Current Events
BILL UTTER FORD is Celebrating their prestigious “President’s Award” and awarded by FORD for outstanding customer satisfaction. BILL UTTER FORD is one of a very limited number of dealers in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and the nation to receive the President’s Award. Less than 10% of all Ford dealerships are recognized by Ford Motor Company with this award each year, making the President’s Award one of the highest honors for Ford dealers.
Come into BILL UTTER FORD and take advantage of all the “Utterly Affordable” specials on all of our vehicles!
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FREE Sync / MyFord Touch Clinic!
Saturday, July 21, 2012 at 10:00 am at BILL UTTER FORD
If you currently own a vehicle equipped with Sync or Sync with MyTouch, then this clinic is for YOU!
- How do I Use Sync Services?
- How many Phones Can be Paired to Sync?
- Sync Does not Recognize my Contacts
- What is the Purpose of Line in and USB Ports?
- Not All my Contacts Downloaded
- Overview on how to use MyFord Touch
Please RSVP and Register for this clinic to RTrevino@billutterford.com soon, as space is limited and fills up fast!
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Categories: News and Events Tags: customer satisfaction, Facebook, ford dealers, ford motor, free sync
Disney releases poster for 'Oz The Great and Powerful'
Disney released its first poster for Oz: The Great and Powerful earlier today. Set to hit theaters March 8, 2013, the movie is a live action prequel to the classic tale.
According to The Wrap, the story follows young Oz, played by James Franco, as he gets whisked away from a Kansas circus to a magical land somewhere over the rainbow. He thinks he’s struck gold until he meets three (super-hot) witches who cloud the picture for him. Eventually – though this may be a mega-spoiler – he becomes the magical man behind the curtain.
The newly released poster evokes a sinister mood, depicting hot air balloon floating across a cloudy sky. along the horizon, a tornado is brewing above the glistening Emerald City skyline.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the movie’s all-star cast includes Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams, and Zach Braff.
The film is being produced by Joe Roth, who also produced an adaptation of Alice and Wonderland in 2010 and directed by Spider-Man Trilogy director Sam Raimi.
Since Disney doesn’t own the rights to the original film, fan’s should expect some differences between this movie and the 1939 classic. nonetheless, the movie still contains its fair share of tornadoes, yellow bricks, and hot air balloons. but unfortunately, no Toto.
image: Disney’s Facebook page
Disney releases poster for 'Oz The Great and Powerful'
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Categories: Movie and Dining Reviews Tags: director sam raimi, Facebook, hot air balloon, image disney, magical land, man behind the curtain
Microsoft loss reflects Web display ad world’s woes
Microsoft Corp shelled out a record $6.3 billion for aQuantive in 2007 at the height of a race with Google Inc and Yahoo Inc to clinch the top spot in Internet display advertising, betting on what many thought was a red-hot business.
The writedown of almost all of that deal’s value , announced this week, shows how misguided those expectations were, and how brutal the once-thriving business of selling banner ads on websites has become.the main culprit is an explosion of advertising space offered by Facebook Inc and other websites that is outpacing steady demand.
But automated online exchanges, smarter search advertising and a growing skepticism about the effectiveness of jamming ads in people’s faces have also conspired to slash prices and suck profits out of the business.
“the inventory or amount of ad spots grew so fast, it outgrew demand,” s aid Dave Morgan, an i ndustry veteran and entrepreneur.
“that brought pricing down massively.
So a lot of display advertising really became a ghetto for bad direct-response advertising.”
Morgan founded Tacoda, an online advertising firm that AOL acquired in 2007 for $275 million. He is now in TV advertising as th e C EO of SimulMedia.
“That’s where the big money and margins are,” he said.
Microsoft’s spectacular capitulation is the latest admission of failure on display advertising.
Ad industry executives say the software leader might now join Yahoo in re-thinking its approach to Internet advertising, though there’s no simple solution to the fundamental challenges they face.
Marketers today have more choices than ever, as Internet penetration s wells in emerging markets and popular websites like Facebook multiply the amount of available online pages.
Advertisers now question the performance of display ads more as Internet users train themselves to avoid such marketing.
A study of Reddit readers by GazeHawk last year found that veterans of the social news site focus on the content they’re interested in, and unconsciously filter out everything else.
“At the end of the day, they don’t work,” said Wine.com CEO Rich Bergsund, of display ads online. “the display ad people are in the business of selling impressions, which may not convert to customers or sales.”
Ad exchanges are also undermining the business by helping marketers reach a bigger target audience more quickly and efficiently, helping them spend less.
BUBBLE, BUBBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE
Display ad prices have roughly halved since the first dot-com boom.
ValueClick, which has a big display ad business, has lost about half its value since may 2007, when the stock hit a record.
Microsoft bought aQuantive that same month – around the same time tha t go ogle acquired display ad company DoubleClick and Yahoo bought online ad network right Media.
The average cost to reach 1,000 people with an online display ad fell t o about $11.50 at the end of 2011 from $13.35 in late 2009, ac cording to SQAD Inc, which tracks negotiated ad deals.
In July 1998, Yahoo was getting about $25 per thousand, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Yahoo, still among the dominant players, has struggled for years to arrest sliding revenue g rowth. Today it is w orth about half of its may 2007 market value.
“display isn’t going away, but it’s becoming harder to make money from it,” said David Hallerman of eMarketer, which tracks online advertising.
Google’s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick is one of the few display ad deals that has succeeded, analysts say.
It used its dominant search technology to make DoubleClick’s display ads more relevant and better targeted, while Microsoft failed to use its Bing search engine to improve aQuantive ads in the same way, said Ben Sch achter, an analyst at Macquarie.
Wine.com used to buy a lot of display ads, but now mainly uses Google paid-search, affiliate marketing and comparison shopping engines, Bergsund said.
In 2007, Yahoo launched an initiative similar to Google’s , but Schachter said it did not deliver on its potential.
“the promise of the Internet was always getting the right ad, at the right time, to the right person,” Schachter said. “It’s just not there yet in display ads.”HOW NOW?
Microsoft remains committed to Internet advertising despite hemorrhaging billions each year from its online services division th at encompassed aQuantive an d includes search business Bing, which has barely dented Google’s market share.
But it may have to reconsider its approach.
The aQuantive writedown may presage moves such as giving away display ads for free, according to Gilad de Vries, vice president of brands and agencies at Outbrain, a content rec ommendation startup.
“the value of ad serving has become completely commoditized and the marginal cost of serving a banner ad has gone down to zero,” he said.
If Microsoft gave away what are already high-volume, low-margin display ads, it may be a ” brilliant” move because it would help the company compete better against Google’s DoubleClick, agreed Donnie Williams, chief digital officer of H ori zon Media.
Microsoft is more interested in selling premium online ads, which run on highly trafficked areas such as the MSN home page or are shown on its Xbox 360 video game console.
The company could sell a premium display ad to run on the MSN home page, and throw in free banner ad spots that appear in other less popular areas of its websites as part of the same package, he argued.
But for now, the company is not publicly articulating its attack plan.
“We’re just starting to hear a little around Microsoft re-evaluating their ad model altogether,” Williams said.
“Things haven’t panned out the way prognosticators once thought. five years a go, no o ne understood the impact Facebook was going to have on consumers and advertisers.”
Microsoft loss reflects Web display ad world’s woes
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Categories: Technology Tags: advertising firm, Facebook, skepticism, thriving business, yahoo inc
Talk Is Cheap, but Sometimes It’s Worth More Than Text
CREDIT: Shutterstock / wavebreakmedia ltd
An old economic riddle asks, "What's more valuable, water or diamonds?" The answer: "it depends on where you are." in the desert, diamonds are worthless. By the side of a crystal-clear lake, water is cheap.
Verizon's new Share everything Plans, announced yesterday (June 12) and taking effect June 28, turn calling minutes into water at the lakeside by making them unlimited. and in many cases it ups the cost of data, now the diamond of mobile services. [How much Smartphone Data Do I need?]
Offering unlimited minutes doesn't mean people will talk more. It's acknowledging that they are talking less and will keep doing so. After all, you don't give away something that's actually valuable.
As an old man (well, a GenXer), I still call people on my phone — even on a super-techy smartphone. but fewer and fewer people are doing so, and they have been opting for minimum talk plans.
even 450 minutes per month is overkill for tweens, teens and twenty-somes, who text, email and Facebook on their phone but are loath to talk into it. "I only use it to talk to my parents," one of my colleagues (who's 26) said the other day. He estimated he uses about 100 minutes per month.
in the technology world, nostalgia is pointless. There is no reason to miss a 56K modem or a 12-inch CRT screen. like broadband and LCDs, the new, non-talking phone communication, from Facebook Messenger to Instagram, enriches the way we interact. [Best Smartphone with Keyboard: Motorola Droid 4]
but talking isn't simply the 56K modem of communication. and dropping it completely would be like choking off bandwidth.
I can talk a lot faster than I can type — especially if the latter requires a mess of silly emoticons to keep things clear. (I find myself typing ":-)" after any sentence that might possibly be taken the wrong way, and I write "Thanks!" way too much just to let people know I'm not taking them for granted.)
As a journalist I despise email. it allows the people I'm interviewing to carefully craft what they tell me – perhaps running it by the PR department first, rather than saying what they really mean. instead of getting a frank, spontaneous conversation, I get another version of the press release. and asking a follow-up question requires a whole other exchange.
Frankly, you don't get to know anyone very well in text. most everyone is clever and funny when they have time to think and type it out. That's a big glitch with online dating. I've had cases where the conversation flows easily — after the requisite delay as each of us types up clever quips and witty replies. but on meeting IRL ("in real life"), we face uncomfortable silences because we aren't getting on as well as we pretended we did. [How Dating Rules Differ for Men and Women]
of course there are plenty of times when talking is a waste of time. Typing "b there in 5" is a lot quicker than calling to update the person you'll be meeting. Plus, you don't face the awkward task of explaining why you are late. you just throw in a ":-)".
Although you will have to face that uncomfortable conversation when you finally do arrive and see the person IRL.
Talk Is Cheap, but Sometimes It’s Worth More Than Text
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Categories: Technology Tags: diamond, Facebook, mobile services, nbsp, techy
Facebook smartphone could come in 2013
Tuesday, may 29, 2012 » 10:49am
Facebook hopes to release its own smartphone by next year, as the newly public social networking giant looks to boost its revenue in the mobile internet market, the new York Times reported.
The company has hired more than half a dozen software and hardware engineers who have worked on Apple’s bestselling iPhone and one engineer who has iPad experience, the paper said, citing employees and other unnamed sources.
It has also expanded a group working on a partnership with Taiwan’s HTC to create a smartphone codenamed “Buffy” — a project first revealed last year by technology blog all Things Digital.
One former Apple engineer who worked on the iPhone and was recruited said he had met with Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg “who then peppered him with questions about the inner workings of smartphones,” the report said.
“Mark is worried that if he doesn’t create a mobile phone in the near future that Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms,” a Facebook employee told the new York Times.
When asked for comment, Facebook neither confirmed nor denied the report.
“Our mobile strategy is simple: we think every mobile device is better if it is deeply social,” it said in a statement emailed to AFP.
“We’re working across the entire mobile industry; with operators, hardware manufacturers, OS providers and application developers to bring powerful social experiences to more people around the world.”
Facebook’s initial public offering this month raised a record $US16 billion ($A16.38 billion) but has sparked fury, and lawsuits, amid concerns that key information about the outlook for the company might not have been made widely available.
The company said earlier this month that it was launching an App Center for mini-programs that plug offerings such as Pinterest or Draw Something into the leading social network, which has more than 900 million members worldwide.
Facebook smartphone could come in 2013
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Categories: Technology Tags: apple engineer, Facebook, hardware engineers, mobile platforms, mobile strategy
