How the Super Bowl ad featuring David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey and Jay Leno came together.

The bank’s demands for billions of dollars from the insurer bled it of cash, which the government later provided.

Amazon’s recent announcement of dramatically higher royalty rates for authors and book publishers, a move designed to level the playing field with Apple’s iPad tablet, seems to be having some effect: another author has signed an exclusive book deal for the Amazon Kindle. In this case, Gavin de Becker — author of several books about security — has agreed to release expanded and updated editions of two of his books, “The Gift of Fear” and “Just 2 Seconds.” A news release says that while both books have been available as print copies for some time, this is the first time “The Gift of Fear” has been available electronically, and both will be exclusive to Amazon’s Kindle Store for one year.

This deal appears to be very similar to a Kindle exclusive announced by author Stephen Covey — creator of the “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People” line of books — in December, which saw the author transfer the rights to two of his books from Simon & Schuster to an electronic publisher in order to do the deal with Amazon. As part of that arrangement, Covey was to get about 50 percent of the proceeds from the sales of Kindle versions of the books, in contrast to the usual 25 percent that most publishers provide. Amazon will have exclusive e-book rights for a year.

Last month, Amazon signed another high-profile author to an ebook exclusive: best-selling Brazilian writer Paolo Coelho agreed to give the company and the Kindle exclusive rights to Portugese versions of 17 of his popular novels. None of Coelho’s books have been available in e-book format before. A recent report also confirmed that British author Ian McEwan signed an exclusive deal last year for electronic publishing rights to five of his books in return for 50 percent of the royalties.

One wonders whether any of these authors will want to renegotiate their exclusive deals, now that Amazon is offering authors and publishers 70 percent royalties instead of just 50 percent. In any case, the upward pressure on royalty rates is a welcome sign of increased competition in book publishing, thanks to both Amazon and Apple, and that is something many authors will no doubt be pleased to see.

Meanwhile, Amazon continues its fight to keep e-book prices low, although it appears to be steadily losing ground in that battle. After Macmillan refused to lower its prices to the $9.99 that Amazon was demanding, the electronic retailer yanked the publishers books from its shelves (both print and electronic), but was later forced to capitulate. Since then, two other publishers have also renegotiated higher prices with the company. Amazon has since put print versions of Macmillan books back on its virtual shelves, but according to a recent report, it is still not stocking Kindle versions.

Related content from GigaOM Pro:

Why Closed Platforms Might Not Be So Bad

The US government filed its Statement of Interest regarding the revised Google settlement yesterday with the District Court in New York. While the statement was signed by an attorney from the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, several agencies including the Copyright Office reportedly contributed to it.

As you may recall, the judge has only 2 choices: he can approve the settlement, or send it back to the parties for revision. He cannot modify it himself.

The US government statement advises the judge that the public interest would be best served by sending the settlement back, and points out that the revised version still suffers from the "same core problem" that afflicted the first version: "an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the Court in this litigation."

The press reports that I've seen take the government's statement as an emphatic thumbs down.

The judge has scheduled a hearing for February 18 in his Manhattan courtroom.

It is very unlikely that the judge will approve this version of the settlement. Also, he may once again decide postpone a full-fledged fairness hearing-although the many objectors, large and small, are eager to have their day in court. Because the parties withdrew the proposed settlement before the originally scheduled fairness hearing occurred in October 2009, the judge has not yet formally considered the many objections filed to date on the revised settlement and filed in anticipation of the fairness hearing cancelled last October.

Bottom line for the long term: even if the judge sends the settlement back, and even if the parties agree to deadlines as short as the deadlines for this presumably ill-fated revision, there is no resolution in sight for the litigation.

Whether the case is tried or the settlement discussions continue, the legal end point will not be the trial judgment or settlement approval issued by the district court judge. The end point will be the disposition of the final appeal from that district court judgment or approved settlement, and that disposition is years away.

It's hard to imagine what relevance the final legal disposition would have then, as public and private innovators are not sitting on their hands, waiting for the judge to sort this out.

By Charles Petersen

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal
by Ben Mezrich

Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America
by Julia Angwin

Facebook, the most popular social networking Web site in the world, was founded in a Harvard dorm room in the winter of 2004. Like Microsoft, that other famous technology company started by a Harvard dropout, Facebook was not particularly original. A quarter-century earlier, Bill Gates, asked by IBM to provide the basic programming for its new personal computer, simply bought a program from another company and renamed it. Mark Zuckerberg, the primary founder of Facebook, who dropped out of college six months after starting the site, took most of his ideas from existing social networks such as Friendster and MySpace. But while Microsoft could as easily have originated at MIT or Caltech, it was no accident that Facebook came from Harvard.

Through the use of various tests, a handful of dating Web sites are competing to impose some structure on the quest for love.

AMEE, the US/UK-based startup that aims to build the largest engine for computing greenhouse gas emissions, has secured a $5.5m series B financing lead by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside existing investors, including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures. AMEE will use the funding to expand its geographic reach and platform.

The prize AMEE is aiming for, known in the sector as “enterprise carbon management”, is expected to reach $4 billion by 2017 because of government and consumer pressure to address climate change. AMEE’s engine is now being used by companies offering carbon accounting or business intelligence software, as well as governments, multi-nationals and SMEs.

The problem AMEE is addressing is that there are currently, multiple standards and hundreds of thousands of individual emission factors used to determine something’s carbon footprint.

So AMEE has codified the major greenhouse gas standards, their computation models, and emission factors into an engine that is available to clients its API. This is exposed as a RESTful HTTP-based web service with XML, JSON and Atom interfaces. Customers so far include SAS and the UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). AMEE’s search engine also enables discovery of greenhouse gas standards and emission factors.

In July last year it boosted its board with Toby Coppel, former chief strategy officer of Yahoo!

It has also created RealTimecCarbon, a joint project by Dynamic Demand, AMEE and Demand Logic, which lets you see the real-time carbon intensity of electricity so consumers can avoid consuming at times of high emissions. This could eventualy be linked to appliances, buildings and factories so they could automatically manage demand according to the carbon being released.

Pat Burtis, Investment Manager at Amadeus Capital Partners, joins the AMEE Board of Directors.

The meeting would mark the first time in the long health care debate that leaders from both sides would be allowed to air their ideas publicly.

Gmail is set to become Google’s next major push into social media. According to The Wall Street Journal, the popular webmail service will soon launch a new feature for sharing content and status updates with friends. [Update: We think Google might announce these features on Tuesday]

As WSJ points out, Gmail users can already update their statuses — sort of — through Gmail’s chat feature. Currently, this feature is more akin to the traditional IM “away message.” However, with this new social push, Gmail will offer a timeline-view of your friends’ status updates, just like on Facebook and Twitter.

Those updates might come from both Gmail and third-party services. According to WSJ, Google-owned YouTube and Picasa will be integrated into the stream. The huge question then is whether or not the new feature will include updates from Twitter and Facebook.

If so, the new features could be thought of more like a TweetDeck or Seesmic, looking to provide an aggregate view of your friends’ social media activities along with the ability to push status updates to the services you use from inside of Gmail. If not, it could be thought of as a major competitor to Twitter and Facebook as Gmail looks to covert its millions of e-mail users into adherents to a whole new breed of social media service.

An issue with the latter, however, is that Gmail has historically added people to your contacts based on e-mail interactions. Hence, this contact list often varies significantly from your friends on social sites where relationships need to be made explicitly.

In other words, your Gmail contacts aren’t necessarily the same people you want to share status updates, photos and videos with. This is an issue that shouldn’t be overlooked in evaluating the new features Google is soon to unveil.

Tags: facebook, gmail, Google, trending, twitter

The way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government, and senators should change the rules to end obstructionism.

Because today's Public Editor column takes the unusual step of recommending that a respected Times journalist be reassigned, I thought it only fair to offer Bill Keller, the executive editor, an opportunity to respond in full. Here is what Keller had to say.

As more and more of our friends and favorite organizations start publishing updates online, being able to organize them well is becoming even more important. Niche-popular desktop social media stream-reader Tweetdeck issued a software update this morning and the most striking change is in its handling of user groups. It's beautiful. The new Tweetdeck is faster, more flexible and easier to navigate.

Groups, we have argued, are the secret weapon of the social web. Here are five ways that the new Tweetdeck gets groups right and that Facebook, the world's dominant social media stream reader by a long-shot, could learn from what Tweetdeck is doing. That would drastically improve Facebook's own user experience.

Sponsor

Internet startup investor John Borthwick of Betaworks has told us that he invested in Tweetdeck specifically because its column metaphor represented a drastic break from the page-based metaphor of the rest of the web and the Instant Messaging metaphor of most other Twitter clients. That's how Tweetdeck works: it lets you put your friends and contacts on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn into grouped columns across your screen. It's a powerful system and the clear leader in the ecosystem of interfaces built around Twitter. Competitor Seesmic has a similar offering and is also based on columns for groups.

These applications may be more overwhelming than many mainstream users are looking for, but the principles could be adapted to Facebook's own interface in some very interesting ways.

The Problem With Facebook's Group Support

Groups of users, which Facebook calls Lists, are extremely helpful in prioritizing messages by their source. They enable users to subscribe to more sources of information in total without fear they will miss high-priority content. Groups help contextualize messages in a stream and with good search support they can help you target queries and unearth the information you're looking for within a limited space of trusted, topical sources of information. Last month, Facebook suggested its users subscribe to news organizations on the social network and put those updates in a special list called News, for example.

Unfortunately, Facebook has never treated Groups with the respect that they deserve. The newest redesign pushes friends Lists a click removed from the front page of the site, even. (It took me three clicks from the home page to see the view pictured on the right, for example.) The company is instead focused on serving up content from favored sources using the new News Feed (vs Live Feed) algorithm. This algorithm says that the more you've interacted with a source of information in the past, the more likely you are to want to read that person's updates in the future. News Feed is a self-reenforcing paradigm that simplifies and narrows a user's universe by taking editorial control out of their hands and putting it in the hands of a black-box formula.

How could Facebook better handle groups? Let's take a look at how Tweetdeck does it.

Tweetdeck's Superior Handling of Groups

• Buttons to navigate directly

  The new Tweetdeck update today added a series of buttons at the bottom of the application for your group columns. Hover over them and you'll see the column name. Click on that button and you'll be brought immediately to that column, a much nicer experience than the awkward old scrolling. The hover display does show some information that's probably not useful to anyone (API calls remaining) but putting rapid group navigation in a good place in the app makes a big difference. It would also be nice if those buttons were configurable in some way - like the red one or #3 is for my @ replies column. But Tweetdeck now makes it much, much easier to navigate between groups than Facebook does. Facebook almost seems to be discouraging use of groups by burying them several clicks below top level options.

  
  
  
• Different Notification Priorities

  Tweetdeck makes it easy to set up different levels of notification for different groups. For example, my "high-priority" Twitter group sends full messages as a pop-up in the corner of my screen when it updates, but my column for people I actually know in real life on Facebook (like my family members) throws a pop-up and an audio notification in Tweetdeck when there's something new. That's awesome.

  Facebook is all about the notifications, why not let me get a special notification when someone in a particular group has posted an update?

  
  

• Shareable Groups, Suggestions etc.

  For years Twitter has been fundamentally public and Facebook private, but for better or for worse that's changing on Facebook. Isn't it time for Facebook to offer bundles of pages or people that you can follow all at once? Twitter and Tweetdeck make this easy with lists, sharable lists and the Tweetdeck directory of recommended lists to follow. Facebook users would love something like that! My college newspaper staff as one big list of Facebook users to follow? My football team? Suzy Bright's curated list of top sex writers to follow on Facebook? People would eat that kind of stuff up.
  

• Keyword Filters

  Last week I was working when the season premier of Lost came on TV. I'm likely to watch it later on DVD. Tweetdeck let me add a filter to all of my groups to hide any posts that included the word Lost! Sick of hearing about the iPad? No problem! Tweetdeck does a great job of building value on top of these groups of contacts: filter for, filter out keywords, analyze a group for its most-used words. There are lots of possibilities. Facebook users would probably like these same options.
  

• A Group for New Friends

  Tweetdeck has a great feature that lets you create a column to display the bios of people who have just started following you. From there you can click once to follow them back. Facebook could easily do something like that, bring new friends and/or recommended friends up higher into a very visible place in the interface. Facebook wants users to go beyond connecting with people they already know in real life (sorry, users, that's what Facebook has decided) so why not create a "group" that's made up of people who are fans of the same pages you are or are otherwise recommended for connecting with?

There are all kinds of ways that Facebook could offer meaningful support for user groups and turn the News Feed into a more powerful tool, with more control for users and more value in the long run. Tweetdeck is doing a pretty darned good job of exactly that.

Discuss

Perhaps yesterday’s tweet by Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it best. Hell has indeed frozen over. Google has run its first major television ad, during the Super Bowl, no less. The rumor that Google would run a commercial during today’s Super Bowl 2010 proved true. Google aired a spot from its online video Search Stories series, [...]

....

This afternoon, Marina/Cow Hollow area:

In Douglas Adams’s humorous sci-fi novel series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a special kind of fish is mentioned — the Babel Fish. When inserted into the ear, it translates any spoken language into whichever language the listener understands. It is a very nifty device, and now Google seeks to create something similar.

According to Times Online, Google is developing a speech-to-speech automated translator for Android phones. It’s essentially a combination of two of Google’s existing technologies; its online universal translator service, Google Translate, and its voice recognition system.

Google plans to make its Babel Fish a lot like a human translator; the software would analyze chunks of speech, and translate them in their entirety rather than translating word for word. Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, claims the technology could go live in a couple of years. “Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on. If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently,” he says.

Anyone who’s used Google Translate knows that translations aren’t (and probably never will be) perfect, but they’re very helpful when you can’t understand a word of some foreign language. However, Google’s voice recognition also has issues of its own, and I fear that these two combined would produce a very high amount of errors. The Times also mentions the issue of different accents, a problem that Google plans to solve by making the software gradually learn the speaking habits of the phone’s owner.

Despite the big issues Google has to overcome to make this technology useful, if anyone can pull it off, Google can. The idea of being able to call someone who doesn’t speak your language, and have the conversation translated almost instantly, well, that’s one of those inventions that made Google the company it is today.

Tags: Google, machine translation, translation

If you are selling a scarcity — an inventory — of any nonphysical goods today, stop, turn around, and start selling value — outcomes — instead. Or you’re screwed. Apply this rule to many enterprises: advertising, media, content, information, education, consultation, and to some extent, performance.

* * *

Start with advertising. I wrote in my report on a local advertising sales roundtable we held at CUNY that sites should shift from selling media — their own inventory of banners and buttons — to selling services for merchants, helping them succeed through networks of local sites and also through Google, Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, email, mobile, and whatever comes next … helping them with their business. The merchant doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your limited supply of space and eyeballs; the merchant cares about sales and return on investment. As Max Kalehoff advised in a comment on that post, “Sell the outcome.”

At a Paley Center breakfast this week, Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin — a titan of ad sales in broadcast — was blunt about the current state of advertising in media: “There’s just too much supply,” he said, “and I don’t think that supply is going to go away. The leverage is on the part of the buyer as opposed to the seller.” When there’s limitless supply, pricing is not based on supply and demand. These are the new economics of media.

Thus the value is in results. That, of course, is what Google realized when it sold clicks instead of pixels, aligning its interests with those of the advertiser and sharing the risk, which motivated Google not to sell scarcity but to create abundance in the form of AdSense. This, for Google, produced a practically limitless supply, which in turn yielded ever-better relevance, effectiveness, and ROI.

Or as Karmazin famously told Google in Ken Auletta’s book: “You’re fucking with the secret sauce.” He recounted his reaction to Google’s strategy at the breakfast: “You want advertisers to know what will work and what doesn’t? That’s bizarre…. Oh, my God, I don’t want to be in that business.” In most media, Karmazin said, the lowest rates were paid by direct response: “The people who knew what worked were the ones who paid the lower rate.” That bubble is irreparably burst.

* * *

So what are you to do if you are media? First, you have to align your interest with marketers if you have any hope of still helping them, still adding and then recognizing value. Marketers will, as Bob Garfield so forcefully states in The Chaos Scenario, build their own, direct relationships around media, without advertising. Or as I’ve been obnoxiously stating it, advertising is failure — it’s what you do when you don’t have a valued relationship.

Relationships. That’s what the business of media must become. In our New Business Models for News, we began — just began — to project the value of the relationship a new media service can have in its community: creating events; educating; gathering and selling data; selling goods directly (as the Telegraph does, quite successfully); running networks to help others succeed; saving money by collaborating. This is why the notion of charging your best customers — cutting off your richest relationships with a toll booth — seems so dangerous to me.

Instead, we must also align our interests with those of the community, with the people formerly known as the audience, helping them do what they want to do, adding value and recognizing it that way. We need to make ourselves their platform.

Content is not a scarcity. You can no longer sell it as such. That’s one of the morals of the Demand Media and Wikipedia stories: Like it or not, for many different motives, there’s always someone out there who can create content that serves a similar purpose, that answers the same question, that is just good enough. Selling content as if it were a consumable — indeed, calling the people who use content consumers — is now outmoded.

Information is not a scarcity, or at least it isn’t scarce for long. Yes, when I don’t know something, then the answer is scarce. But now it’s much easier to get that answer; Google will have it in .3 seconds and if it doesn’t and if enough of us ask it, then someone at Demand Media will write it for me and the rest of the world for $20. When news is new, its value is scarce (as Thomson Reuters Tom Glocer says, his information has its highest value in its first 3 milliseconds); but then that value deflates.

The new media economy gets even more complicated because putting our content and information out there is how it gets distributed, how we find new people, how we build new relationships, how we realize new value.

You can no longer afford to make yourself scarce.

* * *

In education, we’re fooling ourselves if we think that we can maintain our scarcity-based economy: only so chairs to soak in the wisdom of that teacher. It’s a wildly inefficient system — especially in our industrial-age knowledge factories that try to turn out people who memorize the same answer instead of invent new ones.

Earlier, I’ve speculated about the idea of an educational ecosystem with star professors whose lectures are widely available (as is the case with MIT and Stanford) and who gain value (books, speaking gigs) through being broadly distributed. Then we have local tutors who give us the specialized instruction and consultation we need.

Thus we have performers and consultants. There is still value in unique performance. We will continue to buy tickets to concerts by stars (but we won’t pay for the Muzak covers of their songs on elevators). We will buy books. We will pay to sit in a movie theater with popcorn. The new competition in the case of media and performance isn’t that someone will make a good-enough version of what we do but that there is more call for the public’s attention.

Quality is a scarcity. But it is a real scarcity. You may think that your newspaper’s version of the Super Bowl is better than the next, but good luck trying to build a business on charging for it. No, you have to be recognized by enough people as being the best — so many that they spread the word for you — if you want to have a blockbuster. It’s still possible. But in an economy of abundance, it’s ever harder and thus riskier and more expensive to get that hit.

This is also why value shifts from creation to curation: in a world of overabundant content, it’s the filters we need.

If you’re not the star performer (or professor), if you’re the consultant (or tutor) who works much more locally, you do indeed have a scarcity: your own time. That scarcity works against you. So it’s in your interest to scale as best you can. That is why people like me blog. The more we share our ideas, the more attention we draw, the more business we can get, the more efficient we are. I’ve even tried to convince big consulting companies and headhunters and international organizations of this; didn’t get far.

* * *

The real story in nonphysical goods is one of deflation. Value in once-scarce — well, once-controlled — commodities like news, information, and advertising decline as the internet explodes creation and competition. The internet also destroys the ability of many to control distribution and thus value. But at the same time, the internet drastically increases efficiency thanks to platforms and open distribution and the ability — no, the need — to specialize and collaborate. The bottom line in many of these enterprises — as we tried to show in our New Business Models for News — is that they may be profitable, only smaller. Both sides of the ledger deflate.

This is why the old controllers of scarcity have such trouble rethinking and remaking themselves for the economy of abundance. Their reflex is to control more, when that only decreases value.

So stop selling scarcity. Scarcity has no value. Results and efficiency do.

* * *

Then again, people are spending big money — billions — for a virtual market with a virtual scarcity in virtual goods: pixels on a screen. It’s absurd, of course, that anyone can create a scarcity and market value for fictional food for fictional cows, but it’s making money. In this economy, I think we see both the dying gasp and a parody of scarcity.

* * *

Calling all political news junkies who want to watch President Obama’s speeches live on their iPhones: now there’s an app for that.

On Jan. 20, the White House recently launched its first official iTunes app, which brings key features of WhiteHouse.gov to mobile platforms. The free app allows users to view White House video, photos, blog posts and other news events.

The “Newsroom” tab includes press briefings, transcripts, and Letters from the President. The app also offers live streaming video, such as a Q&A with Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer. If there are no events occurring, that part of the app simply says there are no events streaming at this time, and users have to navigate back to the main menu to access earlier video.

A personal familiar with the matter indicated the White House app was created using AppMakr, though the White House does not confirm specific vendors to avoid the impression of endorsement. AppMakr is a relatively new app-making template provided by PointAbout, a technology consulting and services company that has attracted attention for its easy-to-use app building template.

For those concerned that their tax dollars are being devoted to the development of White House technology products: AppMakr’s app build platforms cost only $199 for those that want to create apps but allow AppMakr to retain publishing rights, and $499 for those that want to design and publish the app themselves, with no AppMakr branding. (The White House app shows no AppMakr publishing copyright.)

Currently the White House app is only available to iPhone users, though the White House is developing applications for both the Android and Blackberry platforms, and also plans to roll out a version of WhiteHouse.gov that is optimized for the browsers of some mobile phones.

The Obama administration, more so than previous administrations, has been recognized for its attempts to use technology as a means to connect with the public. Not only did President Obama introduce the role of Chief Technology Officer to the federal government, but also has a handful of Google employees on his staff, including Google’s former global head of public policy, Andrew McLaughlin.

President Obama’s Recovery Act provides for $7.2 billion for nationwide Internet access and the expansion of computer capacity, according to WhiteHouse.gov, and the President has been vocal about his support of net neutrality rules presented by the FCC. Obama’s speeches are often made available for viewing on YouTube; last week, he answered questions on net neutrality submitted by users during an interview on YouTube.

The administration began working on the iPhone app at the end of December as part of an effort to promote the President’s State of the Union address. Nick Shapiro, a spokesman for the White House, says the administration is leveraging technology to foster more communication with the American public, “engage citizens, and deliver on the President’s commitment to running the most open and transparent Administration in history.”

The iTunes app store offers other White House-related apps, including BriefRoom, White-House, and The Unofficial White House News Reader, but Mr. Shapiro confirmed that the new White House app is the only official White House app.

Major brands and manufacturers — and now, book publishers — are deploying new tactics and tools to control how their products are presented and priced online.