Nobody Wins At CES

Rather than do a CES pre-round-up of exciting products I’d like to address this interesting slant on the whole “massive electronics trade show in the middle of the desert” concept that has kept the Gadgets crew here up for the past few weeks. MG said Apple won CES. He was being snide, but, in a way, honest because, in the end, nobody wins CES. The Consumer Electronics Show is, as its name implies, a show for consumer electronics. These include, but are not limited to, TVs, DVD players, Blu-Ray players (if they still make those), and accessories. TV stands! TV brackets! Speakers! Remotes! In fact, there’s an entire hall dedicated to the Asian purveyors of the components that make up those consumer electronics, a sort of Fishmongers Row to the CE industry where the smell is at least far more tolerable. You’ll notice that nowhere in there did I mention PCs, laptops, cellphones, tablets, and Microsoft Windows. That’s because those are typically termed “mobile devices” or PCs or operating systems. There are trade shows for those, as well, although they are far fewer these days than they ever were. Why? Because the Internet took away all the fun of schlepping a booth to the Javitts Center in New York and paying for hotel rooms and food for a bunch of salesmen to stand around giving out tote bags. Why have a COMDEX when you can get Engadget, The Verge, and Gizmodo to cover your geegaw the moment its launched. Why pay $100,000 in booth fees at SXSW as a start-up when you can talk to TechCrunch to get approximately the same number of eyes? It doesn’t make sense. CES is really for buyers. Sure it’s a hoot to see what gadgets will launch at back-to-school in September and we, regrettably, will be there reporting on start-ups and cool gadgets we find. But it’s buyers – men and women who love to spend a week eating steak and playing backgammon at MGM grand – who really drive CES. Buyers may be considerably more plugged in these days than they were in the past, but the orders they place at CES are usually the last time they actively pursue the noephillic instinct until January of the next year. Again, with the rise of the Internet, this is swiftly changing but for now the mom-and-pop electronics shop in Scranton trying to fight off Amazon and Best Buy comes to CES to see which TVs to stock. Microsoft left CES because the news cycle it imparted on the industry didn’t suit it. You can talk backroom politics all you want, but in the end Microsoft could make its own news without CES. Every company is beholden to produce something new and great for CES and their R&D teams are geared to follow this schedule. Microsoft wanted off the treadmill, and they’re big enough to do it. Ultimately, nobody wins CES because there’s nothing to win. Most products announced don’t launch for months (if not years) and the major news articles end up being trend pieces rather than actual reviews. Sometimes companies can take the air out of the event by launching something “huge” – the Palm Pre is the last item in recent memory that really stole the show – but CES is about selling real goods to real people, not impressing some tech blogger with a 1 terabyte cellphone. It behooves us to remember that the Consumer in Consumer Electronics Show is less a term of endearment and more a target for a precision strike. We are the consumer. They want to sell to us. CES is geared to making that happen. If you’re a gearhead, I don’t want to cancel Christmas on you here. Yuck it up. We’ll be covering it in our own way over here . However, just remember that CES exists not to offer solace to the unmitigated fanboy. It exists to make money and when that money can be made elsewhere, CES will go away.

Twitter + Sports = Stat...

Automated Insights , the venture-backed digital media company formerly known as StatSheet, automatically transforms data into content – think interactive applications and things like data-driven news articles , charts and whatnot. Lately, Automated Insights’s been making waves with its extensive network of sports-related websites. For an example, check out the StatSheet MLB website. Today, the company is debuting a website in an effort to showcase “all the cool stuff they are doing with Twitter”. Dubbed Stat.us (amusingly, the name @Jack Dorsey gave Twitter before it became Twitter ), the new website aims to allow sports fans to follow just what they are interested in. The site was born partially out of frustration with Twitter’s limited filtering capabilities, Automated Insights founder Robbie Allen told me. Basically, Stat.us aggregates Twitter accounts for every NFL, NBA, MLB, NCAA Basketball and NCAA Football team in the United States, and populates them with live play-by-play updates, score updates, statistics and analysis. Another cool part of Stat.us is the Twitter Fantasy Tracker, where users can create a Twitter list with the specific accounts from the players on their Fantasy football team. Here’s Allen’s list if you’d like to get a better idea of what Automated Insights is trying to do. At present, StatSheet’s Twitter network boasts over 250,000 followers, and Allen tells me Automated Insights has gathered over 2 billion relevant statistics in a proprietary database to date. The statistics for Stat.us are provided by StatSheet’s official stats provider, sports wire service The Sports Network .

Third Time’s The Charm?...

Startups pivot; it’s part of the process. But how many startups pivot multiple times and still manage to raise significant cash from reputable investors? Sure, maybe it’s a sign of a bubble, a sign that startups are indeed overfunded, or maybe this company is just getting better with each successive effort. We first covered NewsCred back in 2008 , when they launched a credibility rating score for publishers, authors, and stories (by way of community voting plus algorithms) in an attempt to help readers filter the noise and find the highest quality news. Early last year, NewsCred relaunched as a “Ning for newspapers” , allowing users to build custom online newspapers in minutes. Both approaches seemed to hold water, and the startup raised $750K in seed funding from FLOODGATE and IA Ventures last September in support of it new look. However, neither model quite caught on, and the NewsCred of today has landed somewhere in the middle. Co-founder and CEO Shafqat Islam says that two years of iterating and nail-biting has led to the team deciding to ditch its consumer site, reprioritizing its focus on the simple (if not ambitious) goal of reinventing the concept of a newswire service. To do so, NewsCred is licensing content from more than 700 premium media brands, like Bloomberg, Forbes, Guardian, WashPo, and The Economist, and charging customers to access its news API — and the premium content from those publishers. Hopefully, the third try is the charm. And, hey, quite a few reputable investors are willing to bet that it will be. Today, the startup announced that it has landed $4 million in series A funding led by FirstMark, with participation from Lerer Ventures, AOL Ventures and Advancit Capital, through Shari Redstone. (FLOODGATE and IA Ventures also reinvested.) It’s a vote of confidence for the startup’s mission to reinvent the newswire and, in so doing, connect audiences with “the world’s best journalism”, says Islam. In its new B2B approach, NewsCred is looking to provide publishers and brands with fully licensed, full-text articles, photos, and videos from international newspapers to blogs and indy rags. The startup’s in-house editorial team filters and curates thousands of articles for each of its clients’ specific needs and interests, whether broad or niche. Through one platform, one license, and one bill, NewsCred is endeavoring to make it a breeze for publishers and brands to buy, manage, and increase revenue. Along with its editorial team, the startup uses its API to filter and customize news articles by topic, location, language, sources, and date. Through its proprietary semantic and natural language processing technology, NewsCred curates 215K full-text articles from 700+ sources across 50 countries, in eight languages, all of which is organized into 20 categories, and 47K topics. Islam says that the startup’s tech is platform agnostic, working on tablets, mobile, the Web, Facebook, etc and delivers content, images, and multimedia in XML, RSS, or JSON. As to its revenue model? NewsCred chages a monthly API licensing fee to access its content, which is based on the volume of news stories as well as the sources licensed. All revenue received by the startup is then shared with content providers, and the CEO says that it is already paying some of its sources six-figures. For journalists, this can be a great way to gain exposure and access to new distribution channels, while maintaining attribution, and grabbing a supplemental paycheck. For publishers looking to up their production to keep up with the content-spewing 24-hour digital news cycle, NewsCred’s access to a huge array of voices and its ability to customize content and create targeted editorial sections for niche audiences — along with the complementary advertising opportunities — could be appealing. Especially for publishers already pulling in a high volume of pageviews. It’s true that consumers want access to a variety of competing views when consuming their digital content, and NewsCred certainly gives content providers and brands an opportunity to access quality journalism and provide their readers with just that, but news consumers are also wary of plain old RSS feeds, aggregators, rebloggers, syndicators, and the ilk. NewsCred can sidestep this with a big editorial team and feverish curation, but it could be a slippery slope. A one-stop platform for publishers and content producers to gain supplemental content and revenue streams is no doubt appealing, and may just be where this is all going. As long as it doesn’t require another pivot. For more, check ‘em out at home here . What do you think? Is NewsCred onto something?

Google’s Whirlwind Six ...

Google has kicked off the week by posting a six-minute video clip that gives a fast-paced overview of its history as a search company, from its earliest days of Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s PageRank algorithm to its more recent feature launches, like Google Instant. The video features interviews from key members who have worked on Google Search, including Google Fellows Ben Gomes and Amit Singhal, and Google VP Marissa Mayer, who led Search for a decade before taking the helm of Google’s local products. The video revolves around Google’s mission to surface the information people are looking for as quickly as possible, but the most interesting bits focus on the problems and stumbles that Google has had along the way. One anecdote centers on the attacks of September 11: in the wake of the attacks, many people were searching for ‘New York Twin Towers’ and related queries as they attempted to get the latest news — only to find that Google’s index didn’t have any relevant news stories because it was weeks old (Danny Sullivan has written more about this failure). Google’s quick-fix was to post links to relevant news articles on its homepage, and its stumble eventually led to the launch of Google News. Another interesting anecdote: when Google initially began incorporating image results alongside text results for Universal Search, it realized that it couldn’t really compare the relevance of an image to that of a text article. So, rather than try to rank the images directly against web sites, Google just stuck the images in widgets at the top, middle, or bottom of the page. The video is a followup to a clip Google released in August that explores how it tweaks its algorithms .

Google News Now Spotlig...

Google keeps inching its way toward the +1 being a go to social signal as much as a Facebook Like is. There is still a long way to go but as these +1′s get more integrated into existing Google features they get a little more juice. The latest is the opportunity for things that have been +1′d by a Gmail contact or someone from a Google+ circle to show up in the spotlight section of Google News. The blog post tells us Over the past few months, myriad sites across the web (including Google News) have adopted the +1 button to help start conversations. But there hasn’t been an easy way for signed-in users to see what news articles your friends are enjoying — until now. Starting today, the Spotlight section will sometimes include articles that your Gmail contacts and people in your Google+ circles have publicly +1’d. You can see their profile pictures and click through to their Google+ profiles, just like on Social Search. And of course you can +1 the stories too, expressing your opinion and optionally sharing with your circles. Any thoughts? Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information.

Facebook To Mix Sponsor...

Facebook has classically been very reluctant to adulterate its social content streams with advertisements. But today, Facebook begins showing its Sponsored Stories ad units in the site-wide Ticker of real-time social activity stories. This will open lucrative new ad inventory, including placements on the home page. While they are are paid ads, Sponsored Stories display the activity of friends or Pages users Like so they’re typically less annoying than standard ads. Still, the commingling of these commercials with content could offend users not expecting ads to escape their cage in the lower right sidebar. Last year, Facebook launched Sponsored Stories as its next step in social advertising, The ad unit lets brands buy additional exposure for mentions or interactions with them that typically appear as news feed stories. For 8 months these only appeared in the sidebar. Starting in August, though, Facebook began mixing Sponsored Stories about which games friends were playing into the Games Ticker that appears to those using Facebook canvas apps and games. This experiment seems to have gone without significant backlash, leading Facebook to allow Sponsored Stories to appear in the standard Ticker that shows activity stories such as users listening to songs, reading news articles, leaving wall posts, or adding new friends. Facebook PR’s Annie Ta tells me “Starting on Monday [today], we are continuing to slowly roll out Sponsored Stories in ticker across Facebook.” Sponsored Stories have been shown to receive a 46% higher click through rate than standard ads, indicating they provide a better user experience and could attract advertisers. Facebook’s ad czar Gokul Rajaram says he envisions a future where all of Facebook’s ads include social content or context . In fact, the majority of ads on the site already do . Twitter recently began displaying promoted tweet in-stream ads , and reactions haven’t been as overwhelmingly negative as many would have expected. Facebook may see using Sponsored Stories rather than standard ads, and placing them in the Ticker rather than the primary news feed as the proper balance between monetization and maintaining the sanctity of content. I think Facebook is wise not to have injected ads into the primary news feed, as the quality of the news feed experience is a core reason the site is addictive. We’ll be watching for reactions as the rollout of Sponsored Stories to the Ticker continues. While the number of ad spots in the site’s sidebar is relatively stable, Facebook will be able to tweak how frequently ads appear in the Ticker. With proper optimization, Facebook may be able to fly just beneath the radar of widespread discontent while boosting ad revenues that could please investors waiting for its IPO.