Jimmy Horowitz has been upped to president of Universal Pictures.

The studio is looking to Horowitz, who most recently was exec VP, to shape and implement domestic strategic business initiatives and help manage day-to-day business operations.

Read the full story
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118018861.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

What I found interesting was the new light being cast on ownership of data. The profile is ours, the user name and password is ours, but the data is theirs. Now I know in the terms of services (TOS) it clearly states that, but now users are really feeling it. So lets talk social networks for a moment. According to Wikipedia;

A social network is a social structure made of individuals (or organizations) called “nodes,” which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.

So what are they really…a buisness that needs to generate revenue. All social networks have a universal issue, they are busy but not generating enough revenue. And just like any other buisness, revenue keeps the lights on. In my opinion Facebook is trying to increase the value of their profiles to help increase advertising dollars. The more targeted exposure they can generate to their network, the more the real estate is worth. Sound familiar? It’s the foundational component of every shopping center in the United States.

Bottom line here is social media apps and networks need users to build robust pages and be engaging enough to attract tons of visitors who participate and interact. Users need to understand that privavcy starts and stops with themselves. Don’t post your birthday and no one will know, don’t post your current location, and know one will find you.

I hope Facebook comes up with a better way to monetize profile information and less of a way to “punish” those who choose not to participate in that monetiztion.

What’s really exciting here is the validation of cross platform technology, something that Labpixies does very well. Cross platform technology is a way extending a single code base across many platforms. Think of it in terms of language and translation. Imagine if you could say “Hello; how are you?” in English and people who only speak German, Spanish or Mandarin could fully understand you and even respond back “fine, thanks” in their own native language which you would understand as well. Pretty cool!

Now back to cross platform technology, the true benefit to game developers is the enormours cost savings when developing a code base. Normally you would develop a game for the andriod platform, if it turns out to be a hit, you’ll have to rewrite it for the iPhone platform in order to incease your audience share. Now using services like Labpixes with miminal effort, your game can be ready for all platforms and users .

Read more about the acquisition here.

Team,

When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success.

My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.

So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.

As a consequence of this change, I have also made the very tough decision to reduce the size of our team from 167 people to 98 people. As hard as this is to do, I am confident that this is the right decision for our company, our business, and our customers. Marc and I will work diligently with everyone affected by this to help them find great opportunities at other companies.

I’ve never seen a more talented and devoted team, and it has been my privilege to get to know and work with each and every one of you over the last 18 months.

We’ll use today to say goodbye to our friends and teammates who will be leaving the company. Tomorrow, I will take you through, in detail, our plans for the next three months and our new focus.

Thanks,
Jason Rosenthal

It lends an inetresting perspective on the focus of social media. On the heels of Twitter announcing some new revenue models, I wonder if social networking has had enough FREE and now needs to migrate to traditional business standards and generate revenue.  Successful social plays like Twitter, Ning and Facebook have been operating off of the valuation prospect, raising capital based on the acquisition and value goal due to virtually non exsititent revenue streams. Now with devices like the Ipad and Iphone taking hold in the consumer market, we seem to see moderate acceptance of subscriber based fees for premium expeirences, applications and content.

I wonder if Do It Yourself (DIY) video giant Magnify will be next to ditch the FREE?

There will be two “pillars” to Twitter’s business model, Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo said at the company’s Chirp developer conference in San Francisco. The first, announced earlier this week, is Promoted Tweets, which lets advertisers pay for sponsored tweets that appear at the top of search results for certain keywords.

The second pillar is commercial accounts, which Twitter started to talk about last year. That service will allow a business to pay for a Twitter account in return for detailed analytics tools and the ability for several people to post to the same account. Commercial accounts are in beta testing with “a couple of hundred customers” and will be offered more widely in the future, though Costolo didn’t say when. Read More

One of the biggest challenges in social media is also the attraction, free publication. Although many traditional media models have tried to carry over to new media such as subscription based content and ad supported content,  the struggle remains hard for many social publishers.  I suspect whatever revenue models Twitter puts into action will be successful given the overall reach of the platform.

Being “hardware” agnostic, meaning I own several PC and MAC equipment including PC tablets, I was excited to play with it. About 10 minutes into it, I realized I was totally unprepared for what I experienced. Its a game changer!

The graphics are stellar, the form factor is great but the experience is fantastic. First I created a document using Pages, (the keyboard was similar to my iPhone, just with more real estate). Then I dropped in an image, used my index finger to manipulate it around the text, automatically wrapping as I went, and finally saved it to my cloud based storage.

Next I quickly (and tons of fun by the way) edited an image taken from a digital camera. The zoom in, zoom out was lots of fun (pinching as I went).  Being a person who never really learned Photoshop,  I’ll definitely be able to do some layer editing now.

Finally I used my right hand to free form draw on a sketch application. That was not only easy to do, zooming in for things like thicker or narrower lines, but it was really fun. The creative freedom it sparked, and I’m not an artist, was fantastic!

In this post, I didn’t want to stress the typical hardware review, there’s plenty of places on the web to get that, but I want to emphasize how this device may be the ultimate tech enabler. I must of had 20 entrepreneurial ideas run through my mind as I was using it.  Everything from education to health care will be touched.

What a cool “magical” device!.

I hope Mr. Chavez had his tracking pixels set up correctly on his confirmation page….

A few years back, the Internet was positioned as the newest communication channel around. The very ability to instantly create published public content was only surpassed by being able to edit and update that content as well. In just recent years, Internet communication has moved from dynamic text to what I like to call “living on line”. This is the transparency that people now have connecting their actual lives to their virtual lives; in short melting the two together. What’s the spark of this new media paradigm: social networking.

Social networking is the ablity to dynamically connect. Whether your “tweeting, writing on a virtual wall, inviting or accepting friends, or simply posting to a blog :), exposing more and more of your life’s daily thoughts, events and travel is where the web is progressing to.  In a great article by Danah Boyd of Vator News titled Social media is here to stay… Now what? “For users, Web 2.0 was all about reorganizing web-based practices around Friends. For many users, direct communication tools like email and IM were used to communicate with one’s closest and dearest while online communities were tools for connecting with strangers around shared interests. Web2.0 reworked all of that by allowing users to connect in new ways. While many of the tools may have been designed to help people find others, what Web2.0 showed was that people really wanted a way to connect with those that they already knew in new ways.“

So let’s break down the social media food chain into three groups and briefly define the usability and goal of each:

1) The User-these are the people who make up the foundation of the social media. Without user uptake, this would simply be another “great idea”. What users want to accomplish when using social networks such as MySapce, Facebook, Mebo and others is the ability to connect with friends, family and new acquaintances in a vast and “FREE” way. In short, users see social networks as a way to expand their network while cutting traditional communication related expenses.

2) The Advertiser-this group is both an enabler and a hunter. By advertising on and supporting social networks, marketers help keep the network availableo t users. But as with all things, “freedom” comes with a price. Now don’t get me wrong, my background is in helping advertisers generate more return from their online campaigns, but one of the elements I always stress to my clients is soft sale. Social media is a great way to interact with your current and prospective customers, but with this powerful connection to people, comes the challenge to add value and utilize the info sale and trust relationship in order to gain success.

3) The Techies-by far the most challenging and rewarding group. This group usually remains agnostic to the various revenue models wrapped around social media, and more concerned about the development of new applications and services that will engage, entice and gain acceptance.

The important takeaways:

1) Give: Those users and advertisers who use social media to take and never give providing no value will quickly find themselves non existent
2) Enage-When utilizing social media, no matter what group you’re in, always strive to develop content, applications, or services that spark interactivity.
3) Have fun-it’s got SOCIAL built in to the name…

To most web users, the Internet starts with a search engine. With more than 1 trillion webpages online, how can you help your site to be found? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the techniques used to present your site to Google, Yahoo, MSN and other top engines. Now with tons of informational resources, so called experts and training seminars, what is a small bsuiness owner to do?

Without going into a deep technical discussion, there are three very vital steps to keep in mind when developing, publishing and syndicating content online:

1) Keywords: More than just phrases, keyword research is a the foundational discovery step. Knowing what you want to say is often easy; determining who and how people are searching for it is the challenge. Sites like Keyword Discovery and SpyFu are great free resources to utilize. Remember when implementing your keyword and key phrase strategy, it’s not the quantity it’s the quality.

2) On Page Elements-The factors that you use to build your web pages. Items like site wide navigation (how easy is it for a web visitor to discover and find things on your site). Far too many times I see very deep page staructures meaning too many clicks to discovery. A good startegy to stick by is what I  call “3 Clicks to Gold”. Pull up Google, type in a search term, {Click}, from the results page find the item you’re looking for {click}; land on that specific website’s page matching your item {click} and take action (buy, subscribe, call, etc}.

3) Off Page Elements-Extremely important in getting found and improving placement in search engine results pages. Off page factors in short are all the other sites referencing or linking to yours. Now remeber, just as in keywords, it’s not quantity its the  quality. Too many irrelevant links and Google will even penalize you as a link farm (someone who buys tons of links).  A strong off page startegy includes creating social profiles with links back to your site, blog commenting, article submission and even product reviews.

In short, this administration has made remarkably strides in harnessing New Media to reach out and communicate with millions of Americans. Managing that communication is no simple task. Did you know the U.S. government operates at least 20,000 individual Web sites (and you thought managing your own domain portfolio was hard).

Here’s the take away:

1) Harness the web’s interactivity-WhiteHouse.gov has a blog and a YouTube channel…do you?

2) The Content Principles-In the first blog post on WhiteHouse.gov, Phillips listed the site’s top three priorities: “communication,” “participation” and, the buzzword of the online political sphere, “transparency.” Apply these same metrics when developing your customer communications.

3) Accountabality-Obama is being held accountable for everything he’s posting (and not posting) on his site. Remember web content, once released, is somewhat permanant. Don’t post or blog with material that you won’t stand behind later.