Disclosure

Apple Makes Good On Steve Jobs' Promise, Invites Other Advertisers. But What About Google's AdMob? —

Last week, Steve Jobs promised that his iPhone and iPads would be open to outside ad networks. Yesterday Apple made good on his promise, by changing the terms of its developer agreement. But he may not have opened the door all the way.

Backstory: Apple’s original license agreement, released in April, appeared to effectively ban third-party ad networks from selling “in-app” ads on its gadgets, by crippling their ability to track user data. In the absence of any clarification from Apple, it seemed to me (and others) that Apple was set on locking up its platform from advertising competition.

But last week at the D8 conference, Jobs either changed his stance or spelled it out, depending on your persepecctive: Apple wasn’t interested in banning rivals to its iAd platform, he said — it just wanted to cripple third-party analytics companies like Flurry.

And yesterday, Apple changed its legal language to reflect Jobs’ words. Here’s the revised language for section 3.3.9 of Apple’s developer agreement, concerning the use of data collection:

3.3.9 You and Your Applications may not collect, use, or disclose to any third party, user or device data without prior user consent, and then only under the following conditions:

- The collection, use or disclosure is necessary in order to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application. For example, without Apple’s prior written consent,
You may not use third party analytics software in Your Application to collect and send device data to a third party for aggregation, processing, or analysis.

- The collection, use or disclosure is for the purpose of serving advertising to Your Application; is provided to an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving
mobile ads (for example, an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other
than Apple would not qualify as independent); and the disclosure is limited to UDID, user location data, and other data specifically designated by Apple as available for advertising purposes.

If you compare and contrast with Apple’s earlier version, you’ll see the message is clear: It’s OK to collect user data to help sell ads — though you will need to get their permission to do so.

UPDATE: One important caveat here: It appears as if Apple may still be limiting its biggest potential rival — Google’s AdMob. Note the language about only allowing “independent” ad serving companies to collect data: “For example, an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent.”

Google (GOOG) certainly qualifies as a developer/distributor of mobile operating systems, right? The language also appears to disqualify potential rivals — if, for instance, Microsoft (MSFT) tried entering the mobile display market. I’ve asked Apple for comment, but I’m not expecting any.

Meantime, Apple’s language does appear to be good news for smaller competitors like Greystripe, Millenial Media and Medialets — though it may make them less attractive to potential acquirers

Here’s Jobs’ own words on the topic, last week at the D8 conference.

Gillette Geek —

Gillette Geek is a post from Chris Pirillo

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Gillette. All opinions are 100% mine with a cmp.ly/3 disclosure.

I’m a guy. 

As such, I get facial hair – and it’s not all that much fun to deal with on a daily basis. I also have two nosehairs which are plucked fortnightly – but that’s not of any consequence (nor do I believe this factoid will ever show up in a game of Trivial Pursuit).

I’m a geek, too.

Over the years, I’ve amassed quite a collection of hardware I like to refer to as “man gadgets.” These are largely comprised of shiny objects, many of which are now obsolete or relatively functionless (but my, do they shine).

I’m partnering with Gillette to bring to light some of their shiny objects for men now. 

Yes, I happen to accept advertising in a variety of ways (often pushing the envelope with it) – but instead of running simple banners or doing something tricky with text), I’m working with Gillette in a sponsored conversation format to think around the blade. They’ve given me the rather comfortable title of “spokesblogger” for one of their new products online.

I’m being transparent.

Don’t worry; I’m not going to shave myself in public. At least, that’s not what I signed up to do. I’m more interested in how it seems that larger corporations are starting to understand that the future of their brand rests in the hands of of the community. In this case, it’s the community of guys who shave. There are quite a few of us out there, I believe.

I’m putting my face on the line, though – literally. 

I suppose my question to you at this juncture is simple: does shaving matter to you?

Look for my first post in the series on Tuesday.

• Unwanted Facial Hair Tutorial: a “How to” Cosmetics Beauty Tip
• Do You Remember the first of Movember?
• Sideburns Tutorial: A “How To” Cosmetics Beauty Tip
• Braun Pulsonic 9595 Review

A Bill of Privacy Rights for Social Network Users —

Social network service providers today are in a unique position. They are intermediaries and hosts to our communications, conversations and connections with loved ones, family, friends and colleagues. They have access to extremely sensitive information, including data gathered over time and from many different individuals.

Here at EFF, we've been thinking a lot recently about what specific rights a responsible social network service should provide to its users. Social network services must ensure that users have ongoing privacy and control over personal information stored with the service. Users are not just a commodity, and their rights must be respected. Innovation in social network services is important, but it must remain consistent with, rather than undermine, user privacy and control. Based on what we see today, therefore, we suggest three basic privacy-protective principles that social network users should demand:

#1: The Right to Informed Decision-Making

Users should have the right to a clear user interface that allows them to make informed choices about who sees their data and how it is used.

Users should be able to see readily who is entitled to access any particular piece of information about them, including other people, government officials, websites, applications, advertisers and advertising networks and services.

Whenever possible, a social network service should give users notice when the government or a private party uses legal or administrative processes to seek information about them, so that users have a meaningful opportunity to respond.

#2: The Right to Control

Social network services must ensure that users retain control over the use and disclosure of their data. A social network service should take only a limited license to use data for the purpose for which it was originally given to the provider. When the service wants to make a secondary use of the data, it must obtain explicit opt-in permission from the user. The right to control includes users' right to decide whether their friends may authorize the service to disclose their personal information to third-party websites and applications.

Social network services must ask their users' permission before making any change that could share new data about users, share users' data with new categories of people, or use that data in a new way. Changes like this should be "opt-in" by default, not "opt-out," meaning that users' data is not shared unless a user makes an informed decision to share it. If a social network service is adding some functionality that its users really want, then it should not have to resort to unclear or misleading interfaces to get people to use it.

#3: The Right to Leave

Users giveth, and users should have the right to taketh away.

One of the most basic ways that users can protect their privacy is by leaving a social network service that does not sufficiently protect it. Therefore, a user should have the right to delete data or her entire account from a social network service. And we mean really delete. It is not enough for a service to disable access to data while continuing to store or use it. It should be permanently eliminated from the service's servers.

Furthermore, if users decide to leave a social network service, they should be able to easily, efficiently and freely take their uploaded information away from that service and move it to a different one in a usable format. This concept, known as "data portability" or "data liberation," is fundamental to promote competition and ensure that users truly maintains control over their information, even if they sever their relationship with a particular service.

Thanks to I Design Your Logo for coming up with a new logo for me. Disclosure: they did it for free for me, but I needed a new one and thought “why not?” They sent me a bunch of ideas, I picked a couple I liked, and they iterated again. So far most people on Twitter and Google Buzz like it.

At the same time, I have a new design, put in place by my boss, Rob La Gesse. He bought me a new theme for Wordpress and put in place new Twitter widgets from Publitweet (nicer than the ones from Twitter themselves) and also put in place the Wibiya bar at the bottom which lets you see a variety of things I’ve done around the Internet (Google Buzz coming soon) and also adds those Facebook like buttons.

One of the things I’ve tried to do is keep my blog simple and easy to read. That’s one reason we went with the Genesis Wordpress theme.

Anyway, hope you like it, although, like I said over on Google Buzz most of my readers probably won’t even notice because they can read me over there or on an RSS aggregator.

Syncapse Corp., makers of the SocialTALK social media management platform, has announced that it has completed a $3.3 million private equity round.

SocialTALK offers a central dashboard to create, approve and manage content on multiple social media channels, plus look at the metrics from them. The platform offers support for Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and Movable Type, allowing users to create new posts, moderate comments, schedule when posts go out and push the same content to multiple networks at once.

Overall, this space is exploding, and we recently looked at a number of similar tools, including Salesforce.com, Vitrue, ObjectiveMarketer. Another major player — social CRM tool CoTweet — was acquired by ExactTarget back in March.

We believe that the social management space is likely to continue to grow as more companies and brands recognize the need for tools to create more streamlined workflows around social media — especially for larger organizations with compliance and approval procedures that need to be followed.

[Disclosure: Syncapse is a sponsor of the Mashable Media Summit]

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Tags: b2b, MARKETING, social media management, socialtalk, syncapse

U.S. Lawmakers Prepare Online Privacy Rules —

United States lawmakers have spent a year preparing draft legislation for a law that would define and limit privacy for advertisers and Internet companies. The legislation will govern methods of taking information from users online and using that information to target advertisements to them. On Tuesday, they will present the draft legislation.

The timing is good for such an announcement given the worry over, among other things, Facebook's recent changes that have caused fresh worry over privacy.

Sponsor

According to the Wall Street Journal, two of the representatives working on the bill, Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Cliff Stearns (R-FL) are posting the bill on their websites Tuesday. The plan is to accept feedback from readers for two months, then revise and submit it.

Elements of the draft include the following.

• Disclosure of what information is collected and how, how it is used and who it is shared with


• Opt-outs for consumers.


• Restrictions on collecting financial, medical, government ID information and that of children

Internet and advertising companies, meanwhile, argue that any such bill risks damaging the $23 billion online advertising market.

Discuss

Twitter for Android —

Twitter for Android is a post from Chris Pirillo

A few weeks ago, the Twitter team announced that we would be seeing a Twitter client coming soon to Android devices. The app has become available sooner than we thought, as announced on the official Twitter blog today. “When apps work well with each other, sharing becomes as second nature on machines as it does in person. The Android platform is really good at that, and we’ve worked with the Android team to make it super easy to share what’s happening.”

The app makes it easy to stay connected. You can access your timeline by using the home screen widget. Check out a friend’s location on a map in seconds. Or, you can see your contacts’ latest messages in your address book, GoogleTalk list or any other app that uses the Android QuickContact bar. You don’t have to click through twelve different screens to find out what’s happening at any given moment.

Likely the best part of this news is the fact that the entire code will be open-sourced in the near future: “We had a great time working with the Android team and are thrilled that Google will be open sourcing the code used in this app in the near future. We look forward to the amazing experiences developers will create using Twitter APIs in their upcoming Android apps.”

This could bring some seriously cool apps from many talented developers. I know we have a few of you in our community already working on creating Android apps. What are your thoughts about the Twitter app? What do you think can be done to make it even better than it already appears to be out of the gate?

• Twitter Survey Wants to Know What You Think
• Should School be Taught in the Cloud?
• Do Computer Majors Mean Anything Anymore?
• Will Yahoo be the Next Twitter?
• Is a URL Shortener Really What Twitter Needed?
• Disclosure and Compliance Made Easy
• Twitter Buys Tweetie and Promises iPad App
• Tweet Your Way to a Divorce
• Twitter on the iPad
• Tellmewhere Makes Check-ins Make Sense

[NOTE: This is my semi-monthly "blogvertisement" for Lights Jerky etc.]

I’m happy to report that The Lights Jerky Company, based in my hometown of Alpine, Texas, has finally gotten their new website up.

What can I say? It’s the best store-bought jerky I’ve ever had. Locally, it’s really popular. Glenn Short, the owner, sells it in all the bars, convenience stores and supermarkets in the Far West Texas area.  He’s a great guy and he really puts his heart and soul into it. And people can tell…

Glenn and I meet up about once a week or so for beers…

All you jerkyheads can order it here in one, three and five pound boxes.

Seriously, Guys, this stuff is the bomb. A global microbrand in the making? I hope so.

[Disclosure: I'm getting no money for this. I'm just doing it because I like Glenn, I like his jerky and want to see a local business succeed, that's all.]

You might or might not write something to the contrary in the comments, because maybe you’ve had different experiences, but I’ve gotta say, every experience I’ve had with Rackspace has been amazing. (Quick disclosure: they host my site gratis – that has nothing to do with what I’m writing about here.)

I just tweeted a problem. Within three or so minutes, I had a DM on Twitter, a Text message, and someone already dug in deep enough to help me out.

The problem wasn’t theirs. It was a WordPress problem related to the weird hack I’m still seemingly suffering from. But they still helped me find the problem and correct in a few minutes.

The part I like the most: I’m a bit more tech savvy than the average user, and without even having to say this, they treat me FIRST like I know what I’m talking about, and then second like they’re willing to explain if they’ve shot past my ability.

Thanks, Rackspace Cloud, for hosting my site, but more so, for keeping customer service at its best.

For those evaluating a host, they cost a bit more than others, but if you want REAL service, it’s worth every penny.

Facebook Sees Major Outage, Takes Out Partner Site Plugins Too —

Facebook has been inaccessible to many, if not all users, for the last 30 minutes or so. This is incredibly bad timing for the company, which is trying to pitch itself this week as a central part of the web’s infrastructure. Not only is the Facebook.com site down, but error messages are popping up on partner sites using the new social plugins technology launched this week.

Not to get all I-told-you-so, but after hearing the presentations at Facebook’s f8 this week, the burning question on my mind was, has Facebook made itself a central point of failure for the web. It appears that the answer is yes.

Meanwhile, jokes are running rampant on Twitter about how long till people tweeting about Facebook take down Twitter. Downrightnow.com is reporting a service disruption of 28 minutes and counting, though just before we hit publish, we were able to load Facebook.com again. We’ve reached out to Facebook about the outage and they say they’re looking into it.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

All attendees of the f8 developer conference are receiving special RFID tags that enable them to check-in to various locations throughout the conference venue. The service lets you tag yourself in photos, become a fan of various Facebook Pages, and share activity to your Facebook profile. While it’s still a concept service, it’s interesting to see some of the things that Facebook developers are currently testing.

Facebook has been widely expected to make some type of location announcement today, yet there are no specific sessions dedicated to explaining how to implement location within Facebook. One can imagine that RFID would be extremely useful for enabling users to check in to various locations, however in its current form, there’s little disclosure on what each check in results in.

For example, there’s a “Facebook Web Development” booth that you can check into by tapping your RFID tag on a reader (pictured to the right). Once you check in, you become a fan, however there is no disclosure what will happen once you swipe your ID card. Thus the process is clearly an early stage test to provide some entertainment value for attendees of the f8 event. It’s definitely interesting though and it’s a sign that we may see other location announcements in the coming hours.

One other cool feature of the presence reader is that all check-ins are displayed on a large display within the main hall of the conference center. The result is that you can watch people as they walk around the venue in theory. While the actual presence tracking doesn’t appear to be functional (in terms of peoples’ exact location), the visualization adjusts as more people check in to various areas throughout the venue.

More f8 coverage to come!

Presence Visualization

Presence Profile Photo Story

How do you connect to Twitter and understand its value and performance? That's part of the challenge for any enterprise considering how to adopt social technologies to connect with customers.

This week at Sugarcon we heard a lot about how to manage a social CRM envrionment. Increasingly, companies are turning to API's for integrating third-party applications like Twitter to better connect and interact with customers.

Sponsor

Sonoa Systems calls it an API economy with Twitter serving as the most applied API on the planet.

To manage API's, Sonoa offers Apigee, a free self-service for developers working with API's. This week at the Chirp conference, Sonoa broadened Apigee by providing analytics, monitoring, debugging and testing tools.

For example, with API Analytics a customer may monitor usage levels, review usage patterns, see the geo-location and look at performance metrics like response time.

The service now also allows users to share messages with other developers to help with troubleshooting and community learning.

API management will become a major requirement for the enterprise, especially as more applications integrate into CRM environments. As Paul Greenberg stated in his keynote at Sugarcon, the focus is no longer about controlling the customer contact but interacting with the customer in the fashion they wish to communicate.

[Disclosure: SugarCRM paid for a plane ticket for Alex Williams to attend SugarCon in San Francisco.]

Discuss

Atlassian Security Breach and Warning. >>> Update: Apology and Disclosure —

Well, well, hours after telling you not to change passwords, now I am telling you to change it… but this time with good reason. Minutes ago I’ve received a email from Atlassian:

We are sending you this message because we experienced a security breach and suspect that your Atlassian customer account password details (only) may have been compromised.
It is very unlikely that an unauthorised user has had the opportunity to log in to your account so far and if they have, there is very little in the way of personal information which could have been accessed. However, to minimise any further risk to your Atlassian account being compromised, we strongly recommend that you change your Atlassian account password as soon as possible using the procedure below.
Be aware that this security issue only affects Atlassian customers who created an Atlassian account and purchased one of our products before June 2008. Since then, we have been using a more secure user management system based on Atlassian’s Crowd product. When you change your Atlassian account password using the procedure below, your Atlassian customer account details will be stored in our updated Crowd user management system, which will further minimise the chance of a security breach occurring in future.
Procedure for changing your Atlassian customer account password:
1) Login to http://my.atlassian.com
2) Click “My Profile” (3rd tab)
3) Click “Change Password” (in Contact Information section)
4) Update your password to a new value
Atlassian apologises for the inconvenience caused. However, this is an extremely rare event for us and since we take security issues seriously, we are taking every precaution possible to minimise the effects of this security breach.

Sincerely/Best regards,
Glenn Butcher
Director of IT

Not fun .. and I expect to we’ll hear more from Atlassian soon.  For now they are obviously figthing whatever it is – status update from Twitter:

Atlassian had a security breach. Apologies for the confusion. Our site is experiencing heavy loads. We are working on getting back up ASAP.

Personally I am safe – I don’t have active accounts, just decided to help push Atlassian’s charity towards the finish line by purchasing 10 licences, but if you do, time to change the passwords…

Update:  co-Founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes posted the details on the Atlassian blog.

Apparently an old, inactive database table that had already been migrated in July 2008 to the secure Crowd identity management system was not deleted mistakenly.  That indirectly answers the speculation about Atlassian passwords being stored in plain text format.  They are not – anymore, but they used to be, prior to July 2008.

Mike goes on to detail what was / was not compromised:  read for changes, they are resetting potentially compromised account passwords now.

He does not BS, owns up the mistake:

We made a big error. For this we are, of course, extremely sorry. The legacy customer database, with passwords stored in plain text, was a liability. Even though it wasn’t active, it should have been deleted. There’s no logical explanation for why it wasn’t, other than as we moved off one project, and on to the next one, we dropped the ball and screwed up.

They are still investigating what happened and Mike promises full disclosure, coming this week.

It’s been a bad day for Atlassian and some of their customers – but I’m glad they live up to their “Open Company, No Bullshit” slogan, and respond as expected.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

Facebook Search: Already Bigger Than Ask, AOL —

Facebook’s U.S. search queries grew 48 percent in March, bringing the company to 4.2 percent market share, according to comScore data that’s due out this afternoon but has already been distributed by Citi Investment Research. At 4.2 percent of searches, Facebook now has a greater share than the search engine Ask, at 3.8 percent, and the long-time portal AOL, at 2.5 percent. And this is coming off of a February when Facebook redesigned its home page to more prominently feature search and saw an immediate 10 percent jump in search queries.

Microsoft’s Bing, which powers Facebook’s web search, is also on the rise, with 11.7 percent market share a couple tenths above February. Yahoo grew for the first time since Bing was introduced — to 16.9 percent market share — but is still on a overall downward slope for the year. Meanwhile, Google had 65.1 percent market share in March, down just a few tenths from March.

Expect this trend to continue. As we wrote last month:

Understanding information through a social lens can be incredibly useful. Not to mention, half of Facebook’s 400 million users log in every day, so they will likely become accustomed to searching through the site where they live on the web.

Related content from GigaOM Pro:

Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy Flickr user boxchain.

Location-based social network Loopt has just updated its iPhone and BlackBerry applications, adding a hybrid map feature that allows you to view a single map (seen at right) that plots nearby points of interest, friends, and events all at once. The new update also brings LooptPulse, which the company has already launched for the iPhone and iPad, to the BlackBerry.

LooptPulse, which was first announced last fall, is Loopt’s discovery feature. If there are a lot of Loopt users checking in at a nearby event or restaurant, the service will recommend it to you, even if your friends aren’t necessarily there. Loopt generates some of these recommendations using data from its partners like Zagat, CitySearch, Bing, and Tastingtable (recently added partners include SonicLiving, Zvents, and Metromix).

Loopt has been around for much longer than hot location startups like Foursquare and Gowalla, and has more registered users than either of them. But in some senses it’s playing catchup — for years Loopt was a passive service that constantly tracked your location as opposed to the check-in services that have recently caught on. Loopt has now shifted its model to compete more directly with these services, and its Pulse discovery features go beyond what Foursquare currently offers.

Disclosure: Loopt offers a branded TC version of the service here</a.

The concept of browsing the Web with friends is an often-discussed target rarely implemented well - usually requiring heavy browser plugins and Web meeting software or a centralized Web site. We saw Browzmi in 2008, an interesting service that didn't gain tremendous traction, but was a good proofpoint and testing ground. Today, we have a new entrant, Nurph, which lets you take the conversation with friends and move it around, complete with a new URL shortener to drive engagement from network to network. The service is now open in public beta.

Starting with Nurph (at http://nur.ph) is very simple. Go to their Web site and drop in a URL that you want to discuss. That could be anything from CNN or Apple's iPad page to any article or photo stream you find online. The customized URL (extended from nur.ph) delivers a chat window in the bottom right corner of the site, with your Nurph avatar.


If more than one friend is on the URL, their avatar is displayed, just like many other chat rooms. You can chat in the floating window - entering an @username to refer to the individual, or a URL to take the conversation somewhere else with its own Nurph.


In our testing of it, switching URLs was seamless. Clicking a shared link would whisk you away from the existing chatroom and your friends would need to follow you along to keep the conversation going. This was a small hassle in terms of waiting for them to catch up, but there's no sense in keeping a discussion in one place and people in another.

In a Nurph chat I had with some of the company's first users, including Neil, one of the the cofounders, we talked about the popular FTC disclosure icons from this blog in December, debated a slow news day at CNN and chatted about whether we had purchased iPads yet. Practically the only site where we ran into trouble with the Nurph window was when playing QuickTime videos, but for static pages, the Nurph just became part of the experience. Should be a fun way to get family and friends on a single page, breaking chat out of the social networks and into everywhere else.

Check out Nurph at http://nur.ph.

I was just interviewed for a BBC television feature that will run around the same time the iPad is launched. I’ll be a talking head, basically. For what it’s worth, here’s what I provided as background for where I’d be coming from in the interview:

1. The iPad will arrive in the market with an advantage no other completely new computing device for the mass market has ever enjoyed: the ability to run a 100,000-app portfolio that’s already developed, in this case for the iPhone. Unless the iPad is an outright lemon, this alone should assure its success.
2. The iPad will launch a category within which it will be far from the only player. Apple’s feudal market-control methods (all developers and customers are trapped within its walled garden) will encourage competitors that lack the same limitations. We should expect other hardware companies to launch pads running on open source operating systems, especially Android and Symbian. (Disclosure: I consult Symbian.) These can support much larger markets than Apple’s closed and private platforms alone will allow.
3. The first versions of unique hardware designs tend to be imperfect and get old fast. Such was the case with the first iPods and iPhones, and will surely be the case with the first iPads as well. The ones being introduced next week will seem antique one year from now.
4. Warning to competitors: copying Apple is always a bad idea. The company is an example only of itself. There is only one Steve Jobs, and nobody else can do what he does. Fortunately, he only does what he can control. The rest of the market will be out of his control, and it will be a lot bigger than what fits inside Apple’s beautiful garden.

I covered some of that, and added a few things, which I’ll enlarge with a quick brain dump:

1. The iPad brings to market a whole new form factor that has a number of major use advantages over smartphones, laptops and netbooks, the largest of which is this: it fits in a purse or any small bag — where it doesn’t act just like any of those other devices. (Though in the case of the iPhone it comes ready to run more than 100,000 iPhone apps.) It’s easy and welcoming to use — and its uses are not subordinated, by form, to computing or telephony. It’s an accessory to your own intentions. This is an advantage that gets lost amidst all the talk about how it’s little more than a new display system for “content.”
2. My own fantasy for tablets is interactivity with the everyday world. Take retailing for example. Let’s say you syndicate your shopping list, but only to trusted retailers, perhaps through a fourth party (one that works to carry out your intentions, rather than sellers’ — though it can help you engage with them). You go into Target and it gives you a map of the store, where the goods you want are, and what’s in stock, what’s not, and how to get what’s mising, if they’re in a position to help you with that. You can turn their promotions on or off, and you can choose, using your own personal terms of service, what data to share with them, what data not to, and conditions of that data’s use. Then you can go to Costco, the tire store, and the university library and do the same. I know it’s hard to imagine a world in which customers don’t have to belong to loyalty programs and submit to coercive and opaque terms of data use, but it will happen, and it has a much better chance of happening faster if customers are independent and have their own tools for engagement. Which are being built. Check out what Phil Windley says here about one approach.
3. Apple works vertically. Android, Symbian, Linux and other open OSes, with the open hardware they support, work horizonally. There is a limit to how high Apple can build its walled garden, nice as it will surely be. There is no limit to how wide everybody else can make the rest of the marketplace. For help imagining this, see Dave Winer’s iPad as a Coral Reef.
4. How big publishers (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, Condé Nast, the Book People) use the iPad as a hand-held newsstand (where, as with real-world newsstands, you have to pay for the goods) — and how the TV and movie people use the iPad as a replacement for their old distribution systems (also for pay) are Very Big Deals. But not as big a deal as how the rest of us use it. Have you thought about how you’ll blog, or whatever comes next, on an iPad? Or on any tablet? Does it only have to be in a browser? What about using a tablet as a production device, and not just an instrument of consumption? I don’t think Apple has put much thought into this, but others will, outside Apple’s walled garden. You should too. That’s because we’re at a juncture here. A fork in the road. Do we want the Internet to be broadcasting 2.0 — run by a few content companies and their allied distributors? Or do we want it to be the wide open marketplace it was meant to be in the first place, and is good for everybody?
5. We’re going to see a huge strain on the mobile data system as iPads and other tablets flood the world. Here too it will matter whether the mobile phone companies want to be a rising tide that lifts all boats, or just conduits for their broadcasting and content production partners. (Or worse, old fashioned phone companies, treating and billing data in the same awful ways they bill voice.) There’s more money in the former than the latter, but the latter are their easy pickings. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

I also deal with all this in a longer post that will go up elsewhere. I’ll point to it here when it comes up.

Trumba Offers Custom Objects to Calendars —

Trumba, the shared calendar and events communications software company has added the ability for users to attach "custom objects" to their Web calendars and other websites. These "objects" are in essence tables that unfold graphically, keyed to links, or can stand on their own as pages.

Trumba's customers use the company's software to publish interlinked calendars and provide other modular features to their websites. Clients include media companies like the New York Times and Ottaway Newspapers, academic institutions like Kansas State and Emory Universities, and groups like the City of Seattle and the New Orleans Saints.

Sponsor

The custom objects advance the inherent modularity of Trumba's offerings. From Trumba:

"To quickly grasp the idea of an Object, think of it as a table. Each record is represented by a row. Each attribute is represented by a column. Because Objects are tables, you can use them to store any collection of data that you might want to publish on your website."

Dan Hickman, Trumba's president, wrote us:

"Some of our competitors offer a canned venue or performer features that let you track and publish that information along with your calendar but our custom objects feature lets you create any type of content that might be associated with your events. The feature can even be used to publish a connected database of information that's not even related to your calendar."

Examples include attaching venue descriptions and pictures to events, to provide detailed listings of departments in a sleekly retrievable fashion and the ability to solicit and utilize user-generated content.

Disclosure: The author helped Trumba start their first blog many years ago.

Discuss

Don’t spend money on marketing, do offer flexibility and data exporting to eliminate buyers’ regret, make sure to capitalize on and value goodwill, and only charge for things that are hard to do. That’s what some startups say is the key to success in the freemium business. But the biggest reason the five presenters this morning at the Freemium Summit in San Francisco — Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic (see disclosure at the bottom) and MailChimp — are doing well is because they have great products that people want. They’ve been able to get those products to a broad audience by using the freemium model: that is, offering a free service with the option to upgrade. It’s an increasingly important business model, but one that’s hard to navigate, so their anecdotes, open sharing of data, and lessons learned were really valuable.

Pandora’s reverse-freemium approach: Pandora first launched in August 2005 with something that sounds quite similar to freemium: users got 10 hours of free online radio at signup, after which they were asked to pay $36 per year. “In the first couple weeks we had 100,000 people come through and the vast majority listened to every last minute of their free ten hours,” said CTO Tom Conrad. “Then we asked them for their credit card and they would wander off into the wilderness.”

That November, Pandora switched on an “ad-supported” option. It was ad-supported in name only, however, because they had no ad server, no ad staff — not even a place on their page to put ads. But growth quadrupled overnight, and within three days, Apple called and asked to buy out ad inventory through December. Conrad and his team of course said yes, arriving at the price of $10,000 for the month. “We literally hard-coded the ads on the page,” he said. “We didn’t want them to know, but every time they changed their creative we’d have to relaunch the entire site.”

Pandora now has 20 million uniques and took in $50 million in revenue last year. Subscription rates had dropped to well below 1 percent of users. But 1 percent of a large number is still a large number, so last year the company launched Pandora One, a new take on premium with higher quality streams, a desktop app and fewer usage limits. It now has 300,000 subscribers, accounts for 1.6 or 1.7 percent of monthly uniques, and is expected to bring in 15 percent of 2010 revenue.

Dropbox’s numbers game: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says you should know one thing about freemium: “It is a numbers game, so bust out your Excel spreadsheet. It’s all about finding things in the margins — lots of little things rather than one key thing.” Houston went into detail about the backup service’s attempts to recruit users through search marketing. The company found that obvious keywords like “online storage” were bid up, and the long tail of search terms had low volume. Then, people coming from search who actually signed up might not even pick the paid version (which has more storage and features).

Ultimately that meant “our cost per effective acquisition per paid user was thousands of dollars for a hundred-dollar product.” So for a time, Dropbox went to great lengths to hide the free option to users coming in through search, and as a result confused users and felt terrible. “So the big lesson there is if you adopt a freemium business model your marketing cost is the free users.” The fact was that Dropbox was offering a product that people didn’t know they needed until they tried, and “search is great for harvesting demand, not creating it,” Houston said.

Having dropped search marketing as a strategy, Dropbox has actually grown incredibly fast. At some point, the company realized that user referrals were its biggest source of growth, so now it encourages referrals with an incentive program. That increased signups by 60 percent, said Houston, and it now drives 30 percent of total signups. The company now devotes 30 percent of its engineering to acquiring active users.

Houston also told a second story about Dropbox’s realization that its unlimited undo history — available to free and paying users — was responsible for a huge and growing share of its costs. And further, few customers actually used the feature. “We said ‘holy sh*t!’ More than half of our hosting costs are going to deleted, not restored prior versions of files,” said Houston. The company was wary of rolling back a free feature, but was able to manage the transition without too much fuss by telling customers about it openly, and giving existing users the option to keep the feature if they liked.

Evernote’s key metric: Evernote, the personal note-taking service, faces a challenge to spreading virally in that it’s not at all a social product, said CEO Phil Libin. But what Evernote can focus on is deriving maximum value from the users it does have. The company, which launched in June 2008, has 2.7 million users, with 7,000 new users per day (mostly through word of mouth, despite the lack of social features, said Libin), and 50,000 paying users (who convert in order to use the service on multiple platforms and for other premium features).

The thing is, over time inactive users drop off, and active users start paying. Once Evernote finally figured that dynamic out and started talking about it, term sheets and partnerships requests started flowing in, Libin said. “Our key insight is users are growing really fast, but revenue is growing faster.” Currently, users are growing 10 percent per month and revenue is growing 18 percent. “It’s like our users are a fine stinky cheese or wine — it gets better with age,” said Libin. “More and more people who aren’t going to pay just leave, and more who stay pay.” So 0.5 percent of people who sign up in a given month go premium, but 2 percent of people who signed up a year ago are now paying Evernote.

Libin’s key metric is comparing revenue per active user with variable expenses. At this point, the company makes $0.25 per month per active user, and spends $0.09 on variable expenses like infrastructure, customers service and network operations. He said freemium can work for any business if you have 1) a great long-term retention rate, 2) a product that increases in value over time and 3) variable costs.

Automattic CEO Toni Schneider and MailChimp CEO Ben Chestnut added a few more key lessons in their talks. Schneider talked about the blogging-software company’s decision to offer a-la-carte freemium services instead of tiered levels, giving both his team and users more flexibility. His company now makes 40 percent of its revenue from premium services like domain mapping, with the remainder from ad sales and enterprise products. But he said the problem with this approach is customers may not know of services they could receive, because it’s harder to market them individually.

Chestnut talked about the fact that free products are ripe for abuse. His 10-year-old email marketing company started offering a free version seven months ago, and has seen 240 percent user growth, a 225 percent increase in email delivery volume from 200 to 450 million, and a 200 percent projected revenue increase. But the biggest bumps of all? A 354 percent increase in abuse-related issues like spamming, followed by a 245 percent increase in legal costs dealing people trying to game the system. Luckily, MailChimp was able to develop automated ways to discover and deal with some of these issues, but even as an anticipated side effect the increase in abuse from going freemium has been huge.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

FutureDomain writes "Is SSL becoming pointless? Researchers are poking holes in the chain of trust for SSL certificates which protect sensitive data. According to these hypothesized attacks, governments could compel certificate authorities to give them phony certificates that are signed by the CA, which are then used to perform man in the middle attacks. They point out that Verisign already makes large sums of money by facilitating the disclosure of US consumers' private data to US government law enforcement. The researchers are developing a Firefox plugin (PDF) that checks past certificates and warns of anomalies in the issuing country, but not much can help if government starts spying on the secure connections of its own citizens."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This can't be the way that Australia wanted it. One day after Google announced its decision to stop censoring its search results in China, the Australian government released the results of a public consultation on its own Internet censorship proposal. Predictably, Google has some objections (PDF), including its oblique comment that Australia's mandatory filtering scheme could "confer legitimacy upon filtering by other Governments."

"Australia is rightly regarded as a liberal democracy that balances individual liberty with social responsibility," continues the Google filing. "The Governments of many other countries may justify, by reference to Australia, their use of filtering, their lack of disclosure about what is being filtered, and their political direction of agencies administering filtering."

Google is unlikely to come right out and compare Australia to China, but the implication is obvious—and has been made explicit by other groups. Reporters Without Borders said recently that Australia would "be joining an Internet censors' club that includes such countries as China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia."

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