Facebook-Google rivalry intensifies with PR fiasco

Facebook  V/S  Google

The intense rivalry between Facebook and Google just got juicier.

In a twist seemingly out of a Hollywood thriller, Facebook hired a prominent public relations firm toplant stories harshly criticizing Google’s privacy practices in leading news outlets. The efforts backfired when the firm approached a blogger who not only declined the assignment, but also went public with the offer.

The latest Silicon Valley drama has also evoked chatter of smear campaigns, secrecy and even Richard Nixon. It took the once-secret blogger known as Fake Steve Jobs to help sort it all out.

One lesson- If you’re going to write an incriminating email, don’t. Pick up the phone instead.

Here’s another- “If you are out there planting negative stories, you are feeding the conflict,” said Larry L. Smith, president of the Institute for Crisis Management, a public relations company. “When they get in a shoving match, whoever is perceived by the public to be the bully loses in the public eye.”

Rather than getting news outlets to circulate stories about privacy problems facing Google, Facebook found itself having to answer questions about why it wanted to maintain secrecy.

Facebook said it never authorized or intended to run any smear campaign against Google. Rather, the company said it hired Burson—Marsteller to prompt investigations into how a new Google service called Social Circle collects and uses data about people. In a statement, Facebook said it should have made it clear that it was behind the efforts.

Burson—Marsteller said Facebook had requested that its identity remain secret “on the grounds that it was merely asking to bring publicly available information to light.” The firm said that violated its own policies, “and the assignment on those terms should have been declined.” Not that it was.

Facebook’s efforts to stay anonymous — something that violates the terms of service for users of its site {hbox}” began to unravel when Burson-Marsteller contacted blogger Christopher Soghoian, an Indiana University graduate student well known in online privacy and security circles.

The firm’s John Mercurio asked Soghoian if he wanted to write an item for “a top-tier media outlet” blasting Google for what Mercurio calls a “sweeping violation of user privacy.” Soghoian asked for the identity of the firm’s client, but Mercurio wouldn’t reveal it. Soghoian then posted the email exchange online.

Burson-Marsteller, meanwhile, also pitched USA Today. Instead of running with the planted story, USA Today published an article on the “PR firm’s attack of Gmail privacy.”

It took Newsweek tech editor Dan Lyons to figure out that Burson-Marsteller’s mystery client was not Apple or Microsoft, as some murmurs went, but Facebook.

Lyons, incidentally, is the writer behind The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, a sharp—witted blog pretending to be written by Apple’s CEO. Lyons used to go by Fake Steve Jobs, but The New York Times outed him in 2007. (The blog is on hiatus out of respect for Jobs, who is on medical leave.)

“The mess, seemingly worthy of a Nixon re-election campaign, is embarrassing for Facebook, which has struggled at times to brand itself as trustworthy. But even more so for Burson-Marsteller, a huge PR firm that has represented lots of blue-chip corporate clients in its 58-year history,” Lyons wrote in the Daily Beast, a website owned by the same company as Newsweek.

And so, people got a rare glimpse inside Facebook’s thorny relationship with Google in a story that seems more befitting to behind-the-scenes Washington politics or rival pizza joints than the sparring between two seemingly friendly tech giants.

It was also a good lesson on privacy in an age in which few things stay out of the public eye.

“Odds are that if you are writing about something controversial, or doing something controversial, someone is going to leak it,” said Smith, the crisis-management expert.

Google and Facebook are Silicon Valley neighbors with similar scrappy roots as startups.

Over the past few years, however, they have grown more competitive. Google is dominant in advertising that accompanies search results, but Facebook has the potential to draw ad dollars with its extensive knowledge of people’s interests and social circles. With little success, Google has urged Facebook to make its data more accessible to its search engine.

Facebook also has successfully lured scores of Google’s engineers and executives, a key reason Google gave its staff a 10 percent raise this year.

The PR fiasco was prompted by Google’s Social Circle, which is part of the company’s efforts to supplement search results with content from your Facebook, Twitter and other online connections.

Facebook, no stranger to privacy mishaps, criticizes Google for collecting and storing Internet users’ information without their knowledge or consent.

But even the most ardent privacy advocates are dubious Google is doing anything all that bad with Social Circle.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said there are far more pressing privacy issues. They include Google’s mapping service with street-level photography and Facebook’s tendency to encourage people to share more than they think they’re sharing. EPIC also objects to the tracking of people’s location through mobile devices.

Facebook acknowledges that it could have handled the matter better.

“The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way,” the company said.

Google did not respond to messages for comment. Nor did Mercurio and Jim Goldman, the Burson-Marsteller employees behind the Facebook campaign. The blogger, Soghoian, confirmed the email exchange and said, “I don’t write things for other people.”

Lyons would not disclose how he figured out the identity of Burson-Marsteller’s mystery client. As for Facebook’s response that it didn’t intend a smear campaign, he only wrote- “I don’t think there’s any reason not to take them at their word, right? Oh wait.”

Read More :- http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/internet/article2021390.ece

Facebook, Foe of Anonymity, Is Forced to Explain a Secret

Facebook

Facebook, it seems, doesn’t always practice what it preaches.

For years, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, has extolled the virtue of transparency, and he built Facebook accordingly. The social network requires people to use their real identity in large part because Mr. Zuckerberg says he believes that people behave better — and society will be better — if they cannot cloak their words or actions in anonymity.

"Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity," Mr. Zuckerberg has said.

Now, Facebook is being taken to task for trying to conceal its own identity as it sought to coax reporters and technology experts to write critical stories about the privacy implications of a search feature, Social Circle, from its rival, Google.

The plan backfired after The Daily Beast revealed late Wednesday that Facebook, whose own privacy practices have long been criticized, was behind the effort. It didn’t help that some of the technology experts who were encouraged to criticize Google dismissed the privacy concerns around Social Circle as misplaced.

"Doing this anonymously is an obvious contradiction of Facebook’s oft-stated values," said David Kirkpatrick, the author of "The Facebook Effect," a book about the company. "It feels hypocritical."

While Facebook issued a sort of mea culpa on Thursday saying that it never intended or authorized a smear campaign against Google, criticism continued to reverberate in Silicon Valley and beyond. TechCrunch, the influential technology blog, demanded a better explanation and called Facebook’s tactics "slimy" and "cowardly." Another well-read blog, Inside Facebook, called it "a spectacularly failed attempt at undermining the competition."

Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land, an industry blog, said, “It has the taint of a smear campaign despite what Facebook is saying.”

Facebook insiders, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter, said the company hired the well-known public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to suggest stories about Social Circle to reporters because it did not want the issue to turn into a Facebook versus Google story. Social Circle is an optional feature of Google search that uses publicly available information from social networks to personalize search results.

In a statement issued Thursday, Facebook said: "We wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles. We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way."

Companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere routinely approach reporters and analysts with stories about the so-called misdeeds of their competitors. But journalism and public relations experts criticized Facebook for doing so anonymously and insisting that Burson-Marsteller not reveal its identity.

"It’s just unacceptable," said Tom Goldstein, a journalism professor and expert in ethics at the University of California, Berkeley. "Journalists should announce who they are and people who deal with journalists should announce who they are and where they are coming from."

Rosanna M. Fiske, chief executive of the Public Relations Society of America, said it was wrong for Facebook to insist on anonymity and for Burson-Marsteller to agree to it. "In the essence of the public relations code of ethics 101, that’s a no-no," she said.

The Daily Beast journalist who uncovered Facebook’s role, Dan Lyons, knows a bit about false identities. He masqueraded for years as Fake Steve Jobs, a satirical blogger who frequently savaged reporters, companies and public relations people.

Facebook’s secret campaign also underscores the long shadow that Google casts over the company. While Facebook has roundly beat its rival in social networking, its executives, many of whom hail from Google, have long feared that its rival will use its dominance over Internet search to slowly encroach into Facebook’s territory.

Social Circle appears to do just that. It allows Google users who search for a topic like "restaurant in Chicago" to see among the results items about that topic that were posted by their friends on services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Yelp. It works only for people who have chosen to link their Google accounts to their accounts on those services, and relies on information that those services make publicly available on the Internet.

"I don’t think this feature is particularly problematic," said Christopher Soghoian, a graduate fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University who was one of the privacy experts contacted by Burson-Marsteller. "If Facebook didn’t want the data to be public, it could stop sharing it or it could use a technical mechanism to stop Google from accessing it."

When Burson-Marsteller, which had offered to ghostwrite opinion articles and submit them to major newspapers in Mr. Soghoian’s name, declined to say who it was working for, Mr. Soghoian made public his e-mail exchange with the Burson-Marsteller representatives.

Paul Cordasco, a spokesman for Burson-Marsteller, said that the firm made a mistake. "The mistake clearly was not being transparent about the client," he said in an interview Friday. He added that employees would receive additional training to make them "fully aware of our code of responsibility that emphasizes full transparency."

Facebook is by no means the first to promote critical stories about a rival anonymously. The practice is common in political circles in Washington and beyond, and it has a long history in Silicon Valley.

In 1998, for instance, when Microsoft was under fire from antitrust regulators, it was embarrassed by revelations that it planned a campaign to plant favorable letters to the editor and opinion pieces in newspapers across the country that were to be presented as testimonials from ordinary people.

Two years later, a firm working for Oracle was reported to have paid janitors to go through the garbage cans of a Microsoft-backed industry group in hopes of finding information that would embarrass its rival.

Read More :- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/technology/14facebook.html?_r=1

Skype Deal Is Unlikely to Pay Off for Microsoft

Skype

Microsoft has only recently embraced the Internet cloud. But from the perspective of its shareholders, that’s certainly where its $8.5 billion deal to buy Skype belongs.

In theory, it has potential advantages. In practice, Microsoft’s poor track record on mergers and acquisitions and the high price it is paying for Skype mean the transaction is unlikely to pay off.

The idea is that Microsoft can integrate Skype’s voice, video and messaging tools with Office e-mail and its mobile operating system. A recent deal with Nokia could support efforts to promote Microsoft’s smartphone platform, which is an also-ran. Adding Skype, one of the few Internet names other than Google to become a verb, could help, for instance to compete with Apple’s FaceTime video calling. And gaining a Microsoft-like acceptance behind corporate firewalls might extend Skype’s reach.

That all sounds good. But in 2007, the $6 billion acquisition of the online advertising group aQuantive — the biggest by Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, until the Skype deal — hasn’t borne any noticeable fruit in the battle with Google. Neither has the software giant’s search deal with Yahoo. Yet the price Mr. Ballmer has put on Skype, even without an auction, would require it to add huge value.

When Skype filed for an initial public offering late last year, a $5 billion price tag looked optimistic. Microsoft is paying almost 10 times revenue. Even Google trades at only a bit over five times. Put another way, Mr. Ballmer is paying more than 400 times last year’s operating income.

Sure, Skype is growing quickly. Monthly users increased 38 percent last year to 145 million, with the number of paying customers up 19 percent. And the total climbed to 170 million last month. To turn that operating income into a 10 percent annual return on investment, however, even on a pretax basis, it must grow fortyfold.

Microsoft can easily afford Skype. It had $50 billion of cash and short-term investments at the end of March. But it’s hard to see how the outlay, even from cash held overseas, is going to break even for the company’s shareholders. Microsoft was the biggest American loser of market capitalization on Tuesday, shedding more than $1.3 billion in value. That suggests investors in the software giant have a different verb in mind than Skype.

Munis Under Threat

Call it headline risk. Bad press, with stressed state finances, hammered the debt of local governments last year. But the $3 trillion market was never in as bad shape as the doomsayers made out. Still, an improving market — gains in 18 of the last 19 trading sessions through Monday, according to Janney Capital Markets — isn’t immune to stumbles as dysfunctional states tackle budget problems.

Meredith Whitney, a financial analyst, last year made a controversial call that “hundreds of billions of dollars” of municipal bonds would go bad. That helped drive down the market in munis. Yet nothing looks remotely on track for disaster on the scale that Ms. Whitney predicted.

There are less than $10 billion of defaulted bonds outstanding, with just $28 million of those coming from the safest instruments like bonds backed by a state, according to Municipal Market Advisors. Another $22 billion are admittedly showing signs of stress and bear watching, especially if the domestic economy sputters again.

In the meantime, prices have recovered some of their losses and yields on the average AAA-rated 10-year municipal bond have dropped about 13 percent to 2.7 percent this year. Low Treasury rates stemming from the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy have helped, but so has a dearth of supply. A surge of issuance could soften the market.

Then there’s demand. Outflows from muni bond mutual funds have slowed. They are running around $1 billion a week, according to Lipper, a firm that tracks fund flows. That’s less than half the pace earlier this year. But a few more of those bad headlines could have investors reaching for their wheelbarrows again.

Though the market seems stable for now, the finances of states like California and Illinois have an outsize influence on investors. The next fiscal year begins on July 1 for 46 of the 50 states, and budget negotiations will gather intensity in the coming weeks. Throw in concern over the federal debt ceiling, and a few jitters, deserved or not, could easily rattle munis.

Read More :- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/business/11views.html

Autodesk updates SketchBook Pro

Autodesk

Autodesk released a major update to SketchBook Pro software that has artists switching from pencils and paints to virtual canvasses on iPhones or iPad tablet computers. 

SketchBook Pro software upgrades were crafted to take advantage of improved features in second-generation iPads recently unleashed on the world by California-based Apple.

"This is the biggest release we've had since last year when the iPad launched," SketchBook product line manager Chris Cheung said at a Digital Canvas exhibit of art made using the application.

SketchBook Pro

"It is more productive and, as a by-product, it is more fun as well."

The software lets people blend and texture colors as they would with oil paints or other mediums. Movements of fingers on gadget touch-screens are converted into virtual brush strokes. 

"This way, I have my whole art studio in my pocket," said San Francisco artists Julia Kay, whose works were among those in the exhibit.

"If I get bored I can lean against a wall and make drawings in full color, every texture, and I don't have to clean-up afterward."

Works by 82 artists were featured in the Digital Canvas exhibit in the Autodesk Gallery in downtown San Francisco.

Along with professional artists there were SketchBook users whose day jobs ranged from grade school student and farmer to surgeon and aerospace technician.

Matthew Hall of Britain described studied at Winchester School of Art and Chic ester University but veered away from painting for a decade while he focused on video. The he saw artists working on iPads. 

"Now I take my iPad everywhere, using the SketchBook Pro app to capture what's happening around me or what's banging around in my head at the time," Hall said in a description of his work on display at Digital Canvas. 

"Like the primal cave painters we are just creating lines on a surface with our finger," he continued. "I haven't enjoyed doodling this much since I was a child."

Jay Shuster, art director for the "Cars" film sequel about to be released by Pixar Animation Studios, said he did almost all the character design using Sketchbook Pro and credited the software with enabling him to work fast.

"Every day, ever hour counted," Shuster said. "I think, in a way, going digital allowed us to finish 'Cars 2' in the time we did."

He worked with SketchBook software on a Pixar-supplied tablet made by Fujitsu. California-based Autodesk specializes in 2-D and 3-D design software.

SketchBook Pro versions tailored for iPhones, iPads, and iPod touch devices were priced at $5 at Apple's online App Store.

Autodesk also upgraded a version of the software tailored for gadgets powered by Google-backed Android software, according to Cheung.

Read More :- 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/software-services/Autodesk-updates-SketchBook-Pro/articleshow/8186257.cms