Online Sex Videos Force Resignations of Six Members of Turkish Opposition Party

ISTANBUL — Just weeks before general elections in Turkey, six leading members of an opposition party were forced to resign from Parliament on Saturday after sexually explicit videos of one of them were posted on the Internet.

The Web site that posted the videos had threatened to release others that it said showed the five other members who resigned.

The resignations could severely weaken the Nationalist Movement Party, the second largest opposition group in Parliament, which is struggling to win the minimum of 10 percent of the vote required to be seated in Parliament.

Four members of Parliament from the same party resigned earlier this month after similar videos were posted on the same Web site.

The Web site, farkliulkuculer.com, has cast itself as part of a breakaway ultranationalist group aiming to cleanse and reform the nationalist movement in Turkey. The site’s administrators are anonymous.

The Public Communication Agency, which monitors Internet traffic in Turkey, blocked access to the Web site shortly after the videos were uploaded, presumably because of their explicit content.

Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the Nationalist Movement, denounced the videos as blackmail. “It is not correct to mess with these people’s personalities,” he said.

He said the Web site had demanded his resignation by last Wednesday if he wanted the videos to remain secret. He had earlier vowed not to yield to such threats.

Representatives of his party, noting that if they lose representation in Parliament the governing Justice and Development Party would be likely to gain, have accused the government of failing to properly investigate the videos and the Web site.

Lawyers for the Nationalist Movement filed a claim with a court in Ankara, the capital, on Wednesday demanding an investigation. The filing, citing calls made on a cellphone linked to the Web site, said that the video scandal was organized in the United States. Party leaders have previously accused a Turkish-American religious group, Fethullah Gulen, of working with the governing party to drive the Nationalist Movement from politics.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has campaigned strongly against the Nationalists, rebuffed those claims in a television show last week, saying that the Nationalist Movement was trying to blame the government for its internal problems.

The Nationalist Movement Party held 72 seats in the 540-member Parliament before the resignations on Saturday, and polls before the resignations showed it winning about 12 percent of the vote in the election next month. The governing Justice and Development Party is expected to win a third term as the majority government.

Political analysts, pointing to the timing of the release of videos that were evidently collected over a long period, expressed concern about the unethical tactics used to attack the Nationalists. “With these large number of resignations, we have an unprecedented scene here in the world of politics,” said Fatih Cekirge, a political analyst speaking on NTV, who called the blackmailing “political genocide.”

View the original article here

Online Degrees Come of Age in Asia

The nearest university is an hour’s flight from his home. And in any case, it doesn’t offer a doctorate in education, the program Mr. Abdulla, a school principal, wanted to pursue.

Having already taken time off to complete his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Malaysia, Mr. Abdulla was reluctant to take more time away from his job or family, so he enrolled in Asia e University, an institution in Kuala Lumpur that offers online courses.

“Studying online is very suitable for working people,” Mr. Abdulla said in a telephone interview. “You can study at anytime, anywhere, regardless of your location.”

Some universities have long specialized in such distance education, but now more homegrown Asian institutions are seeking to tap the demand for higher education in underserved areas. And as Internet connectivity spreads, more students like Mr. Abdulla are realizing that their education options are no longer bound by geographical constraints — or even by the older model of distance learning, in which students received bundles of course materials in the mail.

“It has really taken the ‘distance’ out of distance education,” said Wong Tat Meng, president of the Asian Association of Open Universities, who is vice chancellor of Wawasan Open University in Malaysia.

Universities around the world have jumped on the e-learning bandwagon to varying degrees, from posting course materials online to making participation in online discussion forums an assessable course component.

Yet some education experts say such programs are not a panacea in removing barriers to a university education. Poor Internet service in many parts of Asia, particularly rural areas, remains a problem, leaving many students unreachable. In addition, online universities, they say, face many challenges, from competing with the more established campus-based universities to building a credible reputation in an environment saturated with schools of questionable qualifications.

Open universities, or institutions that specialize in distance education, have long been part of Asia’s higher education landscape, but the number has grown rapidly in recent years, especially in China and India, according to Mr. Wong.

He said the Internet had led to a “quantum leap” for distance education providers, particularly in places with good broadband infrastructure like South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

South Korea, Mr. Wong said, was the most advanced Asian country in terms of e-learning, with a number of universities delivering courses entirely online.

He said China, which is home to 68 online colleges, is rapidly becoming a major player.

Mr. Wong believes that demand for higher education in South Korea and China, coupled with the fact that these countries have high-speed broadband in major cities, was driving the increase in online providers.

“Many working adults simply do not have the time to attend face-to-face lectures delivered in conventional universities,” he said. “Also, governments simply cannot build sufficient brick-and-mortar universities fast enough to meet the huge demand for knowledge workers needed to drive the knowledge economy.”

It is this demand for education that Asia e University is seeking to meet.

The university was established in 2008 under the Asia Cooperation Dialogue, a grouping of 31 countries, with the aim of giving more students the opportunity to complete higher education.

The Malaysian government finances the university’s headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, while public and private partners finance the operations in the various countries where its courses are offered. Its motto is “by Asians for Asians.”

 

Sony Says Parts of Playstation Network Will Be Back Online This Week

 

TOKYO — Sony said Sunday that parts of its PlayStation network will be back online “this week” after hackers infiltrated the service, made off with detailed personal information and forced a catastrophic system shutdown.

But it could take until the end of the month for a full reboot of the PlayStation Network, which links 77 million gamers worldwide, the Japanese electronics and entertainment company announced at a press conference in Tokyo.

“I am deeply sorry for worrying, and inconveniencing, our users,” said Kazuo Hirai, Sony’s executive deputy president, bowing deeply.

The security debacle has dealt a serious blow to Sony’s bid to build an online network that brings gaming and music content to its universe of gadgets. Sony has lagged behind in building an online presence behind the likes of Apple and its popular online iTunes and App Store services.

The Japanese electronics and entertainment company has also faced questions about whether it moved quickly enough to inform its users of the breach. The PlayStation network went down on April 20, but Sony did not disclose that personal data had been stolen until a full week later.

A subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives has sent a letter to Sony asking for information about the attack, including when the intrusion occurred, if Sony knew who was responsible for the attack and when the company notified law enforcement.

According to Sony, an “unauthorized person” hacked into Sony servers last month and obtained personal information on PlayStation and Qriocity account holders, including their names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and user names and passwords for the PlayStation Network.

The company said that other confidential information, including credit card numbers, could have been compromised, warning customers to “remain vigilant” by monitoring identity theft or other financial loss.

The hacker attack targeted Sony severs over three days in mid-April, Mr. Hirai said. The company first became aware of the unauthorized access on April 19, and shut down its servers the following day.

Sony said usernames and passwords to the network were not encrypted, but the credit card information it had for about 10 million users had been encrypted and that there was yet no evidence that this data was taken.

The company was working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as legal enforcement agencies in other countries, in investigating the attack, it said.

Mr. Hirai acknowledged that Sony had been slow in providing information on the network breach to its users. It had taken the company time to gather accurate data on the breach, he explained.

“Inspecting and analyzing a vast amount of data unfortunately took a lot of time,” he said. “We wanted to make sure that the information we provided was accurate as possible.”

Mr. Hirai said that Sony’s online networks would remain central to the company’s business. Sony’s new Qriocity service, which is used to stream audio and video to high-end Sony televisions, Sony Blu-ray players and other Web-enabled Sony devices, was also knocked offline in the attack.

Once the network is up and running, Sony users will be forced to change their passwords before they can connect. Sony will offer free content and other freebies as part of an “appreciation program,” the company said.

Many features will be back up this week, but its PlayStation Store, where users buy games, movies and other downloadable content, will not be available until later this month, Sony said.

“Sony continues to place utmost priority on its network strategy,” Mr. Hirai said. “We intend to continue our global expansion.”

 

Sony Says Parts of Playstation Network Will Be Back Online This Week

 

TOKYO — Sony said Sunday that parts of its PlayStation network will be back online “this week” after hackers infiltrated the service, made off with detailed personal information and forced a catastrophic system shutdown.

But it could take until the end of the month for a full reboot of the PlayStation Network, which links 77 million gamers worldwide, the Japanese electronics and entertainment company announced at a press conference in Tokyo.

“I am deeply sorry for worrying, and inconveniencing, our users,” said Kazuo Hirai, Sony’s executive deputy president, bowing deeply.

The security debacle has dealt a serious blow to Sony’s bid to build an online network that brings gaming and music content to its universe of gadgets. Sony has lagged behind in building an online presence behind the likes of Apple and its popular online iTunes and App Store services.

The Japanese electronics and entertainment company has also faced questions about whether it moved quickly enough to inform its users of the breach. The PlayStation network went down on April 20, but Sony did not disclose that personal data had been stolen until a full week later.

A subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives has sent a letter to Sony asking for information about the attack, including when the intrusion occurred, if Sony knew who was responsible for the attack and when the company notified law enforcement.

According to Sony, an “unauthorized person” hacked into Sony servers last month and obtained personal information on PlayStation and Qriocity account holders, including their names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and user names and passwords for the PlayStation Network.

The company said that other confidential information, including credit card numbers, could have been compromised, warning customers to “remain vigilant” by monitoring identity theft or other financial loss.

The hacker attack targeted Sony severs over three days in mid-April, Mr. Hirai said. The company first became aware of the unauthorized access on April 19, and shut down its servers the following day.

Sony said usernames and passwords to the network were not encrypted, but the credit card information it had for about 10 million users had been encrypted and that there was yet no evidence that this data was taken.

The company was working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as legal enforcement agencies in other countries, in investigating the attack, it said.

Mr. Hirai acknowledged that Sony had been slow in providing information on the network breach to its users. It had taken the company time to gather accurate data on the breach, he explained.

“Inspecting and analyzing a vast amount of data unfortunately took a lot of time,” he said. “We wanted to make sure that the information we provided was accurate as possible.”

Mr. Hirai said that Sony’s online networks would remain central to the company’s business. Sony’s new Qriocity service, which is used to stream audio and video to high-end Sony televisions, Sony Blu-ray players and other Web-enabled Sony devices, was also knocked offline in the attack.

Once the network is up and running, Sony users will be forced to change their passwords before they can connect. Sony will offer free content and other freebies as part of an “appreciation program,” the company said.

Many features will be back up this week, but its PlayStation Store, where users buy games, movies and other downloadable content, will not be available until later this month, Sony said.

“Sony continues to place utmost priority on its network strategy,” Mr. Hirai said. “We intend to continue our global expansion.”

 

Aspiring Authors Get Help Online

 

In the old days of publishing, getting your manuscript into the hands of an editor often meant mailing the unsolicited finished product to the offices of literary agents or editors, where it would receive a cursory look from an editorial assistant — or none at all.

A modern version of the slush pile is the online “writing community,” a Web site where aspiring novelists can post their ideas, writing samples or manuscripts and open them to comments and reviews from strangers.

On Tuesday Penguin Group USA, the publisher of Tom Clancy, Kathryn Stockett and Nora Roberts, will unveil its own venture, Book Country, a Web site for writers of genre fiction.

In its initial phase Book Country will allow writers to post their own work — whether it’s an opening chapter or a full manuscript — and receive critiques from other users, who can comment on points like character development, pacing and dialogue. Later this summer the site will generate revenue by allowing users to self-publish their books for a fee by ordering printed copies. (The books will bear the stamp of Book Country, not Penguin, and the site is considered a separate operation from Penguin.)

The site will also explain the business of finding an agent, marketing and promoting a book, using social media and handling digital and subsidiary rights.

Penguin hopes the site will attract agents, editors and publishers scouting for new talent, and allow writers to produce work with more polish and direction than they could otherwise.

The project has been spearheaded by Molly Barton, the director of business development for Penguin and the president of Book Country.

“One of the things I remember really clearly from my early editorial experiences was this feeling of guilt,” Ms. Barton said in an interview. “I would read submissions and not be able to help the writer because we couldn’t find a place for them on the list that I was acquiring for. And I kept feeling that there was something we could do on the Internet to really help writers help each other.”

Book Country users are invited to submit work in certain genres: romance, fantasy, science fiction, thriller and mystery. Those categories are broken down into subgenres like military science fiction, steampunk, space opera and alternate history.

In one discussion in a test version of the Web site, users debated the question, “Is your hook ‘high concept?’?” (A sample from a writer who signed in as K. S. Brown: “A vampire is kidnapped and tortured, and the man her secret government sends to rescue her is a weredragon, the ancient enemy of all vampires.”)

To discourage plagiarism, administrators have disabled the copy-and-paste and print mechanisms on the site.

Ms. Barton said she had been influenced by Web sites like Ravelry, a popular site for knitters and crocheters. It has more than 1.3 million registered users.

Countless writers’ Web sites have popped up in recent years, including Writers Cafe, Protagonize and Mibba, but executives at Penguin said other sites did not provide so comprehensive an experience as the site they wanted to create.

 

Bits: Children Fail to Recognize Online Ads, Study Says

“Hey kids, this is advertising.”

A thin banner with those words, or some variation of them, appears on various game sites that are aimed at children and sponsored by food companies like General Mills. The companies say such banners alert players that the games are a form of advertising, meant to encourage loyalty to cereals or junk food whose images often appear somewhere in the game.

But the banners and other notifications do not work, according to a study published in the spring edition of The Journal of Advertising. The paper finds that, despite the presence of the banners, children fail to recognize the games as advertising.

The banners “do not raise awareness of who put the game up or why they put the game up,” said one of the paper’s two authors, Susannah Stern, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of San Diego.

My Thursday story documents how food companies are seeking to reach children through “advergames.” Critics argue that such tactics blur the line between marketing and entertainment, while the companies contend that they have clearly labeled their sites as advertising.

Ms. Stern and a colleague looked at the reactions of 112 fourth-graders who played “Be a Popstar,” a game focused on the Honeycomb cereal brand that was available on Postopia, a site sponsored by Post Foods. The research found that the advertising notifications — which the study refers to as “ad breaks” — didn’t succeed in communicating the commercial nature of the site to most of the children.

Some children played a version of the game with ad labels, and some played a version with the labels removed. When the children were asked to identify the source of the game, there were no significant differences in the responses of the two groups. Thirty-four percent of all participants said the site had been created by a pop star or celebrity — the most common response. Some children even named particular stars, hypothesizing that the site was the product of, say, the Jonas Brothers. Only 10 percent correctly identified the source as the cereal maker or the Honeycomb brand.

In fact, researchers found that the children were more likely to believe that the site was trying to turn them into a pop star than that it was trying to make them want to eat Honeycomb cereal. (However, the research also showed that students who saw the ad labels were significantly less likely to believe that the site had star-making intentions.)

Even children who identified the cereal company or brand as the site’s sponsor tended not to recognize that it was intended to sell cereal. Only one participant picked up such “selling intent,” while 35 percent said the site was meant to be entertainment and 40 percent said it was intended to be informative.

Ms. Stern said the research suggested to her that companies or policy makers needed to consider some way to standardize notifications about advertising online so children understood what they were seeing.

 

In Online Games, a Path to Young Consumers

Lesly likes this online game so much that she plays twice a week, often e-mailing her creations to friends. “I always send them to my cousin in Los Angeles,” she said.

But this is not just a game — it is also advertising. Create a Comic, as it is called, was created by General Mills to help it sell Honey Nut Cheerios to children.

Like many marketers, General Mills and other food companies are rewriting the rules for reaching children in the Internet age. These companies, often selling sugar cereals and junk food, are using multimedia games, online quizzes and cellphone apps to build deep ties with young consumers. And children like Lesly are sharing their messages through e-mail and social networks, effectively acting as marketers.

When these tactics revolve around food, and blur the line between advertising and entertainment, they are a source of intensifying concern for nutrition experts and children’s advocates — and are attracting scrutiny from regulators. The Federal Trade Commission has undertaken a study of food marketing to children, due out this summer, while the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity has said one reason so many children are overweight is the way junk food is marketed.

Critics say the ads, from major companies like Unilever and Post Foods, let marketers engage children in a way they cannot on television, where rules limit commercial time during children’s programming. With hundreds of thousands of visits monthly to many of these sites, the ads are becoming part of children’s daily digital journeys, often flying under the radar of parents and policy makers, the critics argue.

“Food marketers have tried to reach children since the age of the carnival barker, but they’ve never had so much access to them and never been able to bypass parents so successfully,” said Susan Linn, a psychiatry instructor at Harvard Medical School and director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an advocacy coalition. Ms. Linn and others point to many studies that show the link between junk-food marketing and poor diets, which are implicated in childhood obesity.

Food industry representatives call the criticism unfair and say they have become less aggressive in marketing to children in the Internet era, not more so.

Since 2006, 17 major corporations — including General Mills, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Burger King — have taken a voluntary pledge to reduce marketing of their least nutritious brands to children, an effort they updated last year to include marketing on mobile devices.

The pledge says the companies, if they choose to market to children, will only advertise food choices that are “better for you,” said Elaine D. Kolish, director of the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, an arm of the Better Business Bureau that oversees the pledge.

“Compliance is excellent,” she said of the pledge. She noted that in recent months, companies had shut down several child-centric sites, including General Mills’s popular virtual world Millsberry, while other sites have been changed to focus on adults, like those of Kellogg’s Pop Tarts and Pepsi’s Cap’n Crunch. And she said General Mills and Post Foods had cut or pledged to cut the amount of sugar in some cereals.

Only rarely do these major companies violate their pledges, she said: “It’s pretty darn infrequent and it’s not willful.”

Nutrition experts say that the voluntary pledges are fraught with loopholes, and that “better for you” is a relative term that allows companies to keep marketing unhealthful options.

Whatever criticism they may invite, the companies have good financial reason to pitch to children. James McNeal, a former marketing professor at Texas A&M University, estimates conservatively that children influence more than $100 billion in food and beverage purchases each year, and well over half of all cold cereal purchases.

Children “have power over spending in the household, they have power over the grandparents, they have power over the babysitters, and on and on and on,” said Professor McNeal, who has researched family behavior for decades and consulted for major companies on marketing to children. “All of that is finally being recognized and acknowledged.”

Some parents, like Lesly Lopez’s mother, Toribia Huerta, 26, say the online marketing is subverting their efforts to improve their children’s diets. Ms. Huerta said Lesly and her younger siblings pester her for sugary cereals they see in the games and for snacks like Baby Bottle Pops, a candy with a game site that the girl also visits often.

“They ask me for it constantly. They’re hard to resist when they whine,” Ms. Huerta said, speaking in Spanish through a translator. She blames her daughter’s love of sugar for her dental problems, including many cavities.

But Ms. Huerta also said the food sites seemed fun and safe: “They look like good games for her age.”

Games for Goods

Joshua Brustein contributed reporting from New York.

 

Bits: Marketing to Children Online: What Do You Think?

Food companies try to reach children online with Web sites, virtual worlds and video games that may not, at first, appear to be advertising. Children who may think they are simply playing video games are in fact engaging with sophisticated commercials, a practice that is beginning to attract scrutiny from regulators. Matt Richtel has just written an article about the issues raised by these advertisements .

Where do you think food companies should draw the line when communicating with children online? Should there be more regulation in this area?

Post your thoughts in the comments below. If you have questions for Mr. Richtel, leave them here as well. He will respond to readers in a Bits post on Thursday.

 

Bits: McDonald's Makes Subtle Play for Children Online

  There are few references to food on McWorld, a virtual world created for McDonald’s.

McWorld, a Web site for children sponsored by McDonald’s, offers visitors the chance to create characters, decorate digital treehouses and go on a quest in a virtual world.

French fries, hamburgers and apple pies are nowhere to be seen.

This is the latest in online marketing, where the hope is that a site’s visitor will naturally associate the brand with a pleasurable activity. It is a type of advertising that has less in common with a 30-second television spot than with a product placement in a movie.

It is also a glimpse of the future, said Mark Smale, a senior vice president with Creata, the Australian company that created the site for McDonald’s. Mr. Smale said in an interview that companies are realizing that, when going online, the best strategy is to forgo immediate sales in order to build lasting emotional relationships with children. In that sense, McWorld is a more sophisticated version of the sites that Matt Richtel discusses in an article about the online marketing of food to children.

“It’s not overtly aimed at trying to sell product,” Mr. Smale said. “If it is, the people you’re trying to reach won’t be interested, they won’t be engaged.”

This approach, known as engagement-based marketing, has become an important tool for companies marketing to children. Mr. Smale’s clients also include Kellogg’s, Nestle, and Coca-Cola. At an industry conference in New York in February, about 50 people gathered to hear Mr. Smale talk about Creata’s approach.

Critics see such marketing as an unfair way to manipulate children who may not realize what is going on. And there are parts of McWorld and other food sites that encourage purchases. McWorld prompts children to enter codes from Happy Meal boxes to unlock things like special gear for their online avatars.

Kathryn Montgomery, a communications professor at American University who studies marketing to youth, said it would be more honest if McWorld did feature McDonald’s food. At least then the company’s intentions would be clear.

Modern marketing, she said, “is about kids playing with the brand, making friends with the brand, interacting with the brand and communicating with friends in the branding environment.” But in the end, she said, “it’s all about pushing the product.”

McDonald’s dismisses concerns that children cannot distinguish between entertainment and marketing online. Heather Oldani, a company spokeswoman, said McDonald’s had more than 50 years of experience in communicating with young consumers, and that it followed its own guidelines and those of the industry about what is age-appropriate.

“Our standards are high, both from an industry and self-regulatory perspective. And those standards are consistent across all of our communications, whether online or traditional advertising,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Mr. Smale said it would be inappropriate to have a Web site whose sole purpose was to sell food to children. But he said that engaging them with games and other forms of entertainment was different, and entirely acceptable.

Most restrictions imposed on Web sites aimed at children center on privacy. Players on McWorld are anonymous so the site complies with the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. But there are no regulations when it comes to pitching products to children under the guise of entertainment, as there are on television.

The limiting factor on how hard to push sales online is whether companies believe they will drive children away, Mr. Smale said. Television viewers learn to tune out commercials during their favorite shows, a strategy that does not work as well when the commercials are embedded into the entertainment itself.

Branded Web sites work for food companies because it is “getting them out of the position of interrupting the fun,” Mr. Smale said. ” They’re part of the fun.”

 

In Online Games, a Path to Young Consumers

 

Lesly likes this online game so much that she plays twice a week, often e-mailing her creations to friends. “I always send them to my cousin in Los Angeles,” she said.

But this is not just a game — it is also advertising. Create a Comic, as it is called, was created by General Mills to help it sell Honey Nut Cheerios to children.

Like many marketers, General Mills and other food companies are rewriting the rules for reaching children in the Internet age. These companies, often selling sugar cereals and junk food, are using multimedia games, online quizzes and cellphone apps to build deep ties with young consumers. And children like Lesly are sharing their messages through e-mail and social networks, effectively acting as marketers.

When these tactics revolve around food, and blur the line between advertising and entertainment, they are a source of intensifying concern for nutrition experts and children’s advocates — and are attracting scrutiny from regulators. The Federal Trade Commission has undertaken a study of food marketing to children, due out this summer, while the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity has said one reason so many children are overweight is the way junk food is marketed.

Critics say the ads, from major companies like Unilever and Post Foods, let marketers engage children in a way they cannot on television, where rules limit commercial time during children’s programming. With hundreds of thousands of visits monthly to many of these sites, the ads are becoming part of children’s daily digital journeys, often flying under the radar of parents and policy makers, the critics argue.

“Food marketers have tried to reach children since the age of the carnival barker, but they’ve never had so much access to them and never been able to bypass parents so successfully,” said Susan Linn, a psychiatry instructor at Harvard Medical School and director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an advocacy coalition. Ms. Linn and others point to many studies that show the link between junk-food marketing and poor diets, which are implicated in childhood obesity.

Food industry representatives call the criticism unfair and say they have become less aggressive in marketing to children in the Internet era, not more so.

Since 2006, 17 major corporations — including General Mills, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Burger King — have taken a voluntary pledge to reduce marketing of their least nutritious brands to children, an effort they updated last year to include marketing on mobile devices.

The pledge says the companies, if they choose to market to children, will only advertise food choices that are “better for you,” said Elaine D. Kolish, director of the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, an arm of the Better Business Bureau that oversees the pledge.

“Compliance is excellent,” she said of the pledge. She noted that in recent months, companies had shut down several child-centric sites, including General Mills’s popular virtual world Millsberry, while other sites have been changed to focus on adults, like those of Kellogg’s Pop Tarts and Pepsi’s Cap’n Crunch. And she said General Mills and Post Foods had cut or pledged to cut the amount of sugar in some cereals.

Only rarely do these major companies violate their pledges, she said: “It’s pretty darn infrequent and it’s not willful.”

Nutrition experts say that the voluntary pledges are fraught with loopholes, and that “better for you” is a relative term that allows companies to keep marketing unhealthful options.

Whatever criticism they may invite, the companies have good financial reason to pitch to children. James McNeal, a former marketing professor at Texas A&M University, estimates conservatively that children influence more than $100 billion in food and beverage purchases each year, and well over half of all cold cereal purchases.

Children “have power over spending in the household, they have power over the grandparents, they have power over the babysitters, and on and on and on,” said Professor McNeal, who has researched family behavior for decades and consulted for major companies on marketing to children. “All of that is finally being recognized and acknowledged.”

Some parents, like Lesly Lopez’s mother, Toribia Huerta, 26, say the online marketing is subverting their efforts to improve their children’s diets. Ms. Huerta said Lesly and her younger siblings pester her for sugary cereals they see in the games and for snacks like Baby Bottle Pops, a candy with a game site that the girl also visits often.

“They ask me for it constantly. They’re hard to resist when they whine,” Ms. Huerta said, speaking in Spanish through a translator. She blames her daughter’s love of sugar for her dental problems, including many cavities.

But Ms. Huerta also said the food sites seemed fun and safe: “They look like good games for her age.”

Games for Goods

Joshua Brustein contributed reporting from New York.

 

In Online Games, a Path to Young Consumers

 

Lesly likes this online game so much that she plays twice a week, often e-mailing her creations to friends. “I always send them to my cousin in Los Angeles,” she said.

But this is not just a game — it is also advertising. Create a Comic, as it is called, was created by General Mills to help it sell Honey Nut Cheerios to children.

Like many marketers, General Mills and other food companies are rewriting the rules for reaching children in the Internet age. These companies, often selling sugar cereals and junk food, are using multimedia games, online quizzes and cellphone apps to build deep ties with young consumers. And children like Lesly are sharing their messages through e-mail and social networks, effectively acting as marketers.

When these tactics revolve around food, and blur the line between advertising and entertainment, they are a source of intensifying concern for nutrition experts and children’s advocates — and are attracting scrutiny from regulators. The Federal Trade Commission has undertaken a study of food marketing to children, due out this summer, while the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity has said one reason so many children are overweight is the way junk food is marketed.

Critics say the ads, from major companies like Unilever and Post Foods, let marketers engage children in a way they cannot on television, where rules limit commercial time during children’s programming. With hundreds of thousands of visits monthly to many of these sites, the ads are becoming part of children’s daily digital journeys, often flying under the radar of parents and policy makers, the critics argue.

“Food marketers have tried to reach children since the age of the carnival barker, but they’ve never had so much access to them and never been able to bypass parents so successfully,” said Susan Linn, a psychiatry instructor at Harvard Medical School and director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an advocacy coalition. Ms. Linn and others point to many studies that show the link between junk-food marketing and poor diets, which are implicated in childhood obesity.

Food industry representatives call the criticism unfair and say they have become less aggressive in marketing to children in the Internet era, not more so.

Since 2006, 17 major corporations — including General Mills, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Burger King — have taken a voluntary pledge to reduce marketing of their least nutritious brands to children, an effort they updated last year to include marketing on mobile devices.

The pledge says the companies, if they choose to market to children, will only advertise food choices that are “better for you,” said Elaine D. Kolish, director of the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, an arm of the Better Business Bureau that oversees the pledge.

“Compliance is excellent,” she said of the pledge. She noted that in recent months, companies had shut down several child-centric sites, including General Mills’s popular virtual world Millsberry, while other sites have been changed to focus on adults, like those of Kellogg’s Pop Tarts and Pepsi’s Cap’n Crunch. And she said General Mills and Post Foods had cut or pledged to cut the amount of sugar in some cereals.

Only rarely do these major companies violate their pledges, she said: “It’s pretty darn infrequent and it’s not willful.”

Nutrition experts say that the voluntary pledges are fraught with loopholes, and that “better for you” is a relative term that allows companies to keep marketing unhealthful options.

Whatever criticism they may invite, the companies have good financial reason to pitch to children. James McNeal, a former marketing professor at Texas A&M University, estimates conservatively that children influence more than $100 billion in food and beverage purchases each year, and well over half of all cold cereal purchases.

Children “have power over spending in the household, they have power over the grandparents, they have power over the babysitters, and on and on and on,” said Professor McNeal, who has researched family behavior for decades and consulted for major companies on marketing to children. “All of that is finally being recognized and acknowledged.”

Some parents, like Lesly Lopez’s mother, Toribia Huerta, 26, say the online marketing is subverting their efforts to improve their children’s diets. Ms. Huerta said Lesly and her younger siblings pester her for sugary cereals they see in the games and for snacks like Baby Bottle Pops, a candy with a game site that the girl also visits often.

“They ask me for it constantly. They’re hard to resist when they whine,” Ms. Huerta said, speaking in Spanish through a translator. She blames her daughter’s love of sugar for her dental problems, including many cavities.

But Ms. Huerta also said the food sites seemed fun and safe: “They look like good games for her age.”

Games for Goods

Joshua Brustein contributed reporting from New York.

 

In Online Games, a Path to Young Consumers

Lesly likes this online game so much that she plays twice a week, often e-mailing her creations to friends. “I always send them to my cousin in Los Angeles,” she said.

But this is not just a game — it is also advertising. Create a Comic, as it is called, was created by General Mills to help it sell Honey Nut Cheerios to children.

Like many marketers, General Mills and other food companies are rewriting the rules for reaching children in the Internet age. These companies, often selling sugar cereals and junk food, are using multimedia games, online quizzes and cellphone apps to build deep ties with young consumers. And children like Lesly are sharing their messages through e-mail and social networks, effectively acting as marketers.

When these tactics revolve around food, and blur the line between advertising and entertainment, they are a source of intensifying concern for nutrition experts and children’s advocates — and are attracting scrutiny from regulators. The Federal Trade Commission has undertaken a study of food marketing to children, due out this summer, while the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity has said one reason so many children are overweight is the way junk food is marketed.

Critics say the ads, from major companies like Unilever and Post Foods, let marketers engage children in a way they cannot on television, where rules limit commercial time during children’s programming. With hundreds of thousands of visits monthly to many of these sites, the ads are becoming part of children’s daily digital journeys, often flying under the radar of parents and policy makers, the critics argue.

“Food marketers have tried to reach children since the age of the carnival barker, but they’ve never had so much access to them and never been able to bypass parents so successfully,” said Susan Linn, a psychiatry instructor at Harvard Medical School and director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an advocacy coalition. Ms. Linn and others point to many studies that show the link between junk-food marketing and poor diets, which are implicated in childhood obesity.

Food industry representatives call the criticism unfair and say they have become less aggressive in marketing to children in the Internet era, not more so.

Since 2006, 17 major corporations — including General Mills, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Burger King — have taken a voluntary pledge to reduce marketing of their least nutritious brands to children, an effort they updated last year to include marketing on mobile devices.

The pledge says the companies, if they choose to market to children, will only advertise food choices that are “better for you,” said Elaine D. Kolish, director of the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, an arm of the Better Business Bureau that oversees the pledge.

“Compliance is excellent,” she said of the pledge. She noted that in recent months, companies had shut down several child-centric sites, including General Mills’s popular virtual world Millsberry, while other sites have been changed to focus on adults, like those of Kellogg’s Pop Tarts and Pepsi’s Cap’n Crunch. And she said General Mills and Post Foods had cut or pledged to cut the amount of sugar in some cereals.

Only rarely do these major companies violate their pledges, she said: “It’s pretty darn infrequent and it’s not willful.”

Nutrition experts say that the voluntary pledges are fraught with loopholes, and that “better for you” is a relative term that allows companies to keep marketing unhealthful options.

Whatever criticism they may invite, the companies have good financial reason to pitch to children. James McNeal, a former marketing professor at Texas A&M University, estimates conservatively that children influence more than $100 billion in food and beverage purchases each year, and well over half of all cold cereal purchases.

Children “have power over spending in the household, they have power over the grandparents, they have power over the babysitters, and on and on and on,” said Professor McNeal, who has researched family behavior for decades and consulted for major companies on marketing to children. “All of that is finally being recognized and acknowledged.”

Some parents, like Lesly Lopez’s mother, Toribia Huerta, 26, say the online marketing is subverting their efforts to improve their children’s diets. Ms. Huerta said Lesly and her younger siblings pester her for sugary cereals they see in the games and for snacks like Baby Bottle Pops, a candy with a game site that the girl also visits often.

“They ask me for it constantly. They’re hard to resist when they whine,” Ms. Huerta said, speaking in Spanish through a translator. She blames her daughter’s love of sugar for her dental problems, including many cavities.

But Ms. Huerta also said the food sites seemed fun and safe: “They look like good games for her age.”

Games for Goods

Joshua Brustein contributed reporting from New York.

 

Bits: Video Surfaces Online Showcasing Different iOS Interface

 Tinhte.vn

A video appeared online Tuesday that shows never-before-seen features of the Apple iPhone iOS. The video was created by Tinhte.vn, a Vietnamese technology blog.

The clip, which can be seen below,?demonstrates?a new design for the iPhone that allows users to jump between apps currently running on the phone. When a user presses the home button twice, the screen zooms out to show a tiled view of currently running applications.?A user can then switch to another app by pressing the desired tile.

It is unclear if the new interface is an early?prototype, showcasing features that will make it into the next iPhone update, or if the designs were killed by Apple during the development of the iPhone 4, which was released last year.

Either way, the video is quickly making the rounds in the tech blogosphere, where most believe it showcases an authentic Apple design.?Bloggers were also excited that the demonstration takes place on the highly coveted white iPhone 4. The white iPhone has been delayed for months because of discoloration problems with the phone’s exterior.

 

 

In Online Games, a Path to Young Consumers

Lesly likes this online game so much that she plays twice a week, often e-mailing her creations to friends. “I always send them to my cousin in Los Angeles,” she said.

But this is not just a game — it is also advertising. Create a Comic, as it is called, was created by General Mills to help it sell Honey Nut Cheerios to children.

Like many marketers, General Mills and other food companies are rewriting the rules for reaching children in the Internet age. These companies, often selling sugar cereals and junk food, are using multimedia games, online quizzes and cellphone apps to build deep ties with young consumers. And children like Lesly are sharing their messages through e-mail and social networks, effectively acting as marketers.

When these tactics revolve around food, and blur the line between advertising and entertainment, they are a source of intensifying concern for nutrition experts and children’s advocates — and are attracting scrutiny from regulators. The Federal Trade Commission has undertaken a study of food marketing to children, due out this summer, while the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity has said one reason so many children are overweight is the way junk food is marketed.

Critics say the ads, from major companies like Unilever and Post Foods, let marketers engage children in a way they cannot on television, where rules limit commercial time during children’s programming. With hundreds of thousands of visits monthly to many of these sites, the ads are becoming part of children’s daily digital journeys, often flying under the radar of parents and policy makers, the critics argue.

“Food marketers have tried to reach children since the age of the carnival barker, but they’ve never had so much access to them and never been able to bypass parents so successfully,” said Susan Linn, a psychiatry instructor at Harvard Medical School and director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an advocacy coalition. Ms. Linn and others point to many studies that show the link between junk-food marketing and poor diets, which are implicated in childhood obesity.

Food industry representatives call the criticism unfair and say they have become less aggressive in marketing to children in the Internet era, not more so.

Since 2006, 17 major corporations — including General Mills, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Burger King — have taken a voluntary pledge to reduce marketing of their least nutritious brands to children, an effort they updated last year to include marketing on mobile devices.

The pledge says the companies, if they choose to market to children, will only advertise food choices that are “better for you,” said Elaine D. Kolish, director of the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, an arm of the Better Business Bureau that oversees the pledge.

“Compliance is excellent,” she said of the pledge. She noted that in recent months, companies had shut down several child-centric sites, including General Mills’s popular virtual world Millsberry, while other sites have been changed to focus on adults, like those of Kellogg’s Pop Tarts and Pepsi’s Cap’n Crunch. And she said General Mills and Post Foods had cut or pledged to cut the amount of sugar in some cereals.

Only rarely do these major companies violate their pledges, she said: “It’s pretty darn infrequent and it’s not willful.”

Nutrition experts say that the voluntary pledges are fraught with loopholes, and that “better for you” is a relative term that allows companies to keep marketing unhealthful options.

Whatever criticism they may invite, the companies have good financial reason to pitch to children. James McNeal, a former marketing professor at Texas A&M University, estimates conservatively that children influence more than $100 billion in food and beverage purchases each year, and well over half of all cold cereal purchases.

Children “have power over spending in the household, they have power over the grandparents, they have power over the babysitters, and on and on and on,” said Professor McNeal, who has researched family behavior for decades and consulted for major companies on marketing to children. “All of that is finally being recognized and acknowledged.”

Some parents, like Lesly Lopez’s mother, Toribia Huerta, 26, say the online marketing is subverting their efforts to improve their children’s diets. Ms. Huerta said Lesly and her younger siblings pester her for sugary cereals they see in the games and for snacks like Baby Bottle Pops, a candy with a game site that the girl also visits often.

“They ask me for it constantly. They’re hard to resist when they whine,” Ms. Huerta said, speaking in Spanish through a translator. She blames her daughter’s love of sugar for her dental problems, including many cavities.

But Ms. Huerta also said the food sites seemed fun and safe: “They look like good games for her age.”

Games for Goods

Joshua Brustein contributed reporting from New York.

 

Republicans Sharpening Online Tools for 2012

“Hi, everybody,” Mr. Obama says in the 30-second YouTube video posted Monday on his Facebook page. “I just want to take a minute to invite you to a town hall meeting on the economy that I’m holding at Facebook’s headquarters this Wednesday, April 20. It is going to be live-streamed, and I will answer questions from folks across the country.”

By Tuesday afternoon, more than 22,000 people had signed up.

It is all part of Mr. Obama’s re-election effort to use social media and other online tools to galvanize supporters. But unlike in the last presidential campaign, Republicans are better prepared to compete online in the 2012 contest.

“The notion that the Internet was owned by liberals, owned by the left in the wake of the Obama victory, has been proven false,” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican political online strategist who is now advising the exploratory campaign of Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, after working as a digital adviser to President George W. Bush’s campaign in 2004 and later to the Republican National Committee.

During last year’s midterm elections, Republicans caught up with Democrats in using technology and social networks, and now many Republicans elected to the House and Senate are using these tools more than Democrats, according to several political and technology experts.

“This will be the first election in modern history that both parties are understanding the potential of the technology to change the results of the election,” said Andrew Rasiej, a co-founder of TechPresident.com, a blog that covers politics and technology, and a digital adviser to Democrats since Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004. “Both Republicans and Democrats are ready to use online platforms and are no longer skeptical of its potential.”

What Republicans recognized after Senator John McCain’s bruising defeat in 2008 is that Mr. Obama’s digital strategy was deeply integrated into his real-world campaign. Mr. Obama’s team used its Web site, e-mails and text messages to do more than broadcast his campaign message. The tools made it easier for people to donate online, to volunteer for the field operation, particularly in caucus states, and to assume responsibility for other aspects of the campaign, like assembling groups of neighbors for a chat and creating the Obama ’08 iPhone app.

“You learn more from losing than winning sometimes,” said Matt Lira, who worked on the digital team for Mr. McCain’s presidential campaign and who is now director of new media for Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican majority leader.

Mr. Lira said that House Republicans, meeting in January 2009, made a commitment to get into the digital game and moved aggressively during last year’s midterm elections to sign up members and potential candidates on Twitter and Facebook.

“You did not become a top recruit for the House unless you intended to make a robust use of the Web,” Mr. Lira said.

Sarah Palin, who started a brand-new Web site Tuesday with features that allow supporters to easily donate to her political action committee, has long had an established and robust presence on Twitter and Facebook, where she has almost 2.9 million fans. Other possible Republican presidential contenders in 2012, including Newt Gingrich, Representative Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee, use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well. Mitt Romney announced his exploratory committee last week with a video, an update on his Facebook page, which has almost 845,000 members, a Twitter post introducing the hashtag #mitt2012, and a new Web site.

Mr. Pawlenty introduced an innovative twist: a social gaming layer borrowed from Farmville and Foursquare that awards badges and points to supporters who participate more fully in the campaign. As an example, supporters get 10 points for connecting their Facebook account to the campaign’s Web site and 5 points for adding their Twitter account. If you post a message on your Facebook page or set up your own group, you get a badge.

Facebook, in particular, allows candidates to harvest valuable data. By getting permission from supporters to use their Facebook account to log in, campaigns can gain access, depending on a user’s privacy settings, to a supporter’s e-mail address, hometown and personal network. “The days of going to a Web site and signing up and waiting to hear back from a volunteer coordinator about how you can get involved are over,” Mr. Ruffini said.

None of the Republican or Democratic digital strategists are claiming that social media, mobile and other digital tools alone will win a campaign. While Facebook and other social media channels will undoubtedly be powerful tools for presidential contenders in 2012, voters can still expect a barrage of traditional television campaign advertising and direct mail.

“We look at the number of Facebook fans, Web visits, and it is not anywhere near the reach of television,” Mr. Ruffini said. “But things like the Facebook news feeds give us the ability to deliver information into average people’s feeds.”

Republican voters matched Democrats in their use of these tools, with 40 percent of Republican online users turning to social media to get politically involved in a campaign, compared to 38 percent of Democratic voters, according to a study by the Pew Research Center for the Internet and Society. Tea Party supporters were especially likely to use social media to connect with a political group or candidate.

“It is not necessarily that Democrats or young people or liberals have become less active,” said Aaron Smith, the author of the study. “It is more that older adults, conservative voters and Tea Party activists have come to join the party.”

Republican presidential contenders still face a formidable online foe in Mr. Obama. He announced his re-election campaign this month with an e-mail and text message blast, posts on Twitter, a short video on YouTube and a new app that connects supporters and their Facebook friends to his campaign Web site with a question, “Are you in?”

“We will use social media and the latest technology available to fuel the energy and commitment of folks on the ground, community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, house to house, all around the country,” said Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign.

 

Advertising: Checkout Coupon Company Joins Boom in Online Discount Offers

The Catalina Marketing Corporation is introducing Coupon Network by Catalina, to be found online at Couponnetwork.com. Advertisers with offers on the Web site include pantry mainstays like Campbell Soup, General Mills, Kellogg, Kraft Foods, Nestlé, Reckitt Benckiser and Unilever.

There are also some unexpected offers on Couponnetwork.com, among them savings on toys from the Fisher-Price division of Mattel and light bulbs from General Electric.

Coupon Network is an addition to the decades-old businesses that Catalina calls shopper-driven marketing, intended to help advertisers more efficiently and effectively reach target audiences. Catalina estimates that it distributes more than $6.5 billion in coupons to shoppers each year through its printers at store checkout counters.

?

The checkout coupons provided by Catalina compete for consumer favor with coupons in free-standing inserts, which are the coupon booklets carried in Sunday newspapers; coupons in magazines and so-called penny-saver publications; and coupons distributed by direct mail.

Catalina is so well known for checkout coupons that many devoted couponers, as avid discount-seekers refer to themselves, call the offers “Catalinas.” There are few higher accolades in marketing than a brand becoming synonymous with a product, whether it is Band-Aid, Kleenex or Q-Tip.

Still, the online coupon field is alluring, because it is booming. Two factors are feeding its growth.

One is the increasing influence of the Internet in everyday life. Not only are there printers in millions of homes, readily printing out coupons from Web sites, but there is also the phenomenon of social daily-deal coupons from companies like Groupon and LivingSocial.

The other factor benefiting online coupons is the recent bumpy economy. Coupon redemption rates had been falling for decades until the recent recession.

Although online coupons account for only 1 percent of all coupons distributed, they account for about 10 percent of all coupons redeemed, said Susan Gear, group vice president for digital at Catalina in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Ms. Gear also noted that consumers “can print out coupons for exactly the products they want,” which adds to their appeal.

For some time, Ms. Gear said, Catalina had been considering an entry into the online coupon realm, joining Web sites like Coolsavings.com, Coupons.com, Couponmom.com, Redplum.com and Smartsource.com.

The idea gathered momentum after Catalina took technological steps in the last couple of years that included offering coupons by mobile e-mail, handling Target’s coupons section on its Web site and acquiring E-centives, an Internet coupon company.

In developing the Web site, Catalina consulted with advertisers, retailers and bloggers, among them the “Super-Coupon Queen,” Jill Cataldo.

“They’ve got a lot of great printable coupons” on Couponnetwork.com, said Ms. Cataldo, of Huntley, Ill., who has a Web site, Jillcataldo.com, and writes “Super-Couponing Tips,” a nationally syndicated column.

Coupon Network “is doing a good job giving us coupons we might not have seen before and are pretty relevant to what I buy,” she added.

Those are welcome words to an advertiser like Karl Schmidt, director for promotional marketing at General Mills in Golden Valley, Minn. “We’ve been going digital with print-at-home coupons since tests in 2001,” he said.

“In the early days of print-at-home, six, seven years ago, there were issues with redemption,” Mr. Schmidt said, as retailers declined to accept them. As that largely disappeared, digital coupons have become “a significant percentage of our spending,” he added.

“We get great results; it’s the perfect self-targeting medium,” Mr. Schmidt said. “And they’re available 24/7.”

Also, “digital coupons attract younger consumers,” he said, “who aren’t buying the Sunday newspapers” that carry free-standing inserts.

In the digital coupon realm, Catalina executives “are playing come from behind, which they’re probably not used to,” Mr. Schmidt said. “But they have strong content and a strong sales force.”

Another point in Catalina’s favor is that Couponnetwork.com includes a type of Catalina in-store offer, called YourBucks, that are prized by couponers like Ms. Cataldo because they offer discounts off whatever they buy the next time they shop rather than savings on a single specified item the way regular coupons do.

?

The retailers whose checkouts have been home to Catalina’s printers are unlikely to bemoan the company’s expansion online because they, too, have been going digital.

“More and more of our offerings are moving online as well, replacing circular coupons,” said Karen Meleta, a vice president at ShopRite, part of the Wakefern Food Corporation in Keasbey, N.J.

There is a section of Shoprite.com devoted to YourBucks along with other coupons.

Ms. Gear said Catalina has also been considering initiatives in areas like daily deals and group buying, adding, “We’re working with our clients to figure out how to market in this new world.”

“There’s a fun, engaging, gaming element to couponing,” Ms. Gear said. “We are exploring how you take the concept of social networks and add that to it.”

Among the attractive aspects of how social coupons work are the “element of urgency to the daily-deal buying,” she added, and their interruptive nature as companies “send out texts or e-mails.”

Because Catalina is privately held, she added, the company would not disclose how much it has spent on developing Coupon Network. Catalina is owned by the investment firm Hellman & Friedman.

 

Republicans Sharpening Online Tools for 2012

“Hi, everybody,” Mr. Obama says in the 30-second YouTube video posted Monday on his Facebook page. “I just want to take a minute to invite you to a town hall meeting on the economy that I’m holding at Facebook’s headquarters this Wednesday, April 20. It is going to be live-streamed, and I will answer questions from folks across the country.”

By Tuesday afternoon, more than 22,000 people had signed up.

It is all part of Mr. Obama’s re-election effort to use social media and other online tools to galvanize supporters. But unlike in the last presidential campaign, Republicans are better prepared to compete online in the 2012 contest.

“The notion that the Internet was owned by liberals, owned by the left in the wake of the Obama victory, has been proven false,” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican political online strategist who is now advising the exploratory campaign of Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, after working as a digital adviser to President George W. Bush’s campaign in 2004 and later to the Republican National Committee.

During last year’s midterm elections, Republicans caught up with Democrats in using technology and social networks, and now many Republicans elected to the House and Senate are using these tools more than Democrats, according to several political and technology experts.

“This will be the first election in modern history that both parties are understanding the potential of the technology to change the results of the election,” said Andrew Rasiej, a co-founder of TechPresident.com, a blog that covers politics and technology, and a digital adviser to Democrats since Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004. “Both Republicans and Democrats are ready to use online platforms and are no longer skeptical of its potential.”

What Republicans recognized after Senator John McCain’s bruising defeat in 2008 is that Mr. Obama’s digital strategy was deeply integrated into his real-world campaign. Mr. Obama’s team used its Web site, e-mails and text messages to do more than broadcast his campaign message. The tools made it easier for people to donate online, to volunteer for the field operation, particularly in caucus states, and to assume responsibility for other aspects of the campaign, like assembling groups of neighbors for a chat and creating the Obama ’08 iPhone app.

“You learn more from losing than winning sometimes,” said Matt Lira, who worked on the digital team for Mr. McCain’s presidential campaign and who is now director of new media for Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican majority leader.

Mr. Lira said that House Republicans, meeting in January 2009, made a commitment to get into the digital game and moved aggressively during last year’s midterm elections to sign up members and potential candidates on Twitter and Facebook.

“You did not become a top recruit for the House unless you intended to make a robust use of the Web,” Mr. Lira said.

Sarah Palin, who started a brand-new Web site Tuesday with features that allow supporters to easily donate to her political action committee, has long had an established and robust presence on Twitter and Facebook, where she has almost 2.9 million fans. Other possible Republican presidential contenders in 2012, including Newt Gingrich, Representative Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee, use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well. Mitt Romney announced his exploratory committee last week with a video, an update on his Facebook page, which has almost 845,000 members, a Twitter post introducing the hashtag #mitt2012, and a new Web site.

Mr. Pawlenty introduced an innovative twist: a social gaming layer borrowed from Farmville and Foursquare that awards badges and points to supporters who participate more fully in the campaign. As an example, supporters get 10 points for connecting their Facebook account to the campaign’s Web site and 5 points for adding their Twitter account. If you post a message on your Facebook page or set up your own group, you get a badge.

Facebook, in particular, allows candidates to harvest valuable data. By getting permission from supporters to use their Facebook account to log in, campaigns can gain access, depending on a user’s privacy settings, to a supporter’s e-mail address, hometown and personal network. “The days of going to a Web site and signing up and waiting to hear back from a volunteer coordinator about how you can get involved are over,” Mr. Ruffini said.

None of the Republican or Democratic digital strategists are claiming that social media, mobile and other digital tools alone will win a campaign. While Facebook and other social media channels will undoubtedly be powerful tools for presidential contenders in 2012, voters can still expect a barrage of traditional television campaign advertising and direct mail.

“We look at the number of Facebook fans, Web visits, and it is not anywhere near the reach of television,” Mr. Ruffini said. “But things like the Facebook news feeds give us the ability to deliver information into average people’s feeds.”

Republican voters matched Democrats in their use of these tools, with 40 percent of Republican online users turning to social media to get politically involved in a campaign, compared to 38 percent of Democratic voters, according to a study by the Pew Research Center for the Internet and Society. Tea Party supporters were especially likely to use social media to connect with a political group or candidate.

“It is not necessarily that Democrats or young people or liberals have become less active,” said Aaron Smith, the author of the study. “It is more that older adults, conservative voters and Tea Party activists have come to join the party.”

Republican presidential contenders still face a formidable online foe in Mr. Obama. He announced his re-election campaign this month with an e-mail and text message blast, posts on Twitter, a short video on YouTube and a new app that connects supporters and their Facebook friends to his campaign Web site with a question, “Are you in?”

“We will use social media and the latest technology available to fuel the energy and commitment of folks on the ground, community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, house to house, all around the country,” said Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign.

 

Foreign Money Fuels Faltering Bid to Push Online Poker

Former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, Republican of New York, has been the public face of the effort, which has included charity poker tournaments featuring members of Congress, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to a disparate assortment of lawmakers, including Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader.

But late last week, the United States Justice Department delivered an unexpected thunderbolt to this huge lobbying campaign when it indicted top executives at PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker, accusing them of fraud and money laundering. In doing so the government has taken on a politically powerful industry that for a while seemed like it might transform gambling around the world.

As evidence of the industry’s shifting fortunes, major gambling operators like Wynn Resorts are already distancing themselves from the three Internet gambling companies, canceling planned business alliances. ESPN has removed poker-related content from its own Internet site.

This is exactly what the industry was trying to prevent when it set out to block enforcement of a law intended to ban Internet games or to get the law repealed. Interviews show that the companies named in the indictment, while foreign-based, have indirectly been paying more than half of the lobbying and operating bills for a nonprofit organization that is championing Internet gambling in the United States.

Mr. Frank, in an interview on Monday, said he had no plan to back down. “It is a bad law,” he said. “How is it possible that a United States attorney in New York does not have anything more to do than indict people for a full house? He should be indicting people for the empty houses we have around,” referring to the troubles in the mortgage industry.

Mr. Frank and Representative John Campbell, Republican of California, in March introduced yet another bill, backed by the Poker Players Alliance, a Washington-based nonprofit group. Its budget is subsidized by a Canadian trade association whose members include the companies that run Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker.

As a senator, Mr. D’Amato played a regular poker game that featured lobbyists. On Friday, he said in a statement, “Online poker is not a crime and should not be treated as such.”

An estimated 10 million online poker players in the United States have turned to these Internet sites, helping generate perhaps as much as $5 billion in annual revenues for the companies.

On Friday the Justice Department said the companies had illegally moved their earnings to corporate headquarters in spots like the Isle of Man in Great Britain and Costa Rica by conspiring with middlemen who disguised them as sales of items like flowers, pet supplies and golf clubs.

John Pappas, the executive director of the Poker Players Alliance, pointed out on Monday that the organization is made up of an estimated 1.2 million members in the United States, including both amateur and professional players, who want to be able to bet online. One of the executives indicted, Raymond Bitar, 39, of California and Ireland, is a contributor to the Players Alliance Political Action Committee, donating about $15,000 of the $200,000 the committee has given to members of Congress in the last four years, with Mr. Frank collecting the biggest amounts.

But most of the money the committee gives to politicians here comes from individuals not cited in the indictment. And Mr. Pappas said the power of his group came not from industry giants but from its members.

“It is the 1.2 million members who live and vote in Congressional districts across the country,” he said. He did confirm that more than half of his organization’s budget is supported by industry companies, including those indicted Friday.

But the push in Washington, and much of the fund-raising, is coordinated by Poker Players Alliance, which relies in large part on contributions from the Internet-based operators. The organization spent $1.6 million on lobbying last year, using nine lobbying firms, and lobbyists like former Representative Jon Porter, Republican of Nevada, and Mr. D’Amato.

The Poker Players Alliance is enlisting players around the nation to call or write lawmakers to protest the restrictions. It hosts an annual “fly-in” day, when players fan out across Capitol Hill. And it sent representatives to — and set up a poker tournament at — the Conservative Political Action Conference this year, convinced it could find some recruits to its cause at the popular annual event.

In October 2009, 19 members of Congress signed a letter sent to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, urging them to impose a one-year delay on enforcing regulations intended to cut off payments to the Internet poker companies.

One of the lead signers of the letter was Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York; he calls Mr. D’Amato a friend and mentor, and Mr. D’Amato has served as one of his top fund-raisers. In total, 15 of the 19 signers of the letter received contributions from the Poker Player Alliance political action committee in the last election cycle.

Mr. Frank has been celebrated as one of the industry’s most important champions in Washington. He worked last year to push legislation through the Financial Services Committee, where he served as chairman until this year, that would legalize Internet poker, although the bill never got taken up by the Senate or the full House.

Mr. Frank, no poker player himself, has said he opposes the ban based on his distaste for government intervention into the private lives of citizens. His advocacy, he said, goes back to 2002, even before the Poker Players Alliance was set up.

Mr. Pappas, the executive director of the Poker Players Alliance, delivered $51,200 worth of bundled campaign contributions to Mr. Frank’s re-election campaign in late 2009, according to campaign finance reports. These contributions follow up on at least $30,000 more that Mr. Frank took in from the industry in the prior two years, including contributions from some of the industry’s most famous players, like Annie Duke (“The Duchess Of Poker”), Howard Lederer (“The Professor”) and Andy Bloch (“The Rock”).

For now, the companies that have been indicted — and their Internet site addresses seized by the Justice Department — have stopped taking bets from players in the United States, generating a wave of resentment from the millions of players who turned to the games, many several times a day.

 

Foreign Money Fuels Faltering Bid to Push Online Poker

Former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, Republican of New York, has been the public face of the effort, which has included charity poker tournaments featuring members of Congress, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to a disparate assortment of lawmakers, including Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader.

But late last week, the United States Justice Department delivered an unexpected thunderbolt to this huge lobbying campaign when it indicted top executives at PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker, accusing them of fraud and money laundering. In doing so the government has taken on a politically powerful industry that for a while seemed like it might transform gambling around the world.

As evidence of the industry’s shifting fortunes, major gambling operators like Wynn Resorts are already distancing themselves from the three Internet gambling companies, canceling planned business alliances. ESPN has removed poker-related content from its own Internet site.

This is exactly what the industry was trying to prevent when it set out to block enforcement of a law intended to ban Internet games or to get the law repealed. Interviews show that the companies named in the indictment, while foreign-based, have indirectly been paying more than half of the lobbying and operating bills for a nonprofit organization that is championing Internet gambling in the United States.

Mr. Frank, in an interview on Monday, said he had no plan to back down. “It is a bad law,” he said. “How is it possible that a United States attorney in New York does not have anything more to do than indict people for a full house? He should be indicting people for the empty houses we have around,” referring to the troubles in the mortgage industry.

Mr. Frank and Representative John Campbell, Republican of California, in March introduced yet another bill, backed by the Poker Players Alliance, a Washington-based nonprofit group. Its budget is subsidized by a Canadian trade association whose members include the companies that run Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker.

As a senator, Mr. D’Amato played a regular poker game that featured lobbyists. On Friday, he said in a statement, “Online poker is not a crime and should not be treated as such.”

An estimated 10 million online poker players in the United States have turned to these Internet sites, helping generate perhaps as much as $5 billion in annual revenues for the companies.

On Friday the Justice Department said the companies had illegally moved their earnings to corporate headquarters in spots like the Isle of Man in Great Britain and Costa Rica by conspiring with middlemen who disguised them as sales of items like flowers, pet supplies and golf clubs.

John Pappas, the executive director of the Poker Players Alliance, pointed out on Monday that the organization is made up of an estimated 1.2 million members in the United States, including both amateur and professional players, who want to be able to bet online. One of the executives indicted, Raymond Bitar, 39, of California and Ireland, is a contributor to the Players Alliance Political Action Committee, donating about $15,000 of the $200,000 the committee has given to members of Congress in the last four years, with Mr. Frank collecting the biggest amounts.

But most of the money the committee gives to politicians here comes from individuals not cited in the indictment. And Mr. Pappas said the power of his group came not from industry giants but from its members.

“It is the 1.2 million members who live and vote in Congressional districts across the country,” he said. He did confirm that more than half of his organization’s budget is supported by industry companies, including those indicted Friday.

But the push in Washington, and much of the fund-raising, is coordinated by Poker Players Alliance, which relies in large part on contributions from the Internet-based operators. The organization spent $1.6 million on lobbying last year, using nine lobbying firms, and lobbyists like former Representative Jon Porter, Republican of Nevada, and Mr. D’Amato.

The Poker Players Alliance is enlisting players around the nation to call or write lawmakers to protest the restrictions. It hosts an annual “fly-in” day, when players fan out across Capitol Hill. And it sent representatives to — and set up a poker tournament at — the Conservative Political Action Conference this year, convinced it could find some recruits to its cause at the popular annual event.

In October 2009, 19 members of Congress signed a letter sent to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, urging them to impose a one-year delay on enforcing regulations intended to cut off payments to the Internet poker companies.

One of the lead signers of the letter was Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York; he calls Mr. D’Amato a friend and mentor, and Mr. D’Amato has served as one of his top fund-raisers. In total, 15 of the 19 signers of the letter received contributions from the Poker Player Alliance political action committee in the last election cycle.

Mr. Frank has been celebrated as one of the industry’s most important champions in Washington. He worked last year to push legislation through the Financial Services Committee, where he served as chairman until this year, that would legalize Internet poker, although the bill never got taken up by the Senate or the full House.

Mr. Frank, no poker player himself, has said he opposes the ban based on his distaste for government intervention into the private lives of citizens. His advocacy, he said, goes back to 2002, even before the Poker Players Alliance was set up.

Mr. Pappas, the executive director of the Poker Players Alliance, delivered $51,200 worth of bundled campaign contributions to Mr. Frank’s re-election campaign in late 2009, according to campaign finance reports. These contributions follow up on at least $30,000 more that Mr. Frank took in from the industry in the prior two years, including contributions from some of the industry’s most famous players, like Annie Duke (“The Duchess Of Poker”), Howard Lederer (“The Professor”) and Andy Bloch (“The Rock”).

For now, the companies that have been indicted — and their Internet site addresses seized by the Justice Department — have stopped taking bets from players in the United States, generating a wave of resentment from the millions of players who turned to the games, many several times a day.

 

Foreign Money Fuels Faltering Bid to Push Online Poker

Former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, Republican of New York, has been the public face of the effort, which has included charity poker tournaments featuring members of Congress, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to a disparate assortment of lawmakers, including Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader.

But late last week, the United States Justice Department delivered an unexpected thunderbolt to this huge lobbying campaign when it indicted top executives at PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker, accusing them of fraud and money laundering. In doing so the government has taken on a politically powerful industry that for a while seemed like it might transform gambling around the world.

As evidence of the industry’s shifting fortunes, major gambling operators like Wynn Resorts are already distancing themselves from the three Internet gambling companies, canceling planned business alliances. ESPN has removed poker-related content from its own Internet site.

This is exactly what the industry was trying to prevent when it set out to block enforcement of a law intended to ban Internet games or to get the law repealed. Interviews show that the companies named in the indictment, while foreign-based, have indirectly been paying more than half of the lobbying and operating bills for a nonprofit organization that is championing Internet gambling in the United States.

Mr. Frank, in an interview on Monday, said he had no plan to back down. “It is a bad law,” he said. “How is it possible that a United States attorney in New York does not have anything more to do than indict people for a full house? He should be indicting people for the empty houses we have around,” referring to the troubles in the mortgage industry.

Mr. Frank and Representative John Campbell, Republican of California, in March introduced yet another bill, backed by the Poker Players Alliance, a Washington-based nonprofit group. Its budget is subsidized by a Canadian trade association whose members include the companies that run Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker.

As a senator, Mr. D’Amato played a regular poker game that featured lobbyists. On Friday, he said in a statement, “Online poker is not a crime and should not be treated as such.”

An estimated 10 million online poker players in the United States have turned to these Internet sites, helping generate perhaps as much as $5 billion in annual revenues for the companies.

On Friday the Justice Department said the companies had illegally moved their earnings to corporate headquarters in spots like the Isle of Man in Great Britain and Costa Rica by conspiring with middlemen who disguised them as sales of items like flowers, pet supplies and golf clubs.

John Pappas, the executive director of the Poker Players Alliance, pointed out on Monday that the organization is made up of an estimated 1.2 million members in the United States, including both amateur and professional players, who want to be able to bet online. One of the executives indicted, Raymond Bitar, 39, of California and Ireland, is a contributor to the Players Alliance Political Action Committee, donating about $15,000 of the $200,000 the committee has given to members of Congress in the last four years, with Mr. Frank collecting the biggest amounts.

But most of the money the committee gives to politicians here comes from individuals not cited in the indictment. And Mr. Pappas said the power of his group came not from industry giants but from its members.

“It is the 1.2 million members who live and vote in Congressional districts across the country,” he said. He did confirm that more than half of his organization’s budget is supported by industry companies, including those indicted Friday.

But the push in Washington, and much of the fund-raising, is coordinated by Poker Players Alliance, which relies in large part on contributions from the Internet-based operators. The organization spent $1.6 million on lobbying last year, using nine lobbying firms, and lobbyists like former Representative Jon Porter, Republican of Nevada, and Mr. D’Amato.

The Poker Players Alliance is enlisting players around the nation to call or write lawmakers to protest the restrictions. It hosts an annual “fly-in” day, when players fan out across Capitol Hill. And it sent representatives to — and set up a poker tournament at — the Conservative Political Action Conference this year, convinced it could find some recruits to its cause at the popular annual event.

In October 2009, 19 members of Congress signed a letter sent to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, urging them to impose a one-year delay on enforcing regulations intended to cut off payments to the Internet poker companies.

One of the lead signers of the letter was Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York; he calls Mr. D’Amato a friend and mentor, and Mr. D’Amato has served as one of his top fund-raisers. In total, 15 of the 19 signers of the letter received contributions from the Poker Player Alliance political action committee in the last election cycle.

Mr. Frank has been celebrated as one of the industry’s most important champions in Washington. He worked last year to push legislation through the Financial Services Committee, where he served as chairman until this year, that would legalize Internet poker, although the bill never got taken up by the Senate or the full House.

Mr. Frank, no poker player himself, has said he opposes the ban based on his distaste for government intervention into the private lives of citizens. His advocacy, he said, goes back to 2002, even before the Poker Players Alliance was set up.

Mr. Pappas, the executive director of the Poker Players Alliance, delivered $51,200 worth of bundled campaign contributions to Mr. Frank’s re-election campaign in late 2009, according to campaign finance reports. These contributions follow up on at least $30,000 more that Mr. Frank took in from the industry in the prior two years, including contributions from some of the industry’s most famous players, like Annie Duke (“The Duchess Of Poker”), Howard Lederer (“The Professor”) and Andy Bloch (“The Rock”).

For now, the companies that have been indicted — and their Internet site addresses seized by the Justice Department — have stopped taking bets from players in the United States, generating a wave of resentment from the millions of players who turned to the games, many several times a day.