Category: News

I sometimes wonder if Larry Page is a neatness freak. After all, throwing out stuff defines his nearly two years back as chief executive. He has chucked more Google products than junk I discard from our apartment — there’s no hording around here. Nor at Google. But the last 24 hours is simply unprecedented for changes that broadly affect customers and partners. This Spring cleaning is something to behold.

Let’s start with today. Jeff Huber is out as head of Google Mapping and Commerce. He explains: “Finishing up my first decade at Google, and excited to return to my startup roots and begin the next one at Google X! Let me know what you’d like to see Google X do next”. The Wall Street Journal says there’s more: Google Maps will split from Commerce and become part of Search and the other folds into Advertising.

Bigger shocks came yesterday, with the sudden — and I do mean sudden — change regarding Android leadership. Andy Rubin has “decided it’s time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google”, Page says. But the CEO doesn’t say what that is. Huber’s future is clear. Google X is the company’s internal think tank/research lab run by cofounder Sergey Brin. Chrome and Apps lead Sundar Pichai is now responsible for Android.

As if that wasn’t enough, later yesterday Google announced plans to retire — or in the words of colleague Alan Buckingham “execute” — a bunch of products or technologies. Among them: Apps Script, CalDAV API, Google Building Maker, Google Cloud Connect, Google Voice App for Blackberry, Search API for Shopping and Snapseed Desktop for Macintosh and Windows.

But one sent shockwaves across the web last night: Google Reader, which goes under the ax on July 1. I got a notice about the closure date when logging into the service this morning.

Users rally to save the service, which includes three petitions, and lots of angry social shares. In response to the outrage, colleague Mihaita Bamburic quips: “Your move, Google“.

In a few weeks, Page celebrates his second year as CEO. Surely now is time to assess the past year and look ahead, which perhaps precipitates this sudden Spring cleaning. But I wonder when and where it ends. Last week, Google began a new round of Motorola layoffs — 1,200 reportedly — tidying up the subsidiary.

I don’t believe Page is done and see this: The housekeeping is more than just clearing clutter. There is clear consolidation underway as the CEO brings trusted executives — those with whom he resonates or who share his vision — closer to the inner circle. Others will move on, which is one way to look at Huber and Rubin changes. They won’t be the last. Not before Page’s two-year anniversary on April 4.

A different Google emerges as Page’s vision, and that of his lieutenants, propagates — one that: cross-integrates more products and services, releases updates at faster pace and is much, much, much more aggressive in the market place. The Google you thought you knew is something else.

Photo Credit: meneame comunicacions, sl

In today’s talk, Bono — U2 frontman, founder of the anti-poverty organization ONE, and 2005 TED Prize winner – reflects on the past decade’s dramatic reduction in extreme poverty worldwide. “Exit the rockstar, enter the evidence-based activist, the factivist,” he says.

Bono: The good news on poverty (Yes, there's good news)Since 2000, according to Bono’s data, eight million more AIDS patients are getting antiretroviral drugs; eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa have cut their rates of death due to malaria by 75 percent, and the mortality rate for kids under five has fallen by 2.65 million per year—that’s 7,256 lives saved every day.

“This fantastic news didn’t happen by itself. It was fought for, it was campaigned for, it was innovated for. And this great news gives birth to even more great news,” Bono says: the number of people living on less than $1.25 per day has declined from 43 percent in 1990, to 33 percent in 2000, to 21 percent in 2010. “If you live on less than $1.25 a day, if you live in that kind of poverty, this is not just data,” Bono says. “This is everything.”

According to Bono’s calculations, if this trend continues, 2028 will see zero percent of the population living in extreme poverty.

“The opportunity is real, but so is the jeopardy. We can’t get this done until we accept that we can get this done,” says Bono. “Inertia is how we screw this up. Momentum is how we bend the arc of history down towards zero.”

Don’t miss this inspiring talk with a powerful message about the past 3,000 years of history. And for anyone interested in what it means to live in extreme poverty today, here is a series of nuanced essays and interviews that give insight.

1. In February 2010, John Lee Anderson reported from post-earthquake Haiti in The New Yorker. The piece follows Nadia Francois, who was deported back to Haiti from the U.S.; through her story, we see a country not only ravaged by poverty, violence and political upheaval, but also “almost uniquely victimized by nature,” Anderson writes.
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2. Until recently, Mali “was widely viewed as a gentle if very poor democracy,” Joshua Hammer wrote in The New York Review of Books last month. “But the country has long combined poverty, radical Islam, and tendencies to armed rebellion.” In 2011, he writes, that “combustible mix” came to a head as northern Mali became a terrorist haven.
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3. In her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo chronicles life in a slum in Mumbai, India, based on three years of research. In this interview in Guernica, Boo discusses her aim to investigate “what I didn’t know: how people get out of poverty,” she says. “Mumbai, especially, had so many contradictions. You have this manifest prosperity, but then more than half of its citizens lived in slums. The life expectancy in Mumbai is seven years shorter than the country as a whole. How can that be in one of India’s wealthiest cities?”
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4. In 2011, Philip Gourevitch wrote for The New Yorker about a cycling team in Rwanda through which boys like Gasore, an orphaned street kid, found second chances.
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5. Rio will host the World Cup in 2013 and the Olympics in 2016. Which puts the spotlight on “the persistent presence of the militias and drug gangs controlling its favelas, these fearfully poor but hardy communities located all across town,” Misha Glenny wrote in FT Magazine last fall. “The juxtaposition of opulence and misery in Rio highlights the moral disgrace of Brazil’s historical legacy. At the same time, it forces the authorities to make good on the genuine commitment of President Dilma Rousseff and her two predecessors to banish the scourge of chronic inequality.”
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6. In 2011, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a decade-later follow-up to her book Nickel and Dimed, in which she went undercover as a minimum-wage employee to report on the extreme hardships Americans in poverty faced.

There’s a reason why creative people in advertising get out of bed in the morning. It’s about making someone feel something — an emotion — in order to get them to act later. As we ponder a future of advertising bathed in delivering customized messages to each person, in their precise place on their every device at precisely the right moment, a word of caution: the medium is not the message. The message is still the message. Which means advertising is still very much about the brand messaging business, not just the reaching the consumer on any device business.

As a 30-year advertising practitioner, and a Chief Creative Officer of North America’s now largest digital agency, I’m truly amazed at the sophistication of the technologies and platforms for delivering ads to virtually every device, from the smallest hand held screen to Walgreen’s massive canvas in Times Square.

Vast amounts of Silicon Valley capital have accelerated our ability to deliver behaviorally targeted messages and videos that follow you from destination to destination and device to device. Publishers have even begun offering “in app” custom ad units specifically designed to match consumers’ touchscreen desires. As an industry, we have an amazing set of providers and tools at our disposal that connects the consumer with the brand.

But as any smart advertising person will tell you, the creative message itself plays at least half the role in determining the effectiveness of any advertising component. It’s the creative that will always tell an intriguing story, involve and hopefully, leave you inspired to act. This balance between medium and message has largely been lost, as we seem more seduced by the algorithms — the containers and software solutions for delivering messages to devices — than the evolution or effectiveness of them.

We are still very much in the ideas business. Despite how much more sophisticated the algorithms get at search, contextual and behavioral ad serving, advertising still has to move you. And that comes down to the kind of creative that makes you feel an emotion… not just “think” or push you into “lower funnel” activation as many marketers are so anxious to do.

This means drawing you in, getting you involved, and making you react emotionally, which is just as important on a hand-held device as it is in a 30-second TV spot. Creatively, this has been the challenge for the web banner, the video pre-roll, and even the next in-app-native touch-screen rich-media ad. These units may drive our impression-based ad-supported model, but they’ve yet to adequately prove the ability to make the consumer feel.

This emotional requisite often referred to as the “The Big Ideal” or “Higher Order Benefit” was once the holy grail of real advertising currency. These days, it seems emotional ideas have been replaced by sophisticated algorithms that can deliver near-real-time metrics and drive dynamic optimization of creative ad messages. These algorithms allow us to churn out countless versions of copy and banner executions for one campaign — changing layouts on the fly and cramming the call to action into an ad from beginning to end — in many cases before we’ve even gotten the consumer’s attention.

Is this the future of advertising we are destined to produce? Turning the craft of brand storytelling into algorithm-driven copy factories?

The task we face as advertising practitioners is how to combine our efforts with media brethren to create seamless brand experiences and cascade them through new technologies and media platforms. In doing so, we serve a more involved, emotional system of messages on behalf of brands to the right people over time.

We have the technology. We have the talent. We have the ability to redefine the story to make one feel. We just need to remember that the medium isn’t the message and no matter how seduced we are by the science of advertising, we must remember that algorithms don’t feel, people do.

The Future of Advertising
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Google has a lot of information at its disposal, and it’s using it to great effect in its Field Trip app. The app debuted on Android devices last fall, but it just arrived on iOS last week. Using notifications and an optional Bluetooth connection, Field Trip turns your phone into the ultimate tour guide.

It was created by Niantic Labs, which acts as a startup within Google. The premise of Field Trip is very practical: Whether you’re interested in random historical or architectural trivia, are looking for fun things to do with your kids, want to see what local stores are offering deals, or just where the new speakeasy or hipster donut shop is that everyone’s been talking about, Field Trip can show you. Using the iPhone’s location services, the app will show you stuff as you pass by it. You can set your preferences for how often you get the notifications and how much or little you see of each source’s content.

But what it’s doing is basically augmented reality: the phone is using location data to help us interpret the physical world around us. Here’s a quick look at the iOS version:

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Today, Vice President Biden launched an audio series called “Being Biden.”

The series will combine a photo that offers a glimpse into the Vice Presidency with an audio recording of the Vice President narrating the moment and its significance. He will tell the story behind the story – of where he was when the photo was snapped, why it matters to him, and how the experience fits into the broader narrative of this Administration. From meetings at the White House to travels around the country, the Vice President will share his perspective in candid, behind-the-scenes snapshots.

In other words, he’ll explain what it’s like “Being Biden.”

Check out the first installment at whitehouse.gov/beingbiden. The series will be available at whitehouse.gov/beingbiden, and will also be shared through the @VP Twitter account. To recieve an email update when new stories are posted, sign up here.

Check out "Being Biden."

Surprise! Redbox Instant by Verizon officially launched to the public Thursday, just as I had predicted in an earlier story. The launch comes after a three-month-long closed beta test that Redbox Instant CEO Shawn Strickland characterized as a great learning opportunity during a phone conversation Thursday morning. “Now we are open for business,” he added.

Redbox Instant currently offers its subscribers access to 4,600 subscription titles and four Redbox DVD rentals for $8 a month. Customers can also digitally rent or buy around 4,000 movies for a fee to augment their subscriptions with newer fare. Strickland told me that the service saw interest from “hundreds of thousands” of consumers who signed up to join the closed beta test. Tens of thousands not only joined for a free trial, but stayed around to become paying customers after their trial period ended.

So who are those Redbox Instant customers? Strickland said that the beta test confirmed the company’s belief that it was primarily catering to people who still value physical rentals. “It’s a disc plus offering,” he said, with streaming supplementing DVD rentals. That’s also reflected in the type of content the company is making available for streaming. “It clearly starts with movies,” said Strickland, adding that the focus might evolve over time.

That approach is very different from Netflix, which also started out with a movie-focused DVD service, but now invests heavily in TV content. Does that mean Netflix and Redbox are going to be complementary, as opposed to arch-enemies? My conversation with Strickland left me with the impression that he would be okay with that — as long as people are paying for his company’s service as well.

“We think that the over-the-top space will evolve very similarly to the cable and network space,” he said. Meaning: You might get your content from more than one streaming provider in the future, just like you get it from more than one cable network.

Of course, a large part of the rise of cable networks like HBO or even AMC has been the production of original content, something that has been an increasing focus of Netflix and Hulu as well. CAA agent Peter Micelli speculated a few days ago that Redbox Instant may venture into original content as well. Strickland called this kind of talk “really premature,” explaining that Redbox Instant doesn’t even have enough insights into what kind of exclusive content its subscribers could be interested in yet. But he added: “From an industry perspective, there is a clear force in that direction.”

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Everyone knows how finicky the European Union is when it comes to data protection in the cloud, but until now there hasn’t been much noise regarding the humble smartphone app. Now a group of privacy regulators from across Europe has published its opinion on that subject, and the result may be a world of pain for anyone involved in the mobile ecosystem.

The group is called the Article 29 Working Party and, while it doesn’t make laws, it does have a great deal of influence over those who do, and over the way in which privacy laws are interpreted. Its opinion (PDF warning) on mobile apps will be unwelcome in many quarters because it states that just about everyone in the mobile industry — app developers, app store proprietors and even OS and device vendors — has a range of legal obligations around protecting and properly collecting and processing user data.

Compliance with E.U. data protection law means sticking to several principles. First and foremost, the user needs to give full and unambiguous consent to having their data processed. Data processing has to be for a legitimate purpose — like the app’s stated use case — and everyone has a responsibility to keep personal data secure.

Even those mobile players who are trying to stick to the rules may find the task more complex than they first imagine. Here’s an example given by the regulators (with bold type reflecting my emphasis):

“An app provides information about nearby restaurants. To be installed the app developer must seek consent. To access the geolocation data, the app developer must separately ask for consent, e.g. during installation or prior to accessing the geolocation. Specific means that the consent must be limited to the specific purpose of advising the user about nearby restaurants. The location data from the device may therefore only be accessed when the user is using the app for that purpose. The user’s consent to process geolocation data does not allow the app to continuously collect location data from the device. This further processing would require additional information and separate consent.

Similarly, for a communication app to access the contact list, the user must be able to select contacts that the user wishes to communicate with, instead of having to grant access to the entire address book (including contact details of non-users of that service that cannot have consented to the processing of data relating to them).”

How about app stores? Here, the working party recommends that apps “should not just be rated by users for how ‘cool’ they are, but also on the basis of their functionalities, with specific reference to privacy and security mechanisms”.

These kinds of recommendations may seem a tall order, but they are doable. However, the working party seems under no illusion about the challenge it faces. Here’s the whole problem with ensuring the rules get stuck to, distilled into a single passage:

“A high risk to data protection comes from the degree of fragmentation between the many players in the app development landscape. A single data item can, in real time, be transmitted from the device to be processed across the globe or be copied between chains of third-parties. Some of the best known apps are developed by major technology companies but many others are designed by small start-ups. A single programmer with an idea and little or no prior programming skills can reach a global audience in a short space of time. App developers unaware of the data protection requirements may create significant risks to the private life and reputation of users of smart devices. Simultaneously, third-party services such as advertising are developing rapidly, which, if integrated by an app developer without due regard, may disclose significant amounts of personal data.”

There’s the rub. The creation and distribution of apps can involve many, many parties, with services interlinked in a way that’s hard to keep track of — especially since one of the fundamentals of EU data protection law is that the user is kept fully informed of what’s happening with their data, the likelihood of proper compliance breaks down on that point alone. That’s before we even get to the thorny issue of who is situated where and whether sending data to that location means breaking the rules, or how many opportunities for a security breach get opened up by having so many links in the chain.

It’s one thing imposing these rules on a big cloud provider, but what about the one or two-person team that comes up with some app that taps into multiple APIs linking to services around the world? Are they supposed to have a designated data controller within their organization, keeping an eye on compliance? That’s hardly going to be top of their agenda when their app may have been created and set live practically on a whim.

What the Article 29 Working Party is doing here is noble — and I don’t mean that dismissively. We should all be thinking about this stuff. Low barriers to entry shouldn’t be an excuse for ignoring a cumulative effect of privacy erosion.

The question is, are these guidelines going to stay a wishlist, or are we going to see Europe’s regulators enforce them? That’s what these opinions often presage, so we may soon find out what privacy regulation really means in the mobile age.

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Samsung hasn’t even officially unveiled its new flagship Galaxy S 4 yet, but one carrier is already announcing it will carry it. No, it’s not AT&T or Verizon or Vodafone. It’s Tucows’ tiny mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Ting.

Ting said Thursday that it would be among the first in line to sell Samsung’s latest and greatest smartphone — which it coyly said is “commonly referred to as the Galaxy S4” — as soon as it is commercially available. (For all of the details of the official S 4 launch Thursday evening starting at 7pm ET (4pm PT), check out my colleague Kevin Tofel’s live blog.)

“In advance of Samsung’s big launch event tomorrow, we’re excited to say that we’ll be able to offer the follow up to the Samsung Galaxy S3, which we’ll call the Samsung Galaxy S 4 unless we’re provided reason to do otherwise,” Tucows Content Development Manager Andrew Moore-Crispin wrote in Tucows’ blog Wednesday. “What’s more, we’ll be able to do so at around the same time as the major carriers; on or at least around the actual launch day.”

That’s quite a coup for Ting, since MVNOs typically have to wait months — if not forever — to become official retailers of the hottest mobile devices. Not only do MVNOs have to court handset vendors that often have cozy relationships with the big carriers, but they also have to get permission from their carrier partners. In Ting’s case, Sprint provides it network access and ultimately it gets to decide whether Ting or any other Sprint MVNO gets to sell the same devices in its portfolio.

In the last year, though, carriers and Sprint in particular have loosened the leashes on their MVNOS, giving them access to goodies like hot devices and new 4G networks they would normally reserve for themselves. Ting became the first LTE MVNO in August, tapping into Sprint’s brand new 4G service shortly after it launched, and it only had to wait to two months before it could sell the Galaxy S3.

Even more recently those market barriers hindering MVNOs fell further. MVNO Solavei got an early drop on U.S. carriers by becoming the first operator to sell the BlackBerry(BBRY) Z10. Ting’s early access to the Galaxy S 4 is another example that MVNOs no longer have to put up with the big carriers’ scraps.

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Continue reading…

Later today, Samsung will reveal the Galaxy S4, perhaps the most highly anticipated Android handset release to date. The Galaxy S3 sold better than any Android handset in history, setting up the S4 for even more hype. Given what we’ve heard through the rumor mill, it could very well deliver. That’s no small accomplishment, either.

Competitors, unsurprisingly, have Galaxy envy. They’re trying to topple Samsung from its place atop the Android world. HTC makes its stand with the HTC One, but it probably won’t be enough. HTC once showed promise in the Android world, with the Nexus One followed by the Droid Incredible, but it has lost its luster in recent years. Blame it on its poor Sense UI, blame it on poor marketing; it doesn’t matter. Chances are remote for HTC making a serious dent in Samsung’s market share.

For years LG toiled in the Android market. They put out a number of handsets, most notably under their Optimus flagship line, but also weren’t able to make much of a dent. Their biggest successes came from mid-range handsets sold through prepaid carriers. The cost effectiveness won over customers in those markets, while contract customers typically stuck with big names like Samsung and Motorola.

LG, though, seemingly thinks its time has come. It made waves when Google commissioned it to build the Nexus 4. It also went for the high end of the market with the Optimus G — and it’s not afraid to let you know that while you have to wait for the Galaxy S4, you can get the Optimus G right now.

That is Times Square, in the heart of New York City. Millions of people will potentially see that enormous billboard. It likely won’t detract from Samsung’s sales; clever advertising is not necessarily effective advertising. But it does speak to LG’s desire to rise up the Android ranks.

Advertising isn’t the only trick LG has up its sleeve. At this evening’s event, Samsung will reportedly show off eye tracking features for the S4. When your eyes get to the bottom of the screen, it will automatically scroll up. And that’s just one potential use for eye tracking software. Want another one? You can look to LG for that.

The LG Optimus G Pro (CNET review), unveiled at Mobile World Congress last month, has the potential to disrupt the “phablet” market. (And yes, “phablet” deserves quotes, because it’s a cheesy term that will hopefully die out soon enough.) LG has big plans for it, too. In fact, it announced today that it will release eye-recognition software as an update. The phone isn’t yet available in America, and it doesn’t appear that LG has any plans to add the software to the plain old Optimus G. But it would appear that Samsung isn’t the only one coming out with this neat new technology.

Does LG have a chance where HTC does not? It’s possible. At the very least, LG is willing to go straight at the market titan. That might not do them many favors, but it shows that they are deadly serious about becoming a major Android player. Even if their plays don’t vault them to the top, they could enjoy a solid place at the table right behind Samsung.

Even that could take some serious work, though. As you can see from this App Brain report, LG doesn’t even have a handset in the top 20 (by their measurements, which count only AppBrain users). That could be a huge obstacle to hurdle. But with a series of quality handsets in the Nexus 4, Optimus G, and G Pro, perhaps LG is ready. It seems they have a bit more juice these days than HTC.

The post LG Takes Shots at Samsung appeared first on MobileMoo.

Next time you see someone awkwardly filming with their iPad, you can blame Google for encouraging them. On Thursday the company announced that the YouTube Capture app for recording and quickly uploading videos to YouTube is now available for the iPad and iPad mini. It was initially released in December on iOS to work with the iPhone and iPod touch only.

Capture for iPad and iPad mini comes with quick editing tools, has image stabilization and color correction, and the ability to add music to a clip, all within the app. Sharing options include Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

There is no such dedicated app for Android phones or tablets, but that’s likely because direct-to-YouTube uploading is already supported in Android.

The folks at YouTube are aware that filming with a device that is so large it requires two hands can be physically and socially awkward — it reminded users of the iPad app to “film wisely so your iPad isn’t blocking everyone’s view.” But mobile is a huge chunk of its business these days — 1 in 4 YouTube video views come from a mobile device, the company says. So supporting as many popular devices as possible is an important priority.

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A mother survives domestic abuse, but realizes she needs a civil protection order, as well as custody of her child, but she may not be able to afford legal representation.

Five years ago, a group of lawyers came together to support clients like her. They founded the DC Volunteers Lawyer Project (DCVLP) to recruit, train, and support attorneys to provide pro-bono services in three areas: (1) domestic violence, including with divorce, custody, child support, and immigration matters, (2) high-conflict child custody cases, and (3) assisting foster parents.

The DCVLP now has more than 700 volunteer lawyers who provide pro-bono services.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of visiting the DCVLP. I met with the remarkable founders and staff, listened to the story of a former client serving on the board, and heard about all the great work they are doing every single day here in Washington, DC.

White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett with the DC Volunteer Lawyers Project team.

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On Thursday, Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry announced plans to secure Android and iOS devices with Secure Work Space for BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10. The company cites evolving needs and “ever-growing variety of devices” that are used within the work space as the main reason for stepping up to fortify the security of the two mobile operating systems.

BlackBerry targets both smartphones and tablets running Android and iOS through data-at-rest and data-in-transit security capabilities. The company says that administrators will be able to create a “separate and secure work space” which contains corporate apps, calendar, contacts, web email and other features, and configure, interact, secure and wipe the new compatible devices.

BlackBerry claims that Secure Work Space will waive the need for an “expensive VPN infrastructure” to secure transferred data and MDM (Mobile Device Management) providers and multiple vendors, while also featuring easier deployment and worldwide and “flexible technical support”.

The Canadian smartphone maker says that Secure Work Space beta testing is underway for both Android and iOS mobile devices with the general availability to happen towards the end of Q2 2013. More details will be shared at BlackBerry Live in May, according to the company.

Photo Credit: Kheng Guan Toh/Shutterstock

Last year there was a record-breaking 3.3 gigawatts worth of solar panels — or 16 million individual solar panels — installed in the U.S., making solar power the fastest-growing energy source domestically. That’s according to a new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association and GTM Research.

In comparison, a large nuclear or coal plant can generate about a gigawatt, so there was the equivalent of three of these types of large power plants installed across rooftops in the U.S. in 2012. The 3.3GW worth of solar panels was more than the three previous years combined, said the report, and showed a 76 percent growth over 2011.

A gigawatt of those solar panels were installed in California, while Arizona and New Jersey also installed hundreds of megawatts. The fourth quarter in particular in the U.S. saw 1.3 GW worth of solar panels installed, which was a record-breaking quarter, said the report.

The reason that solar panels were the fastest growing type of energy in the U.S. last year was due to the fact that the price of solar panels has dropped dramatically. Companies are also offering financing deals that cover the upfront costs of the systems, and states are offering strong incentives. It’s not a coincidence that states like California with the best subsidies for solar panels had the most installations.

The growth of solar panels in the U.S. is supposed to continue, says the report. For 2013, the researchers have estimated that there will be 4.3GW of solar panels installed, which would be an increase of 29 percent over 2012.

There are now 300,000 solar panel systems operating in the U.S. and a total of 7.2 GW of cumulative solar panel power in the U.S. Concentrating solar systems — which use the sun’s heat instead of light to produce electricity — deliver 546 MW worth of power in the U.S.

The report is note worthy because solar is becoming a game changer. It, along with wind power, are just starting to deliver real volumes and change the way electricity is created in the U.S.

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My dear friend AG Lafley and I have written a book called Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works and we are gratified by all of the positive reviews — The Economist, the Financial Times, Fortune, etc. Even on Amazon.com, the reviews have been 100% 4’s and 5’s.

But sometimes those 4’s inspire a blog post.

One of the Amazon reviewers, ‘Greg’, said lovely, positive things about the book, but ranked it a 4 because: “I seriously question whether this is a strategy book or a marketing book. Yes, the word strategy pops up a lot, but the examples and the cases … belong to marketing.”

In his head, I am sure Greg has a definition of marketing and the book reflects his definition of marketing. But to make his point, he has to have a useful definition of strategy that is truly distinct from marketing. 

Therein lies the rub. As business thought and understanding has evolved, any useful definition of the difference between marketing and strategy has disappeared. That is why Greg could call a strategy book a marketing book. The dividing line between strategy and marketing has disappeared in practice.

It was not always so. Strategy and marketing emerged out of very different traditions.

Marketing came out of sales: given that a company wanted to sell stuff to customers, how could it think about doing that in an intellectually rigorous and planned way? The answer that emerged in the late 1940s was a thoughtful ‘marketing mix’ which gave rise in 1960 to the most famous concept in marketing history: the 4 Ps — Product, Price, Promotion, and Place.

The implicit notion behind this approach was this: if the company was going produce some kind of product (or service but this thinking really emerged in a products environment), it had better optimize the 4 Ps in order to sell as much of it as possible. The players explicitly considered in this equation were the company and the customer.

In stark contrast, business strategy emerged out of military theory: how could a company beat it is enemy? In the case of business, that meant its competition. Thus, the early business strategy thinking that emerged in the 1960s focused on the capabilities of the company relative to its competitors. Was the company farther down the experience curve than its competitors? Was it using the resources from its Cash Cows to fund its Stars to a greater extent than competitors could?

Unsurprisingly, the customer did not loom large in this early view of strategy. In military strategy, customer needs was a pretty simple notion. They — i.e., your citizens — wanted you — their military — to defend against or conquer the enemy. That is about it in terms of customer understanding.

Hence the roots of marketing involved the company and its customer while the roots of strategy involved the company and its competitors. And in that era, marketing and strategy looked a lot different.

But as the practice of each scrolled forward over time, they converged. Marketers figured out that the crux of the issue was product, price, promotion and place relative to competition and sometimes that meant completely changing every P in order to carve out a useful place relative to competitors with some set of customers. Strategists figured out that beating competition entailed having intimate knowledge of exactly what customers wanted so that the capabilities they invested in would actually meet a customer need in a way that would result in better performance than that of competitors.

When these two realizations manifested themselves, the line between marketing and strategy disappeared. Good marketing and good strategy are both about making choices that build and maintain a particular set of capabilities that enables the company to outperform its competitors with a particular set of customers.

Because business schools are generally dedicated to narrow knowledge fields and opposed to integrative knowledge, they have assiduously maintained two separate disciplines in marketing and strategy to the benefit of no one. And because companies have fallen in love with specialization in skill development and fragmentation of organizational structures, they have followed suit and generally maintain separate marketing and strategy departments. That is probably Greg’s organizational experience.

The very best companies in the world have eschewed this unproductive distinction between marketing and strategy, and P&G is one of them. That is one of the reasons why Playing to Win is co-written by its former CEO.

Facebook is trying to improve the algorithms and expand the reach of its Graph Search function. Srinam Sankar, engineering manager on the social network’s search infrastructure team, detailed its plans in a blog post the company published on Thursday. While Graph Search still isn’t available to every Facebook user, its evolution is worth following, as it’s a large-scale implementation that could offer lessons for startups and enterprises dealing with continually growing databases.

Since its release to a select few users in January, Graph Search has caught attention for privacy reasons and for being less than ideal for marketers. Ordinary users have noticed shortcomings, too — searches don’t take status updates and comments into account, and results might turn up information that’s just not up to date. After attending a briefing on Graph Search at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., I pointed to a few of the improvements engineers were kicking around.

Thursday’s blog post suggests that engineers are making progress:

“We are also extending our search capabilities to do better test processing and ranking and have better mobile and internationalization support. Finally, we are also working on building a completely new vertical to handle searching posts and comments.”

As Facebook users play around with Graph Search, Facebook can observe how it’s used — and take user feedback — and adjust accordingly. One way to see if the work is paying off is click-through rate, Sankar writes. Once engineers come up with a possible means to improve the algorithms, they test it, try it out on a small group of users and then compare results.

So, almost two months after the Graph Search beta launch, how is it ranking search results? Exact algorithms are not publicly available. But here are some character traits that give a sense of how they work:

• The search engine for querying Unicorn, the database underlying Graph Search, doesn’t have to spit out exactly what you ask it to. It can consider several factors on the back end before serving up results that you might actually find more relevant: how far away you are from places you search for, such as restaurants; how many degrees of Facebook-friend separation are there between you and the people you search for; how similar search results are to search queries; and what you have searched for in the past.
• Unicorn brings together results in no specific order. But then they get ranked by their scores, which require metadata to be associated with each person, place or thing searchable with Graph Search.
• When you start typing in a search string — take the words “people who live in s,” for example — Graph Search uses natural-language processing to make suggestions for searches of places that start with the letter s, rather than people whose names start with s.
• Instead of offering search results based on the highest scores alone, Unicorn eliminates duplicates. For instance, a bunch of pictures of Mark Zuckerberg might not be what a user had in mind when she searched for “photos of Facebook employees.”
• If results include people, places and things, not just one of those, then Unicorn needs to normalize the results and put them all in the best possible order.
• Queries combine more than one of those elements — say, restaurants that friends like” — require Unicorn to score both restaurants and friends and share data between the two scoring efforts.

It’s nice to see that engineers are trying to improve Graph Search. The product could become more fun and useful. But there’s plenty more work to do, so don’t be caught off guard when Facebook announces further adjustments in coming months. With such a visible product, Facebook will have to keep making improvements, and that’s all the better for developers looking to refine search engines of their own.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• How consumer media will change in 2013
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• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012

I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but…it seems potential danger lurks everywhere on the Internet and your inbox — as criminals seek to infiltrate your computer or raid your bank account. That old saying that everyone is out to get you is basically true these days. Well, not everyone, but a surprisingly large number of people truly are out to get you.

And, to get you, they need a plausible scam. That usually means a “message from your bank” or one from PayPal — I get the latter on a daily basis. But the underside of the web also utilizes other means — virus scares and current events. It’s the current — or future — events that attract the attention of Microsoft’s Larry Hryb, better known as Major Nelson.

Hryb notes that a number of sites offer users to sign up for a chance to become a beta tester for the next-generation Xbox gaming console — Xbox 720, Xbox 8 or whatever it will be called.

Needless to say, these sites will be happy to accept your sign up information, but what you get in exchange will certainly not be a brand new Xbox.

Hryb feels obligated to issue a warning via both his Twitter account and blog:

Confirmed: All sign-up pages for testing the “next Xbox” are FAKE. Do not give them your information — it’s a scam.

— Larry Hryb (@majornelson)

While the readers here tend to be the more tech savvy and likely would laugh at such warnings, there are apparently enough people falling for this to warrant the attention of the Xbox Live chief and prompt him to attempt some measure of damage control.

Photo Credit: Photosani/Shutterstock

Iris Capital and Capnamic Ventures have agreed to a partnership for making early stage investments in Germany. Iris Capital’s early-stage vehicle, OP Ventures Early Stage, will co-invest with the newly launched  Capnamic Ventures Fund. The cooperation may also extend to later stage investments in Germany.

PRESS RELEASE

Iris Capital and Capnamic Ventures have entered a new partnership for early-stage investments in the German digital economy

Paris, Cologne, Berlin, March 14, 2013 – Iris Capital, a leading pan-European VC focusing on digital economy, backed by its main corporate investors Orange and Publicis, and Capnamic Ventures, a rapidly rising player on the German VC scene, which recently spun off from the DuMont Schauberg media group, have entered into a partnership agreement for early-stage investments in Germany.

The Iris Capital early-stage vehicle (‘OP Ventures Early Stage`) is dedicated to European investments. It will co-invest alongside the newly launched multi-corporate Capnamic Ventures Fund in fast growing start-ups of the German digital economy. The cooperation may also extend to later stage investments in Germany.
The two teams will closely cooperate in order to benefit most from their combined technical and business knowledge for investment decisions and portfolio management. In combining their efforts, they will also offer a broader international development perspective to their respective portfolio companies, benefiting in particular from Iris Capital’s presence in North America, Asia and the Middle East.

“Iris Capital has been investing in Germany for a long time. Considering that the German VC environment is particularly dynamic in Europe today, it is increasingly important to reinforce our presence in the early stage segment. Beyond our passion for VC, we share our strong focus on digital economy, spin-off history and innovative and unique multi-corporate approach with Capnamic. By joining forces, Iris and Capnamic will definitely represent a major European early-stage VC player”, declared Antoine Garrigues, Managing Partner at Iris Capital.

Sophie Dingreville, Partner at Iris Capital, has joined the investment committee of the Capnamic Ventures fund. “Our respective early-stage vehicles, both operational and already investing, were launched simultaneously. This is rather unique in fund cycles and builds the perfect ground for a successful collaboration”, she said.

Christian Siegele, Managing Partner at Capnamic Ventures, explained: “We associate well- known corporate investors and successful family offices. The partnership with Iris Capital creates a new level of added value: Iris LP’s Orange and Publicis are leader in the European telecommunication and advertisement market. In cooperation with our investors from the entertainment and publishing sector, we will create a complementary partnership.”

“With Iris Capital as our partner for early-stage investments, we will reach an unparalleled set-up in continental Europe” said Jörg Binnenbrücker, Managing Partner at Capnamic Ventures. “Both teams combine their excellent market knowledge and will thereby enlarge as well as enrich the opportunities for fast-growing startups in Europe.”

About Iris Capital

Iris Capital is a pan-European venture capital fund manager specializing in digital economy. Since its inception in 1986, the Iris Capital team has invested more than €900 million in more than 210 companies.
Iris Capital targets opportunities in service or technology companies, seeking growth capital in order to realize their strategy. It provides active support to its portfolio companies on the basis of its strong sector specialization and experience, and has offices in Paris, Düsseldorf, San Francisco, Montreal, Riyadh, Dubai, Beijing and Tokyo.

In 2012, Iris Capital has entered into a strategic partnership with Orange and Publicis to manage their joint venture capital initiative.

| Press contact: [email protected] | + 33 1 44 50 54 74

About Capnamic Ventures
Capnamic Ventures is a multi-corporate fund with offices in Cologne and Berlin, Germany. Founded in January 2013 the investment focus lies on fast growing business models along the digital value chain and scalable areas such as mobile, e-Commerce, gaming, payment, advertising and software as a service.
Capnamic is backed by well-known corporate investors and family offices. Along with its new fund, Capnamic Ventures will take over management of the entire portfolio of DuMont Venture. The investment vehicle of M. DuMont Schauberg is currently holding over 20 portfolio companies.

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