Filed under: Deals, Consumer experience, Apple Inc (AAPL), Adobe Systems (ADBE)

Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE)’s Flash player is used for most videos available on the internet. Nearly all Computers use it for content play-back. Now, Adobe will use Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL)’s software development kit to develop the product for the iPhone.

According to The Wall Street Journal, “In comments widely reported last month, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said the company’s iPhone hadn’t adopted Adobe’s mobile version of its Flash program because of technical and performance concerns.”

Adobe obviously think Jobs is full of beans. It means to prove that by getting its Flash player on Apple hardware so that customers can watch video from tens of thousand of websites. The Flash player is on about 700 million Computers worldwide, which is why content companies use it.

What is curious is that Jobs would resist allowing iPhone customers the capability to watch a wide variety of content. It would seem that would make the iPhone an even more popular item.

Maybe Apple wanted some cash from Adobe for the privilege of being on the hot handset product, and the media player company stated “no.”

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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Filed under: Deals, Management, Law, JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Bear Stearns Cos (BSC)

New York City holds Bear Stearns (NYSE:BSC) stock in some of its pension funds, and along with nearly all other investors in the brokerage, lost a lot of money.

According to Reuters, the NYSE controller said “I think a lot of people are going to be taking a look. … Was there some deception in there or was this just a miscalculation?” A lot of people will ask the same question, which could lead to a lot of lawsuits.

Could a rash of lawsuits kill the Bear Stearns buyout by JP Morgan (NYSE:JPM)? Stranger things have happened.

At the heart of the argument is whether management knew that the company was falling apart when it said that it felt it would weather the storm of client withdrawals. The other possibility is that the catastrophe happened so fast that executives at Bear Stearns believed that they were OK one day and on the brink of disaster the next. Customers may have pulled money out that fast.

It will all come out in the depositions.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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Filed under: Deals, Industry, Competitive strategy, Boeing Co (BA), Politics, Northrop Grumman (NOC)

Boeing (NYSE: BA) is thumping its chest about the likelihood that it can get Congress to reverse a deal giving a $35 billion military tanker contract to Northrop Grumman (NYSE:NOC) and EADS, the parent of Airbus.

According to Reuters Mark McGraw, a company vice president, stated he was “as confident as I have the ability to be” that congressional auditors would find fault with the U.S. Air Force’s February 29 choice of the rival team. Brave words, especially when the Air Force claims that the Boeing proposal lost on each key metric for building the tanker.

Boeing is counting on members of Congress who don’t want American jobs to go overseas to push back on a contract which includes Europe-based EADS. But, it may not be that easy.

The Wall Street Journal reports that “Government contracting documents show that the U.S. Air Force preferred the size and ability of aerial refueling tankers” being offered by EADS and Northrop. The EADS Airbus 330 can carry more fuel that its Boeing competition.

Boeing is nearly certainly wasting its time. No matter how much some Congressmen would like to save jobs for their districts, they can’t be seen as favoring a deal which is probably substantially inferior.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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Filed under: Business, Design, World wide web, E-mail, web 2.0

Nearly every small business has a Web site and a high percentage of those sites are mired in Web 1.0 parameters. Perform a site self-checkup to determine how Web 2.0 your small business’s online presence is. We’re talking about all of your on the web presence and not simply your Web site. Here are 10 ways to grade your business’s Web 2.0-ness.

1. Last update - if you haven’t updated your Web site yet in 2008, it is definitely old web and not going in the Web 2.0 direction toward interactivity. When content doesn’t change, your site is nothing more than a brochure online.
   No updates yet in 2008? Give yourself a C.
2. Who, When Where - if you aren’t regularly checking your site’s visitor trends, possibly using Google Analytics, then you don’t know who is visiting your site, when they are paying attention or where they are coming from. You could run a promotion and never know if anyone online saw it. How old-web is that kind of thinking?
   No site stat research when marketing is everything? Give yourself a D.
3. Purchase me! - does your site scream BUY SOMETHING rather than equally illustrating why your product or service is essential? Show us some case studies, success stories or testimonials in addition to pitching your product.
   No examples of your product’s usefulness to buyers? Give yourself a C+.
4. No response - when is the last time you paid attention to website-generated email or calls and analyzed how much web-based contact your small business receives? Are you considering how to raise your online contacts through different, not necessarily more, online strategies?
   Not planning how to garner more online contact? Give yourself a C. If you don’t yet know that Google Forms can be used to collect survey data, mark that down to a C-.
5. Still breaking the law? - if you’re sending unsolicited email through your personal email program like Outlook, then you’re probably violating the 2004 CAN-SPAM Act and fines are $10,000 per instance. It’s time to invest small business dollars in a compliant email application. Begin with Constant Contact and research from there.
   Still blasting from a personal email application? Give yourself an F because it’s toying with disaster.
6. Feeding time - have you resisted adding an RSS feed to any portion of your small business presence because you really don’t understand what RSS is? Get one your children to explain it and then generate a weekly updated on the internet feed for your business.
   Not feeding your customers yet with good information? Give yourself a C-.
7. Remote access denied - if your staff still has no intranet and your sales force can’t find up-to-the-minute pricing and forms, try the new Google Sites and get everyone on the same on the internet page. Add a calendar and share it with your staff to give your business more bang for its virtual buck.
   No online sharing? Degrade yourself to a D-. Information is king.
8. Identity Interrupted - does your logo designer know who your PR and Web firms are or are they each operating in an information vacuum? Worse, are you still trying to figure out if you need any of the above? Get your old logo converted into a high-resolution graphic and share it with your Web designer to pull together your branding and small business identity on the web and in print.
   Using a Publisher-created logo on the internet? Give yourself a D+.
9. Anti-social - very few small business owners know what Twitter is and fewer use it. Are you closing your ears to comments made about your service or your product? Why not Twitter and send a “track [your company name or product]” message or at least use a Twitter search engine to see what’s been tweeted. What else should you track? See what Cameron Olthuis, Jeremiah Owyang or Joseph Jaffe advocate.
   No ears on? Give yourself a B- only because Twitter is sort of new but not for much longer.
10. Remote island - spend time with one or two quality small business blogs a week by subscribing to their feed and figuring out which posts are important to your business. Try Small Business Resource for starters.
    Don’t know how to subscribe to a feed? Give yourself a D+ because RSS is simply not new; it’s everywhere.

The end of the first quarter is upon us and you’ve probably just paid first-quarter taxes. Now is the time to score your on the web presence and raise your grade during the rest of this fiscal year. Got more grading areas? List them in comments, please.

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Filed under: Deals, Industry, Consumer experience, Apple Inc (AAPL)

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is considering a radical change in how it makes money on music downloads. Instead of charging for songs, it might give away all of the music on the iTunes service and make up for it by charging more for iPods and iPhones. Industry experts have long thought that the margins on the hardware are better than the money brought in by the download service.

Of course, the barrier to the best is whether the music industry will go along. According to the FT “Detailed market research has shown strong appetite among consumers for deals bundling music in with the cost of the device.”

The labels might resist the idea because they would like more money from Apple and not less. It isn’t clear yet how much the big record companies will get from the increased charge for hardware if the music is free. Apple will probably try to do what it has done in the past. It will get one large music publisher to concur to a deal and use that as leverage to get the others to go along.

The Apple plan does partially solve one problem. Most dgitial music is pirated or comes from ripped DVDs. There’s no point in stealing what’s already free. The record labels make nothing from content which is stolen. The new program might give them a little more of the pie if the price of Apple’s hardware goes up and they get a reasonable piece of the increase.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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