February 6, 2012
Anonymous
Daily Iowegian
The Daily Iowegian
Mon Feb 06, 2012, 07:30 AM CST
CENTERVILLE —
Article source: http://dailyiowegian.com/local/x1346836759/COOKIES-FOR-SALE
TRI-STATE (WFIE) -
Truckloads of Girl Scout cookies will soon be sold and eaten all throughout the Tri-State. Troops are standing by to start making deliveries to 15 different counties in the area.
They’ll deliver through March 12.
Cookies cost $3.50 a box and fund programs that help girls develop leadership skills.
You can still order. Cookies are available at several different booth locations around the Tri-State.
Article source: http://www.14news.com/story/16683533/girl-scout-cookies-ready-for-delivery-in-evansville
Braving Saturday’s cold outside of Crosby’s to sell cookies is nothing compared to the bravery of the U.S. men and women serving overseas in the Armed Forces.
So say the members of Marblehead Girl Scout Troop 66622, which has a special service project under way.
In partnership with C.A.P.T.S. (Calling All Patriots Troop Support), the Girl Scouts will soon be shipping care packages to soldiers in Afghanistan.
Thanks to the generosity of Marblehead shoppers, the troop already has over 30 boxes of cookies for these care packages, but they would like to send more cookies, along with personal-care items.
There is still time for you to buy “Cookies for a Cause,” with the boxes you buy sent to troops overseas.
Cookies will be on sale at the National Grand Bank, 91 Pleasant St., from 10 a.m. to noon, Saturday, Feb. 11. The Scouts invite you to purchase cookies for the troops and perhaps treat yourself to a delicious box of Thin Mints or Peanut Butter Patties, too. Additional goods for the care packages, such as books, toiletries and candy, are being collected in drop boxes at Shubie’s and the Village School through Feb. 17.
“Please help us to support the troops!” say the Girl Scouts.
Article source: http://www.wickedlocal.com/marblehead/news/x720908269/Cookies-for-a-cause-Girl-Scouts-hope-to-send-more-boxes-of-treats-to-troops
Join us at 11 a.m. today for a live Restaurant of the Year web chat with The Root’s chef James Rigato, owner Ed Mamou and restaurant critic Sylvia Rector. Click here to join the chat, or to leave a question for Rigato and Mamou before it starts.
Article source: http://www.freep.com/article/20120206/COL20/302060004
How to be a successful entrepreneur
Want to be an entrepreneur?
Do you already have a business idea that you think will change the world but don’t know how and where to start with?
To be a successful entrepreneur requires more than just a brilliant idea.
Also read: Entrepreneurship: 10 common mistakes that KILL a start-up
In today’s chat, our expert Amit Grover, founder, Nurture Talent Academy, an organisation that trains young entrepreneurs in India will address all your queries related to entrepreneurship. The chat will discuss the following:
To get your queries answered and seek help on the above, join us for a chat with our expert Amit Grover on Monday, February 6, between 3 pm and 4 pm.
About Amit Grover
An IIM-Indore alumnus, Amit Grover is the founder of Nurture Talent Academy, a one of a kind institute that trains young entrepreneurs in India. Grover has successfully conducted 122 workshops, across 37 cities attended by 4300 participants, which includes students and young professionals. His objective is to enable 1000 ventures to start in next 3-5 years, which will generate 20000 jobs.
Grover has previously worked with Infosys, Asian Paints and Onida and is also a member of Mumbai Angels, Indias premier group of angel investors, where he has led over 20 early stage deals in past 4 years.
(Due to circumstances beyond our control,
date and time of chat may change)
Article source: http://getahead.rediff.com/getahead/2012/feb/06/career-chat-how-to-be-a-successful-entrepreneur-by-amit-grover.html
Womack plans to talk about violent crime and how the community can help, police said. The forum is open to the public.
Article source: http://www.theledger.com/article/20120205/news/120209598&tc=yahoo
In an interview with broadcast journalist Charlie Rose last year, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg noted that women have “stalled out at the top” in the corporate environment only reaching fifteen to sixteen percent of the board seats, Sandberg notes.
On Facebook’s Board of Directors, women have hit a big fat goose egg: Zero percent. Seven of Facebook’s seven board members are male, and it’s a “disconnect,” notes Bloomberg’s Carol Hymowitz, that places Facebook in a rare place among its Silicon Valley peers. And even among corporate boards throughout America as a whole: According to statistics from the New York-based nonprofit Catalyst, only 11.3 percent of all the Fortune 500 companies have exclusively male boards of directors.
Is this lack of diversity hurting Facebook strategically? It’s possible. According to Catalyst, Fortune 500 companies with three or more female directors on their boards actually outperform companies with fewer female directors, achieving a 43 percent greater return on equity than their male-driven counterparts.
“It doesn’t make sense for a company that claims to be so forward looking to not have any women directors,” said Susan Stautberg, co-founder of New York-based Women Corporate Directors, in an interview with Hymowitz. “If they just have an old boy’s network in the boardroom, they won’t have access to diverse ideas and strategies.”
To outside observers, it’s strange that Facebook’s COO often noted as a powerful advocate for female empowerment in the workplace hasn’t seemed to effect much change on the board dynamics of her own company.
“It’s surprising and disappointing that Facebook has zero female directors because Sandberg is so powerful at the company and so outspoken in favor of women advancing,” said Malli Gero, executive director of 2020 Women on Boards, in an interview with Hymowitz.
While Facebook declined to comment for Hymowitz’s article, the company’s all-male board does present a curious juxtaposition against the beliefs of both Sandberg and founder Mark Zuckerberg himself. According to Sandberg, who appeared alongside Zuckerberg in last year’s interview with Charlie Rose, they both “care passionately” about women in the economy.
“ I really think we need more women to lean into their careers and to be really dedicated to staying in the work force. I think the achievement gap is caused by a lot of things. It’s caused by institutional barriers and all kinds of stuff. But there’s also a really big ambition gap,” Sandberg said.
“If you survey men and women in college today in this country, the men are more ambitious than the women. And until women are as ambitious as men, they’re not going to achieve as much as men,” she added.
But when, pundits wonder, will they achieve a spot on Facebook’s board?
For more from David, subscribe to him on Facebook: David Murphy.
For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.
Article source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399855,00.asp
* Former Microsoft exec Everson is linchpin of effort
* Commissions first study of ad effectiveness of network
* New ad products to be unveiled by end of February
* Facebook’s rates still trail most other online ads
By Peter Lauria
Feb 5 (Reuters) – About a year ago, when it became
clear that taking Facebook Inc public was a matter of when not
if, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg went out and poached
Caroline Everson, then global advertising head at Microsoft Corp
.
Landing an executive with Everson’s pedigree was a coup -
prior to Microsoft, she was a top advertising executive at
Viacom Inc’s MTV Networks and at Walt Disney Co
. The hire also sent a clear message to Madison Avenue
from the world’s largest online social network: We want to work
with you.
Until Everson’s arrival as vice president of global
marketing, Facebook’s relationship with the advertising
community was at best politely dismissive, at worst outright
antagonistic.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said he views Facebook
more as a way to connect people than a business, and he has been
adamant about limiting the impact of ads on user experiences.
Indeed, his reluctance to flood the social network with ads is
widely viewed as one reason why Facebook endured while an
earlier rival, MySpace, expired.
“Mark has an evangelical approach to advertising,” said
Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Plc, the world’s
largest advertising agency. “He sees Facebook as a vehicle to
open up communication, not to monetize.”
But with 85 percent of its revenue derived from advertising
last year — when revenue was $3.71 billion, Facebook realized
it needed to strike a more cooperative tone with Madison Avenue
ahead of its initial public offering and the accompanying
intense scrutiny on profit growth.
Advertising sources identified Everson, along with David
Fischer, vice president of business and marketing partnerships,
and Blake Chandlee, vice president of global agency relations,
as the triumvirate leading Facebook’s charm offensive.
“It’s been remarkably different over the last 12 months,”
Michael Hayes, president of digital at advertising firm
Initiative, said of Facebook’s attitude toward the advertising
community.
“They didn’t really have a relationship with us before, but
now they are trying to establish a relationship. I’ve definitely
seen an uptick in their interest in working with us,” he said.
Last September, Facebook set up a committee consisting of
executives from brands that advertise on the site, as well as
representatives from many top ad agencies, to regularly provide
feedback on its advertising products and services.
The company also commissioned Hayes’ firm, Initiative, to
compare the success of Facebook ads against other media, such as
television, the first time it asked for such a study.
Sorrell said Facebook plans to introduce new advertising
products by the end of February. A source familiar with the
announcement said it would center on new products around mobile
advertising, but did not provide further details.
A Facebook representative declined to comment on any new
product announcements or to make Everson available for an
interview, citing the quiet period ahead of the IPO.
ADVERTISING, FRIEND OR ENEMY?
Facebook, which boasts 845 million users worldwide, is more
dependent on ad sales than CBS Corp, the most
ad-dependent traditional media company, which derives two-thirds
of its revenue from advertising.
Facebook ranks as the top provider of graphical online
display ads in the United States, accounting for roughly 28
percent of the total “impressions” of such ads last year,
according to industry research firm comScore.
But analysts say the price that Facebook charges for the
bulk of its ads is lower than those of other forms of online
ads, such as the branding campaigns popular on sites such as
Yahoo or the search ads offered by Google.
Facebook is taking steps to make its ads more valuable to
marketers by integrating social networking features with
“sponsored stories” or ads that highlight a user’s friends who
have “liked” a certain product.
The big question is whether Facebook can further evolve its
advertising offerings, which are tempered by privacy laws and
the changing parameters around how social networks can mine user
data for targeted marketing.
“Their ad product opportunities aren’t too robust right now,
and the effectiveness is spotty at best,” Hayes said.
Facebook has come under criticism for the way it has used
member data in the past, including in 2008 when its Beacon
advertising product was assailed for disclosing such things as
what purchases people were making on Amazon.com to
their friends without permission.
Companies have also removed ads from being displayed against
offending user or group profiles, not unlike how brands pull
commercials on television shows in protest.
Facebook listed the evolving nature of privacy and data
protection laws as two risk factors that could impinge future
growth in a regulatory filing.
Still, the key for Facebook, according to David Eastman,
president of digital at JWT, which is part of the WPP group, is
keeping Wall Street at bay while it figures out how to monetize
its role as an identity broker.
“I’m worried about how the IPO will affect creative,” said
Eastman. “I’m worried that the demand for growth and making
numbers will get in the way of really evolving the platform to
figure out how to monetize influence.”
EVERSON AT BAT
If Everson and her team can establish that equilibrium, the
opportunities for Facebook are enormous.
Internet advertising is expected to grow at an annual
average rate of 15.9 percent to $113 billion in 2014, from an
estimated $84.2 billion this year, according to Zenith
Optimedia. That makes the Internet the second-largest ad market
behind TV, which by 2014 will reach $215.7 billion.
Facebook currently commands only a sliver of agency ad
dollars. In 2011, Sorrell said WPP spent $1.6 billion with
Google and just $200 million with Facebook. This year Sorrell,
who labeled Google a “frenemy” in 2006, expects to spend $2.3
billion with the search giant and $400 million with Facebook.
Sorrell said the disparity is because of the greater
difficulty of monetizing social media. Not to mention that the
increased competition with Google in recent years has made it a
“friendlier frenemy,” Sorrell added with a laugh.
“Facebook is a superb branding medium, but right now it is
more about PR than advertising,” he said.
In June, Google launched its own social network, Google+, to
compete with Facebook. The service, which does not currently
display any advertising, has won praise for innovative features
such as group-video-chat technology and a design that allows
users to easily sort friends into different groups.
Sorrell said the two services are preparing for a “battle
royal” to win the future of social advertising.
“There’s a real battle shaping up and the competition is
intense,” he said, adding that from the advertising community’s
perspective more options are better than less.
Everson, who left Microsoft after nine months, is on the
front lines of that battle for Facebook.
A New Jersey native, Everson graduated in 1999 with an MBA
from Harvard. She was pegged as a “Woman to Watch” by trade
publication Advertising Age last May, where her profile noted
that she got married in Disney World and had Wyclef Jean rap a
song about her twin daughters.
“Since she’s joined, Facebook has definitely turned up the
heat on getting cozy with agencies,” said JWT’s Eastman. “There
are lots more opportunities to get closer and more involved with
them.”
Article source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/06/facebook-madisonave-idUSL2E8D41BM20120206
Last week, Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public. It is estimated to be worth at least $75 billion. But unlike other big-ticket corporations, it doesn’t have an inventory of widgets or gadgets, cars or phones. Facebook’s inventory consists of personal data – yours and mine.
Facebook makes money by selling ad space to companies that want to reach us. Advertisers choose key words or details – like relationship status, location, activities, favorite books and employment – and then Facebook runs the ads for the targeted subset of its 845 million users. If you indicate that you like cupcakes, live in a certain neighborhood and have invited friends over, expect an ad from a nearby bakery to appear on your page. The magnitude of online information Facebook has available about each of us for targeted marketing is stunning. In Europe, laws give people the right to know what data companies have about them, but that is not the case in the United States.
Facebook made $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year, 85 percent of its total revenue. Yet Facebook’s inventory of data and its revenue from advertising are small potatoes compared to some others. Google took in more than 10 times as much, with an estimated $36.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2011, by analyzing what people sent over Gmail and what they searched on the Web, and then using that data to sell ads.
Hundreds of other companies have also staked claims on people’s online data by depositing software called cookies or other tracking mechanisms on people’s computers and in their browsers. If you’ve mentioned anxiety in an email, done a Google search for “stress” or started using an online medical diary that lets you monitor your mood, expect ads for medications and services to treat your anxiety.
Ads that pop up on your screen might seem useful or, at worst, a nuisance. But they are much more than that. The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelganger – and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.
Material mined online has been used against people battling for child custody or defending themselves in criminal cases. LexisNexis has a product called Accurint for Law Enforcement, which gives government agents information about what people do on social networks. The Internal Revenue Service searches Facebook and MySpace for evidence of tax evaders’ income and whereabouts, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has been known to scrutinize photos and posts to confirm family relationships or weed out sham marriages.
Employers sometimes decide whether to hire people based on their online profiles, with one study indicating that 70 per cent of recruiters and human resource professionals in the United States have rejected candidates based on data found online. A company called Spokeo gathers online data for employers, the public and anyone else who wants it. The company even posts ads urging “HR Recruiters – Click Here Now!” and asking women to submit their boyfriends’ email addresses for an analysis of their online photos and activities to learn “Is He Cheating on You?”
Stereotyping is alive and well in data aggregation. Your application for credit could be declined not on the basis of your own finances or credit history, but on the basis of aggregate data – what other people whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours have done. If guitar players or divorcing couples are more likely to renege on their credit-card bills, then the fact that you’ve looked at guitar ads or sent an email to a divorce lawyer might cause a data aggregator to classify you as less credit-worthy.
When an Atlanta man returned from his honeymoon, he found that his credit limit had been lowered to $3,800 from $10,800. The switch was not based on anything he had done but on aggregate data. A letter from the company told him, “Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped have a poor repayment history with American Express.”
Even though laws allow people to challenge false information in credit reports, there are no laws that require data aggregators to reveal what they know about you. If I’ve Googled “diabetes” for a friend or “date rape drugs” for a mystery I’m writing, data aggregators assume those searches reflect my own health and proclivities. Because no laws regulate what types of data these aggregators can collect, they make their own rules.
In 2007 and 2008, the online advertising company NebuAd contracted with six internet service providers to install hardware on their networks that monitored users’ internet activities and transmitted that data to NebuAd’s servers for analysis and use in marketing.
For an average of six months, NebuAd copied every email, Web search or purchase that some 400,000 people sent over the Internet. Other companies, like Healthline Networks Inc, have in-house limits on which private information they will collect. Healthline does not use information about people’s searches related to HIV, impotence or eating disorders to target ads to people, but it will use information about bipolar disorder, overactive bladder and anxiety, which can be as stigmatizing as the topics on its privacy-protected list.
In the 1970s, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University named John McKnight popularized the term “redlining” to describe the failure of banks, insurers and other institutions to offer their services to inner city neighborhoods. The term came from the practice of bank officials who drew a red line on a map to indicate where they wouldn’t invest. But use of the term expanded to cover a wide array of racially discriminatory practices, such as not offering home loans to African-Americans, even those who were wealthy or middle class.
Now the map used in redlining is not a geographic map, but the map of your travels across the Web. The term “weblining” describes the practice of denying people opportunities based on their digital selves. You might be refused health insurance based on a Google search you did about a medical condition. You might be shown a credit card with a lower credit limit, not because of your credit history, but because of your race, sex or ZIP code or the types of websites you visit.
Data aggregation has social implications as well. When young people in poor neighborhoods are bombarded with advertisements for trade schools, will they be more likely than others their age to forgo college? And when women are shown articles about celebrities rather than stock market trends, will they be less likely to develop financial savvy? Advertisers are drawing new redlines, limiting people to the roles society expects them to play.
Data aggregators’ practices conflict with what people say they want. A 2008 Consumer Reports poll of 2,000 people found that 93 per cent thought Internet companies should always ask for permission before using personal information, and 72 per cent wanted the right to opt out of online tracking.
A study by Princeton Survey Research Associates in 2009 using a random sample of 1,000 people found that 69 per cent thought that the United States should adopt a law giving people the right to learn everything a website knows about them. We need a do-not-track law, similar to the do-not-call one. Now it’s not just about whether my dinner will be interrupted by a telemarketer. It’s about whether my dreams will be dashed by the collection of bits and bytes over which I have no control and for which companies are currently unaccountable.
Article source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/How-Facebook-uses-your-data/articleshow/11775188.cms
INDIANAPOLIS _ If just watching Super Bowl XLVI on television
isn’t enough, Rams running back Steven Jackson and Buffalo Bills
wide receiver Stevie Johnson will interact with fans via social
media today on the PlayUp sports app.
Jackson and Johnson will correspond with fans by creating their
own interactive virtual hangouts where fans can join and message
them while the New England Patriots and New York Giants battle for
the Lombardi Trophy at Lucas Oil Field.
Jackson and Johnson also will be hopping to other rooms and
chatting with other fans during the Super Bowl. Jackson will be
using his PlayUp username “sj39″ and Johnson will be using
“StevieJohnson13.”
Article source: http://www.stltoday.com/sports/football/professional/rams-report/d3ba09fc-5038-11e1-896d-001a4bcf6878.html
