Seagate has offered $186 million, or about 4.05 euros per share, for 64.5 percent of the shares of LaCie controlled by Philippe Spruch, the company’s chief executive. The offer amounts to a premium of almost 30 percent.

Anecdotally, I can also say that LaCie’s drives are probably the most popular among people who own Apple Macs. I see its orange-encased ruggedized external drives everywhere Macs are used, and I own about a half-dozen of them myself. From a consumer retail perspective, Seagate has generally struggled to penetrate the Mac-owning market. And as we all know, the size of the Mac market is growing faster than the rest of the PC-owning world.

There’s also LaCie’s considerable retail and distribution footprint to consider. Under terms of the deal, Spruch would join Seagate.

Seagate is approaching the deal from a position of renewed strength. It weathered the flooding in Thailand, which hammered the hard drive industry’s supply chain and caused a shortage last year, better than rival Western Digital.

In a recent letter to CEO Larry Page, the National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties (CNIL), France’s data protection authority, criticized Google for deploying its new privacy policy without first addressing the concerns the CNIL detailed in its February letter to the company. And the CNIL put to Google a list of 69 questions it would like answered so that it can determine whether or not the company is complying with European data protection legislation.

Among the CNIL’s questions: Queries about the legitimacy of the need for linking consumer data across services, and some of the subtle tweaks Google has made to language regarding users’ rights and consent. A good example:

QUESTION 22.

A) What does the sentence “We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent” mean? Please provide examples of reduction of rights that would require explicit consent according to Google’s privacy policy.

B) In this respect, Google removed the sentence “we may give you the opportunity to opt out of combining such information,” which appeared in the previous version of the privacy policy. Do you consider that the fact Google no longer gives the opportunity to opt-out of combining such information constitutes a reduction of the user’s rights?

An interesting question, for which Google, I’m sure, has an equally interesting answer. Indeed, the company is already hard at work preparing it.

“We have received the letter from the CNIL, and we will respond in due course,” Google said in a statement to AllThingsD. “We are confident that our new simple, clear and transparent privacy policy respects all European data protection laws and principles.”

In broad brushstrokes, one key aspect of the deal addresses a problem with Cisco’s set-top box business: Its lower profit margins. Adding high-value software to the mix will boost that unit’s overall profitability, De Beer told me. NDS, which has been private since 2009, is on a run rate to about $1 billion in sales this year. “And it’s a very profitable revenue stream,” he said.

But there’s also some pretty interesting tech in play. NDS specializes in software that creates a unified entertainment experience across several devices. You can watch your shows on the TV, as always, but if you want to switch to your PC or tablet, you can do it with a user-interface environment that’s entirely consistent and customized according to the service provider’s branding and needs. NDS has a software architecture called Snowflake that’s supposedly pretty good and is the basis of the Zon TV service that is being plugged in the ad that can be seen below, which I think is for Portuguese TV.

But there’s another Snowflake interface video that’s worth seeing first. Check out the demo reel (also below) of the user interface for SFR’s Neufbox Evolution, which I think is a streaming Internet media box.

The point, De Beer said, is to get more closely engaged with the service providers, and by those he means the cable, satellite and other TV and entertainment outfits around the world, and offer them white-label software they can build and brand as they see fit, to deliver a consistent experience across any device. “They’ll be able to constantly update and upgrade their experiences,” he said.

Another point: NDS is strong in India and China with the satellite TV outfits, whereas Cisco is strong in North America with the cable companies. “They’re strong where we’re weak, and vice versa,” he told me.

There are a few critical points. ISI analyst Brian Marshall observed that Cisco is using up about 20 percent of its offshore cash balance. Also NDS’s business is pretty highly concentrated. About 70 percent of its revenue comes from 10 customers, and a little less than half comes from the top three: DTV, BSkyB and Sky Italia.

While Marshall sees the opportunity in comprehensive digital media, he thinks the price Cisco is paying is “rich for a company growing sales at less than 10 percent year on year.” And with revenue per employee at $200,000 at NDS — much lower than Cisco’s $750,000 per employee — Marshall wonders how the deal will be accretive to Cisco right away. “We struggle identifying sources of accretion in year one other than headcount reduction.”

NDS STUDIO DESIGN & SFR AWARDED from NDS Design on Vimeo.

ZON online from NDS Design on Vimeo.

Here is a very cool — if slightly creepy — video that debuted at the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco.

Made by the Paris-based Quantic Dream, developers of the groundbreaking Heavy Rain game, the “Kara” concept video is a look at the future of gaming, using full-body motion capture and a new computer-graphics engine. It is running in real time on Sony’s PlayStation 3 platform.

Mostly, it is just heartbreaking, as a robot comes to life and is quickly scared by the idea of how precious that can be.

Enjoy:

This morning, a French court denied Samsung’s request for an injunction banning sales of the iPhone 4S in France, sought on the grounds that it violated the South Korean company’s wireless-communications patents.

Describing Samsung’s plea for an injunction as a “disproportionate” measure, the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris ruled Samsung must reimburse Apple $134,100 for its legal fees. But it also denied Apple’s request for damages and said Samsung’s infringement lawsuit against its rival can move forward.

So another loss for Samsung, though the company will have a chance to take another shot at Apple soon. Next week, a Milan court will hold a hearing to review the company’s request for a ban on the iPhone 4S in Italy.

Here’s the key quote, courtesy of Google Translate:

What will you do with your operating system webOS?

We should announce our decision in the next two weeks. This is not an easy decision, because we have a team of 600 people which is in limbo. We need to have another operating system.

Also in the interview, Whitman concedes that if iPads count as PCs, as the research firm Canalys has argued, then Apple will likely overtake HP as the world’s top vendor of PCs. But she says HP would try to retake the crown in 2013.

Whitman is in Europe for an HP corporate event in Vienna, at which HP made some big announcements on the enterprise IT front, specifically around a new concept it calls “information optimization.”

The interview, in the original French, is here; a fair translation into English is here.

When we last heard from Whitman on the subject of webOS, she admitted she wasn’t sure what to do. On Nov. 8, she told an all-hands meeting of HP’s webOS team that she was still mulling over the situation.

Having failed to get any traction in hardware sales, HP killed the TouchPad and all the other webOS-running hardware on Aug. 18. Yet in killing it, HP managed to make its TouchPad device suddenly popular — at a reduced price.

Whatever the result, the whole $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm — which created webOS — has turned out be a bit of a mess for HP. On its earnings call last week, the company said that it is writing off $1.66 billion related to the winding down of the webOS business. Decisions, decisions.

Samsung, which is embroiled in a neck-and-neck race with Apple to become the world’s largest seller of smartphones, is trying to gain an upper hand in a legal battle that started in April when Apple accused it of copying key design elements in smartphones and tablets.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Several social and Jewish groups had urged Apple to withdraw the application, saying it breaches French laws that ban disclosing people’s religion without their consent as well as compiling data about people’s religions. Groups that objected to the app included a council representing French Jewish institutions known as Crif, France’s Jewish student union, and an anti-racism group called SOS Racisme.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The South Korean company has sued Apple for patent infringement in France. Filed in a Paris district court, the complaint claims the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and the 3G iPad violate three Samsung patents. It’s not clear which, but sources tell the AFP they’re likely related to UMTS, a third-generation wireless technology.

With this latest suit, Apple and Samsung are now battling it out in eight courts worldwide: The U.S., Australia, Korea, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, Britain and France.

Facing a barrage of negative press about its upcoming IPO, Groupon CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason took up a pen to counter critics of the social buying service.

Especially under scrutiny has been the Chicago-based Groupon’s accounting of its finances — along with worries that its torrid growth is slowing — both of which Mason addressed in detail in a pugnacious email memo to his thousands of employees.

Specifically referencing a recent article speculating that the daily deals site was running out of money, Mason said, in part:

“While we’ve bitten our tongues and allowed insane accusations (like in the article above) to go unchallenged publicly, it’s important to me that you have the context necessary to brush this stuff off.”

Mason also took on the controversial ACSOI — or adjusted consolidated segment operating income — metric that Groupon used in its initial filing and later stepped back from.

“The reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate ACSOI (no, it’s not the same reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate our Superbowl ad), is that we think it actually does a pretty good job at describing our marketing expenses in a steady state — we just didn’t realize there would be so many skeptics,” wrote Mason.

Mason also took some aim at competitors, such as LivingSocial and Yelp, in the email.

As for the public offering, which is expected next month:

“If there’s a silver lining, it’s that we’re almost on the other side, and the negativity leaves us well-positioned to exceed expectations with an IPO baby that, having seen the ultrasound, I can promise you is not one of those uglies.”

Then again, that is exactly what a dad-to-be would say about his baby, whatever it looked like.

Mason, when asked about the memo, declined to comment.

There is a lot more than that, so here’s Mason’s full email for all you pencil pushers to peruse:

Dear Groupon,

This weekend, I did a Google News search on our company — my first in awhile. The first story that popped up was called The Fall of Groupon: Is the Daily Deals Site Running Out of Cash? I laughed when I read the headline (in the car by myself, weirdly). First — with this article, the degree to which we’re getting the shit kicked out of us in the press had finally crossed the threshold from “annoying” to “hilarious.” Second, I was struck by the irony — I had just finished a board meeting last Wednesday saying this to myself: I’ve never been more confident and excited about the future of our business.

I realize that this sounds like the kind of thing that CEOs say when they’re trying to pep people up. First of all — I’m all about not pepping people up. If you don’t believe me, just ask my fiancée, Jenny “why don’t you ever say anything nice about me” Gillespie. Want another example? Look at the magazine covers in our lobby, which are there to make you sad by reminding you of the impermanence of success.

I’m going to spend the rest of this email explaining why I’m so excited. You need some ammo to argue back against your blog-reading “friends” (silently argue in your mind, that is — you can’t actually say any of this yet), and I’ve been told that the “what have you ever done with your life that’s so great?” rebuttal isn’t working as well for you guys as it has for me.

While we’ve bitten our tongues and allowed insane accusations (like in the article above) to go unchallenged publicly, it’s important to me that you have the context necessary to brush this stuff off.

I’ll summarize my excitement with four points: 1) Growth in our core business is strong 2) Our investments in the future — businesses like Getaways & NOW — look great, 3) We are pulling away from competition, and 4) We’ve built a great team that I would pit against anyone. In other words, all the stuff that one would want to look good? It looks good.

Many of the long-term unknowns of our business are becoming known, and we like the answers. I will now elaborate in a level of financial detail that will give Jason Child a stomach ulcer.

1. GROWTH IN THE CORE BUSINESS

Thanks to a tremendous effort by our sales team, August in the U.S. is shaping up to be a pivotal month. It appears that will revenues grow by about 12% over last month (which is a lot), while we cut our marketing expenses by 20% in the same period.

Beyond their obvious goodness, these numbers are important because they answer one of the main criticisms thrown at us in the past few months, relating to a metric we put in the S-1 called ACSOI (adjusted consolidated segment operating income) to help people understand how we think about marketing expenses. The reason everyone in the world seems to hate ACSOI is that it makes us look magically profitable by subtracting a bunch of our customer acquisition marketing costs from our expenses. The reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate ACSOI (no, it’s not the same reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate our Superbowl ad), is that we think it actually does a pretty good job at describing our marketing expenses in a steady state –we just didn’t realize there would be so many skeptics. I think it’s worth going deep on this one more time — brace yourself.

Our internal forecast shows two different types of marketing: what I’ll call “normal marketing” — which is NOT excluded from ACSOI — and “customer acquisition marketing,” which is. The way Groupon spends on marketing is unique in three ways:

1. We are currently spending more than just about any company ever on marketing — in Q2, we spent nearly 20% of our net revenue on marketing, while a typical company spends less than 5%. Why do we spend so much? The simple answer is “because it works.” But thats only part of what makes our situation special.

2. Our marketing — at least the customer acquisition marketing that we remove from ACSOI — is designed to add people to our own long-term marketing channel — our daily email list. Once we have a customer’s email, we can continually market to them at no additional cost. Compare this to Johnson and Johnson, McDonald’s, or most other companies. If I’m a Johnson, and I’m trying to sell you a box of Band Aids, I have to keep spending money on commercials and magazine ads and stuff to remind you about how sweet Band Aids are, even after you’ve bought your first box. With Groupon, we just spend money one time to get you on our email list, and then every day we email you a reminder of the sweetness of our metaphorical Band Aid. There is no cost of reacquisition — that’s unusual (and we created ACSOI to point that out). If Johnson wanted to follow the Groupon strategy, he would have to start a free daily newspaper about bandages and then run Band Aid ads in it every day.

3. Eventually, we’ll ramp down marketing just as fast as we ramped it up, reducing the customer acquisition part of our marketing expenses (the piece that we remove in ACSOI) to nominal levels. We are spending a ton now because we’re acquiring as many subscribers as we can as quickly as we can. We aren’t paying attention to marketing budget (just marketing ROI) in the way a normal company would, because we know that even if we wanted to continue to spend at these levels, we would eventually run out of new subscribers to acquire. So our customer acquisition spend drops severely to reflect the fact that eventually we’ll run out of people we can add to our email list. We view this internally as a very large one-time expense and then our job forever after will be to continually convert these subscribers into customers and to make sure our customers keep buying from us. Ongoing, the normal marketing dollars we spend are not something we would remove from our internal calculation of ACSOI.

I tried my best to explain this simply, but it’s not lost on me that if you actually understood this, you probably had to read it three times. It’s not easy stuff. It’s much easier to assume that we’re goons. So people can be forgiven for being suspicious. In fact, feel a little bad about how downhearted the critics will be when we don’t turn out to be a Ponzi scheme — those are good impulses for journalists to have, and I hope our non-evil ways don’t destroy their spirits.

Anyway, there’s a reason that I just went on about ACSOI. One of the questions that skeptics ask is, “when you ramp down marketing, won’t revenues stop growing as well? Aren’t you just buying growth?” Over the past several months we’ve been consistently reducing our marketing spend and yet revenues are still increasing at a significant pace. In Q1 of this year, marketing represented 32.3% of our net revenues. By the end of Q2 it had fallen to 19.4%. And it has continued to fall over the past several months all because we’ve been investing in our own long-term marketing channel — our email list.

Internationally we see the same trends — marketing is down, but revenues are up — every country is either losing less or making more. Even in young markets like Korea, where we’re still making massive investments, we’re seeing unprecedented growth. We started building our Korean team this January, despite the presence of two competitors that were larger than any we’d previously battled from behind. Thanks to the brilliant execution of the Korean team, we are set to be the market leader within months. We’ve never had a country grow as fast as Korea!

What about our joint-venture with Tencent in China? Did you read the article that Gaopeng’s CEO has kidnapped the first born children of all our employees and is putting them to work building a laser beam he’ll use to slice the moon in half? It turns out that that one isn’t true either. China is definitely a different market, but every month we inch closer to profitability. As has been our strategy in launching other countries — Germany, France, and the UK, included — our China growth strategy was to hire quickly and manage out the bottom performers. So far, that strategy has improved our competitive position in China from #3,000 to #8. Will we one day reach the dominant status we enjoy in most (come on, Switzerland!) other countries? It’s too soon to tell, but there’s no question in my mind that we’re building a business that will be around for the long haul.

2. NEW BUSINESS LINES ARE BOOMING

Travel and Product are enormous opportunities. After only a few months, they’re already making up 20% of revenue in some countries. We sold $2M worth of mattresses in the UK — in one day! Groupon Getaways will do $10M in its first calendar month — which you might think is awesome, but we’re actually disappointed with those results because we know how much better we’ll be doing soon.

While there’s still a ton of work to do, Groupon Now! continues to see weekly double digit growth. The model works and I believe it will play a major part in the future of our global business as more merchants and customers join the marketplace.

3. WE ARE PULLING AWAY FROM COMPETITION

If there’s a question I’ve received from Groupon skeptics more than any other, it’s, “how will you fend off the competition — especially massive companies like Google and Facebook?” I could give a dozen reasons to bet on Groupon, but it’s impossible to predict the future or the actions of others. Well, now the sleeping giants have woken up — and the numbers are showing that what was proven true with literally thousands of other competitors is just as true with the incumbents of the Internet: it’s kind of hard to build a Groupon. And since anyone with an Internet connection can track the performance of our competitors, I can be more specific:

Google Offers is small and not growing. In the three markets where we compete, we are 450% of their size.

Yelp is small and not growing. In the 15 markets where we compete, our daily deals are 500% of their size.

Living Social’s U.S. local business is about 1/3rd our size in revenue (and smaller in GP) and has shrunk relative to us in the last several months. This, in part, appears to be driving them toward short-sighted tactics to buy revenue, like buying gift certificates from national retailers at full price and then paying out of their own pocket to give the appearance of a 50% off deal. Our marketing team has tested this tactic enough to know that it’s generally a bad idea, and not a profitable form of customer acquisition.

Facebook sales are harder to track, but are even less significant at present.

My point is not that our competitors will fail — some may actually develop sustainable businesses, or even grow — after all, local commerce is an enormous market. The real point is that our business is a lot harder to build than people realize and our scale creates competitive advantages that even the largest technology companies are having trouble penetrating. And with the launch of NOW, I suspect our competition will have an even harder time in light of the natural barriers to entry that are needed to build a real-time local deals marketplace.

4. OUR TEAM

This is the fluffiest of the four points, but maybe the most important — we’ve built a global team of hungry entrepreneurial operators and seasoned executives that rivals any team I know of. Almost every day, I find myself in a scenario where I silently think, “I can’t believe I got this person to work for me — that failure of judgement is perhaps their single flaw.”

I point out the team because while today the business is strong and it appears we must endure success for awhile longer (despite its impermanence), we will inevitably be challenged with issues we didn’t predict — and when that happens, the quality of our team will be a deciding factor in our ultimate long-term success.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I wrote this email because when I read some of the press this weekend, I realized a rational person could read this stuff and wrongly conclude that we’re in trouble. The irony is hopefully clear: We’ve never been stronger.

And while we’ve refrained from defending ourselves publicly, you’ve continued to create our best defense, with every department innovating new practices that are taking our business to the next level. Thanks for staying tough, determined, and agile throughout this process. For now we must patiently and silently endure a bit more public criticism as we prepare to birth this IPO baby — a breed for which there are no epidurals. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that we’re almost on the other side, and the negativity leaves us well-positioned to exceed expectations with an IPO baby that, having seen the ultrasound, I can promise you is not one of those uglies.

I’ve been as candid as possible — hope this sheds some light on things. Reply with your questions if anything remains unclear. Amidst all this, I hope you remember what we’re doing here — we are making history together. I guess you don’t get to build something that reshapes the local commerce ecosytem without getting a few bruises. I’m so proud of the work we’re doing, and I feel extraordinarily lucky to work on what I think is the best thing that’s happened to small businesses since the telephone We’ve invented something that is catalyzing millions of dollars of local commerce every single day in 45 countries and fills the lives of millions of customers with unforgettable experiences — it’s pretty remarkable.

Looking forward to getting this behind us!

Andrew

P.S.: I almost forgot to address the nonsense about us running out of money in the article above. If you apply the same logic used in the article, you’d have concluded long ago that companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart were running out of cash too. Both have often had payables far in excess of their cash. Finance geeks call this a working capital deficit. It’s normal, manageable and a lot of folks actually believe it’s good thing and would kill to get paid from their customers long before they have to pay their suppliers. We are generating cash, not losing it — we generated $25M in cash last quarter alone, adding to the $200M we had before. In other words, we’re doing the opposite of running out of money.

Speaking of “it looks good,” here is Conan O’Brien with a Tourette’s version of Mason’s new catchphrase:

At Google, Steib was most recently Director of Video Advertising for the Americas region, and before that had led Google’s Americas business teams for its emerging ad products, including Mobile Ads, Local Ads and Commerce.

The joint venture is expected to launch late this year, and, like its counterpart in France, will offer designer apparel at low prices for limited amounts of time to people who sign up for a free membership.

Back in May, when the joint venture was announced, the two companies said they will be equal partners, but the terms of the deal were not disclosed, such as the size of the investment or the kinds of resources the companies would be required to contribute.

In the U.S., the company will be competing against other flash sales sites, such as Gilt Groupe, Rue La La and ideeli.

Before joining Google, Steib was the General Manager of Strategic Ventures at NBC Universal, and also served a stint as VP in the NBC Corporate Development group.

In a post tonight, he announced his engagement to fellow Google exec Irene Au, complete with a photo of the ring in a pretty dish. Horowitz asked her last week in Paris.

Both also worked at Yahoo.

In the status update — which begins “She said yes!” — Horowitz noted, “Having gotten through the trivial details of launching Google+ (!), I recently turned my attention to more important matters…”

And, in an email to me about it, Horowitz wrote (judiciously for both Google and Au): “And just to be clear…I got her *permission* to make it public. (So I’m off to a good start, eh?)”

Like I said, adorkable.

Your move, Facebook!

Often known as the second-largest daily deals company in the U.S., LivingSocial wants to own that title in France, too.

The Washington, D.C.-based company is announcing two acquisitions this morning: French daily deal site Dealissime.com and Socialmedia.com, a marketing company focused on social networks.

Based on some calculations, France just happens to be Groupon’s strongest European market.

In May, Groupon had five million members in France, who generated revenues of about $35 million, according to a French daily deals aggregator. Groupon acquired German-based Citydeal to enter Europe more than a year ago.

“Groupon is doing really well there,” said Jake Maas, LivingSocial’s SVP of business development. “It’s a big market for them, and there hasn’t been a strong No. 2 player emerging in France.”

Put another way, there are two main ways LivingSocial can catch up with Groupon: Through geographic expansion or customer acquisition. These company acquisitions address both fronts.

LivingSocial operates in 13 countries and says it is adding roughly 1.5 million new users a week.

Even with the acquisition of Dealissime, LivingSocial still may fall short of being the second-largest deal site in France, said Maas. It might be closer when the analysis factors in the email distribution list it has been building on its own in anticipation of launching there.

Dealissime was launched in April 2010 and is currently offering deals in Paris, Marseille and Lyon. Soon it will launch in Lille and Bordeaux. Dealissime also offers members access to family-friendly deals, similar to LivingSocial, with its Dealissime enfants site launched in March.

Maas said LivingSocial will use a mix of acquisitions and organic growth as it expands globally.

For instance, LivingSocial started from scratch in the U.K. and Ireland, but it acquired a company called Let’s Bonus to add Spain, Italy, Portugal and parts of South America. So far, it’s acquired seven companies, including the two today. Not all of them have been related to getting into new markets.

Maas said it’s unclear how many markets it will be in by the end of the year, but it’s a model that can be repeated around the globe. “We think the model works everywhere and we are going to try and be in all the places where it makes sense.”

In an event ahead of the G8 summit this week, France’s power brokers are hosting a new event–called e-G8 and with the motto, “Internet: Accelerating Growth”–that starts tomorrow in Paris.

Set to be held at the Tuileries Garden in the capital, the conference has been pushed and will be opened by French President Nicholas Sarkozy, who is also president of the G8.

Recently, Sarkozy has advocated the idea of a “civilized Internet”–a decidedly tin-eared concept, since the e-G8 event is chock full of often noisy and always disruption-loving U.S. Web stars.

That includes Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, the social networking site’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, eBay CEO John Donahoe, Groupon CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Sean Parker.

In fact, Mason and Zuckerberg have the two big keynote spots for the two-day event, putting the American point of view on the Internet’s future on front and center.

In other words: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

To commemorate the occasion, the company made a fancy infographic (click to expand, or view the full-page version here) depicting some stats and trivia, such as 44 million of its users are based in the U.S., and its fastest-growing countries in 2010 were Brazil, Mexico, India and France.

NetworkEffect was planning to interview CEO Jeff Weiner for a keynote interview at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco next week, but he had to pull out over concern about public disclosures in the lead-up to the IPO. (LinkedIn co-founder and Executive Chairman Reid Hoffman, who’s also a very active investor at Greylock Partners, is graciously stepping in.)

But LinkedIn hasn’t been entirely quiet lately; earlier this month the company launched a personalized news site called LinkedIn Today based on content shared by its members on its own site and through an extended integration with Twitter.

First, the site Wikileaks.org was dropped by its domain name services provider last night and so has been forced to relocate to another domain name, within Switzerland’s top-level domain. The site can now be found at Wikileaks.ch, which forwards directly to an IP address. WikiLeaks’ former provider, EveryDNS, said in a statement that it took the action because of the numerous denial-of-service attacks that had been carried out against the original domain. More from the Guardian here.

Meanwhile, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman has introduced legislation that would criminalize the publication of the name of any U.S. intelligence source. (Wait, that’s not already illegal?) “Our foreign representatives, allies, and intelligence sources must have the clear assurance that their lives will not be endangered by those with opposing agendas, whether they are Americans or not, and our government must make it clear that revealing the identities of these individuals will not be tolerated,” Lieberman said in a statement. It’s called the Shield Act, and you can read it here.

Then France is getting into the act. Le Point reports that Eric Besson–minister of industry, energy and the digital economy–has asked a government regulator to look into ways to block French Internet companies from hosting the files in that country. A Google translation of Le Point’s story is here.

Finally, Amazon issued a statement giving its side of the story on how it came to terminate its relationship with WikiLeaks, which had briefly been a customer of its Amazon Web Services. It wasn’t the DDOS attacks, it says, nor government pressure, but that WikiLeaks was violating several requirements of its Terms of Service agreement. For one thing, WikiLeaks was required to represent that it had rights to the content it was hosting. “It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content,” Amazon says. For its part, WikiLeaks says Amazon is lying.

Yesterday, BoomTown dropped into the lower Park Avenue offices of the New York-based Gilt Groupe, the online fashion retail site.

Since 2007, the site has raised $83 million from General Atlantic and Matrix Partners, giving it a $400 million valuation and spurring interest from investment bankers who think Gilt might be a good candidate for an initial public offering.

That’s doubtful for now, given how important it is for Gilt to solidify and expand its business, even as competition increases.

But already, Gilt has built an important consumer brand online, using its funding to expand the member-based service that offers a range of well-known fashion brands and luxury goods at sample sale prices, much like the originator of the idea–France’s Vente-Privee.

To keep all the fashion moving forward, Gilt hired former Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO) CEO Susan Lyne, who also was a big-time television exec at ABC, in 2008.

Along with a turbocharge of its operations as its sales grow, Gilt is also attempting to expand its offerings to travel and other experiences, via its Jetsetter site, and growing its base of local “city” sites for a range of services, such as spas.

Also on deck: More personalization for users, to better targets deals, as well as mobile versions of Gilt.

Of course, Gilt is operating in a very competitive arena, with rivals coming at the business from a number of different ways, such as Groupon, the hot discount deals start-up.

Here is the video interview I had with Lyne at Gilt’s Manhattan offices about all this and more:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100826/gilt-groupes-susan-lyne-talks-about-fashion-local-and-not-ipo/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100629/youtubes-sales-pitch-please-buy-ads-and-please-make-them-like-this/ http://allthingsd.com/20100629/youtubes-sales-pitch-please-buy-ads-and-please-make-them-like-this/#comments Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:25:49 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21133 So you’d like to start advertising on YouTube but aren’t sure how to do it? Google’s (GOOG) video site has some advice: Make awesome clips that people want to watch!

Easier said than done, of course. But that’s the gist of the presentation that Hunter Walk, director of YouTube’s consumer products team, gave to ad executives at the big industry schmooze-fest in Cannes, France, last week.

You can see the slides from Walk’s presentation below, but since you can’t actually hear his presentation, I asked him to summarize the pitch in text form. He was kind enough to oblige:

Presented at Cannes Interactive last Friday to the Young Lions (top digital creatives under 30). Goal was to share a perspective on how brands/creative agencies should approach YouTube in order to develop content that resonates with our audience. Given the advertiser enthusiasm of the past year (eg 10x increase in display advertisers on YouTube) we’re now able to shift from basic education about our platform (2007-2008) to one of creating the future together (cue hymnals :) ). So we reviewed some great examples of ads which worked as content AND commercial messaging, and discussed the YouTube design language and creativity from our community. When brands “make content, not commercials” they find a multiplicative effect in their ad spending where promotion leads to organic views–it’s sorta our version of the social gaming viral coefficient–how many people will the viewer pass the video on to….

Note: Many of the clips in the slides below are “playable.” And if you don’t want to squint, click the box in the middle of the menu bar at the bottom of the slide.

And here are three of the examples Walk calls out as excellent content, which also happens to double as excellent commercials. Note that you have probably seen at least a couple of these on TV as well. Draw your own conclusions from that.

Kia’s Soul Hamster (featuring excellent 90s hip-hop from Black Sheep):

Electronic Arts’ (ERTS) ad for “Tiger Woods ’09,” which has its origins in an amateur YouTube clip:

And an ad from Google itself, promoting its Chrome browser:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100629/youtubes-sales-pitch-please-buy-ads-and-please-make-them-like-this/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100531/two-month-two-million-ipads/ http://allthingsd.com/20100531/two-month-two-million-ipads/#comments Mon, 31 May 2010 12:42:20 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=20036 Some Memorial Day bragging from Apple (AAPL): The company has sold two million iPads in the past two months.

No other details, of course–specific verbiage is that sales “topped 2 million in less than 60 days”–but we can safely assume that most of those sales were in the U.S., since the device didn’t go on sale internationally until last weekend.

If you like statistics: That’s approximately 33,000 iPads per day, 1,388 iPads per hour and 23 iPads per minute.

And if you want to hear about the iPad from the man himself: Apple CEO Steve Jobs kicks off the D8 conference on Tuesday.

Press release excerpt:

Apple Sells Two Million iPads in Less Than 60 Days

CUPERTINO, Calif., May 31 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today announced that iPad(TM) sales have topped two million in less than 60 days since its launch on April 3. Apple began shipping iPad in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK this past weekend. iPad will be available in nine more countries in July and additional countries later this year.

“Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100531/two-month-two-million-ipads/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100524/verizon-stands-to-sell-7-8-million-iphones-a-year/ http://allthingsd.com/20100524/verizon-stands-to-sell-7-8-million-iphones-a-year/#comments Mon, 24 May 2010 12:01:15 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=41269 AT&T’s iPhone-exclusivity deal hasn’t yet expired; nor has Apple announced plans to sell the device through a second U.S. carrier. But that’s not stopping analysts from speculating about what might happen when it does.

Riffing on rumors of a Verizon (VZ) iPhone, Morgan Stanley (MS) analyst Katy Huberty theorizes in a research note this morning that given the opportunity, nearly 17 percent of the carrier’s customers would upgrade to an iPhone (see chart below; click charts to enlarge).

“According to our [Alphawise U.S. consumer iPhone survey], there is substantial pent up iPhone demand within the Verizon installed base as 16.8 percent of Verizon subscribers said they are ‘very likely’ to purchase an iPhone if offered on the Verizon Network,” Huberty writes.

“This 16.8 percent is higher than AT&T subscriber’s 14.6 percent extreme interest in the current AT&T iPhone,” Huberty elaborates, “and well above the overall iPhone extreme interest of 7.5 percent.”

Assuming Verizon does add the iPhone to its smartphone lineup and that most of its subscribers who said they were “very likely” to purchase the device do so over a two-year period, Huberty figures Verizon stands to sell about seven million to eight million iPhones annually.

Interestingly, Huberty’s forecast for Phone demand at Verizon does not assume sizable subscriber losses at AT&T. In her view, the end of the carrier’s iPhone-exclusivity deal won’t be the blow some observers claim. AT&T (T) and Apple (AAPL) will obviously remain partners, she says.

In markets where the iPhone has gone from single-carrier to multiple-carrier distribution–France, for example–the carrier that lost exclusivity hasn’t suffered much at all. Beyond this, there’s the issue of early-termination fees, which will make it difficult for current AT&T iPhone users to flee. Says Huberty:

• 60 percent of the iPhone base is locked until 2H11/1Q12. An iPhone refresh could bring a new wave of subs to AT&T and extend the lock-down of those who upgrade. 80 percent of AT&T’s postpaid subs are sticky customers (70 percent are on a Family Plan (FP); 40 percent on business discounts).
• For current subs, the Early Termination Fee (ETF) is $175 falling $5/mo for the term of the contract; for new smartphone subs it’s $325, falling by $10/mo. Every line on a FP has a contract/ETF of its own. In addition, customers would have to pay for a new device if switching carriers.

One final point: Huberty sees Apple shares hitting $400 sometime in 2011. Why? “The market underestimates the earnings power of Apple’s mobile Internet devices,” she wrote. “We view the combination of new product launches, broader distribution [carrier, international, enterprise], more attractive pricing and strong upgrade rates as the key demand drivers over the next two years.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100524/verizon-stands-to-sell-7-8-million-iphones-a-year/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100514/google-street-view-cars-collected-wifi-payload-data-for-3-years/ http://allthingsd.com/20100514/google-street-view-cars-collected-wifi-payload-data-for-3-years/#comments Fri, 14 May 2010 21:23:37 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=40702 Responding to questions about its Street View data collection practices in an April 27 blog post, Google said that it captured only publicly broadcast Wi-Fi network names and their MAC addresses and nothing else–certainly not “payload data,” the personal information being sent over those networks.

Well, guess what Google (GOOG) has unwittingly been collecting these past three years?

That’s right, payload data. And it has been collecting them from Wi-Fi networks not protected by passwords–in the United States, Germany, France, Brazil, Hong Kong and elsewhere.

“It’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks,” Google Senior VP of Engineering and Research Alan Eustace said in a post on Google’s official blog Friday.

“So how did this happen?” he asks, quickly supply the answer: “Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software–although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.”

But they captured it just the same. And now Google is in the uniquely uncomfortable position of sitting on a pile of exactly the sort of customer data that privacy advocates worried that it was collecting. Until the company figures out what to do with the information, Google has temporarily grounded its Street View cars and promised to stop collecting Wi-Fi network data entirely.

“The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust–and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here,” Eustace concluded. “We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.”

I’m sure the European privacy commission and regulators in the United States will make quite sure of that.

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