Articles for Discussion

Articles for Discussion:

Weaponizing FB

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125046431841935299.html#printMode

Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/technology/internet/26twitter.html

A Lawsuit Tries to Get at Hackers Through the Banks They Attack

By SAUL HANSELL

Published: August 20, 2009

A volunteer group called Unspam Technologies hopes that knowing more about data thefts and victims will help improve security.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/technology/internet/26twitter.html
Bits: MySpace Buys iLike Music Sharing Service
By By Jenna Wortham
Published: August 19, 2009
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/myspace-buys-ilike-music-sharing-service/ MySpace will keep the start-up operating as a separate company, at least for now, but the deal raises questions about iLike's future relationship with Facebook, MySpace's archrival.

Businesses Reluctant to Report Online Banking Fraud
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/08/businesses_reluctant_to_report.html

A confidential alert sent on Friday by a banking industry association to its members warns that Eastern European cyber gangs are stealing millions of dollars from small to mid-sizes businesses through online banking fraud. Unfortunately, many victimized companies are reluctant to come forward out of fear of retribution by their bank.

European Cyber-Gangs Target Small U.S. Firms, Group Says

TOOLBOX Resize Print E-mail Yahoo! Buzz ter WHO'S BLOGGING » Links to this article

By Brian Krebs

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Organized cyber-gangs in Eastern Europe are increasingly preying on small and mid-size companies in the United States, setting off a multimillion-dollar online crime wave that has begun to worry the nation's largest financial institutions.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/24/AR2009082402272.html

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August 12 Back From The Edge

Articles for Discussion

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/realnetworks-loses-first-round-in-realdvd-case/

August 11, 2009, 9:20 PM

RealNetworks Barred From Selling DVD Copy Maker

By BRAD STONE

Update | 7:43 p.m. Added comment from RealNetwork

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/technology/internet/07twitter.html

Online Attack Silences Twitter for Much of Day

Published: August 6, 2009

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/here-we-go-again-twitter-is-back-down/

Twitter Goes Down Again After More Cyberattacks

By VINDU GOEL AND RIVA RICHMOND

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/us/11download.html

Tilting at Internet Barrier, a Stalwart Is Upended

Josh Reynolds/Associated Press

Joel Tenenbaum, left, and Prof. Charles Nesson, shown in Cambridge, Mass., challenged federal copyright law and lost.

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: August 10, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/business/global/10cable.html

With Cable, Laying a Basis for Growth in Africa

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Class #4, July 15th 2009

Welcome to class #4 to be led by Levi Shapiro. Have a great class! Notes will be added here. Please check the blog and comment. I am in an immersive program and will have little time the next few weeks but I will continue to respond to emails. Sphere: Related Content

Class #3 July 8th Trends

Some articles for this week:

Quantcast

You might not be able to read this unless you have a WSJ sub. It’s about how Quantcast is selling Behavioral Targeting to as an ad network server system to ostensibly boost CPM rates. I often use QC to get a relative read on site stats. BT is derived from data-mining methods using multi-variant analysis to infer correlations. It generally draws upon taxonomy and ontology disciplines and sometime semantic analysis using “bag-of-words” statistical analysis such as the frequency distribution of terms. In other words, if you have visited www.edmunds.com and www.lexus.com and www.wsj.com we can make certain demographics / psychographic inferences about you Vs. if you visit www.mtv.com , www.tmz.com , www.perezhilton.com and we can therefore target the right ads to the right audience for bigger bucks. In fact some of these systems can collect not only WHAT sites you visit, but WHICH pages you go to on those sites.

www.quantcast.com

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124684239585598449.html

As a counterpoint to the above, there are many privacy worries about the vast amount of data these companies are collecting on a vast number of users. Is this big brother? Is PRC Communist Party sourcing the software? The industry claims that this information is held “Anonymously” so that actual “personal” info is not really stored. But who believes that?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/business/media/02adco.html

And finally, this piece on the flame out of JOOST and the elusiveness of an online video business model even when you start with $45 million VC dollars and have to reinvent yourself after an initial disaster with “client” software and a second disaster due to a surprise called HULU.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/joost-reinvents-itself-again/

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Class #2 July 1st Mark Heninger

Happy 4th of July weekend to everyone! Please post and comment on this class.

Thank you for all the great comments for the first class. I will be responding to the all.

Tangentially related to our course, I had a fascinating meeting in Chicago with Adam Siegel, the Co-Founder of www.inklingmarkets.com , which is a crowdsourced "prediction marketplace" useful for consumer insight and in some cases, a form of advertising itself.

Angelica will post her summary of the class as well.

Please start choosing and asking approval on your book report and course presentation. Several have asked about BLINK and TIPPING POINT. I think I have to take the off the list. I think Mr. Gladwell makes great points that inform many thing related to our subject but I don't believe the books are relevant enough in light of so many more pertinent works available.

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Summer Quarter Class #1, Next Class, Reading Assignment

Welcome to the Summer Quarter! Our class of 46 students has a great cross section of interests and careers represented.

Please be sure to download and review the Syllabus and let us know if there are any questions or additional topics that you want covered.

Here is the TRENDS presentation which I began, and will continue on July 8th.

In the first class I covered the Syllabus including course obj

ectives, topics, and the assignments. Three of the assignments are designed to encourage class participation:

• Discussion Article
• Media Diary
• Mystery Shopper

The other 2 are will also fuel discussions, allow you to go deeper into subjects of interest, and form a broader basis for your grades:

• Book Report
• Elevator Pitch or Research Paper.

I have created an Amazon bookstore for the course. Please select a book from here, or suggest one. Please get approval on a book for your book report, and on your topic for the research paper.

Please take advantage of the opportunities to get to know each other, network, and learn from each other.

In the first class we we fortunate to have Tammara Holzman as our guest speaker. She provided valuable insight into the online/Interactive advertising world and shared here experience

with AVVENTA Worldwide , a large Interactive agency that provides services to some large ad agencies such as DIGITAS as well as directly to large advertisers such as General Motors. They create campaigns for entertainment, publishing, sports and other sectors. They keep personnel costs low by maintaining offices and tech teams in Costa Rica.

She pointed out

how complex the Interactive ad business has become with so

many technologies and metrics and how it is constantly changing. "Internet used to added value for advertisers, now it is considered essential by advertisers."

We began discussion threads regarding audience fragmentation and the decreasing effectiveness of the 30 second spot.

Next week's class will be given by guest Instructor MARK HENNINGER, founder and President of 11AMPS . Mark has Co-Instructed the class for the past 2 years and will deliver his lecture on THE HISTORY OF CONTENT which covers the origins of radio, television and the Internet up through the present.

In preparation for this class, also please read the first two sections of my white paper:

Overview of the Entertainment Industry in The U.S.: History, Business, Technology, Trends, and check out these two timelines which will put things in perspective and which we will refer to for the rest of the quarter.

• HISTORY OF TV TIMELINE
• HISTORY OF CONSUMER ELECTRONICS

Thats Mark on the right below.

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From Champaign IL.

Greetings from Urbana-Champaign IL. and the offices of Illinois Ventures and One Llama Media Inc.

I apologize for the delayed post. A bit of travel, a lot of work, and family chaos.

Music Librarians Association http://www.mla2009.org/
Tomorrow I am giving a presentation to the Music Librarians Conference about Music Search which relates to many of the discussions I have had over the last two days about data and metadata and The Semantic Web.

This teases my lecture about music search.
When you do a typical Google search you are looking for string matches, that is a simple match to a string of letters usually in the form of a word or phrase. There are almost always far too many matches for all but the most unique words or phrases to possibly explore so Google uses some mathematical sorcery embodied in its page rank algorithm to rank order the results by relevancy. Google doesn’t know if by U2 you mean the video, the concert tour, the MP3, the JPEG of Bono or a submarine. It would be nice if somehow the concepts, aka the categories of audio files or biography or concert or rockstar or vessels were contained within the web pages themselves and reported to Google’s query so that it would be able to cluster around such things. In a Semantic Web universe web pages not only contain keywords, they tell search engines what the context of the keywords are and if there are special vocabularies to consider.

News
To follow-up on my Moguls and Megacorps lecture, Viacom reported its Q4 Profits down 69%, Pioneer announced its laying off 10,000, most of the chipmakers reported decreased demands. We discussed the change in Facebook’s TOS last week and sure enough it triggered a firestorm of criticism, which has resulted in FB backtracking on the the policy of “keeping” user data in perpetuity even after it has been “deleted”. This inspires me to re-read Huxley’s BIG BROTHER.

Rhapsody subscribers landed at 775,000 by the end of 2008, up 29 percent from a year-ago figure of 600,000, but still far less than needed for success. Sirius XM is saved by John Malone and Liberty Media, the holding company we learned about last week. Could be a blocking strategy against Charlie Ergen and DISH Network’s takeover intent. Why do you think satellite radio is important to DBS? I believe that the only long term economic solution for the Music recording industry is bundled all-you-can-eat DRM-free, or light-DRM subscription services along with broadband and / or mobile services.

What Would Google Do?
As Mr. Jarvis Jarvis told us last week, Google is always in beta. What would Google Do? Know when to hold em, know when to fold em. Over the past few weeks Google nixed at least 7 projects/companies/experiments.
Jaiku.com: Competition to twitter but was advertised as a multimedia activity stream. Google acquired this in October of ’07. Never reached critical mass. Why twitter and not Jaiku?

• Lively.com: 3D Vitual World
• Dodgeball.com: Location aware app that knows where your friends are. This was another acquisition only a few years old.
• Radio Ad Program: Based on dMark which Google also acquired.
• Print Ad Program: As we discussed
• Catalog Search: Searched print catalogues and was pretty handy.
• Notebook: I never heard of it before the news if its demise.

Random Spottings

• A very interesting Digital Supply Chain company:
  http://www.nstein.com
• An online MTV-Like network
  www.lp33.com

Have a great class tonight without me!

Don't forget to sign up for your presentation spot! Sphere: Related Content