Rivals Jostle Before Apple Announces New iPhone

Markus Schreiber/Associated Press

Samsung, among other companies, got a jump on announcements last week at a consumer electronics conference in Berlin.

Back when was an underdog, it had an easier time shrouding its product announcements in mystery and perhaps catching its competitors off guard.

But now technology companies are watching every one of Apple's moves - and scrambling to get out in front of them.

Several major tech companies are cramming product announcements into this holiday-shortened workweek.

and Motorola Mobility, former leaders in the mobile race who are now also-rans, have scheduled events for Wednesday at which they are likely to announce new smartphones. And the next day, Amazon is expected to introduce new Kindle devices.

Sony and Samsung, among others, got a jump on things last week with announcements of new tablets and phones at a consumer electronics conference in Berlin.

But next week, the tech event calendar is largely blank - with the exception of an Apple news conference that is said to be scheduled for Sept. 12, where the company will reveal its latest , according to a person briefed on the company's plans, who declined to be named because those plans had not yet been made public.

“It seems that the rumor of an Apple announcement is having an effect on competitors' announcements, unless it's an amazing coincidence” that several events are scheduled this week and none the next, said Michael Gartenberg, a technology analyst at Gartner.

“It does make you wonder if Apple has thrown the industry a little bit off balance and taken away a little bit of their confidence,” he said.

In past years it was common for technology companies to deliver product news at trade shows like the in Las Vegas. Now some major companies have scaled back their presence at those conventions and followed Apple's lead in running their own elaborate news conferences, hoping to grab the news media's undivided attention.

Fall product introductions are important to companies seeking to generate excitement ahead of the holiday shopping season. The fall has become especially jam-packed with news in recent years as both the number of companies involved and their product lines have grown, with the addition of players like Amazon and its Kindle products as well as all the companies building mobile devices based on Google's operating system.

This year is particularly intense because, in addition to Apple's anticipated news, Microsoft is releasing a new version of its flagship Windows operating system, as it does roughly every three years. Along with a wave of new traditional-looking personal computers, the introduction of Windows 8 will bring with it an array of tablet computers powered by the software, including Microsoft's own Surface tablet, due for release Oct. 26.

And later this fall, Apple is expected to unveil a smaller version of its iPad with a 7.85-inch screen.

“You're getting all sorts of maneuvering by companies around the time they have to have Christmas products out there,” said Michael Mace, a former marketing executive at Apple and Palm who has a new start-up called Zekira. “I've got to have everything in shops in mid-November. Do I get more attention if I announce before other guys or after? How long before? If I do it in September, does stuff look like it's gotten old?”

With Apple's record of success now, the dates of its announcements are to be avoided - much as it is best to schedule around the debut of a surefire blockbuster from a competing Hollywood studio. Products announced after Apple's could be subject to uncomfortable comparisons or accusations of copying, if they are noticed at all.

“I would personally want to stay away from it unless I thought I had some killer product that I thought was going to be a devastating winner,” Mr. Mace said.

Google, which owns Motorola Mobility, has already tried to upstage Apple. In June it scheduled an event about its mapping services just five days before Apple presented mapping software for the iPhone that will replace Google's technology. But Google drew some criticism for not actually having much new to say.

This week is especially important for Nokia, whose newer Lumia mobile devices have had tepid sales despite an aggressive marketing campaign. Accompanied by its partner Microsoft, Nokia will be showing smartphones with software that will let users swap files among phones, according to a person briefed on the company's plans, who declined to be named because the plans were not yet public.

Tero Kuittinen, an independent mobile analyst and vice president of Alekstra, a company that helps consumers reduce their phone bills, said it was crucial for Nokia to get ahead of Apple in order to send the message that its smartphones look and behave very differently from the iPhone.

“The only possible vulnerability that Apple has is that the look and feel of its phones is starting to stagnate,” Mr. Kuittinen said. “What Nokia's hoping to do is shape the discussion and have consumers ask, ‘Do I really want to have yet another look-alike device?' ”

Twitter\'s Free Speech Defender

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Alexander Macgillivray has addressed disputes over the Occupy movement and India's prime minister.

SAN FRANCISCO - Alexander Macgillivray, 's chief lawyer, says that fighting for free speech is more than a good idea. He thinks it is a competitive advantage for his company.

That conviction explains why he spends so much of Twitter's time and money going toe to toe with officers and apparatchiks both here and abroad. Last week, his legal team was fighting a court order to extract an Occupy Wall Street protester's Twitter posts. The week before, the team wrestled with Indian government officials seeking to take down missives they considered inflammatory. Last year, Mr. Macgillivray challenged the Justice Department in its hunt for WikiLeaks supporters who used Twitter to communicate.

“We value the reputation we have for defending and respecting the user's voice,” Mr. Macgillivray said in an interview here at Twitter headquarters. “We think it's important to our company and the way users think about whether to use Twitter, as compared to other services.”

It doesn't always work. And it sometimes collides awkwardly with another imperative Twitter faces: to turn its fire hose of public opinion into a profitable business. That imperative will become far more acute if the company goes public, and Twitter confronts pressures to make money fast and play nice with the governments of countries in which it operates; most Twitter users live outside the United States and the company is already opening offices overseas.

That transformation makes his job all the more delicate. At a time when Internet companies control so much of what we can say and do online, can Twitter stand up for privacy, free expression and profitability all at the same time?

“They are going to have to monetize the data that they have and they can't rock the boat maybe,” said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington. “I don't predict Twitter is going to lose its way, but it's a moment to watch.”

Jonathan Zittrain, one of his former professors at Harvard Law School, called it both a challenge and opportunity for Mr. Macgillivray, widely known as @amac, his handle on Twitter, and one that could influence the Internet industry at large.

“If @amac can help find a path through it, it may serve as a model for corporate responsibility for an Internet where more and more code and content is governed by corporate gatekeepers,” Mr. Zittrain said via e-mail.

He added that the challenge for Mr. Macgillivray “is not only to pioneer a wise way through this thicket, but to implement it as Twitter's use continues to explode: it's complex maintenance on a jet engine while the plane is in flight.”

Twitter hit some turbulence this summer, when it seemed to forget its principles.

The company briefly suspended a British journalist, Guy Adams, who had used his Twitter feed to repeatedly criticize the handling of Olympics coverage by NBC, a corporate partner of Twitter.

Silencing Mr. Adams led to public outrage (on Twitter, naturally). It fell on Mr. Macgillivray to explain, apologize and assuage. On the company blog, he confessed that a Twitter employee responsible for promoting corporate partnerships had been monitoring Mr. Adams' account and advised NBC to file a complaint with the company.

Twitter in turn suspended Mr. Adams's account because it violated one of its own terms of service: Mr. Adams had disclosed an NBC executive's e-mail address on Twitter.

Mr. Macgillivray ordered the account to be restored and posted a public apology to Mr. Adams. It is “unacceptable,” he said, for Twitter to scrutinize tweets, though he declined to say whether the offending employee was punished. “We should not and cannot be in the business of proactively monitoring and flagging content, no matter who the user is,” he wrote. The explicit mea culpa over the NBC criticism may also have protected Twitter from a lawsuit. Mr. Macgillivray is nothing if not a seasoned corporate lawyer.

This kerfuffle reveals something of the identity crisis that Twitter faces. It is both a gadfly's bullhorn and a valuable stream of business intelligence. And with an $8 billion valuation, its business strategy is being closely watched. Twitter has lately stepped up ways to draw advertising revenue while Wall Street waits for it to go public.

Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars

There are many ways to measure the traction of a social media platform: time spent, page views or unique users. But it might be useful to add one more metric: if the leader of the free world stops by to answer questions from your users, you're probably doing O.K.

On Thursday, President Obama signed up for an “Ask Me Anything” (A.M.A. in geekspeak) session at Reddit, a vast social site that is a staple of digital life for the young and connected, but less well known among grown-ups.

The president answered a few benign questions - Michael Jordan is his favorite basketball player! - along with a few tough ones, including a request to explain his administration's approach to Internet regulation. He even posted a picture to prove he was the one at the keyboard when he typed, “Hi, I'm Barack Obama, President of the United States. Ask me anything.”

While the Republicans were celebrating the potential and might of American business at their convention in Tampa, Mr. Obama was validating one example of business success on an entirely different platform. Reddit, which was founded by two fresh graduates of the University of Virginia in 2005, has just 20 employees, but serves up more than three billion page views a month.

With its basic graphics, endless links and discussions, Reddit can seem like peering into a bowl of spaghetti, but it has surpassed better-known aggregating sites like Digg to become a force on the Web. Occasionally, as in the instance of the Colorado shootings, it takes control of a news story early. Built on open-source software and guided by the ethos of its community, estimated by Quantcast to be 20 million users a month, it is a classic Web start-up in which opportunity seems mixed with barely controlled anarchy.

So who are the silky venture capitalists or young lions of Valley technology who own this vast unruly kingdom? That would be Advance Publications, the home of , the magazine company that bought Reddit back in 2006 for a reported $20 million. That kind of deal is usually a signal that a ritual sacrifice was about to begin in which a clueless old media company snaps up a hot Web property and proceeds to squeeze the life out of what it just bought.

But that is not what happened. Steve Newhouse, the chairman of Advance.net, decided very early on that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit, and for the most part, left well enough alone. “We had some ideas about what would be good, but it might not have worked,” Mr. Newhouse said. “We paid attention to the community instead.”

Its two founders, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, stayed on after the sale for three years - a feat unto itself. And when it became clear that Reddit was hamstrung in competition for leadership and engineers as part of Condé Nast, the company was spun out as an operationally independent subsidiary in 2011.

During that time, it threatened to become an also-ran in the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world of social media. Then Digg, which had been the leader among communities formed around the aggregation of links, made some poorly received changes and users fled to Reddit.

“Strategically, what they have done should be a model of how to create and support a virtual start-up within a larger corporation,” said Anil Dash, a writer and entrepreneur in digital realms. “Condé gave it enough rope and left the people there to their own devices. I don't know whether it was a brilliant strategy or accidental neglect, but the founders did not leave, the community stayed intact, and the site grew beyond anybody's expectations.”

In the context of a company that owns Vogue and The New Yorker, Reddit is a deeply weird place. Links are voted up or down by a community that is full of pseudonyms, which has the odd effect of prompting users to be very intimate and remarkably candid, albeit as avatars. The community is chiefly young, male and extremely wired. It can be a casually misogynistic place, and the site has all the retro graphic appeal of Craigslist, which is to say, not much.

Reddit is not an exception to every rule in the digital world. Like many digital media companies, it has a big audience and minuscule revenue. Bob Sauerberg, president of Condé Nast and a member of the board of the independent company, says that is fine by him.

“We think it has huge potential and we want to make sure that we scale that,” he said. “There will be ample opportunity to monetize what they have built as it grows, and it will be a very big business.”

In the spring, Advance hired Yishan Wong, a former software engineer at Facebook and engineering manager at PayPal, as the chief executive - an unconventional choice because he had little executive management experience. And Mr. Ohanian came back as a board member, yet another odd circumstance.

“When we sold the site, I ended up with a life-changing - at least for me - amount of money, and I thought the least I could do was make good on my end of it, so I knew I would stay for the life of the contract,” he said. “We'd have quarterly meetings with Steve, but for the most part, Steve just seemed to think that if we were able to start the company on $12,000, that we probably wouldn't screw it up. ”

It can make for some jarring juxtapositions. Advance is a privately held company that keeps a tight rein on information of all sorts, yet Reddit is built on open-source software free for the taking or tweaking. The site has harnessed user energy and creativity to self-police the forums and grow in all sorts of unpredictable directions. It is, in media terms, about as far away from the glossy editorial values of Condé Nast as you can get.

“We ran into some annoying human resources bureaucracy when we tried to hire people, but we run lean and don't make a lot of hires, so that didn't come up a lot,” Mr. Ohanian said. “For the most part, we were given a ludicrous level of autonomy. You have to give them credit where credit is due.”

Today\'s Scuttlebot: Zynga\'s Gambling Expert, and Workday\'s I.P.O.

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. Friday's selection includes Workday's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering of stock, more than most people would want to know about Internet cats, and a high-level hiring by Zynga.