Bloomberg Businessweek + allows users to access live information on companies, including current stock prices, performance history, and recent news. Bloomberg personalities are also featured via exclusive video and audio content including a weekly look behind the cover story with Bloomberg Businessweek’s editor and creative director. Additionally, both Charlie Rose and Bloomberg’s Tom Keene will offer their weekly print columns with audio commentary.

Key features include:

*The ability to search across issues by company or keyword, save articles in a personal library, and share favorite stories via email, Twitter and Facebook.

*A special “Highlights” section which gives a synopsis of the week’s top articles.

*A dedicated navigation bar and global table of contents make it easy to find articles and other information.

“We re-imagined the Bloomberg Businessweek magazine for the iPad, enriching it in ways that make sense for our readers,” said Oke Okaro, general manager and global head of Bloomberg mobile.

“Packaged in a clean, easy-to-use and unique interface, the app offers a great reading experience optimized for the iPad.”

Users can download the app on iTunes and get access to a free issue. The monthly subscription is $2.99 while current magazine subscribers can get the app, including each issue, for free.

"Spiffy features are great, but if they’re wrong or don’t trigger in some reasonable way that your mind can predict, the failure is worse somehow," says Google’s Cutts on his blog. "The same holds true with the organic search results: a catastrophic search failure can stick in your mind much more than the 200 searches that worked well. Search quality evaluation is tricky because you need to take that factor plus hundreds more into account. It’s taken years for Google to really evaluate our quality well, and we still continue to learn important new things."

Are you more likely to remember searches that worked well or ones that didn’t? Comment here.

Searchers expect greatness. It’s not even something they consider. They just expect to get what they want. It’s only when they don’t get it that they really notice. But what does it take for a search engine to keep a user from noticing a flaw? What goes into providing quality results?

The search quality team for the most widely used search engine in the world has given a tremendous amount of insight in a series of lengthy interviews with the publication BusinessWeek.

Cutts says Google’s strategy for search quality is a balance of the analytical and serendipity. This comes from a cross between a lot of evaluation metrics and a lot of feedback from both the inside and the outside. Google gets tons of feedback from users, but the search quality team also gets tons of feedback right from within the company. Cutts says they have a mailing list comprised of about 20,000 Google employees who are always complaining and leaving feedback.

The human element steps in in a variety of ways. Cutts says that when he is just out and about on his own time, he will come across places, things, and sites that he will look up to find out what kind of results Google delivers for them, and looks for ways to improve this. He says that Google has gotten better at things like spelling, morphology, synonyms, stemming ("where somebody types in ‘runners’ and maybe they meant ‘runner,’ or ‘running’"), etc.

"We ran over 5,000 experiments last year," Google’s Udi Mamber told BusinessWeek. "Probably 10 experiments for every successful launch. We launch on the order of 100 to 120 a quarter. We have dozens of people working just on the measurement part. We have statisticians who know how to analyze data, we have engineers to build the tools. We have at least five or 10 tools where I can go and see here are five bad things that happened."

Google may rely on the human element to some extent, but don’t take that to mean that more emphasis is placed on this than the machine element. Cutts says Google certainly relies much more on computers and algorithms than any other major search engine (at least historically). He does reiterate a point he has made in the past, however, and that is that Google has become more willing to listen to feedback.

Google’s strategy for improving search results consists of a mixture of humans, formulas, and experiments. These are the elements that it takes to deliver what Cutts says are fresher and more comprehensive results than those from other search engines.

Do you agree with Cutts that Google delivers "fresher and more comprehensive" results? Share your thoughts.

The move was revealed in a post on the Business Exchange blog earlier this week. Simply by linking their Twitter accounts to BusinessWeek’s social network, users’ comments will simultaneously appear on Twitter, along with a link back to the Business Exchange page. It’s a feature that many of their active users have been waiting for.

BusinessWeek no doubt hopes that the Twitter sync will encourage more user participation in Business Exchange, which is a business-based social network that builds communities around a multitude of topics. To date, according to Elizabeth Holmes writing for WSJ’s “Digits”, only around 3% of its active users leave comments.

In preparation for the Twitter tie-up, Business Exchange has made changes to its comments section. Comments have been renamed ‘reactions’ and users have just 120 characters to express themselves despite Twitter’s 140 character allocation – the other 20 characters being reserved for the back-link.

As per many other big brands, it appears even major media companies are now beginning to see the benefits of embracing the popular micro-blogging platform.

Perhaps more interesting than the companies that made the list, is that BusinessWeek acknowledges its selections include companies that have successfully engaged their customers using social media.

The core characteristics of influence are unchanged, whether it’s inspiring a loyal following, spawning big ideas, or building up mammoth market share. What has changed is how players achieve it. A company’s physical assets are less important now than the force of its ideas. In the age of blogging and instant communication, consumers are less the recipients of corporate influence than powerful actors who help shape it. "We’re coming to realize a brand is not just what the manufacturer says it is," says Shelly Lazarus, chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, "but everything that the consumer or the customer experiences."

You can browse the list here.

Comments

Anyway, "The Trouble with Twitter" takes an in-depth look at the money woes at Twitter, in particular its lack of business model. Now, when I say "in-depth," I mean it. In fact, you can safely skip the entire first page–unless you enjoy a little fluff with your morning coffee.

The second page gets to the meat, and has a pretty good analysis of the different types of monetization models Twitter could consider. I’ll summarize the suggested business models:

• Twitter could ask users to pay
• Twitter could get messages to pay
• Twitter could extract money from user data
• Twitter could sell ads

From what I can tell, selling ads is the best lifeline that could be thrown to Twitter at this point. Certainly, it’s likely the option that Twitter users would be least resistant to. Unfortunately, number crunching reveals that Twitter might not be able to make enough money from ads alone:

Advertisers would find Twitter ads generate $28.2 million in profits. So the maximum they logically would spend on such ads is $28.2 million.

Thus Twitter has a real value of $12.26 per user. Compare that with Facebook, which has a perceived value of $300 a user—or at least it did last year, when Microsoft purchased its 1.6% stake for $240 million and the site had 50 million users.

And, that’s assuming some pretty generous CTR and conversion rates.

I’m a huge fan of Twitter–you can catch me discussing Twitter at SES San Jose this week–so I’m hoping it can figure this out before it runs out of money.

So, this is where you come in. What suggestions do you have for revenue model for Twitter? Leave a comment below and we’ll make sure we pass them on to the Twitter team.

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A report from Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang made the prediction based on advertising rates for banner ads.

The CPM rate they used as a comparison is $6. That is quite low, especially considering the demographics of the audience. as BusinessWeek says they are: “business-minded, college-educated professionals with significantly above-average wealth—the sort of audience that advertisers, particularly makers of luxury goods, want to reach.”

The site has an estimated 989,000 subscribers and subscriptions are $79/year (though not all paying that rate). Traffic to the site is about 122.4 million page views a month. It seems a far stretch to get 12x the traffic, but earlier estimates said that it would take much less than that.

The report compares the WSJ.com with nytimes.com, CNN Money, usatoday.com MarketWatch and Yahoo Finance (see graphic).

Comments

This will all occur for the sake of increased integration between BusinessWeek’s online and print properties, according to a leaked memo from editor-in-chief Stephen Adler.  “The new structure will enable us to collaborate more effectively, take greater advantage of everyone’s abilities, learn new skills, and serve our readers and Web users better,” he wrote, as reported by Chris Roush.

See how Web users got singled out?  By most accounts, they’re becoming increasingly important.  Roush touted increased circulation and newsstand sales, but also noted that page views hit a record of 64.7 million.

Furthermore, a tipster told Peter Kafka, “Ad pages way down for mag, .com up, but McGraw Hill share price in the toilet after the S&P ratings debacle.”  And a quick glance at Google Finance can at least confirm the second part of that sentence – a six-month view of the stock is pretty dismal.

We’ll see how well the transformation can turn things around, then.  “Congratulations to all on their new assignments,” concluded Adler.  Our sympathies to those who lost their jobs, as well.

BusinessWeek was first published in 1929, and the topics covered by its current site include “Investing,” “Companies,” “Technology,” “Innovation,” “Small Biz,” “B-Schools,” and “Managing.”  This should suit the users of LinkedIn, where sheep-throwing is not allowed.

So suppose one of those users is reading about a company that’s doing especially well (or particularly poorly), and this person wants to know how it relates to him (or her).  “When you’re viewing a Business Week article with the new LinkedIn feature, you can hover over a company name and find out how you’re connected to the company via your professional contacts,” reports Anne Zelenka.

Interesting, eh?  Except that people may already carry many of those links around in their heads.  Also, folks may not join an entire networking site to take advantage of this one small feature.

Still, as launches go, this wasn’t a bad one, and we’ll be interested to see where the LinkedIn platform goes from here.

You’ve seen ‘em: bold, double-underlined words that make small pop-ups erupt all over the screen.  They apparently manage to make money, or at least generate traffic – “Project Runway” is a recent example of something that benefited as a result of their use.  Still, in-text ads aren’t exactly welcome in most newsrooms.

“Many journalists believe that selling the words in a story blurs the line between editorial and ad content,” reports BusinessWeek.  “Some worry it creates an incentive to insert ad-linked words or order up certain types of stories.”

And those (serious) concerns aside, in-text ads are simply annoying; while I try to consider outside sources’ originality, credibility, and readability, I may compromise on any or all of those issues to avoid directing readers to a piece containing in-text ads.

Some sort of grand call to action would probably be pointless.  Nonetheless, these are issues that everyone should consider when encountering or employing in-text ads.

As proof that “one after another,” video sites are turning their backs on UGC and going steady with the pros instead, BusinessWeek gives us one example: Mania.tv, which recently refocused and got rid of the user-generated part of its model, which apparently never really drew that many viewers.

Of course, it’s possible that Mania either didn’t approach that part of its business properly, or didn’t bother looking for the diamonds in the UGC rough — or maybe people were too busy uploading their stuff to YouTube and DailyMotion and Metacafe. It’s tough being third or fourth to the party, as a number of commenters have pointed out on Lost Remote.

The thing that really bugs me about the BusinessWeek article is that there’s this false dichotomy between high-quality professional content and low-quality UGC crap. It’s not that binary, I would argue. It’s more like a spectrum, with professional content on one end, and as you move down the scale you get lower quality, until there’s your brother-in-law singing karaoke.

Is there a lot of UGC crap that only someone’s mother would watch? Sure there is. But there’s a lot of garbage produced by “professionals” that gets foisted on people through traditional media too, whether they want it or not. I’d take some half-decent UGC over that any day.

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