Tech quote of the day

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Peter Kafka: You’ve complained publicly before about the difficulty in supporting multiple flavors of Android for your apps. But this year you’ve expanded the number of Android handsets you’re supporting from 6 to 11. Did you ever consider not working with Android at all?

Bob Bowman: The short answer is no. But what we have done is that we don’t support every Android phone. Because at some point, it’s diminishing returns. The Android user typically is less likely to buy, and therefore the ROI on developing for Android is different than it is for Apple.

Peter Kafka: Why do you think an Android owner behaves differently than an iPhone owner?

Bob Bowman: The iPhone and iPad user is interested in buying content–that’s one of the reasons they bought the device. The Android buyer is different.

It’s a great phone–make no mistake about it. But if you really want first rate digital content on a device, your first look will probably be an iPhone. And on the tablet, an iPad.

– Bob Bowman runs Major League Baseball Advanced Media, including MBL.com and its subscription services.

Facebook to begin trading at 11 am (updated)

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Facebook will begin trading today at 11 am.  You can access live quotes on the stock, which trades under the FB symbol, here.

I am not a fan of Facebook’s services, and it remains unclear (at least to me) how they will monetize their huge trove of user data sufficiently to support its offering price of $38/share.  The biggest growth in social media is in the mobile space and generating huge revenue from advertisements on mobile devices remains very difficult. In addition, Facebook users should understand that if you don’t pay for a service (and Facebook users don’t) that you are not the customer, you are the product. And you should know what that means.

I hope that the investors read and understood this section of the Facebook prospectus:

If we are unable to maintain and increase our user base and user engagement, our revenue, financial results, and future growth potential may be adversely affected.

We generate a substantial majority of our revenue from advertising. The loss of advertisers, or reduction in spending by advertisers with Facebook, could seriously harm our business. The substantial majority of our revenue is currently generated from third parties advertising on Facebook. In 2009, 2010, and 2011 and the first quarter of 2011 and 2012, advertising accounted for 98%, 95%, 85%, 87%, and 82%, respectively, of our revenue. As is common in the industry, our advertisers typically do not have long-term advertising commitments with us. Many of our advertisers spend only a relatively small portion of their overall advertising budget with us. In addition, advertisers may view some of our products, such as sponsored stories and ads with social context, as experimental and unproven. Advertisers will not continue to do business with us, or they will reduce the prices they are willing to pay to advertise with us, if we do not deliver ads and other commercial content in an effective manner, or if they do not believe that their investment in advertising with us will generate a competitive return relative to other alternatives. Our advertising revenue could be adversely affected by a number of other factors, including:

  • decreases in user engagement, including time spent on Facebook;
  • increased user access to and engagement with Facebook through our mobile products, where we do not currently directly generate meaningful revenue, particularly to the extent that mobile engagement is substituted for engagement with Facebook on personal computers where we monetize usage by displaying ads and other commercial content;
  • product changes or inventory management decisions we may make that reduce the size, frequency, or relative prominence of ads and other commercial content displayed on Facebook;
  • our inability to improve our analytics and measurement solutions that demonstrate the value of our ads and other commercial content;
  • decisions by advertisers to use our free products, such as Facebook Pages, instead of advertising on Facebook;
  • loss of advertising market share to our competitors; adverse legal developments relating to advertising, including legislative and regulatory developments and developments in litigation;
  • adverse media reports or other negative publicity involving us, our Platform developers, or other companies in our industry; our inability to create new products that sustain or increase the value of our ads and other commercial content;
  • the degree to which users opt out of social ads or otherwise limit the potential audience of commercial content; changes in the way online advertising is priced;
  • the impact of new technologies that could block or obscure the display of our ads and other commercial content; and the impact of macroeconomic conditions and conditions in the advertising industry in general.

The occurrence of any of these or other factors could result in a reduction in demand for our ads and other commercial content, which may reduce the prices we receive for our ads and other commercial content, or cause advertisers to stop advertising with us altogether, either of which would negatively affect our revenue and financial results.

Update: It was not a great day for Facebook. There were significant technical trading problems on the NASDAQ and, in addition, the underwriting team had to step in to support the offering price.

CNBC reiterating again the underwriters have a lot of ammunition to keep this stock above the $38 level. Wonder what happens when the underwriters lose incentive to keep $38?

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Cell phone privacy

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If you use a cellphone, your movements are recorded by your carrier. How long do the carriers retain such data?

An internal Department of Justice document shows cell phone service providers keep that information for more than a year, Crump told the committee. Verizon stores the cell towers used by a mobile phone for “one rolling year;” T-Mobile USA keeps this information “officially 4-6 months, really a year or more;” Sprint and Nextel store this data for “18-24 months;” and AT&T/Cingular retains it “from July 2008 [over four years].”

And, of course, if the carriers have the data, the government comes looking for it. At a hearing yesterday in Washington, privacy advocates pushed in favor of a proposed national law to require a warrant for such requests and law enforcement objected, even though such information can provide a total picture of a person’s movements over months and years.

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TED starts self-censoring its own talks

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TED (conference)

TED (conference) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

TED, who’s slogan is “Ideas Worth Spreading” and who has provided hundreds of insightful speeches for years, has decided not to spread one idea. They are refusing to provide access to a talk by a speaker who argues that income inequality is bad for America.

The speaker was Nick Hanauer, and here is part of what he said:

We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Rather they are a consequence of an ecosystemic feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers, and when they thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.

It is very odd, to say the least, for a forum for free expression to back away from one of their speakers.

Yet another TSA failure

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Now it appears that the TSA never properly tested whether its pornoscanners were capable of detecting explosives.

At a Congressional hearing last Wednesday investigating how the Transportation Security Administration acquires and deploys security equipment, members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee sharply criticized the agency for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on technology that they said had not been properly tested.

A report released by the two committees that day called the advanced imaging technology scanners being used in about 180 airports in the United States “ineffective.” And members of Congress who are privy to classified reports about the machines, including one issued in January by the Government Accountability Office, are getting more vocal about their concerns.

So not only are such machines improperly tested for safety, they also have not been shown to perform properly on threats.

Icons don’t change when technology does

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Scott Hanselman has a great overview of the increasing ambiguity of many icons we take for granted. For example, many applications use an icon of a floppy disk for the “Save” function. Since floppies expired some time ago, how long will it be that a floppy disk icon makes sense to someone learning software? He calls these icons “Old People Icons.”  It is a fun read.

Mitt Romney at Cranbrook

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Cranbrook School, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, is, and long has been, a popular private college prep boarding school for the wealthy. So it is no surprise that Mitt Romney, son of auto-magnate and Michigan Governor George Romney, attended Cranbrook.

What may be surprising is that, while Mitt Romney attended the school, he and other students bullied a classmate for appearing different.

So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that to this day Romney does not support full equality for gay people.  In fact, the incident was so insignificant to Romney that he says he does not remember it. His “apology” is that standard political non-apology: if I hurt anyone, I apologize.

And when Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he actively fought against anti-bullying efforts:

Mitt Romney clashed with a state commission tasked with helping LGBT youth at risk for bullying and suicide throughout his term as Massachusetts governor over funding and its participation in a pride parade. He eventually abolished the group altogether.

“We remember well what Romney tried to do as governor of Massachusetts and we now we have more info on some of his own attitudes that may have led to his policy actions,” Eliza Byard, executive director of LGBT anti-bullying organization GLSEN, told TPM, drawing a connection with reports that Romney cornered a youth in high school and cut his hair. “If he’s willing to dismiss that incident as ‘hijinks,’ I could understand that he wouldn’t understand at all why this program was so critical.”

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