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Saturday, August 31, 2013

Lawmakers Respond on Twitter to Obama’s Statement on a Syria Vote

Both chambers of Congress are on recess, and many of their members are far from Washington. But the distance did not stop some of them from responding to President Obama’s statement on Saturday afternoon that he would seek Congressional authorization before launching a military strike in response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Many representatives and senators took to Twitter with their reactions.

Some lawmakers expressed gratitude for the president’s announcement that he would wait for them to debate and vote on a strike, including Representatives Billy Long, Republican of Missouri, and Yvette D. Clarke, Democrat of New York:

Others offered more measured words for the president, reflecting controversies over the extent of the executive branch’s powers. Representative Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, who has taken a leading role in debates over government surveillance, summed up his gratitude this way:

And at least one congressman, Representative Randy Weber, a Republican who filled Ron Paul’s seat in Texas, used Twitter to solicit opinions on the president’s statement:

One question that remained unresolved was when Congress would debate and vote. With Congress out of session until Sept. 9, several lawmakers expressed their willingness to return early:

Whether the House and Senate leaders take them up on their offers remains to be seen. Either way, Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, warned, President Obama would face a difficult debate:



Lawmakers Respond on Twitter to Obama’s Statement on a Syria Vote

Both chambers of Congress are on recess, and many of their members are far from Washington. But the distance did not stop some of them from responding to President Obama’s statement on Saturday afternoon that he would seek Congressional authorization before launching a military strike in response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Many representatives and senators took to Twitter with their reactions.

Some lawmakers expressed gratitude for the president’s announcement that he would wait for them to debate and vote on a strike, including Representatives Billy Long, Republican of Missouri, and Yvette D. Clarke, Democrat of New York:

Others offered more measured words for the president, reflecting controversies over the extent of the executive branch’s powers. Representative Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, who has taken a leading role in debates over government surveillance, summed up his gratitude this way:

And at least one congressman, Representative Randy Weber, a Republican who filled Ron Paul’s seat in Texas, used Twitter to solicit opinions on the president’s statement:

One question that remained unresolved was when Congress would debate and vote. With Congress out of session until Sept. 9, several lawmakers expressed their willingness to return early:

Whether the House and Senate leaders take them up on their offers remains to be seen. Either way, Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, warned, President Obama would face a difficult debate:



Stealth Wear, Coming to a Store Near You

A promotional video from Adam Harvey and Johanna Bloomfield for the OFF Pocket sheath.

Stealth wear, clothing and accessories created to protect their wearers from surveillance, has largely been an abstract concept. Most designs are created as prototypes, not items that can be purchased in a department or drug store.

But Adam Harvey, one of the designers interested in developing countersurveillance fashion, is working to bring some of his ideas, which include anti-drone detection hoodies, to the mainstream.

He recently created a project on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding site, to see if he could drum up enough interest to finance a cellphone accessory, the OFF Pocket, which looks like a small sheath for a mobile device. It works as an electromagnetic barrier, functioning as something known as a Faraday cage, a space where radio waves cannot pass through, preventing the penetration of signals that transmit data and audio. It replicates the refrigerator trick that Edward J. Snowden used to keep his cellphone from transmitting information about where he was staying.

Mr. Harvey and his design partner, Johanna Bloomfield, originally set out with the modest goal of raising $35,000, enough to manufacture a small line of their phone protectors. But the project hit its goal in seven days; it currently has close to $60,000 pledged through the site. Nearly 600 OFF Pockets have been ordered, he said.

Mr. Harvey attributes the swell of interest in the project to the rising awareness of privacy and security concerns.

“People are more aware about what kind of tracking is going on and much more interested in ways to learn about privacy,” he said.

Mr. Harvey said he had been working on the concept for the OFF Pocket since 2011. The first version  was designed as a permanent pocket in a pair of his jeans. The smartphone sleeves currently cost $85 each, but Mr. Harvey hopes to begin manufacturing enough of them to bring the cost down.

Mr. Harvey said that he could not afford to hire an outside firm to extensively test the effectiveness of his products, but that he tested them himself with most of the popular smartphones and major wireless carriers.

The design, which weaves together a number of different metal and nylon materials, “works like a metal cage but is entirely flexible and made of fabric,” he said.

“Everything bounces off,” he said. “Inside, there’s zero signal.”

Mr. Harvey is also working on a collaboration with the New Museum, an arts organization in New York, on a “privacy gift shop,” that will run through Sept. 23.

The New Museum, via Instagram

A view of the privacy gift shop in New York.

Mr. Harvey said his ultimate goal was to start a company to sell his line of privacy designs and products.

“This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a while,” he said. “There’s a big opportunity for anyone making privacy products to get their name out right now.”



Stealth Wear, Coming to a Store Near You

A promotional video from Adam Harvey and Johanna Bloomfield for the OFF Pocket sheath.

Stealth wear, clothing and accessories created to protect their wearers from surveillance, has largely been an abstract concept. Most designs are created as prototypes, not items that can be purchased in a department or drug store.

But Adam Harvey, one of the designers interested in developing countersurveillance fashion, is working to bring some of his ideas, which include anti-drone detection hoodies, to the mainstream.

He recently created a project on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding site, to see if he could drum up enough interest to finance a cellphone accessory, the OFF Pocket, which looks like a small sheath for a mobile device. It works as an electromagnetic barrier, functioning as something known as a Faraday cage, a space where radio waves cannot pass through, preventing the penetration of signals that transmit data and audio. It replicates the refrigerator trick that Edward J. Snowden used to keep his cellphone from transmitting information about where he was staying.

Mr. Harvey and his design partner, Johanna Bloomfield, originally set out with the modest goal of raising $35,000, enough to manufacture a small line of their phone protectors. But the project hit its goal in seven days; it currently has close to $60,000 pledged through the site. Nearly 600 OFF Pockets have been ordered, he said.

Mr. Harvey attributes the swell of interest in the project to the rising awareness of privacy and security concerns.

“People are more aware about what kind of tracking is going on and much more interested in ways to learn about privacy,” he said.

Mr. Harvey said he had been working on the concept for the OFF Pocket since 2011. The first version  was designed as a permanent pocket in a pair of his jeans. The smartphone sleeves currently cost $85 each, but Mr. Harvey hopes to begin manufacturing enough of them to bring the cost down.

Mr. Harvey said that he could not afford to hire an outside firm to extensively test the effectiveness of his products, but that he tested them himself with most of the popular smartphones and major wireless carriers.

The design, which weaves together a number of different metal and nylon materials, “works like a metal cage but is entirely flexible and made of fabric,” he said.

“Everything bounces off,” he said. “Inside, there’s zero signal.”

Mr. Harvey is also working on a collaboration with the New Museum, an arts organization in New York, on a “privacy gift shop,” that will run through Sept. 23.

The New Museum, via Instagram

A view of the privacy gift shop in New York.

Mr. Harvey said his ultimate goal was to start a company to sell his line of privacy designs and products.

“This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a while,” he said. “There’s a big opportunity for anyone making privacy products to get their name out right now.”



Friday, August 30, 2013

Judge Says Search Warrants for E-mails Must Be ‘Limited’

Can law enforcement obtain a search warrant to dig through a vast trove of e-mails, instant messages and chat logs because they have reasonable suspicion that the owners of those accounts robbed computer equipment from a private company?

No, according to a ruling by a federal judge in Kansas earlier this week.

The case is significant in that it limits what constitutes unreasonable search and seizure, as protected by the Fourth Amendment, in the age of big data. The magistrate judge, David J. Waxse, denied the government’s search warrant requests on the grounds that it has to be particular and “reasonable in nature of breadth.”

Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University and an expert on surveillance law, interpreted it this way on Twitter: “You can’t look through the kitchen sink to get the evidence, as you do with physical searches.”

Prosecutors sought search warrants to extract information from Verizon, an Internet service provider, GoDaddy, a Web site hosting company, along with Web communications companies Google, Skype and Yahoo on account holders suspected of having stolen $5,000 in computer equipment from Sprint.

The government believed that the suspects used e-mail and instant-message accounts to “facilitate the purchase, receipt and transportation of the equipment” from Kansas to New Jersey. The government sought “contents of all emails, instant messages and chat logs/sessions â€" and other account-related information” for the named suspects.

The judge balked.

If the authorities are looking for a stolen lawn mower in a garage, he wrote, citing a previous case involving search warrants of physical property, they can’t get a search warrant that covers the upstairs bedroom.

“The manifest purpose of the Fourth Amendment particularity requirement is to prevent general searches. By limiting the authorization to search the specific areas and things for which there is probable cause to search, the particularity requirement ensures that the search will be carefully tailored to its justifications, and will not become a wide-ranging, exploratory search prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.”

The judge went on to say that the government’s search order ought to have “sufficient limits or boundaries” to the communications that law enforcement officials can rifle through. He suggested that the search order be limited to certain keywords or that an independent vendor be asked to automate the process of finding relevant material.

That is to say, use data-mining techniques to not rummage through everything.



Daily Report: Start-Ups That Could Be the Next Big Thing

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Microsoft Cuts Deal With Activist Shareholder to Avoid Fight

The saga of Steve Ballmer’s departure/retirement from Microsoft continued Friday with an agreement between Microsoft and an activist shareholder, ValueAct Capital, that averts a potentially nasty battle over the company’s lagging performance.

Microsoft said in a statement that it has signed a “cooperation agreement” with ValueAct for regular meetings between G. Mason Morfit, president of ValueAct Capital, and Microsoft’s board and management to “discuss a range of significant business issues.” More significantly, the deal gives Mr. Morfit the option of joining Microsoft’s board, which he is likely to do in early 2014, during the company’s quarterly board meeting.

The deal comes exactly a week after Microsoft announced that Mr. Ballmer, its chief executive, will retire from the company within the next 12 months after a successor is found. It is widely believed that pressure on Microsoft’s board from ValueAct played a role in speeding Mr. Ballmer’s departure, though Microsoft has downplayed a connection between the two.

ValueAct, a San Francisco investment firm with $12 billion in assets under management, owns only a small chunk of Microsoft’s stock, about 0.8 percent of its outstanding shares. But Rick Sherlund, an analyst at Nomura Securities who was the first to report on ValueAct in a research report back in May, has said that ValueAct could have banded together with other shareholders dissatisfied with the performance of Microsoft’s stock. Had Microsoft resisted ValueAct’s efforts, the investors could have mounted a public fight, known as a proxy battle, to nominate a representative to the company’s board.

The timing of Microsoft’s announcement of the deal â€" late Friday before a long weekend â€" appeared calculated to minimize the attention it would receive. It also coincided with a deadline by which ValueAct had to notify Microsoft of its intentions to begin a proxy fight.

“Our board and management team are committed to enhancing growth and value for Microsoft shareholders, and we look forward to ValueAct Capital’s input,” Microsoft said in its statement.

By announcing plans for Mr. Ballmer’s departure last week, Microsoft has already made a major concession to ValueAct on one of the issues believed to be on its agenda. Among other shareholder demands is a big increase in the company’s dividends.

George F. Hamel Jr., a founder of ValueAct, did not respond to a request for comment on the firm’s plans. Mr. Morfit said in a statement: “At this critical inflection point in the company’s evolution, I look forward to actively working together with the board and Microsoft’s management team to continue to create value for all shareholders.”

Microsoft and many of its shareholders have been at odds for years. The conflict stems in large part from the long-term investments Microsoft has made in areas like Internet search, which Mr. Ballmer and the company’s board have argued are essential to Microsoft’s future. Investors have been frustrated, though, with the lack of traction that many of Microsoft’s newer initiatives have gained.

In an interview before Microsoft announced its agreement with ValueAct, Mr. Sherlund said he believed the company’s board was finally showing signs of being more receptive to input from shareholders.

“I think you are seeing a monumental shift in corporate governance under way at Microsoft,” Mr. Sherlund said. “Now they are open to talking to shareholders.”



Today’s Scuttlebot: Skype a Decade Later and Why There Aren’t Enough Women in Tech

Every day, The New York Times’s staff scours the Web for interesting and peculiar items.

Here’s what we noticed today:

Skype a Decade Later
GigaOM |  On Skype’s 10th birthday, an argument for why Microsoft is muffling the Internet calling service. - Nick Wingfield

This Is Why There Aren’t Enough Women in Tech
Valleywag |  An eye-popping collection of horror stories from women who pursued computer science in college. - Damon Darlin

Twitter Executive to Leave
Bricoleur |  Alex MacGillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, announced that he was planning to step down. - Ashwin Seshagiri (Related Bits post.)

Google Acquired WIMM Labs to Bolster Its Own Smartwatch Plans
GigaOM |  Move over, Glass. Google’s smartwatch ambitions get more serious. - Claire Cain Miller

New Faces of Android: Inside Google’s Management Shuffle
The Verge |  An inside look at what the departure of Hugo Barra, “a rare friendly face” at Android, means for Google’s mobile team - Claire Cain Miller

Role Models Who Reach for the Stars
The Financial Times |  Is Marissa Mayer doing a disservice to women by describing herself as a geeky coder who never intended to lead? - Claire Cain Miller (Subscription required.)

In the Serengeti, Getting Close to Lions With Technology
Fast Company |  A new interactive feature from National Geographic partly uses robots with cameras to capture lions from the Serengeti in their element. - Ashwin Seshagiri

Facebook Tests ‘Trending’ Section in News Feed
The Wall Street Journal Digits Blog |  Two months after introducing hashtags, Facebook is experimenting with ways to make them useful in a trending section. - Ashwin Seshagiri

Covering the Syria Crisis
Syria Deeply |  Journalists and technologists tell you what you need to know about the crisis in Syria, melding quick hits and long reads - Somini Sengupta



Today’s Scuttlebot: Prisoners Imagine the Internet

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Apple Expands iPhone Trade-In Program to Its Stores

Apple is trying to give people another reason to come to its elegant retail stores: Trading in old iPhones for a store credit toward a new phone.

Apple has offered a trade-in program for years through its Web site, but on Friday the company confirmed it would begin accepting older iPhones in its brick-and-mortar stores.

“IPhones hold great value,” said Amy Bessette, an Apple spokeswoman. “So, Apple retail stores are launching a new program to assist customers who wish to bring in their previous-generation iPhone for reuse or recycling. In addition to helping support the environment, customers will be able to receive a credit for their returned phone that they can use toward the purchase of a new iPhone.”

Apple has teamed up with Brightstar, a company that buys and resells used electronics, to handle the trade-in program.

Ms. Bessette declined to say how much money customers could get for their used iPhones. But on Apple’s Web site, a used iPhone 5 in good condition, with 16 gigabytes of storage and accessories included, goes for $336.

The trade-in program serves to benefit Apple not just by keeping iPhone customers loyal: It gives people an incentive to buy an iPhone straight from an Apple store, instead of other outlets like an AT&T and T-Mobile US store or even a Best Buy. Those stores also offer trade-in programs.

Why bother luring people to the Apple stores? Along with a new iPhone, customers might want to pick up other Apple products. Apple’s retail employees could also persuade customers to pay for its Apple Care warranty program for protecting against damage, competing with Best Buy’s warranty program for iPhones.

What remains to be seen is how Apple will implement the trade-in program without harming the experience of shopping at an Apple store. The company is famous for attracting long lines to its stores whenever a new iPhone is released. If employees have to evaluate older iPhones that are being traded in, it could slow down the lines, driving people to other stores.



Twitter General Counsel Leaves as Company Prepares to Go Public

Alex MacGillivray, Twitter’s chief lawyer and the Internet industry’s most prominent champion of free speech rights, announced on Friday that he would step down from his post, as the company expands its global footprint and prepares for a widely anticipated public offering sometime next year.

The company announced the appointment of a new general counsel, Vijaya Gadde, who had managed the company’s corporate affairs for the last two years. Mr. MacGillivray, better known as AMac, said he would continue in an advisory role.

On his personal blog, he wrote: “I’m looking forward to engaging my various internet passions from new and different perspectives, seeing friends and family without distraction, and just goofing off a bit. We should all do more of that.”

Mr. MacGillivray, who worked at Google before joining Twitter, has won accolades from civil libertarians for advocating for the rights of users and for often resisting requests for information about its users. It pushed back against a court order in 2011 to reveal names of WikiLeaks supporters, including by informing users that their information was being sought.

He has not always been successful. Most recently, Twitter agreed to identify several users who posted anti-Semitic comments on its service, and whom French authorities sought to prosecute for violating that country’s anti-hate laws.

Mr. MacGillivray’s departure comes at a time when Twitter is positioning itself as a multinational company, with offices and data servers around the world and pressure to comply with government requests for user data.

“It’s got enough impact now that governments around the world are going to want it on speed dial and are going to be seeking cooperation on a variety of fronts because Twitter now is such a vector for communications, particularly fast-breaking communications,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor.

Twitter will inevitably have to confront how it balances its business interests with its advocacy of free speech, he added. “You can’t lightly alienate important governments. Figuring out how to reconcile that with desire to promote free of speech, that’s a big corporate question.”

Indeed, the company’s public policy department will now report directly to its chief executive, Dick Costolo, rather than to the new general counsel, as it had in the past, a company spokesman said.

Previously as a lawyer for Google, Mr. MacGillivray pioneered the issuance of semi-annual reports on government requests for user data. Google started the trend several years ago; Twitter followed last year and most recently, so did Microsoft and Facebook.

The general counsel’s office also will be facing a mountain of legal paperwork in connection with the company’s initial public offering.

Ms. Gadde, who has a corporate background, is well positioned to head those efforts. She specialized in corporate and securities law at the Silicon Valley firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati for 10 years before leaving to work at Juniper Networks, a computer security company, and, in July 2011, joining Twitter.

“It’s a ton of work to take a company through an I.P.O., and he may have thought rather than take on that challenge, it’s time for someone else to take it on,” said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University.



Twitter General Counsel Leaves as Company Prepares to Go Public

Alex MacGillivray, Twitter’s chief lawyer and the Internet industry’s most prominent champion of free speech rights, announced on Friday that he would step down from his post, as the company expands its global footprint and prepares for a widely anticipated public offering sometime next year.

The company announced the appointment of a new general counsel, Vijaya Gadde, who had managed the company’s corporate affairs for the last two years. Mr. MacGillivray, better known as AMac, said he would continue in an advisory role.

On his personal blog, he wrote: “I’m looking forward to engaging my various internet passions from new and different perspectives, seeing friends and family without distraction, and just goofing off a bit. We should all do more of that.”

Mr. MacGillivray, who worked at Google before joining Twitter, has won accolades from civil libertarians for advocating for the rights of users and for often resisting requests for information about its users. It pushed back against a court order in 2011 to reveal names of WikiLeaks supporters, including by informing users that their information was being sought.

He has not always been successful. Most recently, Twitter agreed to identify several users who posted anti-Semitic comments on its service, and whom French authorities sought to prosecute for violating that country’s anti-hate laws.

Mr. MacGillivray’s departure comes at a time when Twitter is positioning itself as a multinational company, with offices and data servers around the world and pressure to comply with government requests for user data.

“It’s got enough impact now that governments around the world are going to want it on speed dial and are going to be seeking cooperation on a variety of fronts because Twitter now is such a vector for communications, particularly fast-breaking communications,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor.

Twitter will inevitably have to confront how it balances its business interests with its advocacy of free speech, he added. “You can’t lightly alienate important governments. Figuring out how to reconcile that with desire to promote free of speech, that’s a big corporate question.”

Indeed, the company’s public policy department will now report directly to its chief executive, Dick Costolo, rather than to the new general counsel, as it had in the past, a company spokesman said.

Previously as a lawyer for Google, Mr. MacGillivray pioneered the issuance of semi-annual reports on government requests for user data. Google started the trend several years ago; Twitter followed last year and most recently, so did Microsoft and Facebook.

The general counsel’s office also will be facing a mountain of legal paperwork in connection with the company’s initial public offering.

Ms. Gadde, who has a corporate background, is well positioned to head those efforts. She specialized in corporate and securities law at the Silicon Valley firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati for 10 years before leaving to work at Juniper Networks, a computer security company, and, in July 2011, joining Twitter.

“It’s a ton of work to take a company through an I.P.O., and he may have thought rather than take on that challenge, it’s time for someone else to take it on,” said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University.



Verizon in Talks to Buy Vodafone’s Stake in Its Wireless Unit

Updated, 8:27 p.m. | With a majority of Americans using Verizon Wireless for their cellphone service, it may not seem obvious that almost half of Verizon is owned by a company overseas.

That could soon change. Vodafone, the British telecommunications giant, has confirmed that it is in talks to sell to Verizon Communications its 45 percent stake in Verizon Wireless, a deal that analysts say could be worth at least $125 billion.

For Verizon, this has been a long-sought deal, one that would rank among the biggest purchases in history. With complete ownership of its wireless business, the company would be able to shift from receiving dividends to being able to fully incorporate all of its profit. And it will have full control over what it does with that profit, especially as advertisers, content distributors and wireless carriers increasingly use smartphones, mobile data and information services.

In theory, having complete ownership of the wireless venture would allow Verizon to integrate its businesses more tightly, which might lead to better deals on bundles with wireline and wireless products.

At least in the short term, Verizon customers would be unlikely to see much difference in their service. “The impact from a consumer perspective will be negligible,” said Jan Dawson, a telecom analyst for Ovum.

But it is clear why Verizon would want complete ownership of its wireless division. The lucrative wireless industry, already worth $1.6 trillion, is expected to become a multitrillion-dollar market in the next decade, said Chetan Sharma, an independent telecom analyst who does consulting for carriers.

With 10 billion connections worldwide, the number of cellular subscriptions is on track to outgrow the human population. That is because in addition to cellphones, many other devices, like tablets, video game devices and even home security systems, are now all relying on cell towers to deliver information, entertainment and media to consumers.

Verizon is still the No. 1 cellphone carrier in the United States by market share, but it faces formidable competition from AT&T, the No. 2 carrier. The smaller carriers, Sprint and T-Mobile USA, offer lower-cost phone and data plans to try to compete, but to little avail â€" AT&T and Verizon still account for two-thirds of overall subscribers.

Verizon’s core strategy has been to invest more in network infrastructure to attract customers with the best technology. For instance, it is leading the industrywide race in building a faster fourth-generation wireless network, called LTE. Verizon has LTE covering 500 markets; AT&T has LTE in about 370 markets.

Verizon, one of the last so-called Baby Bells that trace their origins to the breakup of AT&T, has banked on wireless as a central part of its future. Today, a majority of Verizon’s revenue comes from its wireless business. In the second quarter this year, Verizon Wireless brought in $20 billion of Verizon’s total $29.8 billion in revenue.

For the most part, Vodafone has been an unseen partner all these years, happily taking in its cut of the profits via the dividend that its 45 percent stake in the wireless venture has provided. The relationship is one that dates back to the telecom mergers in the 1990s. Bell Atlantic had merged with GTE to become Verizon Communications. Vodafone had acquired AirTouch, an American wireless company. Verizon merged its wireless business with Vodafone’s acquired assets of AirTouch so that combined, they could become a bigger player.

For years, there was speculation that Vodafone would want to get out of the business so it could concentrate on its European operations, but the right price and tax implications of any deal had always held up any definitive agreement.

This year, however, Verizon said it could structure any potential transaction to limit Vodafone’s tax liabilities. Despite speculation this year about a potential deal, no acquisition for Verizon Wireless materialized, and Verizon said in April that it did not have plans to merge or make an offer for all of Vodafone.

Analysts said any prospective deal now would likely involve a cash-and-stock offer that would give Vodafone roughly a 30 percent stake in Verizon.

Vodafone’s chief executive, Vittorio Colao, has previously said that he was open to selling the holding in Verizon Wireless, though the company confirmed only on Thursday that it was in talks about a potential deal. A final deal could be announced as early next week, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

If Verizon and Vodafone were to reach an agreement, each company would have to take on a different outlook for the American phone business, said Craig Moffett, an analyst for Moffett Research.

To justify the billions it would have to pay, Verizon would have to be confident that the growth of Verizon Wireless would remain strong, he said. By contrast, Vodafone would have to believe that the American wireless business is stagnating and that Verizon Wireless cannot grow much more.

“For investors, the pertinent question is therefore: Which outlook do you believe?” Mr. Moffett said in a research note.

At least initially, investors seemed to support the news of the talks. Shares in Vodafone closed up 8 percent in trading in London on Thursday. Its stock price, however, has fallen around 40 percent since the Verizon Wireless partnership was established in 1999.

Verizon’s shareholders, too, seemed enthusiastic about the prospect of a deal. Its shares were up about 2.7 percent, even though it would have to pay, and borrow, billions, to make the purchase happen.

A Vodafone spokesman declined to comment further. A representative for Verizon was not immediately available for comment.

The potential deal would be one of the biggest in the last two decades, trailing only Vodafone’s $202.8 billion takeover of the German cellphone operator Mannesmann in 2000 and the $181.6 billion merger of AOL and Time Warner in 2001, according to Thomson Reuters. (Both figures include the assumption of debt.) And between fees for advising the two companies and for lending money to support the deal, a transaction would be a bonanza for advisers to Verizon and Vodafone.

For Vodafone, the world’s second-largest cellphone operator behind China Mobile, an influx of cash would let it strengthen its core European operations, which have struggled because of the Continent’s financial woes. It would also allow Vodafone’s investors to benefit through share buybacks.

“Vodafone investors are expecting a fairly material payout,” said Paul Marsch, an analyst at Berenberg Bank in London. “They have been waiting for a very long time.”

The healthy earnings at Verizon Wireless stand in contrast to those of Vodafone, which has experienced anemic growth in Europe.

Vodafone reported a 3.5 percent fall, to $15.7 billion, in its so-called joint service revenue â€" a measure of its continuing services that does not include handset sales â€" in the three months that ended June 30.

The decline was the fourth consecutive quarterly drop in revenue, and highlighted persisting weaknesses in the company’s crucial German and British markets.

“Vodafone faces a strategic challenge in its European business,” said Mr. Marsch of Berenberg Bank. By selling its stake in Verizon Wireless, Vodafone could receive a large war chest to finance potential acquisitions and renewed investment in so-called fourth-generation wireless networks.

Vodafone remains either the No. 1 or No. 2 operator in eight of its nine Western European markets, but it is facing increased competition from cable companies like John C. Malone’s Liberty Global, which are offering bundled service packages that include high-speed broadband and telephone services.

Despite its strong market share in mobile phone offerings, analysts say Vodafone needs to improve its operations, particularly in cable, to defend against the ramped-up investment plans of its rivals.

“Vodafone needs to improve its bundled services for its customers,” said Gyanee Dewnarain, a research director at the analyst firm Gartner in London. “People are looking for more value for their money.”

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on 08/30/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Verizon Seeks Rest of Its Wireless Unit.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Protesters Demand Montana Judge Resign Over Rape Sentencing

Angry that a Montana judge sentenced a former teacher who had admitted to raping a 14-year-old student to only a month in jail, several hundred people gathered outside the Yellowstone County Courthouse in Billings on Thursday, demanding that the judge resign. The victim committed suicide three years after the rape, just before her 17th birthday.

The decision by Judge G. Todd Baugh of State District Court on Monday to suspend the teacher’s 15-year prison term, combined with remarks he made about the rape victim during the proceeding, has sparked outrage in Montana and around the country, with online petitions gathering more than 30,000 signatures in a few days. During the sentencing, Judge Baugh said the victim “seemed older than her chronological age” and was “as much in control of the situation” as the teacher.

The death of the victim, Cherice Morales, who was a student of Stacey Dean Rambold, contributed to delays in the prosecution of the case, which was originally filed in 2008.

Judge Baugh later apologized for his remarks, telling The Billings Gazette: “I don’t know what I was thinking or trying to say. It was just stupid and wrong.”

But Marian Bradley, who heads the Montana chapter of the National Organization for Women and helped organize the rally on Thursday, said that the judge needed to step aside and that state lawmakers needed to consider mandatory sentencing for convicted rapists. “It’s highly unusual to get several hundred people to show up for a protest in Billings,” said Ms. Bradley, a longtime rape crisis volunteer. “Everyone here is outraged.”

In an interview with CNN, Auliea Hanlon, the mother of the victim, said she was “floored” by the sentence and by Judge Baugh’s remarks.

A CNN interview with Auliea Hanlon, the mother of the rape victim.

Mr. Rambold, 54, a former technology teacher at Billings Senior High School, pleaded guilty in April to a felony count of sexual intercourse without consent. The charges were first brought in 2008, and his prosecution was deferred in 2010 after Ms. Morales’s suicide raised concerns among prosecutors that a conviction would be difficult to obtain without the victim’s testimony.

Under a three-year agreement, Mr. Rambold attended an outpatient program for sex offenders, and if he had completed it, the charges would have been dismissed. But after he violated the terms of the program last fall, prosecutors brought charges against him again earlier this year and he pleaded guilty to one count, which brought him back to court for sentencing on Monday.



Facebook Post Said to Be by Assad’s Son Dares Americans to Attack

A Facebook post said to have been written by the 11-year-old son of President Bashar al-Assad may offer a glimpse into the defiant worldview of the Syrian elite.Facebook A Facebook post said to have been written by the 11-year-old son of President Bashar al-Assad may offer a glimpse into the defiant worldview of the Syrian elite.

A Facebook post said to be written by the 11-year-old son of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and “liked” or commented on by several people who appear to be the children and grandchildren of other senior members of Mr. Assad’s government, may offer a glimpse into the mindset of Syria’s ruling elite as the country braces for a potential Western strike in response to a chemical weapons attack on Aug. 21.

It is impossible to confirm whether the Facebook account does, in fact, belong to the son, Hafez al-Assad, and aspects of it invite doubt. For example, the owner of the account wrote that he was a graduate of Oxford University and a player for a Barcelona soccer team, neither of which would be likely to appear on the résumé of an 11-year-old boy in Damascus.

But those claims could also be read as the ambitions of a child, and there are reasons to believe that the account may actually belong to Hafez.

The owner of the account wrote that he was a graduate of a Montessori school in Damascus, a detail of the Assad children’s lives that Vogue magazine reported in a February 2011 profile of their mother, Asma al-Assad. That article portrayed them as typical suburban children who played with remote control cars and watched Tim Burton movies on an iMac as they lounged around the family home, described as running “on wildly democratic principles.” It has since been removed from the Vogue Web site, but Joshua Landis, a well-known scholar of Syrian politics, posted a copy to his blog.

Perhaps most significantly, the Facebook post said to have been written by Hafez al-Assad has been “liked” or commented on by several accounts that appear to belong to the children or grandchildren of other senior figures in the Assad administration. Among them are accounts that seemingly belong to two children of Deputy Vice President Mohammed Nassif Khierbek, Ali and Sally, and to three children of a former deputy defense minister, Assef Shawkat, who was killed in a bombing in July 2012.

The accounts said to belong to the children of Mr. Shawkat â€" one of his sons, Bassel, and two of his daughters, Anisseh and Boushra â€" appeared to be authentic, according to a Syrian journalist from Damascus who has extensive knowledge of the country’s ruling elite and spoke on condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns. Mr. Shawkat was married to the sister of Bashar al-Assad, making these three children cousins of Mr. Assad’s son Hafez, who is believed to be the author of the Facebook post.

Many of the people who commented on the post had changed their profile pictures to show portraits of the Syrian leader or his father, also named Hafez, who ruled the country for three decades before Bashar al-Assad took power in 2000. Several of them referenced the author’s relationship to the two President Assads. One referred to the author by a diminutive and familiar nickname, “Hafouz,” and complimented him for his strength and intelligence, writing that such a feat was unsurprising for the son and grandson of the past two presidents. Another commenter wrote: “Like father like son! Well said future President!”

The Facebook post was Facebook The Facebook post was “liked” or commented on by several people who appeared to be the children of other insiders in the Assad regime, including one who referred to the post’s author as a “future president.”
Many of the people who commented on the post had changed their profile pictures to portraits of the Syrian leader.Facebook Many of the people who commented on the post had changed their profile pictures to portraits of the Syrian leader.

If the Facebook post attributed to Mr. Assad’s son is a hoax, it is either a highly elaborate one involving dozens of fake accounts purporting to belong to the children of other regime insiders, or a forgery so impressive that some of those children themselves â€" including the boy’s cousins â€" have been fooled.

Regardless of its provenance, the post appears to illustrate the mindset of Mr. Assad’s core supporters, who have stood by him through more than two years of a grinding war that has killed more than 100,000 Syrians and caused millions more to flee their homes.

The post is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors that would not be unusual for a child, and it may offer a glimpse into the way the country’s leaders â€" or, at the very least, Mr. Assad’s supporters â€" speak to one another and to their families as the specter of foreign military intervention looms.

Judging from the post, supporters of Mr. Assad do not appear to be particularly afraid of the United States.

“They may have the best army in the world, maybe the best airplanes, ships, tanks than ours, but soldiers? No one has soldiers like the ones we do in Syria,” the post’s author wrote of the United States military. “America doesn’t have soldiers, what it has is some cowards with new technology who claim themselves liberators.”

The author then compared the potential American airstrikes to the 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, a close ally of the Assad regime in the current conflict. Many in the Arab world saw Hezbollah as the victor of the 2006 clash.

“I just want them to attack sooo much, because I want them to make this huge mistake of beginning something that they don’t know the end of it,” he wrote. “What did Hezbollah have back then? Some street fighters and some small rockets and a pile of guns, but they had belief, In theirselves and in their country and that’s exactly what’s gonna happen to America if it chooses invasion because they don’t know our land like we do, no one does, victory is ours in the end no matter how much time it takes.”



Tracking the Wildfire Near Yosemite With Online Tools

A handful of online tools are helping people monitor the wildfire burning near Yosemite National Park, which has become the sixth largest wildfire in California’s recorded history.

According to the latest online update from California fire officials, nearly 200,000 acres have been destroyed since the fire began on Aug. 17 in Stanislaus National Forest, but it has not reached the popular tourist destination of Yosemite Valley. Nor has it stopped people from visiting the park, as my colleague Malia Wollan reported. Only parts of the park are temporarily closed.

Mixing satellite images with real-time data, Esri’s interactive map shows the extent of the destruction and the areas under threat, including the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, which is a major source of San Francisco’s water supply.

Mother Jones has produced a Google Earth view on YouTube that shows how the fire has progressed.

A look at how the fire has spread via Google Earth, by Mother Jones.

And a Google crisis map provides both national and local wildfire information for the 2013 fire season.

Southern California Public Radio has produced an online dashboard with the latest information.

Another way to see how the fire has progressed is a time-lapse video produced by Yosemite National Park, with footage from webcams around the park.

A time-lapse video showing the Rim Fire from the official YouTube account of Yosemite National Park.

Then, there’s the old-fashioned webcam view. This one is of alf Dome. It showed clear skies on Thursday, even as the fire was causing air quality problems nearby, keeping schoolchildren inside in Reno and Carson City, Nev.



Tracking the Wildfire Near Yosemite With Online Tools

A handful of online tools are helping people monitor the wildfire burning near Yosemite National Park, which has become the sixth largest wildfire in California’s recorded history.

According to the latest online update from California fire officials, nearly 200,000 acres have been destroyed since the fire began on Aug. 17 in Stanislaus National Forest, but it has not reached the popular tourist destination of Yosemite Valley. Nor has it stopped people from visiting the park, as my colleague Malia Wollan reported. Only parts of the park are temporarily closed.

Mixing satellite images with real-time data, Esri’s interactive map shows the extent of the destruction and the areas under threat, including the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, which is a major source of San Francisco’s water supply.

Mother Jones has produced a Google Earth view on YouTube that shows how the fire has progressed.

A look at how the fire has spread via Google Earth, by Mother Jones.

And a Google crisis map provides both national and local wildfire information for the 2013 fire season.

Southern California Public Radio has produced an online dashboard with the latest information.

Another way to see how the fire has progressed is a time-lapse video produced by Yosemite National Park, with footage from webcams around the park.

A time-lapse video showing the Rim Fire from the official YouTube account of Yosemite National Park.

Then, there’s the old-fashioned webcam view. This one is of alf Dome. It showed clear skies on Thursday, even as the fire was causing air quality problems nearby, keeping schoolchildren inside in Reno and Carson City, Nev.



Facebook to Update Privacy Policy, but Adjusting Settings Is No Easier

Facebook announced Thursday that it planned to enact changes to its privacy policies on Sept. 5.

But the social network’s famously difficult privacy controls will not become any easier to navigate.

Mostly, the new data use policy and statement of rights and responsibilities lay out more clearly the things that Facebook already does with your personal information, Ed Palmieri, the company’s associate general counsel for privacy, said in an interview. “The updates that we are showing in the red lines are our way to better explain the products that exist today,” he said.

In some ways, the company is making it more clear that it uses a wide variety of personal data about its 1.2 billion users to deliver advertising, including things they share and do, what they like, how they interact with ads and applications, and even demographic data inferred from everything else.

Facebook also said that it might use its customers’ profile photos to help their friends tag them in photos. Those photos are already public, but Facebook does not currently use them to help recognize faces when photos are uploaded to the service. “This will make the product better for people,” Mr. Palmieri said. “You can still opt out of it.”

But the company is also deliberately deleting information about specific privacy controls. Instead, Mr. Palmieri said, Facebook decided it was better to send users to various other pages, such as one on advertising, to learn more about privacy issues and how to adjust the controls.

For example, the data use policy will no longer offer a direct path to the control for opting out of your name and activities on the site being used as endorsements on ads sent to your friends.

Facebook is also doing nothing to simplify its maze of privacy settings.The company doesn’t offer clear links or explanations of the settings from its own “Facebook and Privacy” page, and its Graph Search feature isn’t especially helpful for the task, either.

Privacy controls are still buried in at least six different menus. To plunge down the rabbit hole, click on the little lock icon next to your name in the top-left column of your news feed page. You will find privacy settings in the tabs for Privacy, Timeline and Tagging, Blocking, Followers, Apps and Ads.

Mr. Palmieri said the company added one section to its policies in response to its $20 million settlement on Monday of a 2011 lawsuit asserting that the company used its customers’ personal information in advertising without compensation or allowing them to opt out.

The old policy explicitly stated, “You can use your privacy settings to limit how your name and profile picture may be associated with commercial, sponsored, or related content (such as a brand you like) served or enhanced by us.”

Facebook’s new language starts with the opposite position. “You give us permission to use your name, and profile picture, content, and information in connection with commercial, sponsored, or related content (such as a brand you like) served or enhanced by us,” the company said. “If you have selected a specific audience for your content or information, we will respect your choice when we use it.”

Mr. Palmieri said the two versions amount to the same thing.

It brings to mind Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass.” As he told young Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean â€" neither more nor less.”



Reporter’s Notebook: Divining a Start-Up’s Potential

Divining the future potential of a start-up is no easy job. And yet, this is the task that tech reporters take on constantly. We spend a lot of our time trying to figure out which companies, both large and small, are newsworthy and why.

It’s not an exact science â€" more of a balance between intuition and reporting. For clues, we look, in part, to venture capitalists who finance these companies because, after all, they want to bet on winners. These investors say they write checks for entrepreneurs who seem confident, capable and driven by an inner hunger and desire that will carry them to success, and say they often prize these qualities more than the particular idea or company that is involved.

We also, of course, talk to entrepreneurs, who often say a winning idea is one that invents a new way to do something â€" like exchanging messages with your friends or how to find the best restaurant. And we look at data, seeing which companies are gaining users quickly, or attracting people who are particularly interesting to advertisers for one reason or another â€" teenagers or women, for example.

Still, none of these factors are enough to necessarily warrant coverage. An all-star roster of investors is not a surefire measure of success. Investors can bet on losers, too. Good entrepreneurs, by loose definition, are generally passionate about their pursuits, so that doesn’t cut it either. Gaining users is important, but what if the company isn’t making money from their customers yet?

The tipping point â€" the moment at a which a start-up transitions from being an interesting company in the periphery of your radar to a notable that is prime for covering â€" is hard to pinpoint. In some ways, it’s just a gut feeling, based on overall experience. The app, game, service or idea that you’ve had your eye on starts to pop up all over â€" in casual conversations at random parties or in an overheard conversation on the subway. In some ways, a gut instinct is the only way to distinguish between companies that perform the exact same function â€"  Vine versus Viddy, Instagram versus PicPlz, GroupMe versus FastSociety, WhatsApp versus Kik.

Sometimes we get it right, but we can also miss the mark.

Last year, after Facebook announced plans to buy Instagram for a mind-boggling $1 billion, we tried to figure out which companies might be next. We waded through the list of companies we had noticed and picked the ones that seemed most promising for the year.

One company that we originally put on the list was Tumblr, the popular microblogging service. But then we took it off. The company, founded in 2007, felt a bit older than the rest to be considered a start-up and while we knew plenty of people who obsessively used it, it seemed as if most of them worked in media in major coastal cities. We knew that the company was self-reporting eye-popping page view numbers, more than other popular social media sites â€" as far as we could determine based on what we knew about these private companies that don’t have to reveal details about their business. But Tumblr didn’t seem to have a clear revenue-generating strategy or plan for forward momentum.

We went back and forth over whether it belonged, and then decided to take it off and keep it on a mental list of “companies to watch.” Either Quora or Findery, nee Pinwheel, took its place on the roundup.

Then, a few months later, Yahoo bought the company for $1.1 billion, proving it doesn’t always take revenue or a clearly defined road map to attract the big bucks.

As for our other picks last year, demand for Uber seems to only be increasing, amid rumors of a round of funding that would push the company’s valuation into the multibillions. Similarly, Dropbox seems to be sustaining its momentum, by more than doubling the number of visitors who are using the mobile application in the last year, according to comScore, a Web analytics firm. Path also appears to be drawing large numbers of users through mobile. And Pinterest is still widely considered to be a social media heavyweight and is now valued at $2.5 billion, thanks to a recent $200 million investment in the company.

Quora, on the other hand, has lost traffic to its home page in the last year, with a 20 percent dip to 1.5 million visitors from 1.8 million visitors, according to comScore. Airtime and Findery weren’t generating enough traffic at all to register on comScore’s tools. And although Square has convinced many a venture capitalist to funnel several hundred millions to its coffers, the payments start-up seems to be struggling to impart that faith in consumers.

This year, we’ve tried our luck again at picking out a fresh crop of companies that seem poised to take off, both among consumers and among larger companies and corporations who might buy them for their talent and technology. As always, dozens were considered, but not all made the list, including VHX, a video-delivery service, Tinder, a popular dating app, Feedly, a news reading application; Leap Motion, a device that lets you control your computer with hand motions; or Dots, an addictive iPhone game.

We’ll have to wait another year to see how we did.



At Google, a Love Triangle and a Departing Executive

When summer turns to fall, the Silicon Valley gossip scene is usually tantalized by the next iPhone. But this year, it is Google’s secrets, not Apple’s, that have people abuzz.

On Wednesday, reports from Google emerged about a love triangle involving Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, and Hugo Barra, an Android executive who announced the same day that he would leave the company for a rival phone maker in China.

The tech blog AllThingsD reported Wednesday that Mr. Brin was separated from his wife, Anne Wojcicki, and dating a Google employee who was previously in a relationship with Mr. Barra.

See why this is the talk of the valley?

The news set off a burst of publicity in tech blogs and whispers among people in the industry.

Two people with knowledge of the relationships, who would speak only anonymously, confirmed that the couple had separated, and that Mr. Brin was involved with Mr. Barra’s ex. Google declined to comment on the personal lives of employees.

Mr. Barra is a major loss for Google because he was one of the most public faces of Android, often presenting new products onstage, most recently last month, when he introduced the new Nexus 7 tablet in San Francisco.

While he will continue to promote Android in his new job at the fast-expanding Chinese company Xiamoi, he is also working for a competitor of Motorola, the phone company owned by Google. The Android team has been in transition since Andy Rubin, its founder and former leader, stepped down in March.

Mr. Brin and Ms. Wojcicki, who have two children, were married six years ago in a secretive wedding in the Bahamas. The swimsuit-clad couple invited guests to swim to a sandbar for the ceremony.

Their separation has other ties to Google’s business. Ms. Wojcicki, who was often spotted at Google events, is the chief executive and co-founder of 23andMe, the personal genetics company, in which Google has invested. She is also the sister of Susan Wojcicki, Google’s senior vice president for advertising, who met Google’s founders when she rented them her garage to start the company.

Should they divorce, the couple has a prenuptial agreement in which Mr. Brin retains the voting power he has through ownership of Google stock, according to a person briefed on the issue. Mr. Brin’s shares make up the bulk of his $23 billion fortune. They will continue their family charitable endeavors, the person said.

As for Google’s rules on an executive dating an employee, its code of conduct says that relationships between co-workers that create “an actual or apparent conflict of interest” can lead to re-assignment or termination. Mr. Brin currently oversees special projects at the Google X lab, including Google Glass.



At Google, a Love Triangle and a Departing Executive

When summer turns to fall, the Silicon Valley gossip scene is usually tantalized by the next iPhone. But this year, it is Google’s secrets, not Apple’s, that have people abuzz.

On Wednesday, reports from Google emerged about a love triangle involving Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, and Hugo Barra, an Android executive who announced the same day that he would leave the company for a rival phone maker in China.

The tech blog AllThingsD reported Wednesday that Mr. Brin was separated from his wife, Anne Wojcicki, and dating a Google employee who was previously in a relationship with Mr. Barra.

See why this is the talk of the valley?

The news set off a burst of publicity in tech blogs and whispers among people in the industry.

Two people with knowledge of the relationships, who would speak only anonymously, confirmed that the couple had separated, and that Mr. Brin was involved with Mr. Barra’s ex. Google declined to comment on the personal lives of employees.

Mr. Barra is a major loss for Google because he was one of the most public faces of Android, often presenting new products onstage, most recently last month, when he introduced the new Nexus 7 tablet in San Francisco.

While he will continue to promote Android in his new job at the fast-expanding Chinese company Xiamoi, he is also working for a competitor of Motorola, the phone company owned by Google. The Android team has been in transition since Andy Rubin, its founder and former leader, stepped down in March.

Mr. Brin and Ms. Wojcicki, who have two children, were married six years ago in a secretive wedding in the Bahamas. The swimsuit-clad couple invited guests to swim to a sandbar for the ceremony.

Their separation has other ties to Google’s business. Ms. Wojcicki, who was often spotted at Google events, is the chief executive and co-founder of 23andMe, the personal genetics company, in which Google has invested. She is also the sister of Susan Wojcicki, Google’s senior vice president for advertising, who met Google’s founders when she rented them her garage to start the company.

Should they divorce, the couple has a prenuptial agreement in which Mr. Brin retains the voting power he has through ownership of Google stock, according to a person briefed on the issue. Mr. Brin’s shares make up the bulk of his $23 billion fortune. They will continue their family charitable endeavors, the person said.

As for Google’s rules on an executive dating an employee, its code of conduct says that relationships between co-workers that create “an actual or apparent conflict of interest” can lead to re-assignment or termination. Mr. Brin currently oversees special projects at the Google X lab, including Google Glass.



Troubles Ahead for Internet Advertising

When it comes to advertising, the Internet is at war with itself.

Much of the Web relies on advertising income, but anti-ad technology could put a dent in that revenue. A recent report from the Web service PageFair said that on average 22.7 percent of visitors to 220 Web sites were using ad-blocking software, which automatically removes most ads from a Web page. The figures were highest in gaming and technology Web sites, which tend to have a large concentration of savvy users.

PageFair said the practice was growing at a rate that suggests almost all sites will appear without ads by 2018.

There are plenty of reasons to say that isn’t so. For one thing, PageFair makes money by helping companies get around ad blocking, so it has an interest in making ad blocking seem like a problem in dire need of solving. In an e-mail, however, PageFair executives defended their methods and conclusions. The company compared visits recorded on Google Analytics with the ad impressions recorded by a separate ad server.

In addition, Till Faida, a co-founder of Eyeo, which produces the Adblock software for numerous browsers, said Adblock for browsers was being downloaded 170,000 times a day. “Faster than ever,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Eyeo claims over 200 million downloads of the software since it started offering Adblock in 2011.

Earlier this year, Google kicked Adblock for Android mobile devices off its store, making it harder to get the mobile version (it’s still available at an Adblock site). This “had a significant impact on user growth,” he said.

Google is keen to make income from mobile ads, partly because the price advertisers pay Google for largely nonmobile Web advertising has fallen for the past seven quarters.

Risks for ad industry workers

There is another, possibly more serious problem ahead for online advertising â€" or at least the people working in it. What ads are, how they work, and what role they play in the final goal of arousing buyers are changing, too.

We are all increasingly tracked, online and offline, and our friendships and tastes are noted in order to send us the ads that algorithms suggest we will act upon. If we do seem interested in something expensive, like a car or a trip, we may be tracked and fed information for a period of days or months. That means a single ad is relatively less important.

Advertising, in effect, will have a less distinct role in overall marketing. And when a product or function is subsumed, it typically loses some of its profit margin.

“Agencies have to think about having a ‘journey strategist,’ neither a data head or a pure creative, who maps where you’re going with a product, and figures out the best possible way that journey goes,” said Phil Fernandez, the chief executive of Marketo, an online marketing company. The relative value of studying and understanding someone, he said, will be greater than just a pitch. Advertising, marketing, and even sales “are all going to be much more continuous,” he said.

Mr. Fernandez says he often counsels companies to put out even more ads, which is often done more cheaply than was possible even a couple of years ago. The surprise to him, he said, is how little traditional agencies seem to understand how much tracking and data manipulation threaten their businesses. “I see shockingly little presence” in Silicon Valley, he said.

“Their customers are going to start doing this themselves,” he said. “Corporations now have campaign people and infrastructure people, they are building databases of advocates for themselves. They are thinking about durable relationships with their customers.”

Salesforce.com, which makes sales management software, is likewise investing in social media marketing and direct advertising companies, likewise anticipating that corporations will be communicating directly and less expensively.

“Companies are setting up to maintain relationships with 100 million or more people at a time,” said Marc Benioff, a founder and the chief executive of Salesforce. “They will connect with their customers from all sorts of places: Canon from inside an Internet-connected camera; Toyota from inside a connected car.

“The killer app for marketing today, television, still gets the vast majority of the dollars, and agencies procure those,” he said. “It’s early days, but there is a new standard emerging.”

If it does turn out that companies turn their products, like cars and cameras, into media devices, much of what used to be ad messaging will travel there. At that point, not just agencies, but Web pages that depend on them (like, to some extent, this one) will have struggles of their own.



A Tale of Two Online Business Models

Over the weekend, the tech blogosphere was in a tizzy over a profile of Marissa Mayer, the chief executive of Yahoo.

While some readers slurped up the content in the piece, titled “The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography,” others seemed more excited by where it was written and published: Business Insider, routinely the home of kitten videos and endless lists of Top 100 slide shows.

For many, finding this piece on Business Insider was like going to a vegetarian restaurant and being served a bloody, rare steak sprinkled with bacon bits.

Nicholas Carlson, the reporter for Business Insider who wrote the profile  â€" which arrived on the Web weighing a hefty 22,000 words â€" said he spent months reporting and writing the article because, in a sense, the readers asked him to.

“We have an advantage of seeing what the readers are interested in by the page views and comments,” Mr. Carlson said in a phone interview. “As soon as Marissa Mayer became C.E.O. last year there was an incredible surge of interest in stories about her.”

But when the piece was published on Sunday, many readers asked why Mr. Carlson did not publish it as an e-book, or even as a physical book, and charge people to read it, rather than simply place it online free as a very long blog post.

“For us, the decision right now is to invest in the property that is this free online thing, where we can create great content and where it’s great for our readers,” Mr. Carlson said. ”It’s also great for our other constituents, which is our advertisers, who are going to be placed next to that great content.”

Henry Blodget, the chief executive and editor of Business Insider, echoed that statement, noting that pushing something online on the Web site is a lot more agreeable than the difficult routines of the traditional publishing industry, even the digital side of it.

This approach is the opposite of that taken by another online publication, NSFWCorp, which was formed by Paul Carr, a blogger and author. NSFWCorp bills itself as The Economist as written by The Daily Show, and generates what Mr. Carr calls “real long-form journalism â€" but with jokes.”

Those jokes and journalism are not free. Mr. Carr decided that rather than throw his content against the Internet and see what sticks, he was going to charge a hefty $3 per month to readers for access to NSFWCorp’s Web site or $7 per month for a newsprint version of the site.

While NSFWCorp has taken some money from investors, subscriptions are helping prop up the reporting and the site employs several seasoned full-time writers.

“We wanted to explore an online business model that allows great journalists to do great work without resorting to slide shows and videos of kittens,” Mr. Carr said. “And we don’t have to worry about what we write. We can offend 10,000 subscribers and still be in business; if we offend one paid advertiser we could be damaged.”

From the outside looking in, it seems that both models are working. But what about the future?

Mr. Carr sees two different types of online publications. Those that rely almost exclusively on support from readers and subscribers, like his $3-per-month Web site, and those outlets that are solely supported by ads, like Business Insider. ”They will both feed each other; there’ll be a nice symbiosis.”

But he still believes that long-form, fully reported journalism will be difficult to create simply based on revenues from advertising. ”The ad rates are so cheap today that you have to get a trillion page views to pay for real journalism, and you can really only do that with kitten videos.”

For now, there are rare outlets like Business Insider that seem to find no problem placing long-form “real” journalism next to kitten videos and Top 100 lists.

It seems that Business Insider made the right choice by choosing not to charge people to read the profile on Ms. Mayer, and instead giving it away online. The article was shared more than 13,000 times on Facebook and 5,500 times on Twitter, all of which helped garner nearly 900,000 page views for the article.

And that’s 900,000 page views that were framed by several online ads.

“I think it’s hard asking people to pay for something,” Mr. Carlson said. “As a writer, I was excited that we went with the free route because then I knew a lot more people were going to be reading what I was writing.”



Today’s Scuttlebot: A Separation at Google and Twitter Conversations

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