Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Some lawyers are warning their business clients to get employees to sign waivers denying themselves the right to compensation for work completed while using their BlackBerrys or other smartphones. The concern for lawsuits is getting to the point where some employers are being advised to avoid giving them out at all.

Of course, this only applies for non-exempt employees who are eligible for overtime pay. Since cranking out emails on a BlackBerry, or even from home, could easily qualify as on-the-clock labor, lawsuits appear inevitable. Fortunately enough for employers, none of these lawsuits have been filed yet.
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Miguel Helft of the New York Times is reporting today that Getty Images has announced a partnership with Yahoo’s Flickr that will give top amateur photographers a chance to become contributors to Getty, and get paid at the same rates as photographers under contract with the company.

Apparently, Getty is going to comb Flickr and pick out the top photographers they find, concentrating on areas where they are lacking in content, such as certain parts of the world that aren’t well documented by photography. Also, as Jonathan Klein of Getty points out to Helft, the authenticity of Flickr photos is something that advertisers are looking for and often can’t be duplicated in a studio or shoot setting.
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Rogers Communications is the biggest mobile service provider in Canada, and it was their responsibility to roll out the price plans for the iPhone’s initial release into the Great White North.

Their base plan, however is a complete atrocity. For $60 a month, customers sign a 3 year contract, get 150 minutes of talk time, 75 text messages, and a paltry 400MB of data. An online petition has even sprung up in protest of the plans, and has been signed by well over 50,000 people.

Today it’s being reported by almost every tech blog on the Internet, and initially by AppleInsider, that Apple was enraged by the plans and decided not to sell any iPhones in the six or so Apple stores in Canada.
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Office is the one Microsoft product even most Mac users don’t like to go without. Even the annoying Mac guy from the TV ads was bragging about how well Mac runs Office. It really is the one piece of software Microsoft has that is nearly universal, especially seeing now that Windows market share is dipping below 90%.

Now, Microsoft is planning an entirely new revenue model for Office: a yearly subscription. For $70 per year, users get Office, all the updates, and Windows Live OneCare, a service that already costs $50 a year. The service is being dubbed “Equipt.”
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More bad news for the newspaper industry: 2007 saw the biggest decline yet in advertising revenues for the nation’s top newspapers. The year saw an 8% drop in revenues, and 2008 is forecast to be even worse.

The Internet, however, saw a gain in ad revenue of 33%, which roughly correlates to the lost revenue in other sectors. Print’s loss is the web’s gain.

To make matters worse for newspapers, a very poor housing market in states like Florida and California are leading to big hits in classified ad revenues. Additionally, with free classified services like Craigslist increasing in popularity, one of the biggest money-spinners for newspapers is quickly going south. Hearst estimates The San Francisco Chronicle is losing $1 million a day at this point.
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