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  • In Munich, Vice President Biden Highlights Transatlantic Relationship with European Allies

    Four years ago, Vice President Biden spoke at the annual Munich Security Conference to outline the Obama administration’s foreign policy agenda and reset our relationship with Russia. On Tuesday, Vice President Biden wrapped up a similar trip to Europe during which he stressed our strong cooperation with our European allies and highlighted our many joint accomplishments over the last four years. 

    Travelling first to Berlin, the Vice President met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss our bilateral relationship with Germany and the common challenges we face in Iran, Syria, Mali, and Afghanistan. The Vice President and the German Chancellor also traded views on their respective economies as well as energy and climate change.   

    Vice President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Angela Merkel

    Vice President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Angela Merkel walk on the balcony outside the Chancellor’s office overlooking Berlin, Germany, Feb., 1, 2013

    (Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

    Continuing on to Munich, Vice President Biden delivered remarks at the 49th Munich Security Conference and held a series of bilateral meeting with world leaders.  His speech stressed the continued importance the U.S. places on the transatlantic relationship.  “It’s hard to imagine a single threat or opportunity that we cannot address more effectively together,” he said.

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  • Let’s Not Forget The Fall Of SOPA And The Might Of A Unified Internet

    The fall of SOPA was, by far, one of the most interesting events of 2012. It showed that the Internet can and will be an unstoppable force when faced with a threat that targets its very core. Now let’s relive those events so that we may know why we fight for the Internet and the freedom it brings.

    Vimeo user Sam Mularczyk created a video that recounts the events that led up to the fall of SOPA. It’s a great history refresher for those of us who have already forgotten what made the SOPA protests such a significant event.

    The Fall Of SOPA from Sam Mularczyk on Vimeo.

    The end of the video mentions that the Internet still faces threats at the hands of other treaties and bills like ACTA, TPP and CISPA. Some of these have already been shelved thanks to other massive protests, but others are still moving full steam ahead under a veil of secrecy. To defeat these bills, we may need another protest on the same scale of the SOPA blackout, but that’s not likely to happen.

    In short, the Internet is consistently under threat by groups that would seek to undermine it for control or personal gain. The only way to stop it is to use the Internet as it was intended – a communication platform that allows those of similar minds to band together. There’s not always going to be a blackout that spurs Internet users to action, but reminding ourselves of what can be accomplished when we band together may just be enough to shelve other threats to the Internet that are likely to emerge in 2013.

    [h/t: Boing Boing]

  • iPads (Thanks To The Mini) Were 1 In 6 ‘PCs’ Shipped, Tablets One-Third, And Windows RT Didn’t Even Break 1M: Canalys

    ipad-with-ipad-mini

    The PC market is fast shifting into a touchscreen world, and Apple is leading the charge. Some new numbers from the analysts at Canalys note that in Q4 of 2012, one in every three PCs shipped was actually a tablet, and that Apple’s iPad accounted for about half of them, or one in every six PCs shipped.

    Canalys senior analyst Tim Coulling tells me that by “tablet,” Canalys means any computing device with screen of seven inches or more. By combining PC and tablet numbers — a logical thing to do, given that many are substituting tablet purchases and usage for PC purchases and usage — Canalys figures that worldwide PC shipments are actually on the rise — up by 12% on last year to 134 million units for the quarter. That’s in contrast to figures from Gartner, which in January noted that Q4 PC shipments were down by 5% on last year — without factoring in tablets.

    Adding Apple’s iPad sales to its Mac sales puts it into the lead among PC vendors. The company shipped 27 million PC units in Q4, giving it a 20.1% share of the market. The number-two vendor was HP, whose market share is based on its PC prowess. It shipped 15 million PCs, for an 11.2% share of the market. That let it edge just ahead of Lenovo, which shipped 200,000 fewer units.

    Still, Android continues to make inroads. Canalys points out that this is the first quarter where Apple’s iPad has not accounted for more than 50% of all tablets shipped — it was 49%, as it happens, with Android accounting for 46%.

    Apple’s savior was the iPad Mini: “Apple timed the launch of the iPad mini well,” writes Pin-Chen Tang, Canalys research analyst. “Its success proves there is a clear demand for pads with smaller screens at a more affordable price. Without the launch, Apple would surely have lost more ground to its competitors.” Indeed, that fact may well encourage Apple to look at more sizes and price points for its iOS devices in the future.

    Overall, Canalys points out that the tablet market grew by 75% in Q4 to 46.2 million units, and that full-year shipments were 114.6 million units. Given that trend, Lenovo, which has been making some interesting hybrid models incorporating both touchscreen and keyboard features, could well pull ahead of HP if the latter doesn’t make some significant tablet inroads in the next couple of quarters.

    Meanwhile, Samsung is at the other end of the spectrum: its strong performance, placing it into fourth place with 11.7 million units (9% market share) is based mostly on the success of its line of Galaxy Tab tablets. It shipped 7.6 million of these in Q4, a rise of 226%.

    Dell, which is hoping for a turnaround as a private company, rounded out the top five. Dell’s reputation “continues to fade,” Canalys writes, resulting in a 19% drop in shipments in the quarter. “A turnaround in fortunes is likely to take years,” they note — so just as well that Dell will not have to answer so quickly to the markets for its performance.

    As other analysts have pointed out, Windows 8 has so far had little impact on worldwide PC shipments, and an almost negligible impact on tablets — with only 3% of tablets shipped in the quarter based on Windows 8.  That has had a knock-on effect both for Windows and for those who make devices using the OS. “Microsoft’s involvement in the Dell buyout raises eyebrows in the light of its recent aspirations to become a hardware vendor,” Canalys notes. “But it is not likely to solve Dell’s problems as even Microsoft struggles with pads.” Equally difficult was Windows RT, which failed to break even 1 million units at 720,000 shipped. “The outlook for Windows RT appears bleak,” noted Tim Coulling, Canalys senior analyst. He believes the only way out for this is for Microsoft to drastically reduce the licensing price, cutting further into its margins on the product.

    Western Europe’s slow economy also continues to weigh things down.

    Amazon, selling only tablets and no PCs (yet?), didn’t make the top five but still managed a substantial volume shift. Its shipments were 4.6 million units, almost mirroring Dell’s decline with growth of 18%. With the Kindle Fire now selling in more markets worldwide, it will be interesting to see if Amazon can see a big boost this year or if it will be stymied by Apple and Samsung. For now, international is doing a good enough job to offset some small declines in the U.S., where the launch of the higher-priced Kindle Fire HD not proving to be a runaway success as the initial launch of the Kindle Fire was a year ago.

  • Florida Man Convicted Over Facebook Threats to Kill Obama, “Watch the Life Disappear from His Eyes”

    You can say a lot of things and stand behind First Amendment protections. Saying that you’re going to kill the President on Facebook is not one of those things, according to a Florida jury.

    A Florida man has been convicted of making death threats against President Obama and is now awaiting sentencing scheduled for April.

    According to the court, Christopher Castillo posted the threats to his Facebook page in November, just days before Obama was reelected for a second term. The posts reportedly said that he if reelected, he would hunt down and kill the President. Castillo also added that he would “watch the life disappear from his eyes.”

    According to the Secret Service, they visited Castillo shortly after learning of the threat from a citizen. He reportedly admitted to posting the Facebook statuses.

    “(Castillo) was given every opportunity to back down and say it was a joke and he never (backed down),” said Assistant U.S. attorney Shawn Napier. “It wasn’t sarcasm. It was a threat to kill the president.”

    Castillo’s attorney argued that the man who notified the Secret Service of the posts was a noted internet troll who had provoked the comments from Castillo, and that Castillo simply said some things he didn’t mean. He also argued that the comments should be protected as “political discussion” under the First Amendment.

    A jury disagreed.

    As this case and many others prove, things you say on Facebook hold just as much weight as things you would scream out front of the White House. Don’t threaten to kill the President, and especially don’t do it on a public forum like Twitter or Facebook.

    [Orlando Sentinel via NY Daily News]

  • Skimpy Beckham Ad Stirs Up The Web

    David Beckham isn’t shy about showing us his body–a fact most of us are grateful for–and he’s got a new H&M ad out to prove it.

    Beckham, who has a knack for clothing design like his wife Victoria, partnered with H&M last year for a line of underwear and sleepwear. Since then, he’s released a couple of ab-baring ads that give us a glimpse at just what soccer will do for a body. The latest photos come courtesy of a commercial that looks more like a short film, wherein Beckham takes on the role of an action hero and saves the day, all while in his underwear. Here’s a sneak peak of the ad, which was directed by Guy Ritchie.

    Beckham says he always enjoys the look of the ads because of the quality, but he will never get used to seeing himself in them.

    “No matter how many campaigns I do with H&M, I will never get used to seeing myself on billboards,” he said. “It’s always a surprise to me when I see them. I’m lucky to work with such great photographers and stylists, so the images are always the best they can be.”

    Here’s a photo from the last run of ads:

    skimpy beckham ad

    And here are some new ones:

    skimpy beckham ad

    skimpy beckham ad

    skimpy beckham ad

    skimpy beckham ad

  • Report Looks At Performance Of Location Targeting In Mobile Ads

    Verve Mobile recently released its annual State of the Market review, looking at location-powered mobile advertising (via MarketingCharts).

    According to the report, mobile campaigns leveraging location targeting outperformed non-location targeted campaigns by factor fo 2x. Of 2,500 mobile campaigns analyzed, most of them utilized location targeting (which is a focus of the firm’s offerings), but here’s a look at location targeting by vertical:

    Location Targeted campaigns

    “For the history of digital advertising we’ve basically been targeting on a few things, like content and cookie data,” says Verve Mobile CEO Tom MacIsaac. “The big new data set mobile brings to the table is location—a data set that can be as important at inferring intent, demographics, audience segments and other attributes as any we have seen to date in digitl advertising. And it brings genuine value to end users—helping them find products and services where and when they want them—a key attribute of the most valuable advertising mediums.”

    According to the firm, restaurants and retail led all advertisers in use of geo-aware and geo-fenced campaigns. Here’s a look at performance of CTR by targeting tactic:

    CTR by Targeting

    Of course, one major point the report makes is that users are engaging with brands on mobile devices in different ways. It’s not always about the click. They saw a 9% interaction rate for calls, for example.

    Check out the full report here (pdf).

  • Fresh from primetime cameo, Sotera Wireless’ remote patient monitoring tech nabs $14.8M

    If you watched NBC’s Rock Center a couple of weeks ago, you might have noticed a segment featuring Dr. Eric Topol, a longtime cardiologist, author of “The Creative Destruction of Medicine” and one of the leading voices in digital medicine.

    In the segment, he showed off a futuristic flip-phone-sized touchscreen device, worn on the wrist, that helps doctors keep tabs on their patients from afar. The device, called the VisiMobile monitor, tracks a patient’s blood pressure, heart rate, respiration rate and other indicators, and lets doctors check in from wherever they might be via PC, tablet or smartphone.

    On Wednesday, Sotera Wireless, the San Diego-based company behind the VisiMobile technology, announced that it had raised an additional $14.8 million. The company, which changed its name from Triage Wireless in 2009, last year won FDA clearance for its VisiMobile technology.  In addition to the wrist monitor, the system includes sensors for the chest and thumb and a blood cuff monitor. It can connect to a hospital’s existing infrastructure via secure Wi-Fi to let doctors and nurses keep closer tabs on more patients within a hospital or it can be used to let doctors monitor recently discharged patients.

    As health providers prepare to give care to more patients and as hospitals face more pressure to lower readmission rates, systems like this, as well as other tele-health technology, could become increasingly valuable.

    In a statement, Sotera Wireless CEO Tom Watlington, said the new funding would go towards commercialization, clinical development and making the technology available to more than 5,000 hospitals across the country. Safeguard Scientifics, a holding company that provides capital and support to health care and technology companies, said it contributed $1.33 million. Other investors included new funder Delphi Ventures, as well as existing funders Sanderling Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, EDBI, Intel Capital, Cerner Capital and West Health Investment Fund.

    You can see a video of Dr. Topol talking about the technology on Rock Center below:

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  • A Well-Crafted Letter Still Gets the Job Done

    Business letters aren’t a quaint thing of the past. Write them well, and you’ll create a lot of goodwill with clients, partners, and vendors. You’ll increase your profits, too — by getting key customers to renew large orders, for example, or persuading service providers to charge you less for repeat business.

    Here are some pointers to help you get those kinds of results with your letters:

    Focus on the reader. Motivate people to act by giving them reasons that matter to them. And try not to begin with the word I; make it you, if possible (You were so kind, You might be interested, and so on). Keep the reader in the forefront because — let’s face it — that’s what will hold her interest. Not: “I just thought I’d drop you a note to say that I really enjoyed my time as your guest last week.” But instead: “What a wonderful host you were last week.”

    Use direct language. Write simply. Think of Olympic diving: neatly in, no splash, soon out. And if you’re writing on behalf of your firm, use we. It’s much warmer and friendlier than the passive voice (It has been decided vs. We have decided) or the impersonal third person (this organization vs. we).

    You see canned phrases like enclosed please find and as per all the time in letters. They’re high-sounding but low-performing. Your letters will be much clearer and more engaging without them. Some examples:

    pompousverbiage.gif

    Ease into bad news. If you have a rejection to deliver, sandwich it between happier elements. Your readers can bear disappointment more easily if you begin on a genuine positive note and then explain the reason for the negative decision. They’ll also be more likely to grant your wishes — make a purchase, sign up for your webinar, renew a membership — despite your denying theirs.

    Recipients of bad news will probably be unhappy no matter what. But to some extent you can control just how unhappy they’ll be. Be your best self. If your correspondent is rude, be polite; if anxious, be sympathetic; if confused, be lucid; if stubborn, be patient; if helpful, show gratitude; if accusatory, be reasonable and just in admitting any faults.

    Don’t write in anger. Say please and thank you — even in letters of complaint. Omit such courtesies, and you’ll be dismissed as a crank. You can be courteous while still being direct.

    When you receive unreasonable letters, don’t respond in kind. That just starts a negative chain reaction. Approach complaints with a dedication to first-rate service. Write with the same warmth and friendliness you’d use in face-to-face conversations. If you or your company made a mistake, avoid the temptation to ignore it, to cover it up, or to shift the blame. Instead of deceiving readers, you’ll provoke more ire. When you blunder, admit the error and say what you’ve done (or will be doing) to correct it. Stress the desire to improve service.

    This is the second post in Bryan A. Garner’s blog series on business writing. The series draws on insights from Garner’s new book, the HBR Guide to Better Business Writing.

    You’ll find the first post of the series here.

  • The Teeny, Tiny Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter Is Available For Pre-Order

    nanocopter

    A few weeks ago the Crazyflie Nano captured our collective imaginations by winging its way around an open plan office and looking like a cross between a hummingbird and the robotic butterfly that steals things in Dora the Explorer. The tiny quadrotor robot is now available for pre-order for $173 for the multi-sensor version and $143 for a basic version with position sensors. The product should ship in April.

    The project is completely open source and requires a soldering iron and some smarts to complete. The $173 version includes an altimeter and magnetometer so you can tell your height and direction. You can control it with a standard gaming joystick connected to a PC. It weighs 19 grams and is about four inches long and wide. It can fly for 7 minutes on one 20 minute charge, which is about on par for most flying toys.

    The creators, Marcus Eliasson, Arnaud Taffanel, and Tobias Antonsson, built the project over the past three years while holding down day jobs. They’re already running into the hurdles of Internet popularity. In response to a potential buyer asking about the need for a soldering iron, Antonsson writes:

    We don’t have a solution for that right now, sorry. In the future though there might be a fully assembled version. Maybe you can find someone close by that can help you? Also buying your own soldering iron is an option. It doesn’t have to be a fancy one.

    via Wired

  • Open hybrid cloud: Have you thought of everything?

    Building on the well-received analysts’ roundtable “Open hybrid cloud: when open really means open,” GigaOM Research and Red Hat continue the discussion with a deeper investigation into the benefits of an open cloud. Focusing on business cases, the conversation will center on hybrid clouds and why a company would want to maintain the flexibility to run its enterprise using both public and dedicated resources. Panelists will discuss the importance of scalability, portability, choice and other attributes that are must-have checklist items an organization should look for and expect in an open hybrid cloud.

    In this webinar, we’ll discuss:

    • The importance of the right storage architecture in a hybrid environment
    • How open APIs can help users move across various cloud environments
    • How companies can leverage their existing IT and avoid creating new silos
    • Why community-driven innovation has become so important to cloud computing
    • Why maintaining choice by avoiding vendor-in is key to success, both today and in the future

    Our panel of experts includes:

    Register here to join GigaOM Research and our sponsor Red Hat for “Open hybrid cloud: Have you thought of everything?” a free analyst roundtable webinar on Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013, at 10 a.m. PT.

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  • Cloudyn says it exposes hidden Amazon storage costs and you’d be surprised how big they are

    Cloudyn thinks you’re using a lot more Amazon storage than you think, and not all of it shows up in your AWS console. That’s the problem it’s attacking with its new S3 Tracker.

    We all know that people are putting tons of their digital stuff into Amazon; The S3 object count hit a trillion in June and it’s gone nowhere but up since.

    Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner

    Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner

    Sharon Wagner, CEO of Raanana, Israel-based Cloudyn, said his company’s experience monitoring some 400 AWS customers shows surprising things about their usage, many of them relating to storage.

    “We found huge inefficiencies. You’d be amazed at the amount of storage that is retired. We slice and dice that and make recommendations that you move that inactive stuff from S3 to Glacier,” he said. Glacier is a lower cost option for archival storage. If you haven’t looked at that document in a year, perhaps its time to ship it off to Glacier and pay less.

    If a customer is running versioning on its storage, all those versions do not show up in their AWS console, Wagner said. That means they’re paying for them but don’t necessarily have visibility into them.

    If you think of Amazon’s various storage tiers, the old analogy holds. Elastic Block Store (EBS) is your active storage — think flash — while S3 is disk and Glacier is tape. Wagner’s argument is you keep your hot storage in EBS, close to your application, move your less active stuff to S3 and all the rest you cart off to Glacier.

    Cloudyn also introduced a new service that helps track usage of Amazon’s RDS database and recommend when it’s time for a customer to move from pricier on-demand instances to less costly reserved instances that are typically booked in one- and three-year blocks.

    “A database is not the kind of thing that you spin up and down… If a customer has RDS instances they’re not using, we recommend they sell them back to the market. We already do that for EC2 [compute instances.]“

    Cloudyn is one of a half dozen or so companies including Cloudability, Newvem and CloudVertical, that are trying to make money helping customers optimize their use of Amazon infrastructure and minimize their spend. The problem is Amazon itself is coming out with more granular tools to help customers monitor its own services. This week it came out with an email alert system for RDS usage, for example. You can elect to get notifications when your database shuts down or restarts, when a backup starts or ends, or when a failover of a multi-zone instance starts or finishes. Amazon also offers its own Cloudwatch service to provide billing alerts etc.

    But, as Forrester Research analyst Dave Bartoletti pointed out: “Amazon’s tools will get better and better but Amazon has no desire to get you to use less of its services. It’s like in storage — You’d think EMC would be the best vendor of storage management but historically they haven’t been.”

    Bartoletti said this ecosystem of small third parties comes in handy now that many cloud adopters have gotten over the first high of cloud use and need to settle down and get serious about tracking cost and usage. Cloudyn, in his view, has an interesting perspective because of the historical data it keeps about its customers’ use.

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  • Samsung Galaxy S IV Announcement Coming March 15 [RUMOR]

    Though Samsung‘s flagship Android smartphone, the Galaxy S III, has been a huge success for the Korean manufacturer, the company isn’t about to let its dominance of the Android mobile market slip away.

    Rumors last year put the announcement of Samsung’s next Galaxy S phone as early as February or May. Today, the latest rumor puts a more specific date on the announcement.

    SamMobile is reporting that the announcement of the Galaxy S IV will come on March 15. The report cites an unnamed “trusted insider” as stating the new smartphone will go on sale sometime at the beginning of April. Europe and Asia are predicted to get the device first, with the U.S. having to wait for a May or June launch.

    Though the invitations for the announcement event are expected to go out this month after the Mobile World Congress conference, the location of the announcement is still secret, even from the anonymous source. Last year’s announcement of the Galaxy S III took place on May 3 in London.

    SamMobile is the same website that provided the supposedly leaked image of the Galaxy S IV back at the beginning of January. The device is rumored to have close to a five-inch screen with a 1920 x 1080 resolution.

    (via BGR)

  • The cell phone recycling kiosk is slowly invading malls near you

    ecoATMJust got the iPhone 5, and don’t know what to do with your perfectly fine iPhone 4? (Jerk). Well, there’s a growing amount of cell phone recycling kiosks coming to malls near you that will pay you cash for your discarded gadgets. ecoATM, a startup that is building out these networks, has just raised $41 million in debt and options, according to a filing, which could help it start pushing out a much higher volume of these kiosks.

    Five-year-old ecoATM’s kiosks use technology to identify the recycled item (like your basically new iPhone), quantify its condition and worth, and offer you compensation in cash or coupons. The company has about 300 kiosks across 20 states as of now, spokeswoman Anita Giani tells me, which is up from the 50 kiosks they had installed about a year ago.

    That’s steady growth, though a bit slower ramp up than they had expected a few years ago. But Giani says that ecoATM is looking to install hundreds of kiosks more this year, and has also expanded the types of devices it can accept to recently to include tablets.

    ecoATM’s kiosks also have wireless connections, and the boxes use software from startup Axeda to run diagnostics and do remote management. The company can do remote software refreshes on its kiosks, and it can also fix any problems with the kiosks without having to send a technician in person out to each kiosk.

    ecoATMThis debt round is separate from the company’s previous equity rounds. Before that Series B, ecoATM had also raised $14.4 million Series A round in early 2011. The company has a set of strategic backers that could be a strong asset to get its kiosks into more stores, including change kiosk giant Coinstar, Oakland venture firm Claremont Creek Ventures, Tao Ventures, and Singapore billionaire Koh Boon Hwee.

    I’ve been watching the company’s site for a few years, and it’s now added a lot more information about the technology and methods they are using to combat theft. The problem with the kiosks is that if someone steals a new iPhone, and takes it to the kiosk, it could provide an easy way to get cash for the stolen device. After a friend’s phone was stolen recently in San Francisco, the police actually told her to go down to check an area that had recycling options, as it wasn’t uncommon for phones to end up there.

    ecoATM says to fight theft, they have established methods like: requiring a drivers license to recycle goods, the recycler has to be 18 or over, the recycler gives a thumbprint, the devices are kept for 14 days as a precaution, the kiosks use remote cameras to take photos of and monitor the recycler, and serial numbers are kept of the devices to check against reported stolen goods.

    This story was updated at 9:308AM to confirm that ecoATM’s debt round was separate from its former equity rounds.

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  • House Intelligence Committee Collaborating With Obama Administration On New CISPA

    CISPA was one of the more worrisome Internet-related bills of 2012. It threatened the online privacy of just about everyone by allowing corporations to share information with governments in the hopes of sniffing out cyber threats. The House approved bill died while waiting for a vote from the Senate, but it looks like it will be back this year with some new protections in tow.

    The Hill reports that Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, is partnering with Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers to re-introduce CISPA into the house this year. The original CISPA was threatened with a veto from the White House, but Ruppersberger hopes to avoid that this year by working directly with White House staff in the crafting of the bill.

    What kind of cybersecurity bill can we expect from a collaboration between the House and the Obama administration? It’s too early to tell, but Ruppersberger says that his team is “working with the White House to to make sure that hopefully they can be more supportive of our bill than they were last time.” These discussions with the White House are reportedly “working pretty well.”

    For the bill to have support from the White House, it will have to feature more of the privacy protections found in the Senate’s CSA. Both CISPA and CSA raised concern over their lack of privacy protections, but the White House seemed to favor CSA.

    The reemergence of CISPA is only the beginning of a year that will be putting a lot of emphasis on cybersecurity. The U.S. is already gearing up for what could turn into massive offensives that are carried out online. Calls for a cybersecurity bill that sets ground rules for what the nation can and can not do will only continue to grow as the year goes on.

  • AdSense Lets You Add Notes To Keep Track Of Account Changes

    Back in October, Google announced some changes to AdSense performance reports to improve usability and make the reports more visually compelling. One of the changes involved the ability to view changes to an account in more detail with the “Show events” checkbox or a separate event report.

    “Change events are automatically generated and are shown as small flags on your reporting graphs,” explains AdSense product manager Matt Goodridge. “Those annotations help you keep track of the actions you’ve taken in your account, like adding a new ad unit or blocking an additional category, and help you determine the impact of your changes.”

    Based on user feedback, Google has made some further changes.

    “In addition to these automatically generated events, you can now also manually add notes you want to keep track of,” says Goodridge. “This will allow you to find out whether actions which aren’t directly related to your AdSense account, like a website redesign or an advertising campaign for your site, may have had an impact on your earnings. Every user can see all the notes which have been added to an account by other users and can add, edit, and delete their own customized notes.”

    Users can add personalized annotations by going to “Performance reports,” and viewing the changes as an overlay or a separate event report. From there, click “Add note” and you’re all set.