advertising staffers in Florida later in the month.)

“We are moving as fast with real urgency to move back to Yahoo playing offense once again,” said the Thompson memo, which was read to me by several sources, because of increased worries about the company once again hunting for leakers.

(Apparently, like his predecessor before him did unsuccessfully early in her tenure, Thompson is on a yet another pointless hunt for those who talk to outsiders. Memo to Scott: Yahoo is an online media company and not a pay-for-that-used-iPad-on-eBay outfit and the peeps there like to share.)

Back to the memo action. “Were are fundamentally rethinking every part of our business and looking at all options to put maximum effort where we can succeed,” wrote Thompson. “I’m putting tons of pressure on my leadership team … so we can move faster and more deliberately.”

He added — and the bolding is his — “the changes we make will not be incremental ones. We will make bold, fundamental changes to what we do and how we do it.”

After properly freaking the Yahoo staff out — with everyone trying to grok exactly what that meant in terms of their jobs — Thompson then went into three core things the company was going to focus on under his rule (more bolding!):

“1) Focusing intently on those parts of the business that have a competitive advantage.

2) Liberating all of us to work faster and make better decisions.

3) Thinking really creatively about how to build new businesses that leverage our trusted relationships with users.”

Those will be applied, wrote Thompson, to five key parts of Yahoo: Its core business (such as the homepage and news); platforms (such as its cloud services and Yahoo Publishing Platform); data (which Thompson said was the “single most underrated, underappreciated and underused asset, also calling it a “cornerstone for the next generation” of Yahoo); international; and an amorphous thing he called “our future.”

About that, Thompson said Yahoo would “go beyond simply protecting our core assets … we will more than just tweak what we have today … to innovate, acquire and disrupt outside our core.”

Then, without giving any specifics at all, he noted that it’s as “important to know what we’ll do as how,” before launching into three “core principles” for the company, which were all in bold caps (this dude loves punctuating, which I can appreciate!).

They are:

“LISTEN, UNDERSTAND AND PUT THE CUSTOMER FIRST.

GET STUFF DONE.”

(Thompson also underlined “listen,” as well as bolding it, in an orgy of key-shifting.)

“I learned early in my career that innovative concepts without execution are of no value,” he then said, in a classic business-bromide tone. “The Yahoo of the future has to be the organization that consistently surprises the world by how much we get done and deliver to our customers.”

The letter did reference the patent-infringement lawsuit with Facebook at the very end.

“I want to point out that this lawsuit has one simple purpose: Protecting valuable assets of the company and its shareholders,” Thompson wrote. “Others have respected and have licensed our valuable innovations and Facebook must too.”

Thompson ended by noting that “my door is open.” It will be interesting to see who has the guts to walk through it today.

According to the latest comScore report, search dominator Google continued to do so in the U.S. market, upping its share to 66.4 percent in February, from 66.2 percent in the month before.

This marked the third month Google’s search share rose, improvement also enjoyed by Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Its share rose to 15.3 percent, said comScore, from 15.2 percent in January. That is up from 13.6 percent a year ago.

The rise comes at the expense of Microsoft advertising partner Yahoo, which saw its market share fall to 13.8 percent. It was 14.1 percent a month ago, and 16.1 percent a year ago.

This is, as you might imagine, not good news for Yahoo, which relies on income from its once-mighty search business. It’s better news for Microsoft, of course, although it still pays big-time in costs for the wins it is making from Bing.

According to sources, AOL will be announcing that it is making cuts of up to 40 employees in its communication products teams, specifically its AIM instant messaging and AOL Mail units. As part of the changes, its SVP of business operations, Eric van Miltenburg, and AIM head Jason Shellen will be leaving.

[UPDATE: AOL confirmed those moves to be several hours after this post appeared.]

Shellen is a particularly high-profile departure, having sold his start-up Thing Labs, maker of the Brizzly family of Web-based social software, to AOL in 2010. The Thing Labs team, headed by the Google and Blogger vet, had been integrated into AOL’s AIM and other similar offerings.

Van Miltenburg, a former Yahoo exec, had headed up business operations for the now-shifted consumer applications unit.

The departures are among a number of exits by AOL execs who had come to the New York-based Internet company, which has struggled to turn itself around in recent years under CEO Tim Armstrong. The company is now facing a challenge from an activist shareholder, one of the reasons for a renewed focus on cost-cutting and other restructuring.

Yahoo will report its fourth quarter earnings tomorrow, after the markets close, which most expect to be lackluster compared to a year ago.

To call this report a surprise would be, well, wrong.

In fact, it will be the 13th quarter in which the Silicon Valley Internet giant has done worse that the previous year. (This has happened as Internet advertising has boomed for sites like Google and Facebook, as a point of reference.)

Welcome aboard, new CEO Scott Thompson! Now, what are you going to do about it?

Probably cut costs first, including staff, and try to quickly figure out an all-new, this-time-it’ll-take strategery about what to do to turnaround the much beleaguered Yahoo.

But, first, the depressing quarter to deliver again.

The estimates for that weak performance have a range, but the consensus of analysts is expecting revenue to be $1.19 billion on profits of 23 to 24 cents. If Yahoo has managed to rein in costs more than expected, some analysts are hoping for a slightly better report.

Still, all the indications are for more negative signs in user engagement, search share, display advertising stats and more.

Thus, we await the light at the end of the tunnel.

As Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney noted in his cheat-sheet analysis:

“Valuation remains intriguing, but we’re still waiting for convincing Top-Line Turnaround Story Proof. With new CEO Scott Thompson, we believe YHOO will be another wait-and-see turn-around story.”

Of course, much of the action is taking place elsewhere, with the company ferreting away at the deal to sell off a big stake in Yahoo’s Asian assets and also subtracting and adding new board members.

But tomorrow, it’s once more unto the Wall Street breach, dear friends, or close the wall up with our purple dread.

Until the results are in, here’s a recent video I did for WSJ.com’s online Digits show on the possible layoffs at Yahoo:

Just last week, it seemed as if the dangerous riptide had finally turned for Demand Media, the social content company whose stock for the quarter bottomed out in mid-October, in the $5-a-share range.

It has now rebounded to close Friday at $7.76, with a market valuation of just over $651 million — still a far cry from a high of over $27 a share in the last year, but well below the target price of upward of $14 from Wall Street analysts.

That’s why there will be plenty of questions for CEO Richard Rosenblatt in a conference call scheduled for after the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand reports its third-quarter earnings, following the close of markets this afternoon.

Analysts are expecting Demand to lose four to six cents a share. Revenue is expected to be up.

One issue sure to be on the docket will be the traffic problems at its flagship eHow site, which stymied Demand in the quarter. The situation caused it to release a statement about the issue, “which the Company believes is temporary and was the result of an internal technical issue. The technical issue has recently been remediated.”

Assume you will hear more on that and other topics, including updates on the cost of its content and the continued impact on Demand of search-algorithm changes at Google, as well as how it is faring in attracting more lucrative advertising.

I will be covering the earnings and the analyst call, so tune in later today for answers.

As All Things Digital reported last week, Groupon filed an amended S-1 IPO offering this morning, in which it deemphasized a controversial accounting method.

Instead of a metric called ACSOI, or adjusted consolidated segment operating income, the Chicago-based social buying company noted that gross profit was the “important indicator for our business, because it is a reflection of the value of our services to our merchants.”

But the dreaded ACSOI — which leaves out important costs of marketing — is not completely gone. In its filing, Groupon said it would use it internally, noting:

We exclude those costs because, unlike our other marketing expenses, they are an up-front investment to acquire new subscribers that we expect to end when this period of rapid expansion in our subscriber base concludes. While we track this management metric internally to gauge our performance, we encourage you to base your decision on whatever metrics make you comfortable.

In other words, for the love of Pete, please ignore ACSOI completely.

Groupon also included new financials in its filing for the quarter, with a 36 percent increase in revenue to $878 million from the previous quarter and double a year ago. But its loss was $102.7 million, compared to a loss of $35.9 million a year ago.

The company also reported that its subscribers grew from 10.4 million last year to 115.7 million now.

Costs are also lower by eight percent in the new quarter, with Groupon spending $165.2 on marketing to new subscribers, compared to $179.9 million in the previous one.

The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission is a critical one for Groupon, whose public offering has been mired in questions about how it accounts for its financial performance.

Of particular concern: ACSOI, which is a number that does not include important costs, such as critical online marketing expenses to attract new customers to Groupon.

Such accounting is called non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles).

In 2010, Groupon reported that it lost $413.4 million using standard accounting practices. When it excludes some costs from its calculations using ACSOI — including online marketing expenses to attract new customers — it recorded a profit of $60.6 million in 2010.

The new results were stronger, to be sure. Such growth is important, especially given investor scrutiny of Groupon in the current economic turmoil.

As I wrote last week:

And, indeed, questions from the media, investors and, most importantly, the Securities and Exchange Commission about how Groupon accounts for its revenue and profits using ACSOI were swift and decidedly negative.

Hence, a furious debate — along with much internal tension — within Groupon about what to do. At first, in another S-1 amendment, the company backed away from using ACSOI as a “valuation metric.”

But that was apparently not enough for the SEC or anyone else, so Groupon’s top managers finally thought it best to rid itself of the term entirely.

Presumably, with a cleaner S-1, Groupon can concentrate on a whole new set of issues around its IPO, such as the tumultuous state of the markets.

According to numerous sources close to the situation and after regulatory pressure, Groupon will amend its S-1 public offering filing to remove references to an unusual accounting treatment that has attracted controversy.

Sources said the new filing by the social buying company, which is helmed by CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason (pictured above), will likely occur as early as Monday.

It can’t come a minute too soon regarding a metric called ACSOI, or adjusted consolidated segment operating income, which the Chicago-based Groupon used when it filed its S-1 documents in June.

As I wrote at the time about the odd use of ACSOI:

Let’s be clear, this is a number that does not include important costs, such as critical online marketing expenses to attract new customers to Groupon.

Such accounting is called non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles).

In 2010 and the first quarter of 2011, Groupon said its Adjusted CSOI was $60.6 million and $81.6 million, respectively.

On a GAAP basis, Groupon lost $413.4 million for 2010 and $113.9 million in the first three months of 2011.

And, indeed, questions from the media, investors and, most importantly, the Securities and Exchange Commission about how Groupon accounts for its revenue and profits using ACSOI were swift and decidedly negative.

Hence, a furious debate — along with much internal tension — within Groupon about what to do. At first, in another S-1 amendment, the company backed away from using ACSOI as a “valuation metric.”

But that was apparently not enough for the SEC or anyone else, so Groupon’s top managers finally thought it best to rid itself of the term entirely. That will happen next week, sources said.

And, in coming weeks, sources added, the company will be filing additional financial information about both its growth and costs, which will undoubtedly also be put under a microscope by the media, investors and regulators.

A Groupon spokesman declined to comment when asked about the removal of ACSOI from its public offering documents.

This is perhaps the most perfect commentary on the overwrought hue and cry over Netflix raising its prices recently on DVD-by-mail rentals.

While any hike on costs is annoying, I actually just had to talk one high salaried dude down from the ledge, after I pointed out the new monthly price for the online video service was less than he spent at the Starbucks that day on a needlessly elaborate latte.

Kudos to Funny or Die for uncovering “literally the worst thing that has ever happened to white people”:

Earlier today, CNBC reported that the regulatory review of Groupon’s questionable use of certain accounting metrics in its IPO filing was delaying its offering until later in September.

While more questions from the Securities and Exchange Commission about how it accounts for its revenue and profits might indeed eventually push the IPO debut out, according to sources I have interviewed for months now, an offering in mid to late September was actually when the social buying company was planning to take its company public.

It makes sense, since August is seldom used for road shows for companies headed for an IPO — think Wall Street in the Hamptons and you’ll get why.

That said, the continued scrutiny by the SEC is not a welcome development for Chicago-based Groupon, which filed its S-1 documents in June.

In coming weeks, sources said, the company will be filing new financial information about both its growth and costs, which will undoubtedly be put under a microscope by investors and regulators.

That’s no surprise since the contents of the original filing immediately caused controversy, especially over the amount of its venture funding paid out to insiders and also over an unusual accounting treatment called adjusted consolidated segment operating income, or Adjusted CSOI.

As I wrote at the time:

Let’s be clear, this is a number that does not include important costs, such as critical online marketing expenses to attract new customers to Groupon.
Such accounting is called non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles).

In 2010 and the first quarter of 2011, Groupon said its Adjusted CSOI was $60.6 million and $81.6 million, respectively.

On a GAAP basis, Groupon lost $413.4 million million for 2010 and $113.9 million in the first three months of 2011.

Said Groupon about its accounting in its S-1 filing: “We believe Adjusted CSOI is an important measure of the performance of our business as it excludes expenses that are non-cash or otherwise not indicative of future operating expenses.”

Definitely sketchy enough to attract an SEC look-see, which caused Groupon to back away from Adjusted CSOI as a “valuation metric” in a recently amended S-1 filing. Groupon also stepped back a sloppy comment made after the filing by its Chairman Eric Lefkofsky — in a interview he apparently thought was off the record — that the company would be “wildly profitable.”

One thing is certain: There will surely be more amending of the Groupon S-1 in the weeks ahead as it stumbles toward its IPO, which will be one of the most prominent of the Web 2.0 era.

One area of medical care that has gotten little attention online has been — wait for it — dental care.

But before you click away from this story to avoid thoughts of root canals, it’s the well-funded premise behind the latest start-up from longtime online exec Jake Winebaum.

The former Disney digital exec who parlayed Business.com into a $350 million sale several years ago is now at work on Brighter, a dentist discounting service.

Winebaum, noting about half of Americans pay for more than $100 billion in dental costs annually out of their own pockets, said Brighter is aimed at getting consumers a price break for mostly routine work, such as cleanings, crowns and fillings, by negotiating discounts from 25,000 dentists.

These 20 to 30 percent discounts are supplemented by reviews from Yelp and you can also buy the $79 annual plan that gives you even more benefits.

There are a few phone-based services that do this, but this “Groupon for Teeth” is yet another niche in the online buying arena.

Here’s Winebaum — who has gotten $5 million for Brighter from Mayfield — talking about it all:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110609/brighters-jake-winebaum-talks-about-tooth-loving-start-up-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110211/twitter-tells-advertisers-to-dig-deeper-promoted-trends-are-going-to-get-more-expensive/ http://allthingsd.com/20110211/twitter-tells-advertisers-to-dig-deeper-promoted-trends-are-going-to-get-more-expensive/#comments Fri, 11 Feb 2011 11:30:11 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=29572 Twitter’s “promoted trends” ads may be the company’s most consistent source of revenue. Now the company wants to wring more money out of them: It has told buyers to expect a significant price bump for the ads in the next few months.

Twitter doesn’t have a formal rate card, but ad industry sources say the going price for a one-day promoted trends purchase has settled between $70,000 and $80,000, after starting out as high as $100,000 a day.

Now Twitter has started telling buyers the coming price hike will consistently push the ads into the $100,000 to $120,000 range.

Promoted trends give an advertiser a chance to essentially purchase a small sliver of Twitter’s site, by inserting their message at the top of the “trends” section of users’ pages. For now, Twitter sells only one per day, and has been selling the slot out with some frequency.

And promoted trends could become even more valuable for Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and his company if they start carving the ads up into different geographies, giving them the ability to sell more than one per day.

If, say, Twitter could sell at least two different promoted trends, in two different territories each week, at $100,000 a pop, those ads alone could generate $20.8 million a year. Play around with those assumptions, and you can quite easily bite off a big chunk of the $100 million-plus ad revenue estimates we’ve seen floated.

Ad buyers also tell me Twitter has been bullish about its “Promoted Accounts” product, which it rolled out toward the end of last year.

When I first wrote about the concept last summer, and described it as a way to let marketers (or anyone) “buy” followers, the concept upset some Twitter traditionalists.

But they’re going to have to get over it, because it’s exactly what Twitter is selling: It prices the ads, which show up on users “Who to follow” list, on a “cost per follow” basis. Buyers pay between $1 to $3 for every new account that follows them.

The one Twitter ad product I haven’t heard buyers talk that much about is the first one Twitter rolled out. “Promoted Tweets” were supposed to work like Google’s AdWords–”organic” tweets, tied to keywords, that showed up in search results, and later in users’ regular streams.

That seemed like a promising tactic at first. But I’ve never seen a promoted tweet “in the wild”; the only time I’ve seen them is when they’re attached to the promoted trends.

But perhaps I’m just missing them. If you’ve bought one, or if you see one, please pass drop me a line (peter@allthingsd.com) and let me know.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110211/twitter-tells-advertisers-to-dig-deeper-promoted-trends-are-going-to-get-more-expensive/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20110210/stock-trades-near-52-week-high-on-message-that-its-an-all-new-ebay/ http://allthingsd.com/20110210/stock-trades-near-52-week-high-on-message-that-its-an-all-new-ebay/#comments Thu, 10 Feb 2011 21:28:40 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=2633 Two years ago, eBay’s CEO John Donahoe promised Wall Street analysts massive changes to improve the company’s e-commerce experience.

Today, he says it’s all “new eBay.”

At the company’s analyst meeting at its headquarters, the company demonstrated the major changes made over the past couple of years and laid out plans for how local, mobile and social will lead the next wave of commerce.

In the afternoon, Bob Swan, eBay’s CFO, took the stage to give the financial rundown that everyone had been waiting for since the morning.

Swan highlighted PayPal’s growth trajectory by saying that it expects to double revenues over the next three years to between $6 billion and $7 billion, compared with $3.4 billion in 2010.

He also talked up how mobile was gaining speed by saying that PayPal mobile transactions were estimated to double to $2 billion in total payment volume, and that mobile on marketplaces will double to $4 billion in gross merchandise volume.

Meanwhile, when looking at the company’s gross merchandise volume, he sees the business increasing from $60 billion in 2010 to $75 billion in 2013. And, to support the strength of the business, the company anticipates generating $7.5 to $8 billion in free cash flow by 2013.

Swan wants to stress that these growth rates are being driven from the company’s core businesses, and not from the more innovative stuff eBay is working on in local, mobile and social. “We are in a  different state than we were in March 2009, where the crystal ball was murky and full of potholes. Now the crystal ball is full of opportunities. We have unmatched advantages that position us to win.”

That’s possible because of the improvements the company has been making over the past two years.

“We’ve made significant and necessary changes necessary for growth. Two years ago, search was optimized for auctions and suffered. Two years from now, search will be a competitive advantage for eBay,” said Mark Carges,” eBay’s CTO of marketplaces. “We’ve rolled out many tailored experiences and selling on eBay will be vastly simplified.”

To illustrate the change, Carges showed how there’s no more irreverent banner ads on the search results page, and instead of returning up to 19 paid results, it gives shoppers the “best matches” and cuts the time in half that it takes to return results.

The company also launched the buyer protection program, which will return the price of the item and the cost of shipping to customers unhappy with purchases.

Christopher Payne, VP of eBay marketplaces North America, said the company will start to increase marketing spend on these improvements to drive awareness: “We’ve been intentionally quiet as we fixed fundamentals, but starting in the second half, we’ll start marketing this new experience.”

At lunch, analysts were so eager to talk to Donahoe he wasn’t even able to get to his seat. They crowded around him in the lobby to grill him on what impact Facebook, Apple and Google were going to have on the company’s payments aspirations.

Donahoe wasn’t phased, saying that PayPal is technology agnostic. He will support BlackBerry, Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone — and all of the iterations they produce from phones to tablets. What’s more, he says, the company is building the tools and technology for merchants to keep up in what can be a daunting world.

Analysts appear impressed with the improvements. Today, the company’s shares traded up nearly 8 percent, or $2.57, to $34.53, coming close to marking a 52-week high.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110210/stock-trades-near-52-week-high-on-message-that-its-an-all-new-ebay/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110209/inq-mobile-friends-facebook-and-spotify-for-new-android-phone/ http://allthingsd.com/20110209/inq-mobile-friends-facebook-and-spotify-for-new-android-phone/#comments Wed, 09 Feb 2011 22:03:35 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=3681 It’s not the Facebook phone, but it is a phone with a whole lot of Facebook.

INQ Mobile on Wednesday is announcing its new Cloud line–Android phones that have Facebook features deeply integrated into their core as well as a dedicated music service from Spotify. The Cloud’s home screens feature a trove of Facebook options ranging from a visual news feed with images and video to one-button access to features like Facebook Chat and location-based check-ins.

“We want to do for the Facebook generation what BlackBerry did for the enterprise market,” INQ Mobile CEO Frank Meehan said in an interview in San Francisco last week. “For someone under 30 this is the stuff you want to see all the time.”

The Cloud line comes in two models–one with a keyboard and the other with a pure touchscreen. The bad news for you Americans (Mobilized is feeling very British here in London) is that the phone is coming to the U.K. in April, with no firm plans yet for when it might arrive stateside. INQ Mobile currently sells phones with Telus in Canada, but its devices are not yet sold in the U.S.

INQ Mobile made their announcement just ahead of Mobile World Congress, the cell phone industry’s big trade show which gets under way on Sunday in Barcelona.

There have been rumors of an INQ-built Facebook phone for some time–rumors that have been conflated with an official Facebook entry into the mobile market. HTC is also expected to debut a Facebook-heavy phone, though it has yet to announce its plans.

For its part, Facebook praised the INQ device.

Facebook mobile head Henri Moissinac said in a statement that the Cloud phones “bring Facebook to people with a single touch while they are mobile and demonstrate the power of socially aware devices.”

Although the selling point of the INQ Mobile phones are the connections to Facebook and Spotify, the Cloud line is pure Android. The Facebook features themselves are just elaborate home screen widgets tied to the social network, while Spotify replaces the default music player.

In doing so, INQ is looking to strike a balance between offering something unique while maintaining compatibility with Android.

“People haven’t had an emotional attachment to Android,” Meehan said, noting that users have such an affinity for the iPhone, and to some extent even the BlackBerry, or at least its messenger program.

The Cloud phones use a modest 600MHz processor from Qualcomm and feature version 2.2 of Android (a.k.a. Froyo), though the devices are designed to be upgradeable to the Gingerbread version. Meehan said that INQ is deliberately keeping the devices low-cost so they can sell for just a fraction of the iPhone’s price tag, making them attractive to a different segment of the market.

“We’ve taken very much a mass market approach,” Meehan said. “We’re going after the LGs, the Samsungs. We’re not going after people who are going for an iPhone.”

He also sees an opportunity to nab some BlackBerry Curve users.

“The Curve market is ripe,” Meehan said. “They have been sitting there with a terrible browser.”

There are also some family ties involved in the phone’s direction. INQ Mobile is owned by Li Ka-shing’s Hutchison Whampoa, which, through a subsidiary, is also an investor in both Facebook and Spotify. INQ Mobile started in 2008 and has grown to more than 200 employees, said Meehan, who also is a member of Spotify’s board of directors.

As for when the company might bring the Cloud line (or any phones for that matter) to the U.S., Meehan said it could be as early as the second half of this year.

“Let’s see how it goes,” he said. “I’m not rushing into it.”

Of course, it might also help if Spotify launched in the U.S., something that always appears to be on the verge of happening “in the coming months.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110209/inq-mobile-friends-facebook-and-spotify-for-new-android-phone/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110207/aol-says-huffpo-will-be-a-50-million-business-this-year/ http://allthingsd.com/20110207/aol-says-huffpo-will-be-a-50-million-business-this-year/#comments Mon, 07 Feb 2011 12:22:33 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=29427 Ahead of an investors’ conference call, AOL has laid out its financial expectations for its newest acquisition: It thinks the Huffington Post will earn $10 million on sales of “over $50 million” in 2011. It also says it will spend around $20 million on “restructuring charges” due to “cost overlap” stemming from the deal, i.e.: There are some cuts coming.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110207/aol-says-huffpo-will-be-a-50-million-business-this-year/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110201/wedding-planning-apps/ http://allthingsd.com/20110201/wedding-planning-apps/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:57:08 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1625 Brides- and grooms-to-be take comfort in the tangible, whether its bridal magazines that seem to weigh five pounds each, reception venue floor plans or photos of dream cakes. But keeping these tangibles handy at all times means lugging around a thick binder stuffed with paper. No thanks.

This week, I tested several wedding-planning applications for mobile devices that may get couples reaching for an iPhone instead of a binder. As a recently engaged person, I tested them for realistic usability, time-saving techniques and friendly user interfaces.

The Strength of The Knot

It’s nearly impossible to get engaged without quickly growing addicted to TheKnot.com, a one-stop shop for brides and grooms alike. Here, couples can create budgets using a template that estimates cost per item, and they can import guest lists in Excel spreadsheet format. They can also page through photos of other weddings held in their area, or obsessively chat online with other engaged people whose friends are tired of listening to them.

Unfortunately, The Knot Inc. doesn’t have one mobile app that replicates all of the rich features on its website, though typing http://mobile.theknot.com into the mobile browser on a device like the BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phones opens a condensed version of some features, including the ever-ticking countdown (201 days to go!) and checklists sorted into Category, Date or Reminders.

The Knot Wedding Dress Look Book encourages brides to enter personal details to find the best gown.

The company does offer two free iPhone apps (Android apps are in development) that focus on certain features of the website: The Knot Wedding Dress Look Book and The Knot Wedding 911. The Look Book encourages brides to find just the right wedding gown by entering details about themselves like body type, personality, type of wedding and best physical feature. Wedding 911 includes hundreds of wedding questions that are collected, sorted into eight categories and answered by the site’s editor in chief.

IPad owners can get their Knot fix by reading a digital magazine with features like videos demonstrating do-it-yourself save-the-date cards. The iPad app itself is free, but the magazine costs $4.99 per issue. Subscriptions aren’t available.

Get Yourself Registered

Thanks to the iPhone’s built-in camera, couples don’t need a store’s barcode scanner gun to add items to their registries; instead, they can take photos of products’ barcodes with their phone to automatically add items to registries. The MyRegistry.com Universal Wishlist With Barcode Scanner ($0.99), WeddingScan ($0.99), Registry Stop (free) and Gift Registry 360 Scan and Add (free) are four such iPhone apps that perform this function. If the barcode photo doesn’t work, users can manually type in the product name and take their own photo of it to illustrate.

Gift Registry 360′s free iPhone app is a personal bridal registry. Users photograph barcodes with their phone cameras to automatically add products to the list.

Wedding Planner-Approved

A friend of mine who’s a successful wedding planner in North Carolina recommended two apps for the iPhone and iPad: Brides Wedding Genius and My Wedding Concierge. Both are available in free versions, though a $4.99 version of My Wedding Concierge is also available for the iPad.

Brides Wedding Genius is a free iPhone app that focuses on dresses, jewelry and travel destinations for a wedding or a honeymoon. Users conduct searches for content by plugging in preferences such as price, style of ring or destination. Results can be starred and saved to a list of favorites. A helpful “Find Online” tab quickly opens each item’s website within the app. A $2.99 upgrade will add features and sync the app with BridesWeddingGenius.com.

My Wedding Concierge is a self-described inspiration engine, and I tested the full version of this app on my iPad. The home screen of this app offers a large search box and an “Inspire Me!” option below this box. Inspiration comes in the form of suggested wedding blogs, of which there are many, I’ve discovered since becoming engaged. I like that My Wedding Concierge tries to sort through these blogs to return relevant content, even though some blogs seemed a bit unrelated to my searches.

The Knot’s iPad app offers a digital magazine version of the popular website and costs $4.99 per issue.

Make Contact

The $9.99 iWedding Deluxe iPhone app works well if you have a lot of people already added as contacts in your iPhone; a shortcut lets you move those contacts over to the app in one step, thus keeping names of transportation companies, photographers, the ceremony officiant and rental companies in one central spot.

This app’s Home screen shows a countdown clock that measures time down to the second after users input the time of their wedding during setup. A section called The Guide helps locate nearby wedding vendors using GPS and Google Maps. It also lists useful blogs and tips for setting a budget, choosing a ceremony venue and proper etiquette.

BlackBerry and Android

I found a handful of wedding planning apps on the Android and BlackBerry platforms, including a $1.99 Android app called MyWeddingBudget and a $2.99 BlackBerry app called Wedding Organizer. But both of these felt rather bare bones and not as intuitive as the iPhone and iPad apps I used.

If all else fails, the $0.99 Bridezilla Tamer iPhone app will try to add humor to the situation with lines like, “You’re right, it’s perfectly reasonable that our cake costs three months’ rent because we’ll remember how it tasted forever!”

Write to Katherine Boehret at katie.boehret@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/wedding-planning-apps/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110126/netflix-takes-aim-at-the-cable-guys-with-a-promise-to-start-firing-tomorrow/ http://allthingsd.com/20110126/netflix-takes-aim-at-the-cable-guys-with-a-promise-to-start-firing-tomorrow/#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:25:40 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=28680

Interesting PR campaign from Netflix, which is fighting with the cable guys and telcos over the cost of delivering all that streaming video to your living room: The company is going to publish a list of broadband Internet providers, ranked by performance.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’s letter to shareholders goes on about his company’s position vs. the ISPs at great length, and I’ll reproduce it at the bottom of the post.

But you can summarize it in a sentence: If the broadband guys insist on gouging us to get video to our customers, we’re going to make a very public stink.

So tomorrow’s list is a warning shot, meant to give the ISPs a sense of where Netflix is willing to go on this one.

Hastings says the list will detail “which ISPs provide the best, most consistent high-speed Internet for streaming Netflix,” and offers a preview: Charter is tops, right now.

But if you invert Hastings’s description, you get what he really means: We’re going to tell some broadband customers that they’re getting screwed and should switch to a new provider. Heads up, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, etc.

In other news, Netflix casually tossed off another very good quarter: The company added three million subscribers in the last three months of 2010, and says that a third of its new customers are choosing its new streaming-only plan. International expansion is still on the table for 2011 and is a major focus for Netflix going forward, Hastings said.

Here’s his warning/threat to the broadband business:

Recently the FCC adopted a version of net neutrality for wired networks in the U.S., and it’s a step in the right direction. The focus is on fair-play within an ISP’s network, but does not explicitly address entry into the ISP’s network.

Delivering Internet video in scale creates costs for both Netflix and for ISPs. We think the cost sharing between Internet video suppliers and ISPs should be that we have to haul the bits to the various regional front-doors that the ISPs operate, and that they then carry the bits the last mile to the consumer who has requested them, with each side paying its own costs. This open, regional, nocharges, interchange model is something for which we are advocating. Today, some ISPs charge us, or our CDN partners, to let in the bits their customers have requested from us, and we think this is inappropriate. As long as we pay for getting the bits to the regional interchanges of the ISP’s choosing, we don’t think they should be able to use their exclusive control of their residential customers to force us to pay them to let in the data their customers’ desire. Their customers already pay them to deliver the bits on their network, and requiring us to pay even though we deliver the bits to their network is an inappropriate reflection of their last mile exclusive control of their residential customers.

Conversely, this open, regional, no-charges model should disallow content providers like Netflix and ESPN3 from shutting off certain ISPs unless those ISPs pay the content provider. Hopefully, we can get broad voluntary agreement on this open, regional, no-charges, interchange model. Some ISPs already operate by this open, regional, no-charges, interchange model, but without any commitment to maintain it going forward.

Tomorrow, we’ll publish on our blog ongoing performance statistics about ISPs collected from our 20 million subscribers detailing which ISPs provide the best, most-consistent high speed internet for streaming Netflix. We can tell you now, though, that for our subscribers streaming Netflix, Charter is the highest-performance ISP in the United States.

Recently, there was a report that at peak times Netflix subscribers in the U.S. were driving about 20% of peak downstream last-mile Internet traffic. This may or may not be accurate, but it should be noted that because we pay for the data to be delivered to regional ISP front doors, little of this traffic goes over the Internet or ISP backbone networks, thereby minimizing ISP costs, avoiding congestion, and improving performance for end-using consumers.

An independent negative issue for Netflix and other Internet video providers would be a move by wired ISPs to shift consumers to pay-per-gigabyte models instead of the current unlimited-up-to-a-large-cap approach. We hope this doesn’t happen, and will do what we can to promote the unlimited-up-to-alarge-cap model. Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber.

The ISPs’ costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110126/netflix-takes-aim-at-the-cable-guys-with-a-promise-to-start-firing-tomorrow/feed/ 11 http://allthingsd.com/20110126/verizons-iphone-picture-comes-into-focus/ http://allthingsd.com/20110126/verizons-iphone-picture-comes-into-focus/#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2011 15:00:29 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=2947 Although it doesn’t go on sale for another couple of weeks, potential customers for the Verizon iPhone now have nearly all the details they need to decide if the phone is right for them.
That wasn’t the case when Verizon introduced the phone in New York a fortnight ago.

The company said how much the device would cost ($199 or $299, depending on capacity, with a new two-year contract), but was cagey about other details, such as monthly service costs.

We now know, though, that the company will offer a $30 unlimited data plan for the iPhone, similar to that offered for other 3G smartphones, although it still plans to move away from unlimited plans, so there is no telling how long the plan will last. Verizon also said it will charge the same price for the hotspot feature ($20 for 2GB) that it charges for most other smartphones that can act as a wireless hotspot. The hotspot feature is the main distinguishing characteristic of the Verizon iPhone, which in most other respects resembles its AT&T sibling. Even more details on service plan pricing were briefly available on Apple’s site, for those that want to check out voice plans and text messaging rates.

Verizon has also outlined its policies, including who is eligible for an upgrade and what its exchange policy will be for recently purchased devices.

There are still a few unknowns, such as the voice quality of the phone and how Verizon’s well-regarded network will hold up amid the crush of new iPhones hitting the network. And it likely will be a crush. Some analysts have predicted the company could sell 11 million iPhones out of the gate, something that the company on Tuesday’s earnings conference call said was a reasonable forecast.

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