Industry News

Forbes’ Fade-Out

For the first time since B.C. Forbes launched his namesake magazine 93 years ago, there will be no members of the founding family involved in the day-to-day operations of the corporation.  The reigning Forbes family scions, Chairman and CEO, Steve Forbes, and Chief Operating Officer, Tim Forbes, are exiting management of Forbes Media and turning the firm over to an outsider.  Publishing industry veteran, Mike Perlis, will be President and CEO, a new title at Forbes, as it scrambles to solve the riddle of how to blend its digital and print domains.  Steve Forbes, who is also Editor-in-Chief of Forbes magazine, will relinquish the CEO title, while Tim Forbes will give up the COO position. "We've been looking at doing this for some time now," said Tim Forbes, who will now be a board member and have the title of Chairman of Forbes Digital. "It wasn't a case of reluctance, but one of care and caution in finding the right person." Older brother Steve will keep the titles of Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes magazine.

In 2006, the family-owned company sold a sizable stake, estimated to be around 40 percent of the stock, for between $250 million and $300 million, to Elevation Partners, the Silicon Valley-based investment firm co-founded by U2 front-man Bono and Roger McNamee. Like all of media, and publishing in particular, Forbes was hit hard by ad declines tied to the financial meltdown and has suffered through successive rounds of layoffs. In January, the family sold off Forbes' iconic Greenwich Village headquarters. Forbes is believed to have lost tens of millions of dollars in 2009, but has seen its fortunes improve somewhat this year. Perlis was a well-known figure on the publishing scene with deep roots in the early days of International Data Group, a tech media and event powerhouse. In his last day job in the publishing world, he served as CEO of Ziff Davis Publishing from 1998 to 2000. For the past ten years, he's been working as a partner in Softbank Capital, which has been involved in digital-content businesses including the Huffington Post. Source: New York Post

Watchdog Planned for Online Privacy

The Obama administration is preparing a stepped-up approach to policing Internet privacy that calls for new laws and the creation of a new position to oversee the effort. The strategy is expected to be unveiled in a report being issued by the U.S. Commerce Department in coming weeks. The report isn't yet final and could change. In a related move, the White House has created a special task force that is expected to help transform the Commerce Department recommendations into policy. The White House task force is led by Cameron Kerry, the brother of Senator John Kerry (D., Mass.) and Christopher Schroeder, Assistant Attorney General at the Department of Justice. The initiatives would mark a turning point in Internet policy. Recent administrations typically steered away from Internet regulations out of concern for stifling innovation. But the increasingly central role of personal information in the Internet economy helped spark government action.

Privacy issues are bubbling up on Capitol Hill. Rep. Joe Barton (R., Texas), Co-Chairman of the Congressional Privacy Caucus and ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he welcomed the administration's privacy initiative. "Better late than never," Barton said. "I am glad more folks, in the government and otherwise, are beginning to realize that there is a war against privacy." Yet the administration faces significant obstacles to enacting its privacy agenda. There is no comprehensive U.S. law that protects consumer privacy online. Internet privacy issues generally are policed by the FTC which can take action only if a privacy-violating action is deemed "deceptive" or "unfair." A spokesman for the Commerce Department said the administration is "committed to promoting policies that will preserve consumer privacy online while ensuring the web remains a platform for innovation, jobs, and economic growth.  These are considered as complementary goals, since consumer trust in the Internet is essential for businesses to succeed online." Source: The Wall Street Journal

Mobile Search App may Lead to Better Brand Marketing

A year ago, Google introduced a Smartphone application that lets users take photos of objects and get search results in return. The company will take that capability into the world of marketing with an experiment that allows five national brands to use the application in their promotional materials.  In the early days of Smartphones, users could find out about a movie by entering its title in Google’s browser and searching.  Then Google introduced the ability to use voice to make a query. Now, the Google Goggles visual search app, available in iPhones and Android phones, allows users to take photos of an object, say a movie poster, and find out more about it in search results. Google hopes the experiment will give it insight into how consumers may want to interact with a brand. 

Google has reason to believe it just might pay off. The company says mobile searches on Google have grown 500 percent in the last two years, and Google Goggles has been downloaded more than 250,000 times as a standalone application. The app was also recently integrated into the Google iPhone app.  While the technology is not new, the idea that brands can begin to play with it is. Google announced its intention to use the Goggles app as part of its mobile advertising strategy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Mixx conference in New York in September. So while a visual search for a Frida Kahlo painting might show search results like a Wikipedia page about the artist, brands that are taking part in the Goggles experiment – Buick, Walt Disney, Diageo, T-Mobile and Delta Air Line – scan point users to a branded website for cell phones or other content they select.  Source: The New York Times

Nope, Fox Doesn’t want Google Either

NBC, CBS, and ABC had already said no to Google TV, and Fox Broadcasting recently made it unanimous. Google TV enables users to view web content on their living-room sets. News Corporation owner, Fox, has become the last of the broadcast networks to block full episodes of its shows from appearing on the software platform that enables users to view web content and video on their home TVs. Fox executives didn't reject the offering as soon as the other networks because it was still evaluating the platform, sources said. Now that the evaluation is over, the feeling at Fox is that Google's "footprint was too small," meaning that Google TV had yet to develop a large enough user base to make it worthwhile for the broadcaster. Fox also blocks Google TV competitor, Boxee, which also has struggled to develop a significant following.

Be that as it may, there's little doubt about why the networks rejected Google TV, which went live last month. They fear streaming web content to viewers' televisions will hurt existing revenue streams such as ad-supported broadcasts or cable TV subscriptions. The networks might be friendlier to Google TV if the company were willing to pay licensing fees. But Google paying licensing fees for Google TV would be similar to Microsoft charging people to ensure video worked on the Explorer Internet browser. Google won't do it even though there may be some other way to compensate the networks. The decision to block Google TV hasn't been very popular with some pundits and tech blogs. Source: cnet

How will U.S. Financial Reform Protect Consumers?

Almost two years after the near collapse of the U.S. financial system, a sweeping reform package has finally been signed into law. Now the real work begins. Government officials are starting to staff a brand-new, half-a-billion-dollar federal agency. Regulators are gearing up to conduct 67 studies and write 243 new rules. Wall Street lobbyists and consumer advocates are lining up to influence those watchdogs as the law is put into practice. And financial services companies are adjusting to, or looking to work around, the new rules.  But even amid the uncertainty, some things are clear. "Borrowers and investors are likely to benefit from a higher level of regulation, but at the end of the day, we could all be paying more for credit," says Kathleen Engel, a Professor at Suffolk University and a member of the Federal Reserve's Consumer Advisory Board.

The centerpiece of financial reform is the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which will write and enforce consumer protection rules for most loans, including credit cards, private student loans, and mortgages. The agency will be housed within the Federal Reserve, but its director will be a presidential appointee. The bureau will consolidate consumer protection staffs from half a dozen existing regulators, and it should be up and running within a year.  Consumers won't have to wait for Congress to pass a law to be protected," says Engel.  The CFPB will operate a toll-free hotline for borrowers to report problems with a loan, and it will have the power to crack down on deceptive practices and hidden fees.  State regulators will also have the right to enforce new federal rules, adding another layer of protection. The CFPB is a major victory for borrowers. Source: Money Magazine