SACRAMENTO — According to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation and other real estate companies such as The Home Buying Center.com more than $1 trillion in adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) will reset this year bringing higher monthly payments and a corresponding increased risk of foreclosure to thousands of homeowners.Analysts are divided on what this change will mean for the American and global economies, but many families and commentators are worried. Many Californians, and their counterparts in the rest of the country, live paycheck-to-paycheck and, because of unrestrained credit card spending, actually spend more than they make every year.

According to DataQuick Information Systems in 2000 only 18.9% of homebuyers in the Sacramento region purchased properties using ARMs. This number dropped in 2001 to 12.1%, but spiked to 65.1% in 2004, and 72.8% in 2005. The number for 2006 was 62.5%. ARMs were created for sophisticated buyers who planned to live in a given house for a few years, but their use has mushroomed dangerously.

“Offering people long-term credit secured by a mortgage on a single family home has been one of the tools that helped fuel the American dream of home ownership,” opined Patrick McGilvray, J.D., President of http://www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com. He continued, “In recent years though, this tool has become perverted and only a very few will ultimately profit. In years past people could not buy a home until they showed that they had the discipline, or luck, to be able to provide a 20% deposit on the home they wanted. I believe that 100% financing arrangements and the proliferation of ARMs will ultimately hurt the American consumer and our economy as a whole.”

The deterioration in fiscal responsibility of average Americans has been a trend for a long time, but in recent years the skyrocketing value of homes in the West, especially the central valley of California, has provided homeowners an easy way out. Mortgage lenders, banks in particular, have reaped large revenues from fees, points, and interest charges by selling home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) and refinancing schemes to homeowners.

Many homeowners were seduced by solicitations like, “pay off your high interest credit card debt.” But, debt refinancing often creates a house of cards for ordinary working people. The stability of these houses will be tested in the months to come.

HOLLYWOOD, CA - Nielsen Analytics today released a new report revealing that advertisers and television programmers are finding new and more lucrative advertising opportunities with broadband video. The study also determined that the use of broadband video actually extends the reach of traditional TV, and that broadband consumers are young, affluent, highly educated, and tend to have high speed web access virtually 24/7, making it an integral part of their lifestyle.

The study, “Whatever, Whenever, Wherever: How Broadband is Redefining the Economics of Television”, is authored by industry analyst, Larry Gerbrandt, the head of Nielsen Analytics, and completed in partnership with Scarborough Research.
Editor’s Note: Broadband Video – also known as web video, Internet video or broadband
television – is streaming video fed from a web site.

“By researching controlled broadband access, this study concludes that programmers have the opportunity to create new revenue models to benefit content owners and their affiliated stations” said Larry Gerbrandt, general manager and senior vice president of Nielsen Analytics. “Such ad-supported models are uniquely adaptable to the broadband environment and are potentially superior to existing models because they can take full advantage of the digital environment. With broadband streams, for example, fast forwarding through commercials can be disabled making it more likely the consumers
will watch the spots and possibly interact with them.”

Despite growing numbers of prime time television shows being streamed (or pre-viewed) on network web sites, or the increasing popularity of user generated content (UGC), there has been no measurable negative impact on traditional television viewing. Video on PCs and iPods actually is expanding the audience of traditional TV programs, supported by the fact that total TV usage was at a record high in U.S. households at 8 hours, 14 minutes a day during the 2005-2006 TV season according to Nielsen Media Research data. Household viewing has risen more than an hour a dayover the past decade – or more than a half hour more per person.

“Advertisers and programmers using broadband have a unique advantage in the increasingly competitive advertising world,” continued Gerbrandt. “Ad models can be customized and managed in a broadband environment, and interactivity can be embedded into the program in such a way as to enhance engagement which does not take viewers away from the enjoyment of the program.”

Broadband Video Advertising Models
There is a general consensus that viewers prefer short web-served ads, though the market is split between 15-second and 30-second pre-rolls per program segment. Furthermore, because broadband video offers levels of interactivity and viewer engagement not possible in a traditional TV spot, that argues for a higher CPM.
But television – especially the ad-supported kind – works according to a very different revenue model, and systems such as broadband streaming and downloading, could represent a new frontier to be explored and exploited. However, the posting of copyrighted content to web sites still presents challenges that remain to be litigated.

About the Broadband Consumer
Broadband access across the U.S. has reached critical mass and is having a clear impact on user behavior.
• According to Scarborough Research, a local market consumer research company, broadband consumers tend to have high speed web access virtually 24/7 – at work, at home and increasingly across an array of portable devices such as laptops, PDAs and mobile phones.

While only about 9% of US adults report spending 20 hours or more a week on the Internet, this number nearly doubles, to 17%, among those with broadband access at home.

• There is a strong correlation between education and Internet access, and the same holds true for broadband connections. Of the roughly one-third (33 percent) of U.S. adults reside in households without any Internet connection, 69% have only a high school degree or less. The comparable percentage for those in broadband households is one-third or 33%. Of all US adults, almost a quarter (24 percent) have a college degree or greater. . This number increases to 35% among adults with broadband Internet access at home. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of those with post-graduate degrees have an Internet connection, and most of those have a broadband connection.
• Broadband consumers are upscale. According to Scarborough’s findings, 17% of consumers have an annual household income of $100,000 or more, compared to 28% of those with broadband connectivity. Less than a quarter (21 percent) of all consumers live in homes worth $300,000 or more; but the figure is 30% for those consumers with broadband in their household.
• There is a clear generational divide in broadband adoption. The 18-34 demographic
represents 34% of those with broadband connectivity in their household. Though consumers 55+ are less likely than their 18-34 or 35-54 year-old counterparts to be broadband customers, broadband penetration among this older age group will likely increase. The 35-54 demographic is currently most likely to have home broadband access (45 percent).

Hundreds of Sacramento residents marched today from the Oak Park Community Center to the downtown Convention Center to honor the memory and dreams of our America’s most enduring symbol of racial harmony and civil rights, the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Despite the cold weather people marched and witnessed the procession to honor Dr. King and to show their support for continuing his work to create a more just society that works for citizens of all racial backgrounds.

“Sacramento City Councilwoman Lauren Hammond was thrilled people of all races took part. But she says the struggle for justice continues. She continued, “when you look at how many people are homeless, when you see how people fight about undocumented immigrants and they’re not getting paid what they’re worth - so it’s not over, and we should keep marching.”

Oak Park real estate developer Manny Fernandez was also on the scene today to show his support for the improvements that he has seen in the area. “Councilmember Hammond has been very instrumental in helping create the conditions that have allowed Oak Park to become a better place to live. She and the UC Davis Med Center are the two most powerful forces that have led the way to a better future for Oak Park’s residents.”

Dr. King was assassinated in 1968 in the prime of his life, but his message of nonviolence lives on today in the minds of millions of his countrymen. Deborah Randall, a resident of Oak Park for 10 years said, “I’m glad that I came out here today with my son and daughter to support Martin Luther King’s vision and to show my children that there is always hope for a better tomorrow.”

The Oak Park area of Sacramento has had an unfortunate reputation as a place plagued by violence, gangs, and drugs, but it has been improving. Property values in the area have risen in the past few years thanks to young families, first-time homebuyers, and businesses who have chosen to locate in the area. This rise in values mirrors the overall rise in the Sacramento region’s real estate values, but according to real estate experts, the area is still poised for greater growth than the rest of the region which has been stuck in a downward spiral.

SACRAMENTO, Calif.-As the new year begins thousands of local homeowners will find it difficult to shape up their finances because they will see their adjustable rate mortgage payments increase dramatically. “Imagine what people living paycheck-to-paycheck or on a fixed income are going to do when their mortgage payments jump by hundreds of dollars,” said Patrick McGilvray, J.D., President of www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com, Sacramento’s #1 Home Buyer. “We are a network of local real estate investors and short sale experts who help people who need to sell their homes faster than the traditional way of using a real estate agent. We help them avoid the risk of letting of their houses sit on the market for months.”

www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com predicts that thousands of Sacramento homeowners will be facing foreclosure in 2007 because of higher mortgage payments, declining home sale prices and longer times on the market due to a large inventory of homes for sale. This combination can make it difficult for sellers to sell their house if they are behind on their payments.

“We have a unique business model,” says McGilvray. “There is no publicly available information to track homeowners who fall behind in payments when no foreclosure proceeding has started on their home. The Home Buying Center team is known for having a finger on the pulse of the pre-foreclosure market because hundreds of people are calling us at 916-920-FAST when they’re about to miss a payment on their home.”

The forecast of declining home values is supported by many national and local experts such as Sacramento broker Mike Lyon, of Lyon Real Estate, who, in response to a question about area home values, said recently, “We still think there’s so many homes that prices are going to decline in most areas by 10%.”

William Longbrake, a senior policy adviser to the Financial Services Roundtable, an industry group, said he is among those who believe “the worst is still ahead in the housing market” and home prices will continue to fall. Homeowners are not the only ones feeling the pain as builders scale back their plans to construct new homes, and many people in the mortgage and title industries are joining real estate agents in looking for new lines of work.

The YouTube story is indeed a fascinating one. I’m still getting my head around it, but it does certainly go to show how many great ideas, relatively simple in concept, are still waiting to be actualized on the web - and the fact there are many more millionaires yet to be made.

We can all find inspiration in that!

I’m an admirer of YouTube; as much as for their success (perhaps more) as for their service. It doesn’t really matter what happens to YouTube from this point onwards, it was the getting to this point which is truly amazing and a story which will be referred to by many in the industry for years to come.

I only started using YouTube a few months ago - to watch The Evolution of Dance which had received a great deal of press around March this year. At the time of writing this, the clip has been viewed nearly 40 million times.

I sniffed around a little more after viewing the clip and was immediately blown away that just about *any* music video from my misspent youth was available. I tried obscure one-hit wonders from the 80’s.. they were all there. Ah, the nostalgia.

The other point that impressed me was that the service just worked - so easy to use, excellent streaming. Rumor has it that the company currently pays between 1 - 2 million dollars a month in bandwidth bills.

The short evolution of YouTube

YouTube was launched early in 2005 in the same way that most great tech related companies seem to be - a garage and no real cash to speak of (Google, Microsoft and eBay have “garage” type roots). The founders were Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim - all of whom met via their employment at PayPal. As far as I know, none of them are over the age of 30.

The story is that one night they became frustrated with trying to email a video clip. They then fleshed out the infrastructure for their video sharing platform within a couple of hours.

It’s a classic scenario of identifying a problem from the perspective of a consumer and then addressing a need.

The domain name was registered on the 14th of February 2005 and the site was open to the public by May. It was an instant hit; and word of mouth took over which fuelled the initial growth.

Towards the end of 2005, YouTube was “officially” launched after securing funding from Sequoia Capital to the tune of 3.5 million dollars. Sequoia Capital sunk in another 8 million clams in April 2006. The thought of outside investors can be rather scary, but for some businesses, growing too fast can be equally as deadly as growing too slow. If YouTube hadn’t chased the investor cash, their servers would have bogged down, new features couldn’t have been added and users would have quickly gravitated to some of the other services that were rapidly springing up.

As for revenue during this early period - there was none to speak of. This was starting to look rather like a dotcom bubble biz from the late 90’s/early 2000.

The very interesting thing here is that even with all the investment cash, very little was put into promoting YouTube; all the money went into infrastructure and responding to user requests for features. That’s one major difference to many of the dotcom bubble companies who spent up big on ads.

YouTube played it very smart by making it easy for their users to do the promotion for them. It was viral marketing at its best; from simple ideas such has having short links to videos (easy to email) and tell-a-friend functions, to allowing videos to easily be embedded in profiles of other social networking services; with YouTube branding of course. Their voting system also helped to create a sense of community as did profile pages for users.

The ensuing buzz and videos such as The Evolution of Dance then caught the attention of the press and spurred on even more activity.

YouTube and copyright

It wasn’t always a bed of roses during their growth; the issue of copyright has dogged the company on many occasions and probably will do so for some time to come. While I’m sure that the user created original videos has played a substantial role in their success, I do believe that perhaps it was the copyrighted content being so easily accessible that may have been the *major* factor of their rocket ride.

In my case, the Evolution of Dance got me there, but it was the 80’s music videos that kept me hanging around, reinforcing my awareness and recall of the word “YouTube”.

In terms of copyrighted content; how have they survived? Well, they’ve been very clever in utilizing the very grey area of the DMCA Safe Harbor Provisions; which provides protection to service providers from liability for the activities of its users. As they were seen in the eyes of the law to fall into that category; they’ve been somewhat protected .. up until now anyway; there’s still a few law suits kicking around.

But even on that point, they’ve been very smart. Instead of trying to be crusaders and digging their heels in; which has been the undoing of other services, they have extended an olive branch to some copyright owners in the form of revenue share partnerships which has seen some content effectively becoming licensed.

The way that works with music videos is YouTube has software in place which can identify soundtracks in videos posted posted by its users; the copyright owner then gets a slice of any advertising revenue run alongside the video.

These partnerships also helped pave the way for what was about to happen next.

YouTube strikes it big

The payoff for the YouTube founders ideas and clever maneuvering occurred on October 9 when Google, Inc., acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google’s stock. With Google now in the arena, any lawsuits are most likely to become background noise.

From $0 to $1.65 billion in under two years - my hat is well and truly off to these guys just for that achievement. They played the game well.

A word of warning though; starting up a site that has a sizeable chunk of copyrighted content without the copyright owner’s permission is certainly not for the faint-hearted and does raise some rather tricky ethical dilemmas in my opinion. YouTube has been rather unique in having gotten so far, relatively unscathed - and that perhaps may also have been a key element in their success - the speed at which all the above occurred.

By Jonathan Bernstein

Welcome to Crisis Management in the 21st Century and to Internet: The Ultimate Medium. A cross between tabloid journalism and a gladiator competition, between Pollyanna and Pandora, where minds meet and merge, clash and clamor, and where you can get more of anything you want than was EVER available at Alice’s Restaurant.

The Internet has become the largest media outlet in our known universe. Interactive print, audio and video communications are all available, with the line between “amateur” and “professional”, “traditional” and “untraditional” media blurred almost beyond ken. This massive medium has spawned what I am calling “The I-Reporter.”

Consider these realities:

• Anyone can be an I-Reporter.
• While some I-Reporters compete for commercial gain, others compete simply for the joy of recognition. Just as traditional media reporters want to show up on page one of a newspaper, or at the top of the broadcast news, I-Reporters want their material showing up on page one of a Google search and - better yet - staying there for a while.
• Often, I-Reporters are also their own publishers and site promoters, or work in small teams to provide these functions, and through their skill can get better search engine placement and more attention on the Internet than “competing” entities.
• Search engine ranking has very little - and sometimes nothing - to do with quality or accuracy of content.
• Information posted on the Internet propagates virally - it finds a “home” via links or reprinted pages on websites run by people of like mind, and even misinformation is blatantly re-reported at websites operated by supposedly legitimate organizations.
• Some I-Reporters are constrained by the conditions of their employer, some are constrained by a sense of ethics, and some are completely unconstrained except by law - where it can be enforced.

Throw into that cauldron the fact that the general public still hasn’t fully realized how easy it is to misrepresent information on the Internet, and the witches’ brew has now become the most difficult environment challenging many ethical and honest organizations.

Organizations have always had individuals who disagree with their policies, dislike their products or services, are disgruntled former employees, or just had a bad experience with a receptionist. In the past, unhappy individuals could call or write letters to the company, contact the Better Business Bureau, or even seek the help of their local Consumer Reporter. Today, as or more quickly, they can just launch their own website.

Try this fascinating demonstration, given to me by a client recently. In a Google search bar, enter the word “socks” only substitute a “u” for the “o.” I am being obtuse so that readers’ spam-filters don’t delete this article! There were something like 23 million results as I write this article, and almost all of the first 20 Google pages - 200 entries (which is as far as I looked) - were complaints about companies or products.

How does today’s crisis manager deal with this when his or her organization is under fire? Here are some strategic considerations, offered as do’s and don’ts:

• Do not depend solely on the Web-based tactics to correct information that has been misreported on websites of any kind (Web pages, blogs, wikis, etc.) Use direct-to-stakeholder communications.
• Do your best to balance the results of a search for the keywords important to your organization, but remember that a totally balanced search - just like a totally balanced traditional news story - may be, at best, only 50 percent “your side” of a story when there is any controversy already brewing.
• Do not automatically think that you have to respond to every Internet critic.
• Do monitor critics to see if they either (a) draw the attention of your stakeholders and/or (b) start to achieve high search engine ranking. Then have your crisis team meet to discuss the pros and cons of PR and legal responses which could force inaccuracies off the Web or demonstrate to concerned stakeholders, on your own Web pages and/or through off-line tactics, why they have no reason for concern.
• Do not engage in debates with critics on “neutral” sites which allow such interchanges. There are ways to defuse those bombs that don’t make you a target for yet more negativity.
• Do consider getting more aggressive from a PR and legal perspective if allegations have already propagated widely, with considerable damage and the promise of worse damage.
• Do insist, as the top executive officer of any organization, that legal actions against hostile websites not be implemented without professional consideration of the PR implications, and that PR actions against hostile websites not be implemented without legal consideration.
• Do be sufficiently aware of the thoughts and feelings of your stakeholders - internal and external - that you know when and how severely Internet-centered negativity is impacting them. If you do, you will also know when they think you’re doing a good job responding to such negativity.

Virtually all of the crises to which I’ve helped clients respond in the past five years have had a Web-centered/Internet component, with the impact of the Internet on crisis management strategies and tactics growing exponentially every year. While many organizations have “IT people” on staff or on-call, IT expertise often does not translate to “Internet Communication” expertise. With the growth of the Internet, companies were very quick to experiment with it and sometimes learn how to use its capabilities to PROMOTE their products and services, to build brand awareness and enhance their reputation.

But now, just as it was “pre-Web,” the purpose of crisis management is to PRESERVE what has been gained through promotion. To, ideally, prevent crises from happening but, when that isn’t possible, to minimize damage. In the 21st Century, crisis managers need a new paradigm and an expanded skill-set to help their organizations or clients achieve that critical goal.