Pascual Berrone, IESE professor
Few people approve of the fact that the remuneration packages for CEOs of U.S. companies increased six fold between 1980 and 2003. Yet even fewer people know the reasons behind this increase, that is appears especially prevalent in technology companies.

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Title: Online Media Taking Root in Spain
Source: Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade
Abstract: With traditional media undergoing an in-depth restructuring process, many print editions are giving way to online versions, as recently seen with the longstanding Spanish classified publication Segunda Mano. According to the study "La implantación de medios on line en España" ["Online Media Taking Root in Spain"], in 2007 there was an 31% increase in online publications. Magazines, publications, books and other online formats already constitute 8% of the sector's overall revenues, with a total of 659 million euros, which is up 157 million euros from 2006. The study, made public during the International Congress on New Journalism held this November in Cáceres, will be available as of November 25 on the website of the Spanish Telecommunications and Information Society Observatory (ONTSI), a dependency of Red.es. Its name may vary from the provisional title cited in this article.

Available for reading soon at ONTSI (Spanish)

Microsoft's emphasis on privacy in Web browsing has been received fondly by users while raising a few eyebrows among advertisers. "The new privacy controls are things we have been pushing for a long time," claims Ari Schwartz, of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "This technology has the potential to undermine the economies of the Internet," suggests Mike Zaneis, vice president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

For version 8 of its Internet Explorer (IE8), Microsoft has included specific functions to ensure the privacy of Internet users. This is nothing new, however, given that the option to block cookies and prevent third parties from using them to monitor user's browsing habits are already available in browsers such as Safari, Opera and Google Chrome; it has been announced that Firefox will soon be integrating this as well. These functions are now at the heart of the debate because IE8, whose final version is expected to be released at year's end, will not only include them but will in fact do so in a more sophisticated way.

What's more, despite IE's popularity having waned, it remains the most popular browser, with 74% of the market share, and thus any new features that could potentially affect the online advertising market are looked at with a magnifying glass by professionals.

Two of the functions in IE8 fall right into that category: InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking. The first one allows users to finalize a session by wiping out every last trace of activity that they have carried out on the local computer. That includes history, searches, autocomplete functions for addresses, cookies, etc.

The second tool notifies the user when it detects that the website is accumulating data on users' browsing habits. For example, if it happens to use statistics services such as StatCounter or Google Analytics to find out what other websites are being visited by the Internet user. Now, with InPrivate Blocking the user will be able to put such invasive websites on a blacklist and block them, or specifically select which information they allow to be sent to the servers linked to that website.

While less concerned about the issue than the VP of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, other analysts are still skeptical as to the usefulness of these privacy protection mechanisms. The Spanish site El Publicista has published one such opinion, saying that these tools will not be utilized in practice because if users eliminate their cookies then they will have to type their username and password each time they visit a site. Nor will they be able to take advantage of the more personalized services and will instead be repeatedly bombarded with the same banners, since the site displaying them is unaware that the users had seen them before already.
Nevertheless, IE8 minimizes that issue as it allows users to store cookies for specific sites in their Favorites and block those of other sites.

Another line of argument from the aforementioned article says that Microsoft is the first one looking to snatch a piece of the advertizing pie. That was the company's aim when initially attempting to acquire Yahoo!, as with its acquisition of aQuantive, a company whose activity is precisely focused on the use of cookies, and so it will not help to kill goose that laid the golden egg that is online advertizing.

Microsoft, of course, will not require the use of these but, as pointed out by Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer 8 team, "People should be able to choose whether or not they want to be part of that exchange of information." That is just the kind of language that many users were waiting to hear, but never expected it to come from Microsoft.

Articles in The Times, The Washington Post, 01net. (French), PC World Digital (Spanish), El publicista (Spanish) and The Official Internet Explorer website.

Blu-ray is a "bag of hurt," declared Steve Jobs this past October 14. His company does not plan on integrating the new technology into its products until it takes off in the marketplace. But will that ever happen? It remains to be seen. The conventional DVD player "will still be around for a while and its sales are not going to reach to those of its older brother anytime soon," said Carmen Jané of the Spanish newspaper El Periódico this past August.

At the beginning of 2008, the high-definition DVD format war between Sony and Toshiba appeared to be the mother of all battles for the control of living-room entertainment. Everyone was harking back to the precedent of another, similar battle that took place more than a quarter-century before, when VHS conquered Betamax to seize the video market. But history might not be repeated. In part because the takeoff of the high-density Blu-Ray format, winner of the HD-DVD showdown, is being hampered by its price. According to Baquia, in the United States the cost of a Blu-ray disc ranges from 20 to 30 dollars, while players initially hit the market at around 400 dollars. However, those prices could come down to about 150 euros by Christmas time so as to move some of their stock surplus.

In Spain, according to El Periódico, in August conventional DVD players were well below the 100-euro mark, whereas the price tag for Blu-Ray units remained over 300 euros, and its discs sold for more than 30 euros. On top of that, in order to take full advantage of its features one must also have a high-definition TV. To top it all off, Blu-ray still lacks sufficient variety among its titles. According to the consulting firm Nielsen VideoScan, cited by Baquia, only 4% of the movies currently sold utilize this format. In Spain, according to El Periódico, there are 300 titles available, and between January and August 2008 a total of 280,000 movies had been sold. A ridiculous amount next to the 30 million movies on DVD that were sold in 2007.

But this set of adversities seems easier to overcome than the fearsome competition embodied by the industry of on-demand video, which lets customers choose the titles they want and have them delivered to their homes. Some say that what Blu-ray needs is an affordable price and a bit more than time so that the general public can learn to enjoy its advantages. Time will tell as to whether they are in fact right. Or whether it will be those who side with Bill Gates in believing that Blu-ray will be the swan song for the era of storing information on physical media, which will be laid to rest by streaming content being delivered to computers. One point everyone agrees on, however, is that for the time being, the victory achieved by Sony and its allies is not living up to expectations.

Articles in Baquia (Spanish), Macworld and El Periódico (Spanish)