Archive for January, 2012
Dixons CEO John Browett heads to Apple to lead retail division
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
Apple has announced that the John Browett, the now former CEO of UK-based Dixons Retail, will join the company as senior vice president of its retail division.
“Our retail stores are all about customer service, and John shares that commitment like no one else we’ve met,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook, in a statement. “We are thrilled to have him join our team and bring his incredible retail experience to Apple.”
Browett has been the CEO of Dixons Retail since 2007. Dixons is Europe’s largest specialty electronics retailer and it operates more than 1,200 stores in 13 countries, including the U.K., Ireland, Norway, Sweeden, Greece and the Czech Republic. So it only makes sense that Apple has picked up Browett to run its retail division, which earned Apple $ 14 billion in revenues in 2011.
Browett will replace Ron Johnson, who departed last June to become the CEO of department store chain JCPenney. In 11 years at Apple, Johnson helped the company launch over 300 stores worldwide and successfully grow its dominating physical presence. That means Browett will have some big shoes to fill.
John Browett photo via Dixons Retail
Filed under: VentureBeat 
Apple, Browett, division, Dixons, heads, John, lead, retail
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96 percent of Google’s revenue is advertising, who buys it? (infographic)
Monday, January 30th, 2012
A whopping 96 percent of Google‘s $ 37.9 billion 2011 revenue came from advertising, but who is putting all that cash in Google’s wallet?
Google is best known for its web search product, which has completely overturned how we research and find answers. But the search itself is only the basis upon which its golden empire has been built. Advertising based on search, as well as banner advertising on websites touches nearly every industry. It even created the jobs of the search engine and display marketers, whose responsibilities include understanding Google AdWords and Adsense, as well as navigating the strategy behind bidding and maintaining ad campaigns.
In 2011 the industry which used Google’s advertising the most was the finance and insurance industry with $ 4 billion handed over to Google. State Farm topped the charts at a whopping $ 43.7 million spent. The most common search term in this industry with the highest cost per click was “self-employed health insurance,” which charged advertisers around $ 43 for every time someone clicked their advertisement.
The retail and general merchandise industry holds second place for most spent on Google ads, with Amazon leading at $ 55.2 million spent. You would think that number would be so high to accommodate Amazon’s recent debut of the Kindle Fire, but the most commonly search for keyword in the retail industry was actually “Zumba dance DVD.” If we learn anything from common keywords it’s that the economy is down, so people are self-employed and want to dance at home for exercise.
Travel and tourism came in third with $ 2.4 billion spent on Google advertising. Jobs and education came in fourth, and home and garden in fifth.
Check out the infographic below for more on who contributes to Google’s huge wealth.
Rich man image via Shutterstock
Filed under: VentureBeat 
advertising, buys, Google’s, infographic, percent, revenue
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Symantec may have identified a botnet string of Android apps
Saturday, January 28th, 2012
Symantec claims to have found a string of “malicious” applications in the Android app store that resemble botnets.
According to a blog post by the company, these applications are pushing out a type of malware called Android.Counterclank, which is said to be related to a botnet-like virus called Android.Tonclank. Botnets generally extend from a commanding device, which then takes control of other devices via spam messages. On mobile, this control can be achieved through malicious applications.
Symantec says that Android.Counterclank has already affected 1000′s and considers its damage level to be a “medium,” for stealing personal information off of the phone. Thus far the company has isolated 13 potentially harmful applications in the Android Marketplace. The majority of which seem to be gaming applications as well as porn or applications with explicit content.
Mobile security firm Lookout Mobile, however, does not believe these applications to be malicious or botnet-like.
“Some companies are calling this a botnet or malware. Lookout has some concerns about the functionality, however at this time, and as far as we can tell, it does not meet the standard to be classified as malware or a ‘bot,’” said a Lookout Mobile spokesperson in an e-mail. “Consumers should take these apps very seriously as they appear to tread on privacy lines, but they are not necessarily malicious.”
Mobile botnets recently made Lookout Mobile’s threat predictions for 2012. The tactic thankfully hasn’t been used to its full potential yet, but some small scale botnets have already been detected. In 2011, Lookout Mobile found a botnet string called Geinimi originating out of China. This malware was able to receive commands from a remote server, as well as extract information from your phone, and attempt to infect others using your phone.
The company also warns that most common carriers of mobile malware are gaming and porn applications, which make up Android.Counterclank’s roster. See Symantec’s list of infected apps below:
Filed under: security 
Android, apps, botnet, identified, string, Symantec
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Top reasons to launch or pitch your product at DEMO Spring 2012
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
This sponsored post is produced by DEMO.
It’s time to launch your product. But where? Choosing the right platform to make your product’s first public appearance is critical. DEMO’s track record of successes, turnkey services and exposure for your company and product to a worldwide audience of VCs, investors, buyers and press, make DEMO your best option. Here are a few reasons why:
DEMO Scholarship Program Guarantees 20 very early-stage company’s spots at DEMO Fall for no charge and 10 partial scholarships for companies meeting funding requirements. For scholarship considering, applications must be received by February 17.
DEMO Innovation Tour. DEMO is more influential because it has a long history of enlisting top VCs to help bring innovators to market, including companies like Accel Partners, RRE Ventures, Austin Ventures and many more. In fact, in February and March, entrepreneurs can apply to launch in front of VCs at Kleiner Perkins, Madrona Group, Atlas Ventures and others..
FREE launch for college groups. DEMO is more diverse, providing a unique College Alpha Program that gives student innovators a free chance to pitch for 90 seconds and promote their product idea to a worldwide audience of potential investors and business partners.
Apply to Launch or Pitch Deadline: February 17, 2012.
DEMO Sage Program: Launch and pitch companies will receive constructive, valuable feedback and help from key members of the DEMO tech ecosystem—DEMO alumni, VCs, CEO’s from fast-growing startups and angel investors, industry luminaries and disrupters
Opportunity to win DEMO People’s Choice $ 1M Advertising Campaign: A robust advertising campaign, devoted to sharing your message and launch video with over 270 million IT buyers worldwide through the powerful brands under the IDG umbrella, including CIO Magazine, CSO Magazine, Computerworld, GamePro, Infoworld, MacWorld, Network World and PC World.
A portfolio of turnkey, personalized services to prepare you for the best launch experience:
- PR support and communications training with a national PR agency
- Demonstrator presentation review with a professional coach
- On-stage rehearsal and feedback
- Post-event promotion of launch video across IDG Global Website Network
DEMO Global Launch Program: DEMO Brazil is the newest member of the DEMO family! Any DEMO Spring 2012 launch company can participate as a showcase sponsor, at no charge, at any international DEMO event in 2012.
Why DEMO? Learn more and apply to launch by February 17!
Filed under: DEMO, VentureBeat 
2012, DEMO, launch, pitch, product, reasons, Spring
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Top retailers saw big holiday traffic gains thanks to Facebook marketing (research)
Monday, January 23rd, 2012
“Facebook makes our life so much better,” Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow said at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich today.
The “our” he speaks of may actually apply more directly to brands embracing the social network for social marketing.
New data from comScore, revealed during the Monday morning presentation, highlights traffic gains big name brands recently experienced thanks to a combination of paid and earned media efforts on Facebook.
Mega-retailer Walmart, which launched a Shopycat Facebook application prior to the holidays, saw 275 million display ad impressions as a result of a paid media campaign on Facebook, but experienced an additional 117 million social media impressions thanks to the organic sharing activities of its Facebook fans and their friends, co-presenter and comScore CMO Linda Abraham shared.
comScore also looked at the percentage of people who visited retailer websites during a key week in the 2011 holiday season and found that for Amazon, Best Buy, Target and Walmart a high percentage of visitors to these sites were either Facebook fans or friends of Facebook fans (as seen in the presentation slide deck below).
Sixty-four percent of visitors to Amazon during the week ending November 30 were brand-exposed Facebook fans, for instance, and 36 percent were friends of fans, according to comScore. Leading Black Friday retailers also saw significant year-over-year traffic lift thanks to their various Facebook and social campaigns, Abraham said.
The data, Abraham concluded, shows that brands that know their Facebook fans, know their fans’ friends and push out the right creative message are seeing quantifiable results from their social campaigns.
Brands, she heeded, should keep in mind that Facebook users spend a majority of their time on Facebook on their News Feeds (27 percent). They should alo note that Facebook fans are often a younger demographic group than their average customers, and remember that friends of Facebook fans are an equally important audience to reach.
Disclosure: The Digital Life Design conference paid my way to Munich. VentureBeat’s coverage of the conference remains objective and independent.
[Image via DLD/Tumblr]
Filed under: social, VentureBeat 
Facebook, gains, holiday, Marketing, research, retailers, thanks, traffic
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Samsung’s transparent display could help retailers draw crowds to windows
Saturday, January 21st, 2012
Samsung showed off a cool transparent liquid-crystal display at the Consumer Electronics Show a week ago. The 46-inch screen will begin shipping this month to retailers who can use it to draw attention to their storefront windows.
It may sound crazy to put a display on a window, particularly one that could get smashed. But the transparent display market is expected to grow from $ 900 million in 2015 to $ 87 billion by 2025, according to Display Bank.
“We look at it as a smart window,” said Bill Beaton, senior manager for LCD marketing at Samsung, in an interview. “You can think of jewelry displays with it or freezer windows at the grocery store that tell you where to find the ice cream. “
The touchscreen could turn what were once boring window displays into interactive experiences and pump new life into the LCD business. It has a contrast ratio of 4,500:1 with high-definition resolution (1,366 x 768 pixels) and a 70 percent color gamut, which means it is as vivid as a lot of TVs in displaying color.
The tough thing is that the greater the transparency, the lower the color. The greater the color, the less the transparency. So Samsung had to strike a balance through experimentation, Beaton said. And since the displays use ambient lighting, such as sunshine, as a backlight, they don’t work in the dark.
It has a TFT display and is 46 inches. Samsung introduced a 22-inch version last year that is just beginning to make it into stores such as jewelry and luxury vendors.
The display is 9 millimeters thick and weighs about 10 pounds. Samsung says it could be used in product showcases, commercial freezer doors in grocery stores, and platform doors of subway stations. It can also be used in other work or home applications including electronic boards, information windows, medical equipment, electronic signs, and, once the displays get smaller, mobile devices. Samsung also showed off a prototype laptop with a transparent display.
Pricing isn’t available yet but the products will ship soon. But Beaton said the manufacturing process is not particularly complicated for the transparent displays, as they can be made in the same factories as other LCD displays. It’s not unlike a technology showed off by General Motors for car windows. Here’s a video of the display.
Filed under: VentureBeat 
could, crowds, display, draw, help, retailers, Samsung’s, transparent, Windows
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Can Apple’s new textbook initiative save U.S. education? (infographic)
Friday, January 20th, 2012
Apple recently announced a handful of new initiatives focused on making digital books more accessible in the classroom.
The company launched a new version of its iBooks (iBooks 2) iOS application for the iPhone and iPad app, which will offer highly interactive electronic textbooks, as well as a new textbook section in the iBookstore. It also debuted an updated version of its education-based service iTunes U, which gives teachers the ability to do much more than create lectures for download.
While all of these additions are great, some people are skeptical that Apple’s new initiative can do much to improve the country’s education system.
Entering the textbook industry alone is definitely worth Apple’s time if the company’s only motivation is to make money. As VentureBeat previously reported, the education book publishing industry is mammoth, bringing in annual revenue upwards of $ 5.5 billion for sales of lower education (Kindergarten to 12th grade) and $ 3.7 billion for sales of scholarly/higher education in 2010, according to statistics from the Association of American Publishers.
It’s true that Apple is a business, and the principle reason for every business is to turn a profit. But as history has proven with the iPod (a.k.a. digital music revolution), Apple’s business strategies revolve around improving an entire industry to gain long-term, stable profit. This business strategy is also how Apple plans to approach education and textbooks.
There is also plenty of proof that suggests Apple wants to revolutionize education. Dearly departed former Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs discussed the topic in Walter Issacson’s official biography of Jobs, as VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi recently pointed out. But Apple also owes much of its early success to education, as Apple marketing senior vice president Phil Schiller said at the education event today. (And for what it’s worth, I did use Mac computers almost exclusively while attending public school in the ’90s.)
Ultimately, its impossible to know if the American education system will improve as a result of Apple making its platforms and devices more accessible to learning or teaching in the classroom. It’s reasonable to assume that making Apple platforms/devices more education-friendly will entice more school systems to use Apple products. And it’s highly likely that when teachers or students do used these more classroom-friendly Apple devices, it will improve the learning process.
But if there’s one thing that won’t improve the U.S. education system going forward, its spending an exuberant and unnecessary amount of money on paper textbooks year-after-year. If nothing else, school boards across the country may eventually divert the money they spend on textbooks to spending money on Apple technology as a more efficient use of resources.
Check out the fact-filled infographic below for more information regarding Apple’s ability to save the U.S. education system.
[Infographic via Online Education]
(Click image to enlarge)
Filed under: media, VentureBeat 
Apple’s, education, infographic, initiative, save, textbook, U.S.
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SOPA blackouts and protests go live for Google, Wikipedia & many others
Wednesday, January 18th, 2012
A handful of U.S. websites have decided to go dark today in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act as well as its senate cousin the Protect IP Act — two piece of proposed legislation aimed at curbing piracy efforts abroad.
Perhaps the most vocal protester of the bunch is search engine giant Google, which has decided to update its homepage with a large sideways black box over the company’s logo. Since the site prides itself on staying very minimal, the logo is basically the most dominant visual element on its search homepage at any given time — meaning it’ll be difficult for the majority of U.S. web users to avoid observing the protest if nothing else.
The Google homepage also features a link to an anti-SOPA/PIPA infographic and a form that allows you to sign a formal petition against the bill. Google writes:
Fighting online piracy is important. The most effective way to shut down pirate websites is through targeted legislation that cuts off their funding. There’s no need to make American social networks, blogs and search engines censor the Internet or undermine the existing laws that have enabled the Web to thrive, creating millions of U.S. jobs. Too much is at stake – please vote NO on PIPA and SOPA.
To summarize, both SOPA and PIPA would give the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against foreign-operated websites associated with infringing, pirating or counterfeiting intellectual property. If it becomes law, it could drastically change the way the Internet operates. For example, if a website is accused of containing copyright-infringing content, the site could be blocked by ISPs, de-indexed from search engines and even prevented from doing business online with services like PayPal.
In addition to Google, several other staples of the web have also joined in the SOPA protest, including Wikipedia, Mozilla, WordPress, BoingBoing.net, The Huffington Post and many more. Some organizations, such as Reddit and the Cheezburger Network of sites, have chosen to begin their protests or blackouts at 8 a.m. EST tomorrow.
We’ve included a gallery of screenshots below displaying protest messages from several sites. Since it’s only 1 a.m. on the east coast, I’d expect we’ll end up updating this page with more screenshots throughout the day.
For more information about the proposed legislation, check out VentureBeat’s ongoing SOPA coverage.
Filed under: media, VentureBeat 
blackouts, Google+, Live, many, others, protests, SOPA, Wikipedia
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Former White House CIO Vivek Kundra joins Salesforce as emerging markets EVP
Monday, January 16th, 2012
Cloud services leader Salesforce has hired former U.S. chief information officer Vivek Kundra as its executive vice president of emerging markets, the company announced today.
Kundra made headlines as the federal government’s first-ever CIO when he was hired by the Obama administration in March 2009. While in his job, Kundra managed $ 80 billion in technology investments and instituted a 25-point plan to reform and restructure the government’s IT management. Kundra left his job in August to become a joint fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
The move to Salesforce as an EVP for emerging markets makes sense for Kundra. Ideally, his time with the federal government will have prepared him to talk up Salesforce’s cloud initiatives throughout the world.
“Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, in a statement. “His disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise.”
Before serving as federal CIO, Kundra was the chief technology officer for the District of Columbia and the assistant secretary of commerce and technology for the state of Virginia.
Vivek Kundra photo via Dell’s Flickr page
Filed under: cloud 
emerging, Former, House, joins, Kundra, markets, Salesforce, Vivek, White
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Surprises abound as Amazon reveals its 10 best-selling games of 2011
Sunday, January 15th, 2012
Amazon has released their top-selling digital and physical game titles from 2011. The online retailer has quickly become the quintessential center of great gaming deals, release-day shipping, and exclusive pre-order bonuses (including up to $ 20 back, in some cases).
There are a few surprises to be found, including Deus Ex: Human Revolution as the top digital download. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, the top-grossing video game of all-time, dominated physical sales, but barely made the digital downloads list.
Electronic Arts walked away with 50% of the top 10 digital titles, while rival Activision only had one (Call of Duty) on either list. This dominance will likely dissipate throughout 2012 as EA restricts digital downloads of its games to the EA Origin service.
Ubisoft’s casual-friendly Just Dance franchise continued to rake in the cash, with the multiplatform Just Dance 3 selling more physical copies almost every other game this year, while Just Dance 2, released exclusively for the Nintendo Wii in 2010, came in 8th, above Gears of War 3 and FIFA Soccer. Just Dance is an exception to not one, but two rules: It’s a successful entry in the mostly-extinct music rhythm genre, and it’s the only casual title to be included on either list.
Interestingly, and perhaps most telling of all, Nintendo doesn’t have a single product on the lists, despite the number of Wii and DS/3DS units owned outselling any other console worldwide, and the release of several high-profile games last year, including The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Super Mario Land 3D, and Mario Kart 7.
The last thing to note is that most of the physical titles were released during the holiday season (October-December), while digital titles have a more even spread of releases throughout the year.
Physical – all platforms
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
- Just Dance 3
- Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- Battlefield 3
- Batman: Arkham City
- Madden NFL 12
- Portal 2
- Just Dance 2
- Gears of War 3
- FIFA Soccer 12
Digital
- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
- Battlefield 3
- The Sims 3
- Battlefield Bad Company 2
- Sid Meir’s Civilization V
- Dead Island
- Total War: Shogun 2
- Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3
- Crysis 2
- Dragon Age 2
Filed under: games, VentureBeat 
2011, abound, Amazon, bestselling, games, reveals, Surprises
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