(TrendHunter.com) While we all know that the Disney princesses lived happily ever after, this new series explores what our favorite animated heroines would look like after one too many drinks. Hangovers happen to the…
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The eclectic company will place part of its businesses in bankruptcy protection, where the possible buyers will include the company’s flamboyant founder, Ryan Kavanaugh.
Three daytime shows are being canceled in advance of Brian Williams’s joining the cable network, possibly in September. MSNBC’s prime-time lineup is so far untouched.
LinkedIn’s second-quarter results beat Wall Street’s expectations on all fronts, but the signs behind the numbers seemed to worry investors.
There are unusually high levels of mergers and acquisitions in the agency world right now, but that doesn’t mean small shops can just breeze into the right kind of sale, panelists said at the Ad Age Small Agency Conference on Thursday in Boston.
Potential buyers aren’t the problem. “New buyers coupled with new capabilities and demand is driving a lot of new activity in the market and I really don’t see it stopping any time soon,” said Maurice Watkins, partner at Results International, an investment bank focused on agencies and marketing tech companies. The big agency holding companies are only doing about 15% of the global deals right now, he said, with IT companies, international buyers, media companies and private equity driving many of the other deals.
The questions are which agencies are wanted, ready to sell and prepared to navigate the process. Size does matter, even within the “small agency” crowd, Mr. Watkins said. “It’s very difficult to in any market to find a buyer for the 10-person agency,” he said. Fifty people, however, draws a certain kind of buyer. If you get to 100 people, that’s a different kind.
At Ad Age’s Small Agency Conference in Boston, a panel of industry veterans discussed the best ways of navigating new business today. Search consultancy AAR Partners Co-President Lisa Colantuono, 72andSunny Business Develoment Head Rebekah Jefferis, Work & Co Partner/Product Management Gene Liebel and new business consultancy RSW/US Owner and President Mark Sneider offered do’s and don’ts for the process, including missteps that you can make from the very first meeting and how to turn an outrageous fail into a winning move.
Don’t try to score on the first date. “People try to win the account from day one,” said Ms. Colantuono. “The most important thing to think about is getting invited to the next meeting,” not the end game, she said.
Don’t talk about yourself. “Do talk about the client,” said Mr. Sneider. “We have 50 clients across the U.S. and often, we see agencies defaulting to what’s comfortable, talking about themselves, which can sound generic. It’s better to come in with smart questions and begin creating a bridge.”
Currently a controversy is brewing over at Github, which can be described as “the facebook of programmers”. That’s one heck of an elevator pitch, and made Github the darling of VC-funders and happy users alike. It’s a web-based Git repository hosting service, where you can upload your projects and if anyone takes a liking to your repo they can fork it and work on it too.
Git in this context is a free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full version-tracking capabilities. A fork is a copy of a repository. Forking a repository allows you to freely experiment with changes without affecting the original project, and the original project doesn’t affect yours. Just making that clear so that Adria Richards doesn’t come around in case I make any forking-jokes.
Currently, there’s an all out gif-and-snark-war going on in this trainwreck of a thread over at Github, below a small change made in the fork of a repo. A change where the word “Retard” – “delay or hold back in terms of progress or development”- was removed and exchanged for the word “Git” – “an unpleasant or contemptible person”. Why? Github wants to remove the word “retard” from code. Github had already deleted the original repo, and suddenly all forks from this repo were affected, ie; also gone from public view and use on Github. Nixx who had this fork was told by a friend of theirs that their repo had been taken down on Saturday the 25th of July; “I had not received any email from GitHub regarding this” Nixx explains. No warning. “I could not access any management panels, so even if I wanted to delete the repo and replace it with a dummy repo with the same name pointing to a new host, for instance, this would be impossible.”
“I sent an email through GitHub’s support form almost immediately, asking why it was taken down. 7PM the next day (Sunday, 26th) I received my first reply from GitHub. They stated that the original repo was taken down because it broke the terms of service”
Nixx notes that Github did not mention any specific clauses or details in their terms that had been breached. It’s only in the follow-up response that Github refers to “Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable…” as a reason for removing the word retard.
“I replied almost immediately asking specifically what it was banned for.” Nixx explains, then “9PM on Tuesday, the 28th, I got the response I included in the commit message, stating that my repository had been restored for 24 hours to allow me to remove the word ‘Retard’.”
When Nixx exchanged the word “retard” for “git”, the comments to the change were suddenly filled with popcorn-eating gifs. Which words are kosher in code? Is the British insult better than the word for slow? Is the Image Manipulation Program called “Gimp”, also hosted at Github, now problematic? There are currently 224,477 code results for the word “retard” at Github, are they all at risk of being shut down with no warning?
There are alternatives to Github, try Gitlab, or Gogs.io, or getgitorious. This is not the first time things have been removed from Github citing a terms of service breach, last year a repository called “Gamergate OP” was abruptly removed. The problem now is that by being “the facebook for programmers”, Github is the centralised network for sharing projects, and leaving becomes difficult when you and your projects are connected to other users of Github.
But just like Facebook, it seems so important when you use it, but so redundant when you’re not on it. By placing all their eggs in one basket, the happy code-sharing users actually made Github king over their projects, the language police of their code-comments, and put their work at the whim of any changes to this terms of service. On July 20th Github also announced that they adopted the Open Code of Conduct, a ‘Code of Conduct is inspired by the code of conducts and diversity statements from several other communities, including Django, Python, Ubuntu, Contributor Covenant, and Geek Feminism. ‘ And suddenly it has dawned on people what a mistake it is to centralize a decentralized version control system. Vague lines in TOS are a dime a dozen, and a lawyers best friend that way any service can be arbitrary in their enforcing of “the rules”.
The question is, looking at that trainwreck of a thread, who felt the need to actually start policing code-comments? By doing this, Github risks alienating their core users, though at least one user in the trainwreck thread insists that they should all “shoo”. As in “You all lose. Just leave. Go form your own git hosting service that’ll wither and die. Shoo.” The thing is, the core users can literally do just that, and where would that leave Github the business? Will it be worth $2 billion after 224,477 repos are arbitrarily locked down or deleted?
“People are really unreliable when it comes to what they like or don’t like,” said Rana el Kaliouby, chief science and strategy officer for Affectiva at Ad Age’s Small Agency Conference in Boston. But luckily, it has a solution for that.
Affectiva’s technology reads and analyzes human emotion from a single expression. The obvious use is for market research, but Hershey Co. had a different idea. The confectionary giant, working with tech firm Wild Blue Technologies, wanted to use the technology to drive consumers down the grocery aisle. The company invited consumers to walk to the middle of the aisle, where they would find an Affectiva-powered kiosk prompting them to smile into the machine for a free sample.
“One point of conversion down the aisle is $100 million,” said Frank Jimenez, senior director, insights-driven performance and retail evolution at Hershey.
A Los Angeles judge said he planned to bar a sale of the property but invited a developer and Ms. Perry to make competing bids to rent it.
Imagine que mil pessoas querem muito, MUITO, que a banda Foo Fighters faça um show na cidade onde eles moram. Essas pessoas são fãs o bastante para aprenderem a tocar e cantar uma das músicas mais legais dos Foo Fighters, Learn to Fly. O que elas fazem depois disso? Tocam e cantam a música, claro. […]
> LEIA MAIS: Vídeo mostra mil pessoas tocando e cantando Learn to Fly do Foo Fighters
Post originalmente publicado no B9
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“People are really unreliable when it comes to what they like or don’t like,” said Rana el Kaliouby, chief science and strategy officer for Affectiva at Ad Age’s Small Agency Conference in Boston. But luckily, it has a solution for that.
Affectiva’s technology reads and analyzes human emotion from a single expression. The obvious use is for market research, but Hershey Co. had a different idea. The confectionary giant, working with tech firm Wild Blue Technologies, wanted to use the technology to drive consumers down the grocery aisle. The company invited consumers to walk to the middle of the aisle, where they would find an Affectiva-powered kiosk prompting them to smile into the machine for a free sample.
“One point of conversion down the aisle is $100 million,” said Frank Jimenez, senior director, insights-driven performance and retail evolution at Hershey.
A sequência do jogo Angry Birds foi lançada hoje pela Rovio e para marcar o lançamento a empresa criou um curioso vídeo, que mostra como seria uma disputa entre pássaros e porcos na vida real, ou melhor, em um universo em que animais não precisam respeitar as leis da física. Trata-se de uma versão live […]
> LEIA MAIS: Trailer de Angry Birds 2 mostra como seria uma guerra entre pássaros e porcos
Post originalmente publicado no B9
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Fiber One premiered its new cheesecake bars with a sampling event in Grand Central’s Vanderbilt Hall today.
Today’s event, which falls on National Cheesecake Day, kicks off a campaign and announces national distribution of the product. Additionally, there is a social component supported by Betty White and a partnership with Lisa Lillien’s Hungry Girl brand, which offers healthy eating tips and “guilt-free” ways to indulge. Below is a tweet from Ms. White’s official account. She has 1.2 million Twitter followers and 200,000 Instagram followers.
Hey guys! @FiberOne is turning #CheesecakeDay into #F1CheesecakeMonth! #ad If only the Girls could see this: http://t.co/DeBEaojkhR
Time Warner Cable, awaiting regulatory clearance to merge with Charter Communications, posted second-quarter profit that missed analysts’ estimates as program, sales and marketing costs rose.
The cable company shed 45,000 video subscribers, its smallest second-quarter loss since 2008, to end the quarter with 10.8 million TV customers. It added 172,000 residential broadband users.
This is the first earnings report since Time Warner Cable agreed to be acquired by Charter Communications for $55.1 billion, creating the second-largest cable and broadband provider in the U.S, with 24 million customers. The deal, which needs approval from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and the blessing of the Justice Department, came just weeks after Comcast dropped its $45.2 billion takeover bid for Time Warner Cable in April in the face of opposition from the same agencies. Time Warner expects the deal to close by the end of the year.
Procter & Gamble Co. will likely keep marketing spending flat as a share of sales this fiscal year, but global media spending will still rise as the company keeps plowing savings from agency and production costs into media.
Such cuts helped P&G beat analyst forecasts for core earnings per share excluding a host of restructuring costs even as it fell well short of projections for the top line last quarter. Organic sales growth was “rounded down” to flat vs. consensus analyst projections for 2% growth for the quarter ended June 30.
One area where P&G is meeting targets is marketing savings. For the just-concluded fiscal year, the company cut the number of agencies it works with by 40% globally, trimming agency and production spending by around 15%, or $300 million, with “more savings ahead of us” in year two,” said Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller, “most of which will be reinvested in stronger advertising programs.”
The prospective deal would be the latest effort by big media companies to get a toehold in digital media and its large audience of young people.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
