Poison pills, iOS, and venture capital

June 10, 2010

Apple’s latest Program License Agreement for iOS contains an interesting clause on data collection for the purposes of advertising – with user consent, collecting certain bits of data are permitted, as long as they’re sent to an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads (for example, an advertising service provider owned [...]

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The tech press isn’t either

April 23, 2010

Blippy, a service that lets you share your purchases with others, was just called out by Mashable for exposing its users’ credit card numbers to a search engine. Since Mashable is widely-read, I start hearing from all over that Blippy released all of its users’ credit card numbers to the world, and since that’s a [...]

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iPhone 4.0 & iAds advertising

April 8, 2010

So iAd was announced, as expected. The first thing I thought of when I saw it is Xzibit saying “yo dawg, I put an app in your app so you can app while you app,” but that’s just because I read too much Reddit. The second thing I thought is ‘damn, this is mighty similar [...]

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Not actually futures

February 22, 2010

Andy Atherton’s recent post in AdExchanger about a futures market for advertising is interesting but flawed, primarily because of problems with the terminology. Let’s start with forward contracts. A forward contract is just a contract for the future sale of something. Guaranteed advertising buys are forward contracts, for example. A forward contract doesn’t imply that [...]

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Your terms of service don’t exist

February 17, 2010

Recently some guy got an inactive Tumblr username, ‘pitchfork’, jerked from him by Tumblr and given to Pitchfork Music. Pitchfork handled the incident with exemplary style. Nothing worth commenting on – until some other guy wrote that this was a non-story, because Tumblr reserved the right to do this in its terms of service. Less [...]

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