Report by Todd Zander, Vice President of Mobile and Emerging Media for WebMD Health Corporation Last week the Mobile Media Upfront 2012 event convened mobile agencies, brands, technologists and publishers to reflect on the state of mobile advertising, identify all the pain points and challenges, and offer solutions and ideas on how to take mobile buying into the next phase of growth and adoption. Collectively the agency panelists seemed to agree that mobile is a powerful force and it's not going away anytime soon. But contradictory perspectives and opinions were pervasive among the buying community. One agency exec said that mobile advertising
Read MoreThinkPad laptops have long been associated with boxiness, durability, good battery life and a broad appeal for business users and schools. Now, Lenovo, which bought the ThinkPad brand when it acquired IBM’s personal computer business in 2005, is stripping away some of the weight of the ThinkPad, with a new lightweight model that falls into the Ultrabook category. The China-based PC maker is also introducing new ThinkPad X, T, W and L Series models, including the lightweight X230, and the ThinkPad X230t, a 12-inch convertible tablet that comes with a fully attached keyboard. First, the X1 Carbon: Lenovo is claiming the featherweight title with this one, calling it the world’s lightest 14-inch professional Ultrabook . It clocks in at three pounds and, as one might expect from the name, is built with carbon fiber. It has an HD display and backlit keyboard, and is running Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors. Business users will appreciate the option to connect to 3G wireless networks via the laptop, provided that they’ve subscribed to a data plan through a carrier, for those times one needs to get work done and Wi-Fi is as unavailable as water in the desert. While Lenovo says the laptop can be fully charged in 30 minutes, it’s unclear how long the battery charge is expected to last; and a few other details about the product — such as price and the number of built-in ports — are still unknown.
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The pay TV business continued to expand in the first quarter, but that growth is clearly decelerating. The top 10 publicly traded operators of cable, satellite and telecommunications-based pay TV services added 494,000 video subscribers in the first quarter, according to data compiled by paidContent from Q1 earnings reports. That represents just 54 percent of the quarter-to-quarter growth reported by these companies in Q1 2009, when the U.S. was mired in recession. Earlier in the week, Sanford Bernstein senior analyst Craig Moffett released data indicating the total subscriber gain to be only around 422,000 — in addition to the hard data released by
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Real Simple caused a stir on the web in December when it told Ad Age that it was getting more referrals from a relatively obscure platform called Pinterest than from Facebook. Five months later, it has joined an exclusive "100,000 Club" comprising brands with a six-figure following on the social-media upstart. Real Simple is the first print publication to crack six figures, according to a ranking by the social-media influence tracking service ZoomSphere, and trails only wedding blog The Perfect Palette (255,000 followers) and the hair and makeup how-to site The Beauty Department (123,000 followers). To give some context, the next-most-followed
Read MoreOne of Yahoo’s biggest long-term investors, Capital Research and Management, which owns more than 10 percent of the company in two different funds, is leaning toward voting for the slate proposed by activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point, in the wake of the controversy around the botched bio of its new CEO Scott Thompson. “Having a CEO with that hanging over his head is really a problem going forward,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “It’s hard to pretend this is not a problem.” While sources said Yahoo’s longtime institutional investor — which currently holds large stakes via its Capital Research Global Investors and Capital World Investors funds — is not likely to go public with their voting choice for now, it has told has told key Yahoo board members of their grave concerns over the situation. Ironically, in the last proxy showdown with Carol Icahn, Capital removed its support of Yahoo’s slate too and was important to many major changes at the company. Such a move is problematic for Thompson, since the rejection of another big shareholder at its upcoming annual meeting will keep the unusual issue and right in the middle of a noisy proxy fight. A special committee of the Yahoo board is investigating the situation — in which a fake computer science degree somehow got on the resume of the former president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit and later into official Yahoo regulatory filings.
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So why are the giants of American software, social networking, online retailing, mobile devices and computing determined to square up to each other? Microsoft [MSFT], partner of handset device giant Nokia, last week eased itself into the ebooks market with its $300 million investment in Barnes and Noble. Seems the software giant wants a slice of the e-reader market, where Amazon is king. Microsoft’s purchase, though, is part of a very interesting puzzle, when set alongside, for example, rumors of a Facebook smart phone device or what Google is doing in social or retail. Google [GOOG] also bought into devices nearly a
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Mark Zuckerberg showed up to a New York event in his customary black hoodie and sneakers — it seems only meeting the president will wrestle him into a jacket and tie. The roadshow itself was said to be uneventful, with CEO Zuckerberg and other executives answering just a few questions about the company’s strategy in China, its acquisition of Instagram and its plans for mobile products, the Wall Street Journal reported. When it comes to the Instagram deal, Zuckerberg reportedly told potential investors that he’d “do it again.” Facebook also visited Boston Tuesday, but — according to the Boston Herald— Zuckerberg was not
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Paywall sites are having a bad month. Google shuttered One Pass at the end of April. Now paywall and news aggregation site Ongo, which launched in January 2011 with $12 million in funding from the New York Times, Washington Post and Gannett, is closing, Nieman Journalism Lab reports. Ongo was founded by former eBay and PayPal exec Alex Kazim and aimed to aggregate news while charging for some content from big newspapers. NYTco’s Martin Nisenholtz described Ongo as a “Hulu of news.” But as Nieman explains, the pricing scheme was confusing: A basic Ongo subscription gave you access to content from The Washington Post
Read MoreEvery year, come tax season, I curse myself. I might write about all things digital, but when it comes to receipts and important documents, my record-keeping is analog amateur hour. So this year I’m getting serious about scanning. Fortunately, there are plenty of portable scanning options out there, ranging from mobile apps to wand-like scanners. This week, I set out to determine whether an app or a pocket-sized scanner with receipt-management software can really do the job of a larger scanner. I tested three options: The smartphone app JotNot Scanner Pro by MobiTech 3000 , PlanOn’s tiny SlimScan SS100 scanner, and Xerox’s new wand-shaped Mobile Scanner . The JotNot Pro app uses the iPhone’s camera to capture images of documents. And after five days of testing, it became apparent that the app was great on the go, but I wouldn’t use it to scan tons of files. The SlimScan scanner’s size was attention-grabbing, but the device and its software were problematic for me. Despite its larger size and $250 price point, the Xerox scanner was my top pick, because of its fast scanning and its wireless connectivity via an Eye-Fi card. [ See post to watch video ] I began the scanner tests with JotNot Pro for iPhone, which was updated late last year and costs $1.99.
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