NPD DisplaySearch Senior Analyst, Richard Shim said, “Mobile PC brands read the writing on the wall in the fourth quarter. Consumer demand for notebooks was expected to be weak following modest back-to-school results, especially with the expected launch of Windows 8 on the horizon, and increasing interest in tablet PCs. As a result, brands focused their typical holiday price cuts on tablets to boost demand.”

Although the numbers sound impressive for Apple, many disagree with counting iPads along with laptops. Apple doesn’t think the iPad is a mobile PC either. CEO Tim Cook has been very open about the fact that he expects there to eventually be some cannibalization of Macs due to the iPad, though it may already be happening to Windows PCs.

About a dozen free mobile versions of apps, such as Angry Birds and Assassin’s Creed, were published to the market yesterday morning by developer Logastrod. The author published the apps after including code to the games that would allow SMS messages to be sent to premium line numbers. Vanja Svajcer, of the blog Sophos, detailed the damage unaware downloaders can suffer after installing such apps:

Misusing premium SMS services is the most common model for malicious mobile malware. When a malicious app is installed, it starts sending or receiving messages, which makes the installation very expensive for the user. The damage is often seen only when it is too late, once a monthly bill is received.

Svajcer goes on to criticize Google for having regulations that are too relaxed and permit developers to easily sneak their malicious apps into the Android Market. The benefits of successfully publishing an app to the Market and therefore making money from it outweigh the consequences of being banned by Google from contributing any more apps to the Market. “The attacks on Android Market,” he adds, “will continue as long as the developer requirements stay too relaxed.

Google has implemented security screens that require the user’s acknowledgement that the apps were able to edit, read, and receive text and multimedia messages before the download of the app can be completed, but such a policy appears to not protect the users enough. Obviously, users are likely to breeze past such warnings and it’s not entirely surprising, either, given the wide popularity and reputation of games like Angry Birds. When everybody and their brother has probably downloaded Angry Birds at some point, who would seriously worry that the app they think they’re downloading is not an offering from a reputable developer. Other criticism directed at Google’s failure to protect its users suggest that Google should improve the way in which they educate users to protect themselves more effectively. As it stands, Google leaves its Android users in the lurch because their “caveat emptor approach means it’s up to users to make sure they don’t get swindled while shopping in the company’s official apps bazaar.

That they don’t have a stricter policy for app publishing is a disrespectful gesture towards their customers who clearly are not tech-savvy enough to be suspicious of every download. Worse than simply taking a knee on the issue, Google seems to have excused themselves with the equivalent of an Alfred P. Neuman security policy that simply shrugs, “What, me worry?”

What do you think? Should Google be doing more to keep their Android Market free of malware, or does the responsibility fall to the Android Users. Let us know below in the comments.

Well, since pizza is a borderline spiritual occurrence for me it pains me to see a purveyor of pizza pie being thrown into the middle of a thin crusted legal battle. It appears as if there was something cheesy going on in Knoxville, TN as of late around the Facebook and Twitter rants of the owner of the Pizza Kitchen, Travis Redmon.

It appears that Mr. Redmon was feeling a little slighted by his marketing company, Low & Tritt, and he didn’t appreciate that. Personally, I can’t imagine that kind of thing ever happening in this day and age but I digress. The marketing company decided that the actions of Mr. Redmon merited a $2 million lawsuit. That’s a lot of dough !

According to the Knoxvillebiz.com site

According to the suit, Redmon defamed the marketing firm in two Aug. 17 Facebook entries that said, “Do not EVER use Lowandtritt mktg. firm!” and “CROOKS! – Stolen email list, and have tried to pressure me by threat of lawsuit to sign a ‘license agreement’ to use their mktg materials.”

The following day on Twitter Redmon posted, “Lowentritt mktg firm has done it again…” and “Can you believe that they have not only stolen my email list, but have now hacked Pizza Kitchen’s facebook page taking it offline?”

There are 300 or so fans on the Pizza Kitchen page and so the folks at Lowe and Tritt decided to do the simple math of saying that each one of those 300 must be worth $6,666.66 apiece in future lost business. It was at this point in the story where my pizza went cold when I realized that maybe this great Knoxville pizza Facebook faceoff was the related to the number of the beast, 666. I’ll have my pizza topped with the Four Horseman and a side of Armageddon, please! But once again, I digress.

On a serious note here, I think these folks in Knoxville must be upset with the play of the University of Tennessee’s football team or something because this is out of hand. Social media never plays well when it becomes social mudslinging. You can look at the PDF of the court papers filed by Lowe and Tritt at the Knox news site and decide for yourself if this is as stupid (or overcooked) as it looks.

Low & Tritt also is suing for breach of contract for continuing to use promotional materials without permission and for fees accumulated when it failed to pay its invoices on time.

So two million bucks over a Facebook rant that likely no one saw or cared about? My question is what kind of monthly retainer was being charged to merit that kind of a number? Apparently the Pizza Kitchen sells pizzas topped with gold dust and diamonds. I think that’s their extra crunchy style.

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Not so much, as TechCrunch reminds us. Google News isn’t the most popular news site on the Internet:

In the U.S., Google News is overshadowed by both Yahoo News and even the sites controlled by the New York Times (which includes NYTimes.com, Boston.com, HeraldTribune.com, and several other newspaper sites). According to comScore, Google News attracted 16.2 million unique visitors in the U.S. in February, compared to 42.3 million for Yahoo News and 46.2 million for the sites operated by New York Times Digital.

So leaving Google News aside, we come to probably the more important question of whether the search engine (which does dominate its niche) is really a threat to newspapers, in controlling the way we users access news sites. (Because it’s really hard to type in “ap.org.”)

The heart of the AP’s argument is that Google is depriving the news company of its hard earned ad dollars. However, as TC points out:
 

The money Google makes from its search ads is not necessarily money that would have otherwise gone to a “news” or content site. If Google didn’t exist, those ad dollars might have gone to an e-commerce site or a travel site or a real estate site or any number of other places. News sites have no claim to those search advertising dollars. It is incumbent upon each of us to attract an audience by having something original or interesting to say. When news sites do that, other sites link to them, and then they rank more highly in Google search results, which sends new readers their way.

 

And, as always, news sites should remember this important fact: if you don’t like Google, it’s really easy to block them. If you think Google’s stealing your content, use robots.txt to block the crawlers from your site. Problem solved.

Other than the fact, of course, that you want the traffic (and thus the higher advertising rates) Google sends your way.

What do you think: can newspapers ultimately adapt enough to find their place on the web, or are they simply too married to the old ways to try to find a different model that might work better?

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The survey of 145 interactive marketing professionals snuggles-up nicely with cScape’s research published in December that suggested companies will focus more on customer engagement in 2009.

Highlights from the report authored by Jeremiah Owyang include:

• 53% of interactive marketers expect their budgets for social media marketing to increase as a response to the recession.
• Social media budgets remain miniscule compared to the rest of interactive marketing. Three-quarters of marketers say their social media spend is $100,000 or less over 12 months.
• Social media is not yet a marketing line item. 45-percent of marketers say their social budgets are determined as needed and 23-percent say they scrape together funds from wherever they can find them.

Only 25% of companies are spending more than $100k a year on social media and it’s not yet a line item? Reminds me a lot of search engine marketing circa 1999. If you spend peanuts on social media, you’ll get…peanut butter–not filet mignon–when it comes to seeing results. Something Owyang agrees with:

“If you continue to fund social applications only as experiments, you’re unlikely to be able to do enough to make an impact, or to have a secure source of funding for the future. One way to put these efforts on a firmer footing is to concentrate on objectives and measure progress… rather than just experimenting to see what happens.”

You can purchase “Social Media Playtime Is Over” from Forrester for $749.

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The findings are reported over at eMarketer from a study done by the Kelsey Group and BIA Advisory Services. By the year 2013 the local ad market will shrink. The compound annual growth rate from 2008 – 1013 is projected to be -1.4% with the biggest year to year decline occurring this year. Here’s the picture.

I am not a very big fan of these crystal ball prognostications. We are barely able to determine what will happen 6 months from now let alone 4 plus years from now. The pattern that is predicted however makes sense. The decline will occur in traditional media. There is no surprise here. We can see how poorly things are going for local advertising by simply looking at the state of the newspaper industry. That combined with doubt as to the future of hard Yellow Page advertising explains the drop in that area. It’s predicting the numbers that always makes everyone queasy.

Now, the upside of this is the fact that online local advertising is anticipated to grow significantly. It is predicted by this study to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 18%. Right now online advertising is about 12% of the overall local spending and that could go as high as 22% by 2013. Impressive numbers for sure if you are in the online space and if you chose to buy the research.

I think it’s less about being right about the magnitude of the change but rather about the change itself. The real question and thinking should be around why this is happening. So why is it? It’s becoming a bit of a broken record but online is trackable and measurable in ways that traditional marketing isn’t. Based on that it just makes better sense for businesses to use marketing dollars where they can be most effective with a greater return on investment.

So as an Internet marketer make sure you look past the headlines. This is the good side of the marketing fence to be on for the foreseeable future because the grass is getting greener right where we are.

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Over at TwiTip they’ve done a nice job of talking about Twitter’s search capability and what it means to someone who is actually trying to use it versus talk about it. Not sure how you feel but lately the company to company sniping between Google, Facebook, Twitter and everyone else is a little tiresome. Until it actually affects how we use these tools (they are tools after all not some kind of magic potion) why not just work on making their products better and stop yammering but I digress.

Since many feel that the search feature of Twitter is the money maker for the ever expanding Internet darling it makes sense to see what they are up to. The author, Chris Allison, has this take as an overview after mentioning the hive mind that Twitter creates:

Google is a hive mind too, but their data is often collected as a side effect of user action, whereas the majority of Twitter’s “thoughts” are genuinely created and intentionally produced- carrying on

This distinction is important in establishing the place in the market that each of these information giants may hold moving into the future. Twitter is busy making their search function more robust. To cut to the chase and let you draw your own conclusions the two best options for you are to go the advanced search page. What caught my eye is the ability to look at tweets from a locality, time and sentiment point of view. I admittedly have not had the time to dive in and truly test drive these features so don’t be afraid to tell us about your experience.

In addition there is a search operator page that outlines everything you will need to know to search Twitter in its current incarnation. I suspect Twitter search will be a moving target for quite some time and one that merits very close attention moving forward.

So here’s some questions to ponder. Does this capability truly threaten Google? How will you use Twitter v. Google when searching for information? Beyond that, what about the rest of the real world of searchers that we as Internet marketers need to be thinking of? So many questions and I suspect so many Pilgrim opinions.

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That’s the stance of Boston Analytics, anyway, which analyzed the past, present, and future of mobile value added services in India.  And if anything, Boston Analytics may have taken a conservative approach – James Quintana Pearce believes it significantly underestimated the number of cell phone subscribers.

On to the data, then.  Boston Analytic’s graphs show India’s per capita GDP going up and mobile call tariffs going down.  Also, mobile revenues appear to be rising, even though the average revenue per user is dropping.  And these trends appear ready to continue for the foreseeable future.

So India’s shaping up to be an even more tempting spot for Google and Yahoo than it has been in the past.  Other American companies – including AOL? – could also try out their mobile products in this market.  (AOL has, by the way, given no indication that it would make such a move, but the company’s ongoing layoffs indicate that it needs to try something, and an expansion into the UK occurred just last month.)

We’ll see where this goes, but as with just about everything, don’t expect much to happen before the beginning of 2008.

The pretty pictures were used with Arthus-Bertrand’s permission, but there’s much more to it than that.  Google’s Rebecca Moore explains, “Each image is paired with thought-provoking statistics about the current environmental situation they depict.  The facts and figures were put together by GoodPlanet.org, Yann’s non-profit organization established to promote environmental awareness and sustainable development.”

And although many of the developments we cover tend to be picked up by the American press, this one seems to interest a much larger audience – a query for “Google Yann Arthus-Bertrand” in Google Blog Search turns up more top-ranking results in French and Spanish than in English.

Google’s environmentally-friendly projects were once viewed as an oddity, but if anything, the company has participated in them with increasing frequency over time.  Since Google’s market share and market cap have continued to grow, shareholders have no reason to complain, and the rest of us get to enjoy interesting offerings like the Yann Arthus-Bertrand layer.

The event is scheduled to take place at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, in room Stevens 5 at the Chicago Hilton, tonight from 6 – 7:30 p.m. All the attending members will be divided into three categories, like:

• agency search marketers
• in-house search marketers
• other marketers

Each group will have members from the three top search engines and will get around 15 minutes to put their views before others.

On this occasion, SEMPO will also unveil the data collection phase of its annual State-of-the-SEM Market Survey. All search engine marketing professionals working in an agency or in-house are eligible to take part in this survey. It is not mandatory for the participants to be a member of the SEMPO.

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