Now, with municipal elections due in October, Hungary is facing its third election campaign in 18 months. Disgusted, the Two-Tailed Dog Party decided to run for office in Budapest and the southern Hungarian town of Szeged with the slogan: “Eternal life! Free beer! Tax cuts!” “Money without work!” is another popular cry as are: “We will promise anything,” “There’s a 93 percent chance we won’t steal” and “You will be happy!
A Facebook fan, whatever the count, isn’t the same thing as a website visitor, said Hemen Patel, president of CRM Metrix, which handles web analytics for such marketers as Procter & Gamble Co. and Coca-Cola. Nor is a Facebook fan page really free, he said. “Even though the platform may be free, the agency is charging $250,000 to $300,000 to maintain it,” he said. “Then we see figures like 300,000 fans, but only 300 do anything actively. … The question becomes am I really going to sell $1,000 worth of Tide to this one person over a lifetime?
No matter what your company did in the past two years, Apple did it better. It reminds me of Sony in the 80s and Microsoft in the 90s. Companies were afraid of Microsoft in the 90s. All Microsoft had to do is decide to enter your space and you’d be out of business, if you weren’t lucky enough to be bought by the company. That’s not the case anymore. In this sense, Apple is the Microsoft of this decade.
The news of Apple’s slow-moving cloud comes as Google’s competing service appears to be zooming along. The search engine has recently hired Elizabeth Moody, an attorney with deep experience negotiating digital-music deals. Record executives expect Moody will help cut the first cloud-music licensing agreement. Google has told music executives that it wants to launch a music service this year.
If Apple doesn’t appear to have the same urgency about racing Google into the cloud, it may be that Apple knows Google has a long way to go before it can seriously mount a challenge in music. Apple’s iTunes is the country’s largest music retailer, online or off.
Facebook Inc. will probably put off its initial public offering until 2012, giving Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg more time to gain users and boost sales, three people familiar with the matter said. Facebook would benefit from another year of growth absent the added scrutiny that comes with a public listing, instead of holding an IPO in 2011 as investors speculated, said the people, who asked not to be identified because Facebook doesn’t discuss share-sale plans. Still, Zuckerberg, who holds board control, could push for a stock sale at any time, they said.
In its reasoning in favor of EFF’s jailbreaking exemption, the Copyright Office rejected Apple’s claim that copyright law prevents people from installing unapproved programs on iPhones: “When one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses.
