Archive for February 26th, 2010
Three Months Later, Gatorade Dumps Tiger Woods
NEW YORK (AP) — Add Gatorade to the list of endorsement deals that Tiger Woods has lost.
A spokesperson for the drink, sold by PepsiCo Inc., confirmed late Friday that it had ended its relationship with the golfer.
“We no longer see a role for Tiger in our marketing efforts and have ended our relationship,” a Gatorade spokeswoman said. “We wish him all the best.”
The spokewoman said Gatorade would continue its relationship with the Tiger Woods Foundation.
Gatorade discontinued its Tiger Woods-brand drinks in November, a decision made before Woods’ marital problems and infidelities became known.
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Microsoft’s Latest Attempt To Derail Google: Sic The Antitrust Cops On Them (MSFT, GOOG)
All of you folks who have been around a while will enjoy the delicious irony in this. The baddest-ass monopolist on the planet is now expressing “concerns” about Google’s growing market power.
Specifically, a Microsoft attorney has penned an official company blog post explaining why Google’s growing share of the search and advertising market is an anti-competitive threat, calling on regulators to “decide whether or not Google’s practices should be seen as illegal.”
This is obviously the latest in Microsoft’s many futile attempts to slow the Google juggernaut. But it’s also a sentiment that many companies affected by Google can relate to.
The lengthy post by VP and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner is worth a read. Here’s the most relevant part:
As Google’s power has grown in recent years, we’ve increasingly heard complaints from a range of firms—large and small—about a wide variety of Google business practices. Some of the complaints just reflect aggressive business stances taken by Google. Some reflect the secrecy with which Google operates in many areas. Some appear to raise serious antitrust issues. As you might expect, many concerned companies have come to us and asked us for our reaction and even for advice. When their antitrust concerns appear to be substantial, we suggest that firms talk to the competition law agencies. (Complaining to Microsoft won’t do much good.)
As reflected in the news earlier this week, firms voicing these complaints have started to meet with competition law agencies, confidentially. (Firms – especially smaller companies – are often reluctant to voice their antitrust concerns publicly because they feel that they must continue to do business with Google and do not want to jeopardize their relationship with them.) Over the past few months Microsoft, too, has met with the DOJ and the European Commission. The subject of our meetings has been the competition law review, now completed, of the search partnership between Yahoo! and Microsoft. As you might expect, the competition officials asked us a lot of questions about competition with Google—since that is the focus of the partnership. We told them what we know about how Google is doing business. A lot of that entails explaining the search advertising business, which is complex. Some of that inevitably gets into Google practices that may be harming publishers, advertisers and competition in search and online advertising.
All of this is quite important because search is so central to how people navigate the Internet, and because advertising is the main monetization mechanism for a wide range of Web sites and Web services. Both search and online advertising are increasingly controlled by a single firm, Google. That can be a problem because Google’s business is helped along by significant network effects (just like the PC operating system business). Search engine algorithms “learn” by observing how users interact with search results. Google’s algorithms learn less common search terms better than others because many more people are conducting searches on these terms on Google.
These and other network effects make it hard for competing search engines to catch up. Microsoft’s well-received Bing search engine is addressing this challenge by offering innovations in areas that are less dependent on volume. But Bing needs to gain volume too, in order to increase the relevance of search results for less common search terms. That is why Microsoft and Yahoo! are combining their search volumes. And that is why we are concerned about Google business practices that tend to lock in publishers and advertisers and make it harder for Microsoft to gain search volume.
Microsoft would obviously be among the first to say that leading firms should not be punished for their success. Nor should firms be punished just because a particular business practice may harm a rival—competition on the merits can do that, too. That is a position that Microsoft has long espoused, and we’re sticking to it. Our concerns relate only to Google practices that tend to lock in business partners and content (like Google Books) and exclude competitors, thereby undermining competition more broadly. Ultimately the competition law agencies will have to decide whether or not Google’s practices should be seen as illegal.
Read the entire post at Microsoft On The Issues >
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See Also:
- Google: No Reason To Think Apple Is Ditching Us For Bing On the iPhone
- January Search Results In! Bing Keeps Gaining Share, Everyone Else Loses
- IT BEGINS: Europe Opening Google Anti-Trust Probe
Covington Hired Through The Downturn While The Economy Bested Debevoise
More annual results rolled in recently and the silver lining is that it’s not all bad news.
At Covington & Burling, revenue increased by 10% to $583 million and profit per partner declined by 8% to $1.2 million, according to The Blog of Legal Times. Lateral hires and an increase in overall headcount combined with a lack of layoffs marked the year (as a casual fact-check, the firm doesn’t even appear on Law Schucks layoff tracker—score!).
At Debevoise & Plimpton, another firm that survived the year without layoffs, revenue fell by 12% to $670 million last year and PPP dropped 16% to 1.87 million, says Am Law Daily. The firm blames the double decline on the downturn, as its corporate litigation practice slowed and the Siemens AG investigation ended.
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See Also:
- White & Case Takes A Hit, Revenue Down 11 Percent
- Quinn Emanuel Avoids Firings Amid Revenue Drop
- Northern California Biglaw Revenue Flat In 2009, But Things Mostly Sunny For Partners
Twitter Considered Its Own ‘Twit.ly’-Like URL Shortener
John Borthwick, CEO & Co-Founder, Betaworks
Bit.ly- More Than A URL Shortener (6 min)
- Bit.ly allows users to shorten, share, and track links (URLs)
- Bit.ly usage mainly comes from Twitter, Facebook, and emails
- The commercial use of tracking stats
- The Twitter – bit.ly relationship
- Turning bit.ly clicks into revenue
- Building a business in New York City
Watch Lessons For Entrepreneurs From Entrepreneurs with John Borthwick HERE >
Produced By: Kamelia Angelova & William Wei
See More:
– Borthwick: Forcing Google Buzz Into Gmail Was A Mistake
– How Do Advertisers Know Everything About You?
– Why Twitter And Facebook Aren’t Enough For Chatting About Live Sports
More Video: Click HERE >
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See Also:
- Bit.ly Launches Bitly.tv To Track Popular Video Clips
- URL Shortener Bit.ly Launches Pro Service To Deflect Google Attack
- Bit.ly Offering Even Shorter ‘J.mp’ URLs
Yelp CEO: We Will Beat Bogus Extortion Lawsuit
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has responded after his company was sued for extortion.
Yelp is being accused of demanding money in exchange for removing negative reviews from its site.
In a blog post, Stoppelman says Yelp will win the suit and that the extortion claims are bogus:
In light of recent news, I wanted to share some thoughts about the lawsuit that was filed against Yelp this week.
There has been a long history of people accusing Yelp of monkeying around with reviews in exchange for money. The allegations are disappointing, not only because they are false, but because they ignore empirical evidence in favor of conspiracy theories.
You can see for yourself: thousands of businesses that advertise on Yelp have both negative and positive reviews. Despite these counter-examples to the contrary (virtually no advertiser on Yelp has a perfect reputation), extensive media explorations that end inconclusively, and the absence of any actual evidence to support this theory, this unfortunate and untrue meme has taken on a life of its own.
The reason 29 million people used Yelp last month to find a great local business is because of the trust they place in the reviews on our site. The entire value of the Yelp community to consumers and businesses hinges upon that trust — and we would never do anything to jeopardize it. Simply put, Yelp does not remove or hide negative reviews in exchange for money and Yelp salespeople do not offer to do so. Additionally, Yelp treats review content equally for advertisers and non-advertisers alike. Advertisers pay for advertising and enhanced listings, and nothing more; and businesses are not penalized for declining to advertise.
At Yelp our motto is “connecting people with great local businesses.” To do that, we aim to provide consumers with the best, authentic information we can about local businesses. We work hard to determine that information is genuine in order to protect consumers from fake, or shill reviews, and businesses from malicious reviews from competitors.
In fact, it’s this difficult task that sometimes causes confusion or frustration for some business owners and can lead to these conspiracy theories or worse (see: lawsuit). Anytime a business owner is confused about Yelp — especially if they decide to file a lawsuit — we take it very seriously. That’s why we empowered businesses owners with a voice on the website over two years ago and launched outreach and education efforts to the business community.
We know this lawsuit to be without merit, we will fight it vigorously, and we are confident we will prevail. And we will not be dissuaded from our mission of helping people connect with great local businesses in their communities. In fact, we will continue to expand to new markets both in the US and internationally, and to provide innovative new ways “to Yelp.”
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See Also:
- Yelp Hit With Extortion Lawsuit For Allegedly Demanding Payments To Pull Negative Reviews
- Yelp CEO Doesn’t See An IPO Anytime Soon
- Yelp Wins Award For Dumbest Funding-Announcement Timing Ever