Online social networking meets personal finance

Published in August 8th, 2007

BOSTON: It used to be taboo to talk about money at social gatherings. But in an age when people boast about their relationships and post embarrassing photos online, it was only a matter of time before social-networking Web sites began cropping up to offer financial advice.

“Banks and credit card companies are coming up with innovations to help you get into more debt,” said Shawn Ward, co-founder of Geezeo.com, a social and personal-finance Web site that was launched this summer. “People look to online communities for motivation, intelligence, to see where they are compared to their peers - and a lot of traditional finance has missed the boat in terms of the community aspect.”

The new networks all focus on different aspects of finance, but the underlying idea is the same: that the tools that people use to connect with their peers and share information on Web sites like Facebook, Del.icio.us or Wikipedia can help people save money or make smarter purchases.

Social-investment sites take the sheen off “expert,” allowing people to compare their investments or trade advice and opinions. Social-lending companies let people appeal to other people, rather than their banks, when they need a loan.

And financial-advice sites that employ social-networking tools act like Weight Watchers for money: people choose goals, such as buying an iPhone or paying off a credit card, then move toward them while others with the same goals trade encouragement and strategies.

“I know a lot about the mistakes people make at a young age, and I think it's a great concept,” said Cary Carbonaro, head of Family Financial, a traditional financial planning firm. “If I'm in debt, I can go talk to other people in debt or ask someone who is my peer and not embarrass myself.”

But there are questions ranging from privacy and security risks to the dubious benefits of leveraging the financial “expertise” of the masses. The wisdom of the crowd may be a fine way to discover the most amusing YouTube video, but Wikipedia has been vilified for inaccuracies, as has much of the online world.

Start-ups need to gain the trust of users, assuring them that their software is hacker-proof and that their detailed financial information won't end up in the hands of marketers. Still, Internet entrepreneurs are betting that financial advice from a disinterested crowd with various levels of expertise may be as good as, or better than, that of professionals who work on commission or work for a bank.

“There's no question if you're a consumer, you are so outgunned by the marketers lined up against you,” said Jason Knight, chief executive of Wesabe.com. “Social finance is a way for consumers to find out if there's real value where they're spending money.”

The new companies range from spendthrift to speculative, and are predicted to carve out a respectable niche. Social finance should have 2 million users by the end of next year and 16 million within 10 years, according to Online Banking Report, an industry newsletter.

Geezeo.com and Wesabe.com start out like online versions of Quicken or Microsoft Money. People link bank accounts and credit cards to online accounts with privacy and security systems. The Web site takes that information and breaks it down by categories, using tags that are assigned or generated by other users.

Others may have tagged Dunkin' Donuts as “coffee,” for instance, so the Web site will decipher the language of the bank and suggest categories. Then the site can break the spending down into “tag clouds,” a cloud of text where the biggest expenses, like “rent” or “groceries,” are noted in larger type. Geezeo, still in beta, features groups like “Shopaholics” or “Boston on a Budget.”

On Wesabe, clicking a transaction tells a user how much other people spent at a store, lets them know where fans of the store tend to spend money and allows them to exchange relevant tips linked to transactions, like how to avoid shipping costs at Amazon.com, or an analysis of how much a cup of coffee really costs.

David Knight, 28, of Greer, South Carolina, spent a lot of time online looking for ways to squeeze money from his budget after his son was born in February. Knight signed up for Wesabe the same month.

“I like the social aspect; it saves me time,” he said, and it “ties in everyone else's ideas.”

At the other end of the spectrum, a slew of sites try to help people invest.

Covestor.com, launched this summer, tracks the investment records of members, who can judge the performance of their portfolio against the crowd. Zecco.com is a Web brokerage with blog and features that allow people to share tips and trades. Wikinvest.com bills itself as a Wikipedia for investments.

Steamy sex films, now moving to cellphones

Published in August 8th, 2007

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Private Media Group

PARIS: When staid Deutsche Telekom struck a deal last winter to tap a vast catalogue of steamy sex films for mobile telephone customers, the news was treated like it was radioactive.

The telecommunications company's name was removed from the news release issued by Erotic Media, a publicly traded adult film distributor based in Baar, Switzerland, and replaced by “a leading German Internet service provider.”

When questioned about the new business category, an executive at a Deutsche Telekom unit played down the significance.

“Adult content is just a small part of our broad video-on-demand offering, which includes more than 1,700 content items at the moment,” said Susanne Bruns, a spokeswoman for the Deutsche Telecom unit, T-Mobile. “Our film selection is focused on high-class entertainment, such as Hollywood blockbusters, German and international classics, or documentaries which are provided by BBC and the History Channel.”

She declined to say how much the company made from adult entertainment.

Although they are not trumpeting such deals, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, 3UK and other mainstream telecommunications providers in Europe are developing red-light districts on their Web portals. In recent weeks, some have made deals with Yahoo and Google to prominently display search tools that ease the hunt for adult entertainment for mobile devices. More have sites in testing phases.

But it is a delicate topic for most of these companies that do not actively promote or market their sites.

“We always say it's like having a shower without being wet,” said Philipp Rotermund, a managing director for Erotic Media. “Everybody wants to distribute adult content because they all know that they can earn with it, but it's complicated.”

On its pink-hued portal, the British telecommunications operator 3UK displays a Top Shelf icon that promises “the hottest Playmates and Cyber Girls.”

Deutsche Telekom's mobile subsidiary, T-Online, leaves just a little to the imagination on its “erotik” section with scantily clad women promoting titles like “Sex Tycoon,” “Kick Maidens” and “Game Babes.” In the Netherlands, a Vodafone Live portal promotes a pornographic puzzle, erotic cartoons and “toys for boys.”

“Telecoms don't want us to issue news releases because they don't want to be associated with this new platform,” said Peter Cohen, chief operating officer of Private Media Group, a publicly traded adult entertainment company based in Barcelona. “I can't tell you more than that because I'm not at liberty.”

“But with these new media platforms we're extending our reach,” he said. “The old paradigm of the business of a man in a seedy raincoat is over.”

Telecommunications companies may feel a little faint-hearted after a Canadian company, Telus, endured a withering public scolding earlier this year from Archbishop Raymond Roussin of Vancouver, British Columbia, whose demand for a company boycott prompted Telus to withdraw adult programming. Roussin argued that such services take the “accessibility of pornographic material further into the public realm.”

Despite such criticism, Europe has emerged as the No. 1 market for mobile adult entertainment, just ahead of the Asia-Pacific region, according to the most recent study of mobile adult content from Juniper Research, which tracks the technology industry.

No U.S. operator has opted to offer such services, although CTIA, a cellular industry trade association, has developed a code of conduct for age verification that could eventually regulate adult entertainment offerings.

“We talk about this and it's one of the situations that we're keeping an eye on,” said John Walls, a CTIA spokesman. “There's a vast difference culturally between the European consumer and the American consumer. There are very different mores, and the American carriers are conducting themselves as they see fit.”

European operators shared some of the same reticence. Windsor Holden, a Juniper Research analyst, said, “First they were concerned that it might in some way damage the brand, and that is still a concern. Then in 2005 they started introducing age verification systems and filters to provide some regulation.”

Those regulations take unique forms in different European countries.

Germany is the most stringent, requiring users who want to purchase adult material to prove they are 18 or older by picking up special forms at local post offices where employees personally match faces to identification cards. In Britain, the system relies on purchases through credit cards that are available only to customers 18 years and older.

Will Gardner, the research and policy manager at Childnet International, a British group that promotes Internet safety, said he was satisfied with a code of conduct that local operators had created to regulate age verification, but some children still gained access to credit cards to purchase adult material.

Publicis plans global digital ad network

Published in August 8th, 2007

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times David Kenny is reshaping digital advertising for Publicis worldwide.

NEW YORK: It is only a matter of time until nearly all advertisements around the world are digital.

Or so says David Kenny, the chairman and chief executive of Digitas, the advertising agency in Boston that was acquired by Publicis Groupe for $1.3 billion six months ago.

Now Kenny is reshaping the digital advertising strategy for the entire Publicis worldwide conglomerate, which includes agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett and the Starcom MediaVest Group, and the global accounts of companies like Procter & Gamble, American Express, Hewlett-Packard and General Motors.

The plan is to build a global digital ad network that uses offshore labor to create thousands of versions of ads. Then, using data about consumers and computer algorithms, the network will decide which advertising message to show at which moment to every person who turns on a computer, cellphone or - eventually - a television.

More simply put, the goal is to transform advertising from mass messages and 30-second commercials that people chat about around the water cooler into personalized messages for each potential customer.

“Our intention with Digitas and Publicis is to build the global platform that everybody uses to match data with advertising messages,” Kenny said. “There is a massive transformation happening in the way consumers live and the data we have about them, but very few companies have stepped up to it yet.”

Publicis announced last week an important step in its digital plan: the acquisition of the Communication Central Group, a digital agency in China founded in 1995, for an undisclosed amount.

The agency, to be called Digitas Greater China, will give Publicis a foothold in the Chinese advertising market, which analysts within Publicis estimate is growing at about 20 percent a year, much faster than global growth in the market, which hovers around 5 percent a year.

“There's a chance to invest right now in China, India, Russia and Brazil, which will pay off big over the next five years,” Kenny said.

“These economies are going to boom, and ads there are going to go directly to mobile and directly to the Internet.”

Beyond the growth potential, Publicis executives see these economies as important sources of low-cost labor for a Digitas subsidiary called Prodigious, a digital production unit that works with all agencies in the Publicis Groupe. Prodigious already uses workers in Costa Rica and Ukraine to produce copious footage for companies like GM.

Greater production capacity is needed, Kenny says, to make enough clips to be able to move away from mass advertising to personalized ads.

He estimates that in the United States, some companies are already running about 4,000 versions of an ad for a single brand, whereas 10 years ago they might have run three to five versions. And he predicts that the number of iterations will grow as technology improves.

The Publicis digital plan can be viewed as a reaction to the changes in how consumers live, but it is also a response to competition among Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Publicis is trying to carve out a niche as a middleman between those online giants and the consumer brand companies that buy advertising. The role is not unlike the way agencies have long connected advertisers to offline media like television networks, newspapers and magazines.

“How do we see Google, Yahoo and Microsoft? It's important to see that our industry is changing and the borders are blurring, so it's clear the three of those companies will have a huge share of revenues which will come from advertising,” said Maurice Lévy, chairman and chief executive of Publicis Groupe.

“But they will have to make a choice between being a medium or being an ad agency, and I believe that their interest will be to be a medium,” he added. “We will partner with them as we do partner with CBS, ABC, Time Warner or any other media group.”

Lévy's view of the dominant Internet portals diverges from that of other advertising executives. Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the WPP Group, another ad agency conglomerate, has publicly called Google a “frenemy” and has recently acquired 24/7 Real Media, an advertising network that positions his company to compete more directly with Google and other online portals.

Lévy, who has a penchant for grand ambitions, says he does not plan to compete with Google - rather, he wants Google to need Publicis.

He is widely credited with the transformation of Publicis from a small French ad company into one of the largest advertising holding companies in the world, competing with the WPP Group, Omnicom and the Interpublic Group. His stated goal is to stir up the digital sea before he retires in 2010.

Israel’s ECI-EDS picks Minicom’s Data Center Management Systems

Published in August 8th, 2007

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/24-7PressRelease/ - JERUSALEM, ISRAEL, December 15, 2006 - Minicom Advanced Systems Ltd., a global leader in KVM switches and server management solutions, announced that its DX and Phantom systems have been installed at ECI-EDS Israel.

One of the world’s leading telecommunications equipment manufacturers, ECI-EDS operates hundreds of servers spread across a number of sites. The company wanted to simplify the process of accessing and controlling their diverse servers via the installation of Minicom’s DX and Phantom systems. Following the installation ECI-EDS now employs up to eight users to control their hundreds of servers via a secure out-of-band connection over CAT5 cable. Additionally ECI-EDS staff can now remotely access the BIOS of their mission-critical computers from their workstations wherever they are in the world.

ECI-EDS’s IT Manager, Yaron Pinto says, “There is no longer any need to physically run to the server room for every single problem. Thanks to the new remote access and control capability our server room is no longer a burden to manage but is more organized and easy to use.”

According to Hanan Geva, Regional Sales Manager for Minicom Israel, “Minicom’s DX system provides powerful data center management based on KVM technology giving out-of-band BIOS level access to servers. The system features serial control, access over IP, power management and user administration capability. ECI-EDS choice of Minicom for such a large and important installation is clear proof of the confidence our partners show in the technological capability of our solutions.”

For more information about Minicom, visit http://www.minicom.com or contact:

Sam Green
Marketing Communications Manager
sam.green@minicom.com
Tel: +972-2-5359-635
Fax: +972-2-5359-693
http://www.minicom.com

ENERGY STAR leads the trend of energy efficient products

Published in August 8th, 2007

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/24-7PressRelease/ - TAIPEI CITY, TAIWAN, November 23, 2006 - WITRONIX, a digital signage systems provider, always value environmental design products and sets its goals as being innovative and in search of excellence. “What we want to do is an environmental friendly product that compile with merging environmental awareness. For example, no fan makes no annoying noise, or the design of low voltage of 8 Watt power consumption, but ensures the endurance still.” said by Charley Tsai, the president & CEO of WITRONIX Co., Ltd. Moreover, in order to enhance the service for its clients in North America, WITRONIX also completed the sales office setting in US.

WITRONIX possesses many success application stories worldwide such to well known companies as：NTUC FairPrice International in Singapore, TESCO chains supermarkets in Thailand, Eslite Book Store in Taiwan and CHOSEN MEDIA, the first channel-based interactive medium in Taiwan. More information about Witronix can be found on the website at http://www.i-casting.com.

Cost-conscious consumers transform European mobile phone market

Published in August 8th, 2007

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BERLIN: When Sebastian Knight moved from St. Gallen, Switzerland, to the German capital last year to begin work as a financial editor, he sought an inexpensive mobile phone carrier.

Knight, 25, checked out the biggest operators - T-Mobile, Vodafone, E-Plus and 02 - but he said their rates were confusing and most wanted him to sign a two-year contract.

He ended up buying a triband Motorola L6 phone from Aldi, the largest German discount supermarket chain, for €99, or $137, and a €20 AldiTalk pay-as-you-go SIM phone card to make calls.

AldiTalk uses E-Plus's network, and Knight pays 14 cents a minute to call any domestic mobile or fixed network at any time of day - among the lowest prices available in Germany.

“I went with Aldi because they were cheapest,” Knight said. “But I also chose them because I knew Aldi, the supermarket, which has a reputation for selling good stuff.”

Across Europe, experts say, growing ranks of cost-conscious consumers like Knight are transforming the Continent's mobile phone market by bypassing established networks and forcing big operators to reinvent themselves to stay competitive.

The pressure to “go low” is now so great that T-Mobile, the wireless unit of Deutsche Telekom, last month created its own discount brand, Congstar. Unlike T-Mobile, Congstar lets consumers create their own monthly flat-rate packages by selecting the individual wireless networks they call most.

“T-Mobile had to create a new brand because, in the minds of many consumers, T-Mobile had become a known quantity,” said Bettina Seute, an analyst at Teltarif, a research firm in Göttingen that studies the German mobile market.

The reputations of many established operators have suffered from their practice of offering rigid rate plans with hidden costs and paragraphs of fine-print exceptions, said Hartmut Hermann, managing director of Klarmobil, a discount operator with about 500,000 customers based in Büdelsdorf, Germany.

“For years, the big network operators have exploited consumers with extremely high prices with the sole intent of generating huge profits,” he said.

Whether marketing facelifts like T-Mobile's Congstar can bring in new customers, sales and profit - or merely slow the erosion of consumers to rivals - remains to be seen. “It's too early to tell what these makeovers will bring,” said Paolo Pescatore, an analyst in London at International Data.

Most are following the progress of the Dutch operator KPN, the European leader in discount branding. KPN runs BASE in Belgium and E-Plus in Germany; but is overshadowed in Germany by T-Mobile and Vodafone, which had a combined 75 percent market share. KPN in 2005 began introducing a series of discount mobile brands aimed at specific consumer groups.

Simyo was the first pay-as-you-go discounter in Germany aimed at young, text-messaging users, followed by Ay Yildiz, catering to Turkish consumers. BASE, which focuses on high-volume callers, sold the first flat-rate mobile packages in Europe.

As it started its multiple brands, KPN cut operating costs by curtailing phone subsidies and outsourcing some functions. Its wireless grid maintenance went to Alcatel-Lucent and Web sales of new cellphones to Internet retailers.

KPN also signed marketing deals with Aldi and Conrad, an electronics chain; Albert Heijn, a Dutch supermarket chain; the music TV channel Viva, and the Belgian children's broadcaster Jim TV. From March 2005 through March 2007, KPN added 5.1 million customers, including 3.5 million in Germany, lured by its new partners.

In Germany, E-Plus's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization rose from 21 percent of sales in 2005 to 36 percent by March on an annualized basis. It is now the fastest-growing network in Germany, with a 15 percent market share.

“You can't have a one-size-fits-all strategy in a market that is saturated,” said Stan Miller, chief executive of KPN's international mobile operations. “What we have managed to do through our restructuring and our multisegmented strategy is to create profitable growth.”

Whether other European operators will go the same route is unclear, analysts said. Vodafone, the world's largest carrier, declined to comment on whether it would create a discount brand. Orange, the wireless unit of France Télécom, has no plans, said a spokesman, Bertrand Deronchaine.

Torsten Gerpott, a professor of telecommunications management at the University of Duisburg-Essen, said Vodafone and Orange were resisting creating discount brands because they did not want to put pressure on their own prices. “It really depends on the competitive intensity of the markets,” Gerpott said.

John Strand, an analyst in Copenhagen who specializes in wireless discounters, said the big operators would find it hard to duplicate the success of E-Plus unless they also cut operating costs.

Competition increases for pay TV in sub-Saharan Africa

Published in August 8th, 2007

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AP Photo/Graham Hughes Arsenal's Kolo Toure in action.

LONDON: Julian McIntyre, a telecommunications executive, rode through the streets of Kampala, Uganda, throwing soccer balls to bystanders while sharing the back of a flatbed truck with Ugandan soccer players.

McIntyre's marketing stunt in the capital of the East African country on Friday was intended to promote the new sponsorship of Ugandan soccer by GTV, a start-up satellite television broadcaster that wants to expand the tiny and largely untapped market for pay television in sub-Saharan Africa.

GTV, a subsidiary of Gateway Communications, a telecommunication provider in Africa, branched out this summer into pay TV by starting satellite broadcasts in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. The company soon plans to move into several other countries.

In one display of its ambitions, GTV outbid the main existing satellite broadcaster in the region, MultiChoice of South Africa, for the rights to broadcast most of the English Premier League's soccer matches.

Securing the rights to 80 percent of Premier League matches was a significant step, McIntyre said, because the league has a large following in Africa, where African-born players like Didier Drogba and Michael Essien of Chelsea and Kolo Touré of Arsenal are household names.

“Africa represents the last great green-field media market in the world,” McIntyre, president of Gateway Communications, said by telephone from Kampala. “In aggregate, it is an enormous market, which, with the right product, can be a huge opportunity.”

The goal of GTV is to reach 250,000 subscribers by the end of next year, and one million within three or four years, he said. It plans to operate in up to 25 countries by the end of 2008, including some in French-speaking parts of West Africa, where the mostly English-language content will be supplemented with French-language channels.

Outside South Africa, where the satellite broadcaster MultiChoice has 1.3 million customers, pay TV has primarily been affordable only to a small elite and to international hotels. MultiChoice, a subsidiary of Naspers, a South African media conglomerate, has about 450,000 subscribers in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, a region with a population of more than 700 million.

Other African pay TV operators have only small national or regional presences. CanalSat Horizons, part of Canal Plus of France, is available in Francophone regions of West Africa, for instance.

In a region where even basic over-the-air television programming - not to mention color sets or disposable incomes - is in short supply, many broadcasters assumed until recently that the market for pay TV would remain limited, too. But the rapid spread of mobile phones across Africa has persuaded McIntyre that there might be an opportunity in satellite television.

GTV's broadcast plans will not be limited to games from Europe. McIntyre said GTV would invest up to $5 million in Ugandan soccer over the next five years, including the first regular broadcasts of matches in the country's top national league.

“People in Uganda will always want to know what is going on with the Drogbas and Essiens of the world, but there is also a massive pent-up interest in local football,” he said.

Following the sport is one thing, but actually watching matches is another. Pay TV has been too expensive for most audiences, and many free, over-the-air broadcasters have been unable to afford sports rights.

But that may be changing. Some conventional broadcasters are starting to add soccer programming as international competitions increase and as organizations like the Premier League break up rights packages that used to be sold as a block.

GTV is also trying to broaden its appeal by offering a premium package including English Premier League and Italian Serie A broadcasts at a lower price than MultiChoice, which used to have the rights to all the matches.

Prices vary by country, but in Kenya, for example, GTV's top package is priced at about $40 a month, compared with about $70 for MultiChoice's premium plan, which includes broadcasts of the 20 percent of Premier League matches not shown by GTV.

Privately held GTV has spent $50 million on the African TV project, McIntyre said. It has raised more than $100 million in the bond market and has drawn investment from Kinnevik, a Swedish holding company with media interests.

GTV offers a basic package, without the soccer matches, priced at around $25. In anticipation of the competitive entry of GTV into the market, MultiChoice, which operates under the name DStv, has also introduced lower-cost packages, including one that is priced below GTV's basic offering.

And while most English soccer matches have gone to GTV, MultiChoice has the rights to other top soccer competitions, said Caroline Creasy, a spokeswoman for MultiChoice.

Elle magazine is having some work done

Published in August 8th, 2007

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Lars Klove for The New York Times Elle magazine's new look will be introduced in the September issue.

NEW YORK: To the fashion world, Elle magazine's visual identity has become predictable to the point of redundancy, losing the spunk of its early years.

The imagery of sexy, confident women posing in desert oases against impossibly blue skies seemed to give way to the personal swimsuit fetishes of its longtime creative director, Gilles Bensimon.

Bensimon, according to those who worked with him, demanded unusual control over every image appearing in the magazine - from the clothes to the hair and the models. For years, he personally photographed most of the fashion features.

“I don't think that was only perception, as anyone who looked at the magazine could see,” said Roberta Myers, the current editor of Elle. “Fashion is about image. It's a story that you have to tell visually, and you cannot do that in only one voice.”

It was not until the end of last year that Bensimon, 63, began to concede space to outside photographers and stylists, leading to a redesign of the magazine by Joe Zee, its new creative director, who was imported from Condé Nast in January.

The new look that Zee has been developing will be fully introduced in the September issue, which goes to subscribers next week. Elle is already generating controversy - or buzz, depending on point of view - for putting the troubled actress Lindsay Lohan on the cover.

“It is a big change,” said Bensimon, who during an interview Monday night brushed aside persistent reports of his resistance to the changes. He will continue to photograph Elle's covers and some features for its 39 international editions, but his title is now international creative director and his name has moved from the top of the masthead to the bottom.

“For me, it is a positive,” Bensimon said, before turning philosophical. “What can you do if you are always thinking that it was better before? Let's think about tomorrow.”

Since Zee, the former fashion director of W and editor of the short-lived Vitals shopping magazine, took over, there have been indications that Elle intends to become a more provocative read.

Myers and Zee chose Lohan for the September cover in the spring. Just days after the actress was interviewed and photographed, paparazzi shot her passed out in a car and she entered rehab for the second time in six months. The magazine decided to leave her on the cover. She appears in a Venus pose, pulling up the hem of a violet Donna Karan dress. A Lohan quotation says, “I'm glad I went to rehab - I needed to get away from everyone and I didn't know how.”

The image - with the actress' words - was shipped to the printer before Lohan's latest arrest last week on charges that included driving under the influence and cocaine possession. It is a turn of events that may make the cover seem ironic.

But this is not the only controversy with which Myers must contend. In Elle's transition to a post-Bensimon era, it has been plagued by reports of budget cuts, canceled trips for editors to the couture shows in Paris and reduced access to car services.

Twenty of its 59 editorial staff members and freelancers on the masthead have departed this year, according to a count by Jennifer Gerson, a former Myers assistant, who is now blogging on the Web site www.Jezebel.com. The departed include two of the magazine's most recognizable faces - Isabel Dupre, its style director, and Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, the fashion editor-at-large.

A staff member who remained at Elle said the senior employees who departed were loyal to Bensimon. “They banded themselves together as a way to survive, until the ship went down,” said the person, who requested anonymity because employees were not permitted to speak about personnel matters.

Myers, for her part, did not deny the departures but declined to comment on particular employees. She said the magazine's parent company, Hachette Filipacchi Media, continued to invest in Elle and that any financial cutbacks resulted from routine budget reviews.

Still, Elle has an image problem in the fashion industry. Although its newsstand sales have shown healthy gains for the past three years, it has settled into third place among its U.S. competitors, trailing Vogue and In Style in total ad pages for the year.

The September issue includes a new column by Nina Garcia, the fashion director whose manicured claws appear on “Project Runway,” and some intriguing articles, notably a critical report by Megan Deem about Myfreeimplants.com, a Web site that connects women with men who would like to sponsor their breast implants. Yet other articles seem to exist as quid pro quo to advertisers.

Revealed: The secret writer of the ‘Fake Steve’ Jobs blog

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SAN FRANCISCO: For the last 14 months, high-tech insiders have been eating up the work of an anonymous blogger who assumed the persona of Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive and one of the world's most famous businessmen.

The mysterious writer has used his blog, the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, to lampoon Jobs and his reputation as a difficult and egotistical leader, as well as to skewer other high-tech companies, tech journalists, venture capitalists, open-source software fanatics and Silicon Valley's overall aura of excess.

The acerbic postings of “Fake Steve,” as he is known, have attracted a plugged-in readership - both the real Jobs and Bill Gates have acknowledged reading the blog (fakesteve.blogspot.com). At the same time, Fake Steve has evaded the best efforts of Silicon Valley's gossips to discover his real identity.

Meanwhile, on the east side of the country, Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes magazine who lives near Boston, has been quietly enjoying the attention.

“I'm stunned that it's taken this long,” said Lyons, 46, when a reporter interrupted his vacation in Maine on Sunday to ask him about Fake Steve. “I have not been that good at keeping it a secret. I've been sort of waiting for this call for months.”

Lyons writes and edits technology articles for Forbes and is the author of two works of fiction, most recently a 1998 novel, “Dog Days.”

In October, Da Capo Press will publish his satirical novel written in the voice of the Fake Steve character, “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody.”

Unlike the off-the-cuff ramblings on his blog, “Options” is a well-plotted satire that imagines Apple's chief executive grappling with his real-life stock option backdating troubles and getting help, and bad advice, from friends like Larry Ellison, Bono and Al Gore.

The book, in part, led to Lyons' unmasking. Last year, his agent showed the manuscript to several book publishers and told them the anonymous author was a published novelist and writer for a major business magazine.

The New York Times found Lyons by looking for writers who fit those two criteria, and then by comparing the writing of “Fake Steve” to a blog Lyons writes in his own name, called Floating Point (floatingpoint.wordpress.com).

Lyons said he invented the Fake Steve character last year, when a small group of chief-executives-turned-bloggers attracted some media attention. He noticed that they rarely spoke candidly.

“I thought, wouldn't it be funny if a CEO kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it,” he said.

Lyons said he recalled trying out the voices of several chief executives before settling on the colorful Apple co-founder. He twice tried to relinquish the blog, but started again after being deluged by fans e-mailing to ask why Fake Steve had disappeared.

Though many speculators have guessed Fake Steve was an Apple insider, Lyons says he has never interviewed Jobs or written a story about the company. “I have zero sources inside Apple,” he said. “I had to go out and get books and biographies to learn about a lot of the back story.”

Lyons said that writing as Fake Steve became addictive. He developed a unique lexicon and catalog of insults for the character. Bill Gates is Beastmaster, and Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, is Squirrel Boy.

Last month, when a reader asked Fake Steve about Apple's succession plan, he replied: “My plan at this time is to live forever and to remain in charge here, though perhaps with fewer restrictions on my power. The truth is, I am not human - I am a man-god, son of Zeus, born to mortal woman but fathered by the ruler of the gods, lord of thunder.”

Lyons receives around 50 e-mail messages a day through the blog, many with ideas for posts, and says the site had 700,000 visitors last month. Recently someone claiming to be Jobs' daughter, Lisa, wrote to tell him, “You don't sound at all like my father, but your blog is hilarious.”

The guessing game around his identity was intense, with speculation centering on a variety of plugged-in journalists, former Apple employees and even the real Jobs.

Over the last year, Forbes' publisher, Richard Karlgaard, even got into the act, speculating about Fake Steve's identity on Forbes.com several times. At one point he wrote: “The guessing game has begun.

“Who is writing it? Send me your guesses. I'll gladly buy the most expensive iPod for the first to identify Fake Steve Jobs.”

Lyons said he felt bad and later revealed himself to his bosses and colleagues.

Conflict over digital content moves to cellphones

Published in August 8th, 2007

Posted by admin in Hitech

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MILAN: For many consumers, the restrictions that companies put on what they can do with their digital content, whether it be music, video clips or pictures, are akin to stipulating that a book you purchase can only be read in your house and cannot be loaned to a friend.

For the producers who make that content or companies like Microsoft who restrict access to it with technology called digital rights management, or DRM, guaranteeing that the content cannot be illegally copied is fundamental for encouraging the creation of songs and videos that people want to buy. These competing views have been tussling for years over digital content on computers - only now the battlefield has moved to the cellphone.

Microsoft and Nokia, which both make operating systems for mobile phones and compete for control of that market, are coming together in a rare accord in an effort to take advantage of the expected explosion of the sale of mobile digital content in the coming years. Under the agreement to be announced Monday, Microsoft's PlayReady DRM technology - which helps content owners like music companies and service providers deliver digital content while restricting access - will be loaded directly on some Nokia phones beginning early next year.

The market for mobile content - music, games, graphics, video and adult material - will exceed $44 billion in 2011, up from $20 billion this year, the market researcher iSuppli estimates. But many consumers have balked from the beginning at the restrictions put on them with DRM. And some analysts argue that the technology has limited the growth of digital content sales.

In many cases, for example, a song bought over the Internet on a computer cannot be transferred to a cellphone or a song bought with a cellphone cannot be used as a ring tone on that same phone.

“DRM has been a massive stumbling block, and in no other retail environment are these sort of restrictions imposed on the consumer,” said Nick Lane, a principal analyst with Informa Telecoms & Media in London.

“That two big guys are looking to address this should spur the rest of the market, but it remains to be seen if this is too late to kick-start the industry,” Lane said. “Microsoft and Nokia coming together seems to be a step in the right direction to sorting out the mess created with DRM, but has it come too late? Once consumers have a negative experience it takes them a few years to come back and say let's try this again.”

PlayReady, presented in February and now available to all cellphone makers who want to pay a licensing fee to Microsoft, will be pre-installed on Nokia S60 and Series 40 phones. This is the first accord between Microsoft and a cellphone maker for PlayReady, but other agreements will follow, said Chadd Knowlton, the general manager of Microsoft's Consumer Media Technology division. Cellphones running on the Windows Mobile operating system, about 14 percent of the market, are also likely soon to include PlayReady, he said.

“The top-level goal here is to build a virtuous cycle so the end users have compelling content that flows and businesses can be built around producing and distributing that content,” Knowlton said. “By working with Nokia we have a good chance of moving the needle forward on this.”

PlayReady allows users to buy or rent content and will let them share it between different devices. A song could be bought on a whim with a cellphone after hearing it at a store and then transferred to a computer or other mobile phone that has been set up as part of the same domain, or group, and also has PlayReady installed.

Nokia does not disclose how many of each type of phone it sells, but Sebastian Nystrom, the company's director of technology strategy, said the S60 and Series 40 phones that will have PlayReady installed on them account for “a very significant share” of what Nokia churns out. Nystrom shrugged off the suggestion that Nokia could antagonize customers by introducing phones with Microsoft DRM technology.

“There will be paid-for and free content, both protected and unprotected,” Nystrom said “We believe in giving consumers choice.”