March 2012

No More Innovation for the Fun of It

The Internet, with companies sniping at one another and blithely ignoring major privacy violations, is on the verge of the same fate as the true-blue American industries before it: losing its sense of fun.

Take Apple. When Steven P. Jobs and Steve Wozniak started the company, they were just a couple of guys tinkering with technology. Now Apple is a machine that seems unwilling to stop at anything to win. It’s not just the big companies either. I’m increasingly wary of downloading an app, or signing up for a new service or Web site, for fear that the creator had an ulterior motive. Does Angry Birds really need to take my address book when I install it on my phone? Will I really want to see constant warnings popping up to tell me an app is taking this or that bit of once-private data? For many other people, the privacy debate is eroding trust on the Internet. Entrepreneurs routinely begin talking about the mission of their company by explaining that something is broken: banking, travel, chores, education — even fun can be made more fun. More often than not, these entrepreneurs are right and have solutions to make the world a better place. But for the technology companies that started out with this same goal to innovate and make things better for people, it seems as if the fate that befell the auto, airline and phone industries is destined to happen here, too. And that’s not much fun.

Finding Your Book Interrupted ... By the Tablet You Read It On

People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.

E-mail lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away. That adds up to a reading experience that is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity. And some of the millions of consumers who have bought tablets and sampled e-books on apps from Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble have come away with a conclusion: It’s harder then ever to sit down and focus on reading.

Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls

Welcome to the brave new world of Massive Open Online Courses — known as MOOCs — a tool for democratizing higher education.

While the vast potential of free online courses has excited theoretical interest for decades, in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree. And in what some see as a threat to traditional institutions, several of these courses now come with an informal credential (though that, in most cases, will not be free). For many of the early partisans, the professed goal is more about changing the world than about making money. But Udemy, a startup with backing from the founders of Groupon, is hoping that wide use of its site could ultimately generate profits. And Udacity, which is supported by Charles River Ventures, plans to, essentially, monetize its students’ skills — and help them get jobs — by getting their permission to sell leads to recruiters.

Apple’s Job Creation Data Spurs an Economic Debate

The accuracy of the Apple jobs calculation in the United States may well be debated among economists for years.

“Apple has a big effect, and big is about as precise as I can make it,” said Gary P. Pisano, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. “It’s hard to say the exact size.” David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that the “entire business of claiming ‘direct and indirect’ job creation is disreputable” because most of the workers Apple is taking credit for would have been employed elsewhere in the company’s absence. “But of course, they might not have been as well paid or gratified with their work,” Autor said. “We’ll never know.” Autor also said that Apple should not be held accountable for employment problems in the United States. “Generating the conditions that give rise to high rates of employment and wage growth is the domain of policy makers, not individual companies,” he said.

Limbaugh Advertisers Flee Show Amid Storm

Emboldened by Rush Limbaugh’s public apology over the weekend to a law school student whom he had called a “slut” and a “prostitute,” critics of the radio talk show host are intensifying their online campaign against his advertisers.

The apology, they said, was a signal that the campaign was working. Over the weekend, a seventh company, ProFlowers, said that it was suspending all of its advertising on “The Rush Limbaugh Show” despite his apologetic statement. For now, the ad boycott is uncomfortable but not crippling for Limbaugh, who is estimated to make $50 million a year and whose program is a profit center for Premiere Radio Networks, the company that syndicates it. The program makes money both through ads and through fees paid by local radio stations, and while it often has sparked outrage during more than two decades on the air, efforts at ad boycotts in the past have had no measurable effect. Liberal groups and activists, however, hope that this time is different.

DVRs and Streaming Prompt a Shift in the Top-Rated TV Shows

For almost a decade, identifying the most popular show on television has been easy: “American Idol,” case closed. But that conclusion is not a given anymore, and not only because the numbers for “Idol” have plummeted this winter.

The daily ratings are in many ways a mirage now, sure to change significantly once the people who time-shift their television viewing are taken into account. In fact, because of that behavior, there has been a change in the standings. Among the group that determines much of the revenue of the television business, viewers ages 18 to 49, ABC’s “Modern Family” now is the most popular show on television. No other show on television comes close to that comedy in adding 18- to 49-year-old viewers who record shows and watch them later. So far this season, new episodes of “Modern Family” have grown from a first-day average of 7.1 million viewers in that age group to 10.2 million, counting seven days’ worth of added viewing — a gain of 3.1 million each week, according to Nielsen Research. These time-shifters, though, cannot be counted in the overnight ratings, where “Modern Family” tends to trail both “Idol” and NBC’s “The Voice.”

News Corp Staving Off a Scandal

On Feb 27, British investigators said that News Corporation’s British tabloid, The Sun, had participated in widespread bribery to “a network of corrupted officials.” Then on Feb 29, the widening inquiry into illegal activity at News Corporation’s British newspapers led to James Murdoch’s resignation as head of the company’s embattled British publishing unit. What happened back in New York? News Corporation’s stock went up.

The wave of incriminating headlines and the surging stock price reflect the cognitive dissonance generated by News Corporation’s phone hacking scandal. Even while Rupert Murdoch, the company’s chairman and chief executive, has doubled down on one of the newspapers at the center of the worsening scandal, creating a new Sunday edition of The Sun, investors have been cheering the possibility that the negative news in Britain could prompt the company to spin off its newspapers.

News Corp. Probe Turns to Russia

Apparently, a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe into News Corp . has turned to a former Russian subsidiary, seeking to determine whether a billboard company called News Outdoor Russia paid bribes to local officials to approve sign placements in that country.

The investigation opens another legal front for the New York-based media conglomerate. News Corp. is trying to contain the damage from scandals over newsgathering tactics at its British newspapers unit, including admitted hacking into voice mails of people in the news and allegations of bribes paid to police and other officials. As is often the case in foreign-corruption probes by the FBI, investigators are trying to establish whether any overseas units of News Corp. engaged in corrupt acts or bribery, and, if so, whether those acts were part of a pattern of corruption that reached across countries and business units.

Actress’s Privacy Lawsuit Challenges the Internet Movie Database

Junie Hoang is famous now, in a 15-minutes sort of way. She’s suing the Internet Movie Database and its parent, Amazon, for disclosing her age, 41, in an online profile.

Hoang’s lawsuit against IMDb and Amazon, filed last October in the United States District Court in Seattle, is promising to become a drawn-out battle that may expose more than the ire of an actress who claims her career was damaged by the revelation that she is older than she looks. As the suit proceeds, the discovery process could show how IMDb, a vast repository of movie and television information that has become Hollywood’s quasi-official record book, compiles the facts and figures by which people in the entertainment industry are publicly defined. If Hoang’s lawyers prevail, moreover, the case may provide a road map for others who believe they have been abused by the biggest data collector in the film industry.

Plans for 'TV Everywhere' Bog Down in Tangled Pacts

It was dubbed "TV Everywhere." But for many TV viewers, it has had trouble going anywhere. Nearly three years after Time Warner and Comcast kicked off a drive to make cable programming available online for cable subscribers, the idea of TV Everywhere remains mired in technical holdups, slow deal-making and disputes over who will control TV customers in the future. Now some media executives say the effort, aimed at insulating cable television against a rising tide of cheap online video alternatives, risks getting left behind—a concern that found voice last week at two different industry conferences. While some cable programming is available online, much isn't, or is available only to subscribers of certain pay-TV providers. That is because TV Everywhere—which is a concept, not a specific service—requires a lot of deal-making.

Benton

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