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Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Samsung Will Open Mini-Stores Inside 1,400 Best Buys

Samsung Electronics is giving Apple some of its own medicine. The company will set up mini-stores this summer inside Best Buys across the United States.

Samsung on Thursday said it would open 1,400 of the stores by the end of June. Called a Samsung Experience Shop, each store will be an entire section at Best Buy devoted to showcasing Samsung smartphones, tablets, cameras, laptops, televisions and accessories. It will also include customer support for Samsung products, similar to the Genius Bar at Apple stores.

Samsung is the biggest maker of phones in the world. But Apple’s iPhone is still the top-selling mobile device in the United States.

Nonetheless, Samsung says the launch of its Best Buy stores is not about competing with Apple, but rather to provide consumers with what they want. “At the heart of who we are, this is about responding to consumer needs and requests and ensure they’re delighted and empowered and happy with their choice of Samsung as a brand,” Ketrina Dunagan, vice president for retail marketing, said in an interview.

Apple has about 400 bricks-and-mortar retail stores around the world. Apple also has mini-stores in Best Buy locations and partnerships with other big retailers like Walmart and Target; its iPhones and iPads are prominently displayed in carriers’ retail stores.

Samsung’s devices, too, are heavily promoted with big signs and booths inside carriers’ stores, and in July, the company opened a retail store in Vancouver. It remains to be seen whether the company will continue to roll out its own stores. Ms. Dunagan said opening stores inside Best Buys was a quicker way to broaden the company’s footprint in retail.

Other electronics makers like HTC, Motorola and Research In Motion do not have as strong a retail presence, and they mostly rely on wireless carriers selling their phones.

Samsung has had a partnership with Best Buy for a long time. The main difference now is that instead of having its products scattered throughout Best Buy stores, they will all be in one place. In the mini-stores, Best Buy employees will be trained to educate shoppers on Samsung devices and walk them through purchase and activation. In stores with more space, there will be demonstrations showing how Samsung devices can share content across multiple screens. In the customer support section, shoppers can ask Best Buy employees what they can do when something goes wrong with a Samsung device, as when the screen breaks.

Of course, Samsung must pay Best Buy to put its products in the spotlight in so many stores. Ms. Dunagan declined to comment on how much because the details of the partnership are confidential.



U.S. Embassy in Cairo Scrubs Twitter Feed of Link to ‘Daily Show’ Commentary on Egypt

In a belated attempt at damage control, the United States Embassy in Cairo edited its official Twitter feed on Wednesday to remove an update that drew attention to video of the American comedian Jon Stewart’s withering criticism of Egypt’s government.

A screenshot of the official Twitter feed of United States Embassy in Cairo on Wednesday. A screenshot of the official Twitter feed of United States Embassy in Cairo on Wednesday.

As The Lede reported on Tuesday, the embassy’s apparent promotion of the “Daily Show” segment, which mocked President Mohamed Morsi for the interrogation of an Egyptian comedian accused of making criminal use of satire, prompted furious Twitter replies from the official accounts of both the president’s office and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement that got him elected.

At one stage on Wednesday, the American embassy’s feed disappeared entirely from the social network. Before it was restored, without the offending tweet, Foreign Policy reported that the decision to take the account down was made by the American ambassador in Cairo, Anne Patterson, without consulting her superiors in Washington. According to an unnamed official who spoke to FP, the State Department then pressed the ambassador to reverse course, “lest it appear that the United States is caving to the online pressure.”

During the brief time that the feed was missing from the social network, Issandr El Amrani, a Cairo-based journalist who blogs as The Arabist, made exactly that point.

The sudden disappearance of the official feed also led, inevitably, to a parody account with an almost identical handle being set up to fill the void. One tweet from the fake account was even directed at the Islamist bloggers who run the Brotherhood’s official @Ikhwanweb account.

Even after the embassy feed was restored, Rick Sanchez, a Fox News contributor, criticized the American government for editing it in response to pressure from the Egyptian presidency and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mr. Sanchez, who was fired by CNN in 2010 when he suggested that Jon Stewart’s mockery of him was motivated by the Jewish-American’s inability to understand a Latino, also took issue with the Brotherhood for trying to drag him into its dispute with the comedian. Late Tuesday, the bloggers who manage the Brotherhood’s @Ikhwanweb account advised followers to watch an Al Jazeera report on Mr. Sanchez, which illustrated, they said, that the U.S. has “double standards regarding freedom of speech, or lack of, and anti-Semitism.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Sanchez pushed back at the Brotherhood and endorsed the “Daily Show” critique of the Islamists the embassy had backed away from.

Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman in Washington, told reporters at a briefing on Wednesday, “Embassy Cairo’s Twitter feed is back up now. We’ve had some glitches with the way the Twitter feed has been managed. This is regrettably not the first time.” Ms. Nuland’s comment about previous “glitches” appeared to be a reference to comments posted on the embassy’s Twitter feed on Sept. 11 last year, which condemned the makers of a film mocking the Prophet Muhammad just before Islamist protesters stormed the diplomatic compound in Cairo.

Although those comments, condemning “efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims,” were posted on Twitter before the protesters in Cairo climbed the walls of the embassy and pulled down the American flag, as the tweets continued to circulate on the social network following the attack that day, they were inaccurately characterized by some opponents of the Obama administration in the U.S. and Egypt as an apology to the protesters issued after the breach of the embassy.

That night, before reports of a subsequent attack on the American consulate in Benghazi emerged, the Cairo embassy’s official Twitter feed condemned both the provocative film and the storming of the compound by protesters.

As The Lede reported last year, the embassy’s Twitter feed has been used to engage critics of American policy in the region in dialogue and to aggressively rebut rumors on the social network â€" including the conspiracy theory that the Obama administration had helped to install the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate in the presidential palace. In July, for instance, days before anti-Islamist protesters hurled insults at Hillary Clinton during the secretary of state’s visit to Egypt, the embassy’s Twitter feed refuted claims that the U.S. was behind the Brotherhood’s victory in the presidential election.

As The Lede noted on Tuesday, the embassy’s Twitter account was still being used yesterday to point out that comments attributed to the ambassador by a disreputable Egyptian newspaper â€" in which she supposedly said that “The land of Egypt belongs to the Jews” who “were expelled from Egypt after they built the pyramids” â€" were a complete fabrication.

Perhaps by coincidence, just about the only part of “The Daily Show” take-down of Egypt’s Islamist president that was not well-received by Egyptian critics of the government was Mr. Stewart’s apparent reference to the legend that the pyramids were built by Jewish slaves as if it were a fact.



A Big Data Weapon for the Mobile Ad Challenge

The march of mobile is following the usual evolutionary path in media â€" first come the eyeballs and later comes the money. People spend an estimated 10 percent of their media attention staring at their smartphones and tablets, but mobile advertising accounts for a small fraction of 1 percent of total advertising spending.

Yet from a small base, mobile ad spending is expected to grow rapidly. IDC estimates that mobile advertising will surge from $4.5 billion last year to $12 billion by 2015.

Advertisers will follow the online audience to mobile, but will they be doing it blindly Audience measurement and targeting in mobile devices, where apps rule, is way behind the Web.

Many companies are working on overcoming this mobile ad challenge, including the two giants in mobile software technology with their own operating systems and apps stores: Google and Apple. Yet a start-up, Mobilewalla, has an intriguing, Big Data approach to the problem.

“What we’ve done is develop a scientific way to measure app audiences,” said Anindya Datta, a founder and chief executive of Mobilewalla. “It is a very hard problem.”

And an important one. The promise of Internet advertising is that the measurement and targeting of audiences is vastly superior to that in traditional advertising. But in mobile, where Apple and Android applications are the windows for so much viewing, audience tracking is far more difficult. Unlike the Web, where the code â€" so-called cookies â€" for identifying Internet addresses is in browser software, mobile apps lack a similar tracking tool.

“Spray and pray” is how ad industry experts describe most mobile campaigns. That problem could hold back the growth curve of mobile ad spending. “If you can’t target ads, the utility is greatly diminished,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC.

Mobilewalla’s data scientists and engineers, Mr. Datta said, have created a way to pull and sift through more than two billion consumer reviews on app stores, Twitter messages and Facebook public profiles and posts. It also gets information from app publishers who agree to share user information.

The Mobilewalla team is looking for signals of sentiment and correlations in the data to try to make accurate predictions about the demographic characteristics of people using certain apps, and point to correlations and clusters of users. Its technology is a variant of the “collaborative filtering” techniques used by Amazon and Netflix to make recommendations. It uses machine-learning software to find apps that share similar audiences and then humans to refine the algorithms.

For example, the ESPN app and Univision Sports app were initially in the same cluster as sports apps. But 90 percent of the ESPN users are English speakers and 78 percent of Univision’s are native Spanish speakers, Mr. Datta said. They are not the same demographic group at all. So the software is tweaked accordingly.

The kindred apps can be quirky. For example, Mr. Datta said, his company’s research shows the Bible! app (published by Logos Bible Software) has a significant audience overlap with apps called Slotsjourney (FishStick Games), Slotmania â€" Slot Machine (Playtika LTD), and Slots by Zynga (Zynga). Religious Christians, Mr. Datta said, seem to like to gamble, especially playing slots.

Another: the Drudge Report app overlaps considerably with the Domino’s Pizza app. Republicans, Mr. Datta said, apparently prefer Domino’s pizza. But the Pizza Hut app has a different audience.

“It’s how they are attacking the problem that seems novel,” said Ramesh Jain, a computer scientist at the University of California, Irvine. “They are treating this as a Big Data problem, working with huge metrics of people expressing their sentiments about apps.”

The challenge is magnified by the growth and volatility of mobile apps. Every week, as about 100 new movies and 250 new books are introduced worldwide, about 15,000 smartphone apps are added to apps stores around the globe.

The churn of what’s rising or falling in popularity is accelerated in smartphone apps. The turnover rate among the 100 most popular mobile apps, according to Mobilewalla’s calculations, is 45 percent after 30 days and 85 percent after 90 days â€" double or triple of the churn rates in television or even Web sites.

Thus, a tried-and-true method of measuring audience in television and on the Web â€" observing the viewing behavior of panels of users â€" does not work for mobile apps, Mr. Datta said. The panel approach relies on persistent popularity over weeks or longer. In mobile apps, that kind of stability does not exist.

Mobilewalla demonstrated its technology last month at the American Association of Advertising Agencies convention in New Orleans. And a major mobile-display ad network, InMobi, has been using the Mobilewalla technology for a couple of months. “We use Mobilewalla to look for apps that are trending upward, to find publishers that look promising as new business prospects, and to add more color as we look for user clusters for audience mapping,” said Shrikant Latkar, vice president of global marketing for InMobi.

Mr. Latkar noted that InMobi also uses other technology tools to target audiences, like AdTruth, a software that can recognize what mobile devices people are using. “It all enriches the feed into our data store,” he said.

Mobilewalla is based in Seattle, with teams in Singapore and India. Founded in 2010, the company has been backed by angel investors, including Rajan Anandan, the chief executive of Google in India. Earlier this year, it raised its first round of venture capital, led by Madrona Venture Group in Seattle. The angel and venture funds, a total of $7.2 million, will be used to expand the 26-person start-up as it seeks to build out its business.

Scott Jacobson, a managing director of Madrona, said a former colleague of his from his days at Amazon.com, who is now in the mobile ad business, pointed him to Mobilewalla.

“Everybody is clear about where attention is going â€" to mobile,” Mr. Jacobson said. “But mobile ad networks are very primitive compared with their Web brethren. There is a need to build an ecosystem for effective advertising for measurement and targeting. Mobilewalla is a data company with a novel way to address that hard problem.”



A Big Data Weapon for the Mobile Ad Challenge

The march of mobile is following the usual evolutionary path in media â€" first come the eyeballs and later comes the money. People spend an estimated 10 percent of their media attention staring at their smartphones and tablets, but mobile advertising accounts for a small fraction of 1 percent of total advertising spending.

Yet from a small base, mobile ad spending is expected to grow rapidly. IDC estimates that mobile advertising will surge from $4.5 billion last year to $12 billion by 2015.

Advertisers will follow the online audience to mobile, but will they be doing it blindly Audience measurement and targeting in mobile devices, where apps rule, is way behind the Web.

Many companies are working on overcoming this mobile ad challenge, including the two giants in mobile software technology with their own operating systems and apps stores: Google and Apple. Yet a start-up, Mobilewalla, has an intriguing, Big Data approach to the problem.

“What we’ve done is develop a scientific way to measure app audiences,” said Anindya Datta, a founder and chief executive of Mobilewalla. “It is a very hard problem.”

And an important one. The promise of Internet advertising is that the measurement and targeting of audiences is vastly superior to that in traditional advertising. But in mobile, where Apple and Android applications are the windows for so much viewing, audience tracking is far more difficult. Unlike the Web, where the code â€" so-called cookies â€" for identifying Internet addresses is in browser software, mobile apps lack a similar tracking tool.

“Spray and pray” is how ad industry experts describe most mobile campaigns. That problem could hold back the growth curve of mobile ad spending. “If you can’t target ads, the utility is greatly diminished,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC.

Mobilewalla’s data scientists and engineers, Mr. Datta said, have created a way to pull and sift through more than two billion consumer reviews on app stores, Twitter messages and Facebook public profiles and posts. It also gets information from app publishers who agree to share user information.

The Mobilewalla team is looking for signals of sentiment and correlations in the data to try to make accurate predictions about the demographic characteristics of people using certain apps, and point to correlations and clusters of users. Its technology is a variant of the “collaborative filtering” techniques used by Amazon and Netflix to make recommendations. It uses machine-learning software to find apps that share similar audiences and then humans to refine the algorithms.

For example, the ESPN app and Univision Sports app were initially in the same cluster as sports apps. But 90 percent of the ESPN users are English speakers and 78 percent of Univision’s are native Spanish speakers, Mr. Datta said. They are not the same demographic group at all. So the software is tweaked accordingly.

The kindred apps can be quirky. For example, Mr. Datta said, his company’s research shows the Bible! app (published by Logos Bible Software) has a significant audience overlap with apps called Slotsjourney (FishStick Games), Slotmania â€" Slot Machine (Playtika LTD), and Slots by Zynga (Zynga). Religious Christians, Mr. Datta said, seem to like to gamble, especially playing slots.

Another: the Drudge Report app overlaps considerably with the Domino’s Pizza app. Republicans, Mr. Datta said, apparently prefer Domino’s pizza. But the Pizza Hut app has a different audience.

“It’s how they are attacking the problem that seems novel,” said Ramesh Jain, a computer scientist at the University of California, Irvine. “They are treating this as a Big Data problem, working with huge metrics of people expressing their sentiments about apps.”

The challenge is magnified by the growth and volatility of mobile apps. Every week, as about 100 new movies and 250 new books are introduced worldwide, about 15,000 smartphone apps are added to apps stores around the globe.

The churn of what’s rising or falling in popularity is accelerated in smartphone apps. The turnover rate among the 100 most popular mobile apps, according to Mobilewalla’s calculations, is 45 percent after 30 days and 85 percent after 90 days â€" double or triple of the churn rates in television or even Web sites.

Thus, a tried-and-true method of measuring audience in television and on the Web â€" observing the viewing behavior of panels of users â€" does not work for mobile apps, Mr. Datta said. The panel approach relies on persistent popularity over weeks or longer. In mobile apps, that kind of stability does not exist.

Mobilewalla demonstrated its technology last month at the American Association of Advertising Agencies convention in New Orleans. And a major mobile-display ad network, InMobi, has been using the Mobilewalla technology for a couple of months. “We use Mobilewalla to look for apps that are trending upward, to find publishers that look promising as new business prospects, and to add more color as we look for user clusters for audience mapping,” said Shrikant Latkar, vice president of global marketing for InMobi.

Mr. Latkar noted that InMobi also uses other technology tools to target audiences, like AdTruth, a software that can recognize what mobile devices people are using. “It all enriches the feed into our data store,” he said.

Mobilewalla is based in Seattle, with teams in Singapore and India. Founded in 2010, the company has been backed by angel investors, including Rajan Anandan, the chief executive of Google in India. Earlier this year, it raised its first round of venture capital, led by Madrona Venture Group in Seattle. The angel and venture funds, a total of $7.2 million, will be used to expand the 26-person start-up as it seeks to build out its business.

Scott Jacobson, a managing director of Madrona, said a former colleague of his from his days at Amazon.com, who is now in the mobile ad business, pointed him to Mobilewalla.

“Everybody is clear about where attention is going â€" to mobile,” Mr. Jacobson said. “But mobile ad networks are very primitive compared with their Web brethren. There is a need to build an ecosystem for effective advertising for measurement and targeting. Mobilewalla is a data company with a novel way to address that hard problem.”



S.E.C. Sets Rules for Disclosures Using Social Media

8:34 p.m. | Updated Chief executives can now feel free to post, blog or tweet â€" as long as they inform investors about their social media strategy first.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday outlined new disclosure rules that clarify how companies can use Facebook, Twitter and other social networks to disseminate information provided they meet certain requirements. Still, the new move may reduce spontaneity because companies may limit their communications to official corporate accounts and file the information with the agency at the same time.

With the decision, the S.E.C is playing catch-up to the new era of social media.

In December, the regulator warned Netflix that it could take action against the company for a 43-word message that the company’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, posted in his personal Facebook feed. In the note, Mr. Hastings congratulated his team for exceeding one billion hours of video watched in a single month.

But the federal agency raised concerns that the post violated Regulation Fair Disclosure, commonly known as Reg FD, which requires a company to publish material information to all investors at the same time. While Mr. Hastings’s announcement was made on his publicly available Facebook page, which had over 200,000 followers, the information was not subsequently disclosed in a securities filing or news release.

At the time, Mr. Hastings and Netflix said that his message was both immaterial and readily available to investors, having been picked up by a number of blogs and news media outlets. “We use blogging and social media, including Facebook, to communicate effectively with the public and our members,” Mr. Hastings wrote â€" on his Facebook page, naturally â€" after disclosing the investigation last year.

Now, the S.E.C. seems to be relaxing its stance.

After an investigation of several months, regulators said that companies could treat social media as legitimate outlets for communication, much like corporate Web sites or the agency’s own public filing system called Edgar. The catch is that corporations have to make clear which Twitter feeds or Facebook pages will serve as potential outlets for announcements.

“They did a really good job of splitting the baby,” said Thomas A. Sporkin, a former S.E.C. enforcement official and now a partner at Buckley Sandler.

In developing its rules, the agency also let Mr. Hastings avoid sanctions for his Facebook post. Neither the chief executive nor Netflix incurred any penalties since receiving the so-called Wells notice from the agency in December.

Instead, the regulator issued what is known as a report of investigation, used on the rare occasion when it wants to issue broad guidance from a specific investigation. As part of its release, the agency reiterated its goal for Reg FD, namely making sure that investors receive important information at the same time.

“One set of shareholders should not be able to get a jump on other shareholders just because the company is selectively disclosing important information,” George S. Canellos, the agency’s acting enforcement chief, said Tuesday in a statement. “Most social media are perfectly suitable methods for communicating with investors, but not if the access is restricted or if investors don’t know that’s where they need to turn to get the latest news.”

Mr. Hastings is not the only corporate executive to face trouble over his social media habits.

Last year, the fashion retailer Francesca’s Holdings fired its chief financial officer, Gene Morphis, for his frequent use of Facebook and Twitter. Among his posts, from March 7: “Board meeting. Good numbers=Happy Board.”

In a news release last May, Francesca’s cited “improper” communications of company information through social media as the reason for letting Mr. Morphis go.

As in the past, the S.E.C. is treading carefully in its corporate disclosure policies. In 2008, the regulator clarified that corporate Web sites alone could qualify as wide disclosure if investors already knew that those pages could be sources of material information. The Netflix inquiry raised concerns that the commission felt could be addressed more broadly, according to a person briefed on the matter.

“The S.E.C. had to ask itself, How do we adopt a 2000 regulation to 2013 when social media is commonplace” Mr. Sporkin said, referring to the year Reg FD was enacted. “That obviously wasn’t even a thought back when this was written.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 04/03/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: S.E.C. Sets Rules for Disclosures Using Social Media.

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