Because Hello, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and of course Facebook itself aren’t clogging up your phone enough already, the big blue social juggernaut has an idea for one more app to add to the pantheon. And this time, they’re sort of homing in on a slice of Twitter’s turf.
What Facebook’s got now is a new, stand-alone, Twitter-style app devoted to breaking news, Business Insider reports.
According to BI, the product has not yet been formally announced but is in active alpha testing.
This one is different from the “standard” Facebook approach in that it explicitly exists to let publishers reach people, rather than for people to reach out to each other. The idea is that after users download the app, they get to select which “partnering publications” (partnerships that, of course, Facebook gets to work out on lucrative terms with those outlets) they want to follow.
When those companies push breaking news updates to the app, users will get notifications blasted out to their mobile devices.
The alerts are, by design, short and punchy — 100 characters of text and a URL to the news site’s source article, Business Insider says.
So why would Facebook do it, other than “for money and for data to make more money with, obviously” when every major news platform out there, from ABC and the BBC to BuzzFeed and Yahoo, already has their own stand-alone news apps?
There’s a market for aggregators. Running 5, 10, or 20 different apps annoys users and bogs down phones. Of course, newsreaders and aggregators also abound, but none has quite the product penetration of Facebook, which reaches approximately 1.5 billion users. It’s easy for consumers to reach for a familiar brand.
The Detroit News reports that Takata is working with Insurance Institute for Highway Safety to commence the campaign that includes national ads and direct mailings to millions of vehicle owners.
Takata announced its plans in a confidential memo to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last month, noting that it plans to introduce a new website – http://ift.tt/1IYWKYQ – to encourage consumers to get their cars fixed under the “Get the Word Out” consumer outreach program.
The proposed ads – which would appear on Google, Facebook, Twitter, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, CNN and Yahoo – include the message: “URGENT AIRBAG RECALL NOTICE: Does your airbag inflator need to be replaced?”
To begin with, the campaign will focus on areas of high humidity where airbags are thought to be at more risk for unexpectedly forceful deployments, including Florida, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Hawaii, Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi.
The parts maker says it will conduct real-time data analytics on the campaign and make changes to demographics and markets as needed.
As for the direct mailings, Takata says it will work with IIHS in “coordinating a mailing by insurers that would encourage affected policyholders to respond to the recalls.”
Before the campaigns can move forward, NHTSA must first approve the plan, the Detroit News reports.
A spokesperson for the agency said it was still reviewing the plans, as well as another confidential filing from Takata regarding steps to find the root cause of the airbag issue.
Recalls of vehicles with Takata-produced airbags began slowly in 2008, but gained traction over the last year, culminating in the recall of 33.8 million vehicles in May.
The company and a plethora of investigators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as well as the 10 automakers affected by the recall have yet to identify what causes Takata’s airbags to rupture so violently. Because of this, it’s unclear whether or not vehicles already repaired are actually safe.
One Cablevision commercial depicts a sheriff telling Verizon that the town is done with its lies about WiFi.
It’s not uncommon to see a cable provider commercial that pokes fun at or attempt to disprove a competitor for their claims of being the faster, less expensive, or just plain better option. But there one less lineup of such ads you’ll be seeing on your TV, as a judge ruled this week that Cablevision must stop running its ads that essentially call Verizon a “liar” regarding claims that it had the fastest wireless network.
On Monday U.S. Magistrate Judge Gary Brown granted Verizon a temporary retraining order to put a stop to Cablevision ads running in New York, ruling the spots were “literally untrue and implicitly false” and knowingly misled consumers.
Cablevision’s ad campaign — which began back in January and depicted, among other things, a sheriff telling Verizon that “this town’s had enough of your lies” — claimed Verizon wasn’t truthful about its broadband internet speeds, the quality of its DVR, service appointments, and other business practices.
“The law, like our economic system, encourages spirited competition,” Brown said in his ruling. “But when a competitor exceeds the bounds of decency by falsely impugning the integrity of a competitor, it runs afoul of the law.”
Reuters points out that Cablevision previously agreed to voluntarily discontinue certain print ads in July. Those ads included depictions of Verizon as Pinocchio and reps for the cable company with “pants on fire.” Under the judge’s order this week, Cablevision has until this Friday to discontinue its television ad campaign.
Verizon was quick to welcome the judge’s ruling in a statement (PDF), saying Cablevision’s ads were nothing “but a campaign to keep accurate and factual information away from consumers.”
“The Cablevision lawsuit and its other tactics have a great consequence, even if it’s the opposite of what Cablevision had hoped: It’s clear, and confirmed by a court, that if you want faster Internet upload and download speeds and the ability to access those speeds wirelessly, Verizon offers it,” Susan Retta, Verizon vice president of consumer marketing, said in a statement.
A spokesperson for Cablevision tells Reuters that the company would continue to challenge Verizon’s claims, “not only through the legal system but also in the court of public opinion.”
Brown’s ruling is just the latest chapter in the Verizon/Cablevision saga.
Back in January, Cablevision filed a lawsuit [PDF] alleging that Verizon’s advertisements that it had the “fastest WiFi available” were an attempt at misleading customers during Cablevision’s launch of its own WiFi service called Freewheel.
The company accused Verizon of making misleading statements that are not only false advertising about its own products but also mislead consumers with regard to Cablevision.
“The false ads in Verizon’s campaign are designed to undermine the competitive threat Cablevision’s WiFi services pose to multiple facets — both internet and cellular service — of Verizon’s business,” the suit stated.
Brown threw out that lawsuit last week, saying that Verizon was not lying to the public by claiming its FiOS fiber optic network provides the fastest WiFi.
“The evidence presented suggests that Verizon FiOS’s top three tiers, namely 150/150 Mbps, 300/300 Mbps, and 500/500 Mbps all provide faster download speeds than Cablevision’s fastest plan, and all five FiOS plans offer faster upload speeds than any of Cablevision’s offerings,” Brown ruled on Friday.
Retta said in a statement that the court decision also confirmed that Cablevision’s 1.1 million WiFi hotspots emanate from routers in the private homes of its subscribers and not in public locations, as the company claimed.
Many remaining A&P stores are NYC-area Pathmark stores. (Morton Fox)
When layoffs are coming within 60 days, federal law requires employers to notify employees and their state labor department. An industry publication reports that yesterday, the venerable and bankrupt grocery chain A&P issued these layoff notifications, called Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notices, to employees at all of their stores. However, most of the stores remain on the market, and A&P hopes to sell them to competitors soon.
There are 297 stores in the chain. The judge in their bankruptcy case has approved the closing of 25 stores, and they at least hope to find buyers for the rest. Acme Markets, Stop & Shop, and Key Food have all expressed interest in buying a total of 118 of the stores, and other interested buyers may come forward as the bankruptcy proceeds. Even the union representing A&P employees assured workers that the WARN notice is just procedural, and the majority of stores will probably still be sold.
The judge also told the bankruptcy court this week that he has seen competitors colluding to keep their bids low in similar grocery chain bankruptcy cases, and will require bidders to declare in writing that they haven’t discussed their bids with their competitors/fellow bidders when bidding in this auction.
A&P is the oldest grocery chain still in business in this country: it’s been in operation since 1859, but has also filed for bankruptcy twice in the last five years.
Yesterday was a special event for loyal customers of makeup retailer Sephora who have accumulated points in the retailer’s loyalty program, where unusually fabulous rewards came out. The company hyped the event for days in e-mails and on its social media pages, then was apparently surprised when a large number of customers were ready to pounce on the rewards, and most of them left disappointed.
In Sephora’s rewards program, generally one dollar spent equals one rewards program point. Sometimes customer service awards extra points for taking surveys or to placate unhappy customers. For the past week, they offered point multipliers ranging from double to quadruple depending on which reward “tier” a customer had reached.
“Epic Rewards” means unusually fabulous rewards for customers with 1,000 to 10,000 points. Some were worth more than the normal cash value of a reward customers might receive for that many points, like a trip to Paris to visit the Lancôme factory available to people with 10,000 points. (You can view a full list of the rewards available here.)
Simply having 10,000 points wasn’t enough to get someone that reward. It was more like a raffle or a sweepstakes, yet customers understood the items to be something that they could “earn” by racking up points.
E-mails pushed this as an opportunity to boost your points balance before Epic Rewards came out. Some customers did, some didn’t, but plenty were excited about the event. What Sephora never said was how many of each item was available. Were beauty collectors earning points for an exciting promotion, or effectively buying raffle tickets?
Customers were told only that the rewards would be available at some point during the business day, Pacific time, on Monday, August 10th. Customers report having the page ready on their computers or phones and their refreshing fingers primed. Finally, it happened around noon Pacific time.
Then things began to go wrong: even customers who were able to scoop up the items they wanted and put them in their carts weren’t able to make it to checkout, no matter how quickly they did so. Allyson’s experience trying to nab a special palette of Yves Saint-Laurent eyeshadows was typical:
I refreshed and refreshed the screen randomly throughout the day and around 2:50PM ET i was magically able to add the item to my cart (I already had hair ties added as not to be an issue when checking out). I made it past the first checkout page, the billing address confirmation, and hit the last checkout button when the screen refreshed and said, “items in your cart are no longer available).
I went back to the [2,000 point] reward page and selected another item, but all items at this time were crossed out for selection. My guess on total time was under 1 minute (to be fair I did not try for any of the 1K rewards).
Going after lesser rewards may not have helped, as other customers learned.
Now, some cynics may complain that the problem here is that customers are angry because they didn’t get items that were effectively offered in a raffle. That’s true, but the event was heavily marketed, and not presented as a raffle. The customers had the wacky idea that spending thousands of dollars at a luxury retailer should make them valuable customers or something.
Sephora still hasn’t made any public statements about the issue, and they haven’t responded to a query from Consumerist.
“Telling customers the event will occur during business hours is not good enough,” wrote Allyson, the customer who sought eyeshadows and failed. “[Sephora] should have clearly communicated the time the event was going to start. Some people had been awake since midnight because the last time the rewards were offered it was around 4AM.”
Sephora whipped dedicated customers up into a frenzy, and is responding to their frustration with offers of reward points. Why would they want more points?
@erinhill we're so sorry that our Epic Rewards sold out so quickly and definitely understand your frustration!
Customers, for their part, have responded by setting up a Facebook war room, signing online petitions, and returning their purchases made in order to rack up more points shortly before the rewards event.
RadioShack still says that they can’t identify the purchasers or the holders of the estimated $46 million worth of gift cards that are still out there for the chain. While there are still RadioShack stores, those are owned by a different company and won’t accept the old gift cards. The Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, wants to make sure that gift card holders know that the Shack owes them money.
RadioShack is fine with letting gift card holders file a claim as creditors in the bankruptcy and get in line behind the creditors that kept the electronics retailer afloat in its last few years.
The request that the AG has made is pretty simple: they want RadioShack to notify people who have or
who might have purchased RadioShack gift cards about the bankruptcy proceedings. Or, in lawyer-talk:
Due process requires that these gift card purchasers are entitled to actual notice of
the confirmation proceedings so that they receive all required information and are given a
reasonable time for a response in order to meaningfully participate in the confirmation process in
this case.
Some of the missing gift card holders may have lost or destroyed those cards, and they’re now unable to claim them, which would make that cash part of the interest-earning funds of the respective state attorneys general. We don’t doubt that the AG’s office wants to make sure that RadioShack makes every effort to get money back to consumers before their lenders, but remember that AGs benefit from this arrangement.
While celebrities get special treatment most places they go, there is no VIP pass that allows them to endorse a prescription drug without disclosing its associated risks and limitations. So when mom-to-be Kim Kardashian used social media to sing the praises of a morning sickness pill, it raised a red flag for federal regulators.
The Food & Drug Administration sent a warning letter [PDF] to Duchesnay, the company behind the morning sickness pill Diclegis, notifying the maker that it must discontinue using Kardashian’s social media endorsements because it doesn’t adequately address risk factors associated with the use of the pills
Diclegis, which was approved in 2013, is intended to treat nausea and vomiting of pregnancy in women who do not respond to other conservative management.
According to the FDA letter, a review of the endorsement by Kardashian found the posts to be “false or misleading in that it presents efficacy claims for Diclegis, but fails to communicate any risk information associated with its use and it omits material facts.”
As a result, the FDA claims the post misbrands the pill, which makes its distribution a violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
Kardashian posted her endorsement of the pills through her Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts in mid-July. They have since been taken down, with the exception of a dead link on Twitter.
According to the FDA letter, the endorsement included the following claims:
OMG. Have you heard about this? As you guys know my #morningsickness has been pretty bad. I tried changing things about my lifestyle, like my diet, but nothing helped, so I talked to my doctor. He prescribed me #Diclegis, and I felt a lot better and most importantly, it’s been studied and there was no increased risk to the baby. I’m so excited and happy with my results that I’m partnering with Duchesnay USA to raise awareness about treating morning sickness. If you have morning sickness, be safe and sure to ask your doctor about the pill with the pregnant woman on it and find out more http://www.diclegis.com; http://ift.tt/1DprUH2.
While endorsement post included links to the company’s website and Duchesnay sent out a press release providing more details about the partnership including information on Diclegis, the FDA claims those steps weren’t enough to mitigate misinformation.
“The social media post, however, entirely omits all risk information,” the FDA letter states. “By omitting the risks associated with Diclegis, the social media post misleadingly fails to provide material information about the consequences that may result from the use of the drug and suggests that it is safer than has been demonstrated.”
The FDA gave Duchesnay until Aug. 21 to submit a written response on whether it plans to comply with the agency’s request by submitting all promotional materials and a plan to discontinue misbranding or simply cease distribution of Diclegis.
A spokesperson for Duchesnay tells Bloomberg that the company acknowledges its promotional materials need to be in accordance with FDA rules and regulations and that it would “immediately and effectively” addressing any issues.
According to the FDA letter, this isn’t the first time Duchesnay has been in trouble for promotional materials related to Diclegis. Back in 2013, the FDA sent a warning regarding its announcement of the drug, which allegedly omitted risk information and limitations of the medication.
