Apple and the horrible, no good, very bad Maps app

The Amazing iOS 6 Maps Tumblr

The September launch of the iPhone 5 was marred by the disastrous reception Apple’s new Maps app received. Parody social media accounts popped up within hours, as disappointed users complained of poor or missing location data. CEO Tim Cook felt compelled to make a public apology, and it’s thought that the episode was the last straw that caused Cook to send SVP Scott Forstall packing. To rub extra salt in the wound, Google’s own Maps app for iPhone was greeted with the Twitter equivalent of a Hallelujah chorus when it arrived last week – and was downloaded 10 million times in 48 hours. – Erica Ogg

Google’s media player that never got a chance to play

Google surprised many in June when it announced the Nexus Q, a wireless digital content player dubbed as “the first social streaming media player.” But not all surprises are good ones. The small orb-shaped device launched at an introductory price of $299, triple that of the more capable Apple TV. And aside from the high price point, the Q offered no media services save Google’s own Play store for movies, television shows and music. The unique DJ function — allowing anyone’s Android device on the same network to mix the music — was hardly enough to justify the Q, which Google suspended indefinitely in July. — Kevin C. Tofel

Facebook’s troubled IPO

The initial public offering of the world’s largest social network was supposed to be the tide that lifted all technology boats, but the IPO instead turned into a stock-market train wreck and crushed the hopes of many other tech-stock hopefuls in the process. Thanks to a combination of mismanagement by the NASDAQ stock exchange (which used a new trading system for the issue) and a misreading of the initial demand by Facebook and its brokers — which resulted in an over-supply of stock — the company’s share price tumbled by more than 50 percent in the days and weeks following the offering. The company still wound up raising more than $16 billion, but the episode gave the tech darling a black eye as far as some investors were concerned, and likely set the market for tech-stock issues back by months, if not longer. — Mathew Ingram 

Two words: HP and Autonomy

The $11.1 billion purchase of Autonomy by Hewlett-Packard may have been announced in 2011, but the enormity of the screw-up didn’t fully surface till 2012. In May, HP management booted former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch, and in November the company asked authorities in the U.S. and U.K. to look into Autonomy’s accounting practices prior to the buyout. That process is ostensibly now underway. Nevertheless, after airing all this dirty laundry in the November earnings call, HP CEO Meg Whitman asserted that HP remains “100 percent committed to Autonomy.” For the record, HP took a loss of $6.85 billion for the full fiscal year ended October 31, 2012 — most of that from an $8 billion writedown related to the Autonomy business. — Barb Darrow 

Nate Silver’s an idiot and Romney wins in a landslide

Except…Nate Silver isn’t and Mitt Romney didn’t. Silver, the founder of the New York Times‘ popular FiveThirtyEight politics blog, and several other notable statisticians mathematically predicted Barack Obama’s reelection with perfect or near-perfect accuracy. Meanwhile, Karl Rove sputtered through election night on Fox News, futilely defending his prediction like a child trying to convince a teacher a dog ate his homework. Maybe there’s something to this data analysis after all. Go figure. – Derrick Harris 

Amanda Palmer crowdfunding fubar

Alt-rock fave Amanda Palmer experienced the downside of social network savviness in September after she raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter to fund her new CD — then solicited musicians to play for free on her subsequent concert tour. Reaction was heated and Palmer quickly regrouped, saying she would pay more than beer, hugs and “merch” for the help. The alternate theory is that this was all a massive publicity stunt — in which case, it was hugely successful. (Palmer has since cancelled her 2013 tour to help a friend deal with cancer.) — Barb Darrow 

Twitter gags NBC Olympics critic

What do you when someone says mean things about your friends? You shut them up; at least, that’s what Twitter did during the London Olympics when it suspended the account of journalist Guy Adams, who tweeted snarky things about the TV coverage of Twitter’s corporate partner NBC. Twitter blamed an internal communications snafu and restored the journalist’s account two days later. Still, the incident became Twitter’s first full-blown PR crisis and a reminder of its growing shadow over our media lives. — Jeff Roberts 

The Western Mail’s caption fail

Tweeters celebrate epic #fails on an almost minute-by-minute basis. And for digital media aficionados, ye olde newspaper sub-editing and caption errors rank high on that dreary list. But there was none more epic in 2012 than Welsh newspaper the Western Mail, which committed what was labeled “the worst caption fail of all time” when it identified a photo of an airport manager, who died when the plane he was travelling in hit a mountain, with “LOL.” Although British prime minister David Cameron may think the acronym stands for “lots of love”, everyone else knows not to “laugh out loud.” The internet was not amused. Nor was Western Mail publisher Trinity Mirror, which responded, “We apologize for any offense this error may have caused.” – Robert Andrews

AT&T’s face-off over FaceTime

Trying to convince your customers, the public and your regulators that you’re just a big, cuddly carrier without an anticompetitive bone in your body? Maybe blocking a wildly popular app that happens to compete directly with your core service isn’t the best way to score points. Oh, but wait, AT&T didn’t block FaceTime over its cellular networks. You could use Apple’s video chat app to your heart’s content if you signed up for one AT&T’s (more expensive) family share plans. It’s not every day that a carrier stifles competition and jilts its customers for more money in a single brush stroke, but Ma Bell is a very efficient painter. Eventually consumer protests and the threat of the FCC involvement caused AT&T to backtrack. It offered FaceTime over cellular to more subscribers, and sheepishly claimed it was just protecting its customers from the inevitable network overload FaceTime would bring. Okay, but if AT&T’s new fangled 4G networks can’t handle video, what was the point in building them? Email and Twitter updates? — Kevin Fitchard

Bravo’s Silicon Valley startup trainwreck

Silicon Valley has been abuzz with Randi Zuckerberg’s Bravo reality show “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley,” which attempted to portray the craaaazy lives of startup founders and their companies in the Wild West. However, the show has been widely panned by techies and journalists in the Valley, who are obviously underwhelmed by shots of people in the pool with iPads and dialogue like ”Silicon Valley is just…balls to the wall.” Of course there’s an element of hilarity to the shenanigans associated with tech startups in the Valley, but it doesn’t appear that Zuckerberg’s show will be the one to effectively dramatize it. And now that the final episodes are being downgraded to a 4 PM PST time slot, looks like the show’s on its way out. – Eliza Kern

J.K. Rowling’s unreadable book

Getty Images

J. K. Rowling fans who’d preordered the ebook edition of her hotly anticipated new novel, The Casual Vacancy, were in for a surprise on September 27: Thanks to improper formatting by publisher Hachette, the ebook was literally unreadable, with a choice of two type sizes — microscopic or massive. Hachette pushed out a new file later in the day, but this was one of the biggest books of the year, and in 2012 there’s no excuse for failing to test an ebook before you release it. – Laura Owen 

VeriFone copies Square’s user agreement

VeriFone launched its mobile payment acceptance system Sail to compete with Square. But it went a little too far in emulating Square when it copied big chunks of wording from Square’s user agreement. When called on it by GigaOM, VeriFone cut about a third of its user agreement out to eliminate the copied text. – Ryan Kim

So who didn’t suffer a data breach?

Shutterstock/deepspacedave

So much for consumer confidence. In 2012, several of the biggest names in tech were forced to ask for users’ forgiveness after hackers gained access to customer records. In January, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh apologized after hackers accessed names, email, billing and shipping address and scrambled passwords for potentially 24 million customers. And, in June, Yahoo, LinkedIn , Last.fm and eHarmony followed up with confessions of their own after a spate of hack attacks that compromised user passwords. In April, electronic transaction processing provider Global Payments also confirmed a data breach of 1.5 million credit cards. – Ki Mae Heussner

First, some context. If you somehow missed it, Presidential candidate Mitt Romney thrust Sesame Street into the center of the election debate by declaring that he liked Big Bird but that he didn’t want to subsidize the bird’s employer, PBS.

Romney’s comments set off the predictable social media firestorm on Twitter, including the inevitable parody accounts like this one:

Which began sending out funny tweets like this one:

Still flummoxed we’re the focus of budget cuts. Oscar lives in a TRASH CAN

— Skid Row Big Bird (@SkidRowBigBird) October 4, 2012

The more people took notice of the Big Bird flap, the more important people wanted to weigh in too:

President Obama: “Thank goodness somebody is finally getting tough on Big Bird.”

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 4, 2012

While these type of instant-memes are becoming ever more common, what stands out in this case is how quickly PBS responded. As Mashable reports, the broadcaster purchased the keyword “big bird” in order to have a PBS message appear atop the Twitter stream:

The episode shows how PBS has learned an important new communications skill: whipping up ads on very short notice. As Twitter VP Joel Lunenfield noted on Tuesday at an advertising week event in New York, social media creates massive, passionate “transient communities” around certain events. These audiences, however, dissipate very quickly — is anyone going to be tweeting about Big Bird a week from now?

What this means is that advertisers in these situations don’t have months or weeks. Instead, they have just hours to make a message (or better yet a pretty picture) and to buy spots to place it. Despite what the old proverb says, for marketers, the race will indeed be won by the swiftest.

In the past, any truly public analysis of the performance of the candidates had to wait until the event was over, when the usual political operatives and pundits like former Clinton advisor James Carville would be called on by CNN or Fox News to pick a winner, criticize the moderator, or handicap future debates. We’ve always had real-time, horse-race-style discussion of these events, but it has almost always taken place in small groups — in bars, or at local viewing events, etc. Never before has there been a way to eavesdrop on a giant conversation about such a thing as it happens.

Game-time commentary: Good or bad?

That kind of game-time handicapping is great fun when it’s the Super Bowl, or the Academy Awards, or some other event with less at stake (although football fans might disagree about that description). But presidential debates — in theory, at least — are supposed to be important elements in the political process, which help undecided voters make up their minds and therefore can ultimately affect the course of political history. Does Twitter help or harm that process?

Hey Obama -- TRAIN WITH HILLARY. This is ROCKY III and she's your Apollo Creed. #eyeofthetiger

—
Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) October 04, 2012

Some would argue the political process is something of a circus anyway, and that carefully stage-managed events like the debates are already a sideshow with little political value — and therefore the additional theatrical element added by real-time commentary isn’t going to have much effect. Many parts of the process are probably also ephemeral, and likely to die out relatively quickly: will there be long-term political repercussions from Mitt Romney’s mention of shutting down PBS, fueled by all of the parody accounts devoted to Big Bird and other characters that Twitter produced? Unlikely.

An optimist would say there is something very real to be gained by having people watch such debates for any reason — even if it’s just to follow along with the wisecracks on Twitter — because then at least there is a chance they might accidentally become more informed about political issues. According to Twitter’s graph of discussions during the debate, some of the biggest peaks in tweets-per-minute came when the two candidates were discussing Medicare. Were most of those jokes or partisan attacks, or did they actually contribute to anyone’s understanding of the issues? That’s hard to say.

The spin cycle is now measured in minutes

The rise of Twitter as a political force has definitely accelerated the metabolism of a campaign by orders of magnitude, to the point where political analysts now talk about a news cycle that is measured in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. Is that ultimately a good thing for politics or democracy? Some have argued that it is beneficial in part because trumped-up stories or blind alleys can be defused much more quickly, or burn themselves out rather than dominating the spin cycle. But a chorus of Twitter responses can also add fuel to something that might not actually be meaningful.

“I can’t watch a debate anymore without having my iPhone in my hand. I don’t feel like I’m having the full experience if I’m not reading the reaction in real time.” — NBC News chief digital officer Vivian Schiller

On the plus side, some pointed out that Twitter users watching television and following along with the real-time discussion were clearly better off than the professional journalists who were attending the debate — and theoretically were supposed to provide some kind of expert analysis later — since all of those reporters were stuck in a separate room with a balky audio and video feed. And as Alex Howard at O’Reilly noted, it might have changed the debate in some interesting ways if some of the smart commentary and questions from Twitter users had actually made it into the debate itself.

During the debate, even some Obama supporters (at least the ones in my stream) seemed to quickly come to the conclusion that the President was off his game, that he was tired or even uninterested, and that Romney gained the upper hand by being more forceful. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith actually declared Romney the winner only 42 minutes into the event. Those impressions were then reinforced by the pundits on the post-game talk shows. Within an hour, the story of the debate seemed to be that Obama had “lost” and Romney had “won,” even though some said the Republican candidate contradicted himself at a number of points.

Is any of that going to have a lasting effect on voters’ decisions, or the way that the campaigns react? Or is it just ephemera that will be gone in a matter of days, as Twitter users become infatuated with some other celebrity event or perceived injustice? It’s clear that for both voters and politicians, and the political operatives who run their campaigns, the Twitter-sphere’s instantaneous reaction to events is a reality they have to take into account — and it could be changing the way we engage with political issues in some important ways. Whether that’s good or bad remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Aih and Shutterstock/iQoncept

The Politico piece, about an incident on Friday involving presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, calls it the “21-minute news cycle.” As Dylan Byers describes it, Romney made a comment at a campaign stop in Michigan about how no one had ever asked him for his birth certificate — a crack that appeared to refer to the controversial “birther” debate over where President Barack Obama was born. Within a matter of seconds, a reporter attending the event had posted the remark to Twitter, where it was then retweeted hundreds of times over the next few minutes (according to data Politico got from the Twitter-analytics service Topsy).

Political brush fires can erupt within minutes

Several minutes later, Politico and BuzzFeed had both posted items on it making the connection to the “birther” debate, and BuzzFeed had posted a video to YouTube of Romney making the statement. Within minutes, the Romney campaign had issued a comment saying the remark was taken out of context and that the candidate did not mean to dredge up the birth certificate issue again — a statement that was followed quickly by one from the Obama camp, which accused Romney of doing exactly that. Over the next few hours the news made its way to TV news shows and elsewhere, but most of the heat from the incident had more or less died down by the end of the day, and Byers noted that the event is a perfect example of how things have changed:

“Four years ago, the fallout from a controversial remark would have taken hours, if not a full day, to unfold. In 2012, social media, which enables reporters to file in real-time and puts increased pressure on campaigns to speed up their response time, has brought the pace of the news cycle down to a matter of minutes and seconds. The ‘one-day story’ — itself an archaic term in the 21st century — has become the one-hour story.”

This phenomenon is something we discussed at the paidContent 2012 conference in New York earlier this year, during a panel that I moderated with Vivian Schiller of NBC News and Josh Marshall of the political blog network Talking Points Memo. As Marshall described it, social media — including blogs such as his, which started the process that was later accelerated by Twitter and Facebook — have not only sped up the news cycle but have added new “vectors” that political analysts of all kinds have to take account of. In other words, instead of just paying attention to the New York Times and one or two political talk shows, everyone has to pay attention to Twitter as well, and to new sources of political content such as BuzzFeed and Huffington Post.

You could argue that the tendency for inconsequential or even irrelevant incidents to get blown out of proportion has increased thanks to Twitter and the appearance of “viral content” sites like BuzzFeed (which has been making a big push into the political sphere since it hired former Politico writer Ben Smith) and that is probably true. But then, such incidents also got blown out of proportion by television talk shows and news programs and newspaper columnists before blogs and Twitter and Facebook came along. In many ways, all those tools have done is speed up and enhance a process that has been under way for decades.

Irrelevant stories also burn out faster

During our conversation in June about social media and political coverage, Schiller also argued that the speed with which Twitter and other networks operate can be beneficial as well — since it can help defuse or tamp down an incorrect or ridiculous report that might otherwise have taken hours or even days to disprove through traditional media channels. As Byers noted in his story, the Romney comment might have turned into a multiple-day issue, as newspapers picked it up and it worked its way through the usual sources of political commentary, but instead it was mostly out of gas within a few hours. As reporter Sasha Issenberg put it:

“These little stories catch fire on Twitter more quickly than they did even with bloggers in 2008, but it also means that they burn out faster.”

There’s another element of Twitter and social media that could be beneficial during an election campaign, and that is the way that such tools allow for sources directly connected to events to comment and affect the news flow — something that could help alleviate the “pack journalism” effect that Jeff Jarvis and others have complained about, in which thousands of reporters congregate at a single event and repeat the same kinds of information over and over. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has written about how social media can be an effective tool to combat this phenomenon during events such as the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere, because it allows other non-traditional sources to become part of the narrative.

This phenomenon of having “the sources go direct,” as blogging pioneer Dave Winer has described it, is probably one of the biggest disruptive effects that Twitter has introduced into political journalism — and its impact, both positive and negative, is only going to become more obvious as the nation gets closer to the election. Whether it is primarily good or bad depends a lot on your perspective. Is it bad because there is more sound and fury that signifies nothing, or is it good because irrelevant stories burn themselves out more quickly and the sources of information have become broader?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users See-ming Lee and Nils Geylen

In a complaint filed this week in Delaware, Mobile Transformation LLC says a “Romney vs Boris” video on Buzzfeed violates its technology by showing a static ad at the same time the video is streaming.

The shell company is relying on US Patent 6,351,736 which was issued in 2002 and covers a “system and method for displaying advertisements with played data.” The “method” described in the patent refers to the idea of showing a visual ad while music is playing:

A method and a system for playing a first type of data, such as audio stream data, for the user while simultaneously displaying an advertisement in the form of a second type of data, such as video data. The system and method enable advertisements to be displayed while music is being played from an audio file by the computer of the user, thereby providing an alternative revenue source for the owner of the rights to the audio data. Furthermore, since the advertisement is in a data format, preferably video data, which is different from that of the audio music file, the display of such an advertisement does not interfere with the enjoyment of the music or other audio data being played.

The Buzzfeed video, which shows London mayor Boris Johnson slamming Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, is not an audio clip. Mobile Transformation LCC claims, however, that it violates the patent because it uses an “embedded flash player to present a first data type of a video file of “Boris v Romney” along with the presentation of advertising data of a second type that includes a static image advertisement.”

Records show the patent has been assigned to a chain of shell companies before it became the basis of the current troll suit.

Patent trolling involves shell companies that don’t make anything acquire patents in order to demand money from companies that do make things. Since they have no tangible assets, the shell companies are not vulnerable to countersuits, meaning their victims frequently pay them to go away rather than endure expensive trial. Mobile Transformation LLC has already sued 21 companies and settled with a dozen of them.

Buzzfeed said it can’t comment as it is still reviewing the lawsuit. The website, which makes highly-sharable content like “The 25 Happiest Animals in the World,” is unlikely to roll over for the patent troll, however. Last year, after it was sued by infamous copyright troll Righthaven, Buzzfeed countered with an abuse of process lawsuit. (It will be interesting to see if Buzzfeed tries to go viral with “10 pieces of prior art that invalidate an advertising patent.”)

The shell company’s lawyer did not immediately return a request for comment. The lawsuit is below:

Troll v Buzzfeed

@RupertMurdoch managed to stay quiet last week while Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of News Corp., was doing last-minute maneuvers behind the scene, then publicly pitching the break up of his company.

But his Twitter alter ego is back with a vengeance, starting Saturday with a sotto voce tweet about the past week:

Tough week, but went better than I expected.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) June 30, 2012

Then came a Sunday barrage over 5 hours or so as Murdoch tweeted from the country he verbally shivved Thursday during his media rounds — when he said repeatedly proclaimed that he would not make any more major investments in England. He meant, perhaps, simply to tamp down the possibility that News Corp. would try again for BSkyB but came off as starkly negative on the country where News Corp. still holds 39.1 percent of the pay TV company, including Sky News, and News International, with the Times of London, the Sun and their Sunday editions. It’s also the country where his company, his reputation and that of his son James currently faces the most jeopardy both legal and legislative.

London again. 8 lively, different Sunday papers. Some great writing, some fun, some hysterical but happy change from boring Sunday NYT.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

So far, so good. That was followed by a bit of unsolicited advice to Prime Minister David Cameron (it was Mitt Romney’s turn in June) — then he couldn’t resist the tabloid news of the day:

Scientology back in news.Very weird cult, but big, big money involved with Tom Cruise either number two or three in hierarchy.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

That done, as he has on several occasions since taking to Twitter over the winter holidays, Murdoch answered questions:

@gramercypark many emerging, but Google twins, Jack Dorsey stand out. Look for next wave to be in biotech.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

Sticking through the attacks on his credibility and ethics:

@dr_henry77my folks! Come off it, let’s have serious discussion.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

But. like many of his news outlets, Murdoch couldn’t stay away from Scientology, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes:

Watch Katie Holmes and Scientology story develop. Something creepy, maybe even evil, about these people.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

A little later came:

Since Scientology tweet hundreds of attacks.Expect they will increase and get worse and maybe threatening.Still stick to my story.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

And a question about whether he is a Christian. Murdoch replied: “I try to be.”

He also drew a line between Scientology (“evil”), Mormonism (“a mystery”) and Mormons (“not evil”). Lucky for him given that he appears to be backing a Mormon for president.

@shakircMormonism a mystery to me, but Mormons certainly not evil.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

Alan Murray, the Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor, chimed in:

Too busy readingthe Scientology tweets!“@keptsimple81: Why everyone retweeting @rupertmurdoch? Why haven’t I seen @alansmurray tweet?”

— Alan Murray (@alansmurray) July 1, 2012

Murdoch grabbed the chance to promote the Journal and went off the air (for now):

@alansmurrayRight!Yesterday’s WSJ iPad app really great. New software, great graphics.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) July 1, 2012

That’s just a sampling of the two dozen-plus tweets over six hours. The whole is a canny, conversational stream of consciousness.

No backing off the he-said-what comments that are getting the most attention but also a sincere effort to communicate with people he might not otherwise reach. I’ve watched a lot of people at his level use Twitter to broadcast. Murdoch seems to get that it needs to be interactive to succeed. (He has nearly 265,000 followers now, up from nearly 240,000 when I checked last Thursday.)

It’s a year ago this week that the phone hacking scandal blew up, taking with it the News of the World, News Corp.’s chance to buy BSkyB and, it looked for a time, possibly the Murdochs. It still is far from resolved no matter how often he says it is, particularly with a number of his former execs under arrest and potential investigations in the U.S. It has dented his and the family’s power, to be sure, and helped lead to the break-up of the company he built over some 60 years, but Murdoch survives.

He’ll survive Scientology, too.

The report (sub.req’d) says that the Romney campaign is the first to buy ads delivered on Apple’s advertising platform, iAd. The campaign explained the ad purchases to the Journal, saying that mobile devices are ”the most personal device you carry. We felt like we wanted to connect with people where they spend their time.”

Romney’s move also suggests that, in the same way that 2008 was the first social media election, the 2012 campaign will be the first to include widespread adoption of mobile ads.

Both campaigns are predicted to spend $159 million on online advertising, and the mobile portion of that could help shape the extent to which consumers will accept ads on their phones and tablets. So far, mobile advertising has sputtered despite perennial predictions of a big breakout. Skeptics say that mobile screens are too small for effective advertising and consumers find the ads intrusive.

The Romney campaign is betting that the mobile ads will lead to deeper engagement and encourage voters to donate and share the Romney messages with their friends. The Obama campaign and Apple declined to comment to the Journal on Romney’s iAd initiative. Both sides have been using Google’s mobile ad network.

The Republican campaign is also augmenting its mobile strategy with its ‘With Mitt‘ app, an Instagram like tool that lets supporters share photos overlaid with patriotic or pro-Romney images. The app appears to be a clever idea in light of the enormous population of sharing online photos — what Om calls “the basic unit of digital emotion.”

The “With Mitt” app, which lets users share photos by email, Facebook or Twitter, appears to have smoothed over an earlier glitch in which it misspelled “America.” Here’s an example, using the “I’m a Mom for Mitt” overlay :

I couldn’t find an Obama campaign equivalent to ‘With Mitt’ but the incumbent’s team is touting its official Obama 2012 app that allows users to receive news, donate and more.

(Main image a still from Romney iPhone video via WSJ)