Posts Tagged: "Twitter"

Last June, Walter Palmer, an American dentist and recreational big game hunter, shot and killed Cecil, a southwest African lion who had been the subject of a study by Oxford University and a major attraction for Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. At first, Cecil’s killing drew international outrage and media attention, the hashtag #CecilTheLion spreading like wildfire on social media. Then it drew trademark applications. At least four different applicants currently have live trademark applications pending in the United States for CECIL THE LION, covering everything from the noble, including charitable fundraising services and information and news commentary relating to wildlife conservation, to the commercial, including dolls, trading cards, and charms.

Millions of people, from talk show hosts to world leaders, have engaged in a dialog about and with emoji and what it means to communication. Emoji are becoming an increasingly pervasive communication instrument, increasingly used in advertising, to discuss social issues and advocacy, and to even a bridge communication tool between generations. There are even emoji related patents owned by Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others. Many commentators have speculated on the future of the emoji with an overwhelming consensus: this trend is here to stay.

Twitter’s popularity has not only benefited the legitimate side of the pharmaceutical industry. A study released in December, supported by both the Global Health Policy Institute and the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies, found an empirical link between all Twitter content and content aimed at the illicit drug sales. A survey of two week’s worth of posts shared on Twitter, involving the analysis of more than two million tweets, turned up 45,000 tweets which encouraged drug abuse. The survey found that more than three-quarters of tweets both pertaining to the non-medical use of prescription medications and including a hyperlink to a sales affiliate related to the anti-anxiety drug Valium.

The administration of the 44th President of the United States will be remembered for many reasons, but one theme which has been playing out since the earliest days of Barack Obama’s presidency is a predilection towards using popular and developing technologies. In his first few months in office, President Obama created the position of U.S. Chief Technology Officer, an official adviser to the President on tech policy and a role currently served by Megan Smith, a former executive at Google. Obama’s techie status is cemented by media reports of his long-time adherence to BlackBerry phones as well as his warm attitude and close relationship with major Silicon Valley players.

The top two spots on the list of the 100 most valuable brands are occupied this year, as last year, by Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), respectively. These two companies have held their respective spots since 2013, when both were able to ouster The Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE:KO) from the leading position in the Interbrand study, which it had held since Interbrand began releasing the report in 2000. Interbrand’s top 10 global brands include a collection of Companies We Follow often here on IPWatchdog, including 4th-placed Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT), 5th-placed IBM (NYSE:IBM), 7th-placed Samsung Electronics Co. (KRX:005930), 8th-placed General Electric Company (NYSE:GE) and 10th-placed Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN).

Social media has been getting a lot more serious about the business of breaking news to a massive online readership. In the middle of September, Facebook launched a new service called Signal which provides a platform for the discovery and curation of news content in a way that helps journalists see which items are trending. For Google in particular, the news content sector of the Internet is likely one where it hopes to challenge Facebook more vigorously. In July, Facebook pulled ahead of Google as a source of news content for readers obtaining their news online.

The big winner among social media e-businesses in the 2015 consumer index is Pinterest, the personal web cataloguing service headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Its consumer satisfaction index score rose by about 3 percent since last year to a score of 78, tied for the best 2015 index score of any e-business. Most people think of Pinterest as a fun website for getting party ideas or tips on how to style a home, but there have been some interesting aspects of Pinterest’s business developing. Recently, the Bank of America Corp. (NYSE:BAC) announced that Pinterest, which manages about 1.3 billion pins related to money management, is driving about 30 percent of the company’s social media traffic. A police department in Dover, DE, recently became one of a small but growing contingent of departments who have launched Pinterest accounts to advertise a public lost & found service. Pinterest users who have ever found themselves frustrated at an inability to purchase imaginative items they find on the site may be happy to note that the site is rolling out buyable pins.

On-demand video services like Netflix and Hulu were niche businesses just a few years ago but in recent months it’s become clear that these platforms for streaming movies and television shows are a big part of the coming future of media entertainment. A recent Nielsen report indicated that 41 percent of American households have access to at least one subscription-based video on-demand (VOD) service. One out of every three homes in America has Netflix and one out of every ten has access to at least two video on-demand services.

Twitter is a perfect case study to demonstrate just how important patents, particularly software patents, are to a start-up company that has aspirations of going public… In repeated filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission since October 2013, Twitter has explained over and over again just how important their patented technology is to the company. They have also repeatedly explained that unlike other companies and competitors, even with nearly 1,000 patents, their own patent portfolio is extremely small by comparison. This poses real concerns for Twitter, which is why they warn the SEC and investors of the ramifications of such a small patent portfolio with every new filing.

Both Facebook and Twitter will need to grow up and mature as companies if they are going to succeed for the long haul. A review of the patent portfolios suggests that Facebook has a much greater chance of ultimately succeeding because it seems to have a much more developed patent strategy than Twitter, which afford the company a larger number of monetization opportunities… Without a thoughtful strategy to protect the innovations they create they are leaving money on the table. It was one thing to make ideological decisions when the company was private, but publicly traded companies really need to answer to shareholders, at least in theory. Twitter’s continued allergy to filing patent applications may well come back to haunt the company, which has already seen its first quarter of declining usage.