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David Carr stops short of saying that the American magazine business is headed for a dead cat bounce, but the recent numbers on newsstand sales are grim:

David Carr, Wondering How Far Magazines Must Fall – NYTimes.com

Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff. Last week, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that newsstand circulation in the first half of the year was down almost 10 percent. When 10 percent of your retail buyers depart over the course of a year, something fundamental is at work.

I talked to an executive at one of the big Manhattan publishers about the recent collapse at the newsstand and he said, “When the airplane suddenly drops 10,000 feet and it doesn’t crash, you still end up with your heart in your stomach. Those are very, very bad numbers.”

Historically, certain categories of magazine will encounter turbulence, but this time all categories were punished in the pileup. People was down 18.6 percent, and The New Yorker had a similar drop, declining by 17.4 percent. Vogue and Cosmopolitan were down in the midteens, and Time fell 31 percent. When Cat Fancy is down 23 percent at the newsstand, it seems that there’s little place to hide. Newsweek, it should be mentioned, was off only 9.7 percent at the newsstand, but that’s cold comfort.

[…]

It’s not just consumers who are playing hard to get: advertising is down 8.8 percent year to date over the same miserable period a year ago, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. With readership in such steep decline and advertising refusing to come back, magazines are in a downward spiral that not even their new digital initiatives can halt.

Carr closes with an anecdote about his recent recent doctor’s office visit, where a pile of magazines went unread, because all the patients were staring at their cell phones.

There will be something like magazines in the post-normal economy, once the internet has gobbled all media into its enormous maw and excretes it out as mobile. But the transformation will be so large scale that it’s hard to imagine the brands like Vogue, GQ, Newsweek or Cosmo with retain much value, if any.

It will only be a matter of time when Facebook rolls out their Timeline feature to more users this fall. According to sources close to the situation, the social networking giant aims to have all members switch to Timeline in the coming months. This is to make the experience across the social media website consistent.

Introducing Facebook Timeline

Prior to this, Facebook rolled out the Timeline feature as an opt-in option in December 2011. It was followed by a greater push in January, introducing the new profile format to selected users. The social network implemented a seven-day preview period for users to display, edit or hide their Facebook content before receiving the new format.

As posted by Paul McDonald, and engineering manager for the Timeline team:

“Last year, we introduced timeline, a new kind of profile that lets you highlight the photos, posts and life events that help you tell your story. Over the next few weeks, everyone will get timeline. When you get timeline, you’ll have 7 days to preview what’s there now. This gives you a chance to add or hide whatever you want before anyone else sees it.”

The Seven-day Preview Period

Users who are still using the old format will have seven days to preview their profile once they upgrade to Timeline. This will enable them to review everything that appears on their page before anyone else can see it. They can also choose to publish their new profile at any time during the review period. On the other hand, those who decided to wait after seven days, will have their Timeline automatically published by Facebook afterwards.

In relation to this, the seven-day review period will depend on the day of its launch and when the users logged in. Furthermore, nothing will change with the user’s privacy settings when switching to Timeline.

After Facebook re-introduced Timeline and the seven-day preview, millions of users started switching to the Timeline format on their own terms each week. When the social networking giant rolls out the new profile format to more users this fall, all members will receive the latest version soon enough.

Not Yet on Timeline?

For users who can’t wait to activate their Timeline profile, simply go to the Introducing Timeline page and click “Get Timeline.” They can also wait for an announcement to appear at the top of their profile page.

Other than that, the Facebook Timeline is also available on Android devices and on m.facebook.com.

Source: Introducing Facebook Timeline | Facebook

The post Facebook, Rolling Out Timeline to More Users this Fall appeared first on About Social Media.

The NightWave is a tiny “sleep assistant” designed to relax you quickly into sleep. The soft blue light guides your breathing and focuses your mind until the next thing you know, it’s morning. More »

Apple on Friday issued a note to developers outlining a fix for an in-app purchasing exploit that allowed for the free download of for-pay content, and also announced that the loophole will be plugged when iOS 6 is released this fall.

While AT&T hasn’t confirmed or denied whether it will be charging for the upcoming FaceTime over cellular iOS feature, Sprint says it will offer the service for free when the next-gen mobile OS launches this fall.

NewMe Accelerator, the startup incubator program aimed at under-represented minorities in the tech industry (namely African Americans, Latinos, and women), announced today that it has chosen seven startups to be part of its Summer/Fall 2012 cycle.

One thing that really sets NewMe apart is that it is a residential program, so the founders all move into one house together where they all “eat, sleep, and breathe” the startup building experience. The aim is to hack on their respective projects day and night, in between meetings with a star-studded group of mentors such as Mitch Kapor and Ben Horowitz.

This next batch of startups will move into NewMe’s San Francisco house on August 13th, and stay there for 12 weeks. Here are the seven startups that will make up NewMe’s third class:

• whoorli, founded in Atlanta by Sharron Battle, is an easy way to promote your personal brand through picture, video, and file sharing of digital content you create.

• Sparkroad, founded in Folsom, Calif. by Yuri Costa, connects home and school in creating a healthier learning environment for children.

• Travtar, founded in Bridgewater, New Jersey by Stavan Shah, Srishti Goyal, lets you search all sorts of accommodations and helps you figure out which one makes the most sense for your trip.

• Dwllr, founded in Cincinnati, Ohio by Khisaun Ferguson, is the first its kind platform that helps homebuyers, sellers and real estate professionals buy and sell real estate faster and completely online.

• Plisten, founded in Atlanta by Randy J. Mitchell, is a social site and app that changes how You Interact with Corporate & Political Brands & Personalities on the web.

• Spriggle, founded in New York City by E. Carolina Huaranca and Susie Ye, is a one stop hub that aggregates local service providers for parents who seek convenient and affordable playtime with their children.

• NoBadGift.com, founded in Baltimore, Maryland by McKeever E. Conwell II, Michael P. Washington, and Sam Henry, is a crowd gifting platform that allows friends and family to get together to ask and receive gifts they really want. Contributors have a choice of buying one gift or contributing to a bigger, more costly purchase.

The NewMe Accelerator was founded just last year, so while it is still in its early days it seems to be hitting its stride. TechCrunch TV talked to NewMe founder Angela Benton at the program’s Spring 2012 Demo Day about how NewMe has grown so far — you can watch that interview in the video embedded below:

To refresh your memory, quantipulation is:

The art and act of using unverifiable math and statistics to convince people of what you believe to be true.

Examples of quantipulation abound in marketing and politics. Today, I’ll show you how to quantipulate with graphics, using a real-life example pulled from a very reputable firm’s blog.

In a post titled What Social Networking Websites Do Consumers Access Within the Course of a Typical Month? the Raddon Group enclosed a Powerpoint deck that reported the results of a recent survey the firm conducted. The graphic below was pulled from the deck, and was altered to hide the numbers on the vertical axis. The chart shows the adoption of PFM (personal financial management) tools from Fall 2010 through Spring 2012.

Based on the chart, what would you guess the growth in PFM adoption has been? From about 30% to 90%+? Sounds reasonable to me. But here’s the chart with the numbers, as displayed in the presentation deck.

Although the two bars representing Fall ’11 and Spring ’12 are twice the size of the Fall ’10 bar, the difference between the bars is just 2%, or 20% of the original bar’s total. 

Call me silly, but if one bar is twice the size of another bar, how can that bar be only 20% greater than the other one?

Bottom line: While it’s tempting to manipulate graphics to make changes look more pronounced than they really are, it’s not a good management or presentation practice. Axes should start at zero (unless the numbers reported go into the negative range). And the size of bars should be proportional to the space allotted for them. 

In other words, if your chart takes up 5 inches of space, a bar representing 20% should be about 1 inch long (or high, depending on the orientation). 

Oh, and one more thing: If you do try to quantipulate, I will find it and call you out on it. 

Filed under: Humor, Presentations, Quantipulation Tagged: presentations, Raddon Group

European wireless operators are placing orders for nano-SIM cards in anticipation of the as yet unannounced sixth-generation iPhone which is expected to leverage the technology when it is released this fall.

With Apple’s next iPhone believed to be in production ahead of a fall launch, a picture claiming to show the device’s front panel shows a centered FaceTime camera located above the earpiece.