The European Union Monday put more pressure on Google to come up with "remedies" to its concerns that Google may be abusing its market power. In a letter to Larry Schmidt, Google's CEO, the EU lays out the results of its antitrust investigation and gives the search giant mere weeks to address four problem areas or face formal proceedings that could lead to a fine of up to 10 percent of Google's annual revenue.

The EU has been investigating Google since November 2010. That investigation led the EU to identify four areas where Google's business practices may be considered "abuses of dominance."

Joaquín Almunia, the vp of the European Commission responsible for competition policy, urged Google to avoid "adversarial proceedings" by solving the EU's concerns.

"Restoring competition swiftly to the benefit of users at an early stage is always preferable to lengthy proceedings, although these sometimes become indispensable to competition enforcement," Almunia said in a press statement.

The EU itemized four areas for Google to address-first was that Google's general search results display links to its own vertical search services differently than its competitors.

"We are concerned that this may result in preferential treatment compared to those of competing services, which may be hurt as a consequence," said Almunia in a press statement.

The second concern is that Google is copying content from competing vertical search services and using it in its own offerings.

The third and fourth concerns dealt with Google's advertising practices, specifically that Google prevents ad partners from placing ads from Google's competitors on its sites and that contractual restrictions on software developers prevent them from transferring online search ad campaigns from Google AdWords to competing platforms.

A Google spokesperson said the company had just started looking through the commission's documents: "We disagree with their preliminary conclusions, but we're happy to discuss any concerns they might have. Competition on the Web has increased dramatically in the last two years since the commission started looking at this, and the competitive pressures Google faces are tremendous. Innovation online has never been greater."

Google's dominance has raised red flags with the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating the search giant's business practices. In a sign that the FTC may be stepping up its scrutiny of the search firm, it recently hired Beth Wilkinson, a former Department of Justice prosecutor, as its lead investigator.

Five of the nation's largest cable companies have agreed to connect their WiFi networks, giving their Internet customers access to metro WiFi through more than 50,000 hotspots in the New York City area, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando and Philadelphia. The service, available to subscribers whenever they roam outside their own cable system, will be dubbed "CableWiFi."

The announcement was made this morning by Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable, coinciding with the opening of the industry's annual cable show in Boston.

Earlier this month, Cablevision and Bright House Networks launched CableWiFi alongside their branded WiFi Networks in the New York City area and central Florida. The other companies will be rolling out the service over the next few months.

The new service represents the largest WiFi sharing effort among cable operators to date and is part of the industry's strategy to position itself as more than just a pay TV service.

"We believe that WiFi is a superior approach to mobile data and that cable providers are best positioned to build the highest-capacity national network offering customers fast and reliable Internet connections when away from their home or business broadband service," said Kristin Dolan, Cablevision's senior executive vice president of product management and marketing.

Plans are for the cable companies to grow the number of WiFi hotspots and expand into additional cities.

This year marked the first time USA Today digitized its 23-year-old Super Bowl Ad Meter by rolling it out to Facebook in app form. You know lots of love weigh in on Superbowl ads. What hasn't been known until today is the impact that Facebook had on the Ad Meter's reception.

The app's more than six million users accounted for two million video views and 200,000 ratings of Super Bowl ads. But because the app used Facebook's Open Graph-which allows actions like watching or rating a video to be automatically shared to a user's News Feed, as long ast they've given the app permission-an additional 200,000 views were generated.

And for every 100 pieces of content that were shared through the app, 120 users checked out the app, according to USA Today and Facebook. USA Today also saw an 11 percent increase in visitors to the Ad Meter page and a 9 percent jump in time spent on the page the day of the big game.

USA Today worked with social marketing firm Involver in developing the app, and that company's vp of marketing Roland Smart claimed the app drove more content into the News Feed "than any other campaign-based [Open Graph] app ever."

For instance, in the month following the app's launch, each action shared through the app was seen by more than 10 people. However, over time where people were coming across those actions shifted.

Within the first week of the Ad Meter launching, 67 percent of traffic came from Facebook's News Feed, Ticker or other external sources, but by week two 82 percent of the app's traffic came from Facebook Timeline, implying that users saw in a friend's profile that they had watched or rated a video and then clicked through to the app. Four weeks after the app launched, 97 percent of its traffic, or more than 5 million referrals, came through Timeline, said Smart.

Specs
Age 28
New gig Publisher, editor in chief, The New Republic
Old gig Facebook co-founder, Obama campaign strategist, founder of Jumo

After Facebook and Washington, what's it like to be part of the old-media establishment?
It's completely different from the startup world. TNR is one of those big institutions, but in some ways, we're a bit of a startup. We're trying to build a sustainable business model for the next 10 to 20 years, which is going to be a challenge. But you look at The Atlantic, The Economist-there are traditional print models that are flourishing. I feel like there's a hunger out there for big-idea journalism. Book sales are at an all-time high. The magazines I'm talking about, all their print numbers are up. Not to overstate it-it's a small order of people-but I think the conventional wisdom that young people don't want to read is a little misplaced.

How are you going to make this magazine viable? Do you plan to go broader or keep it as a niche audience magazine, for example?
I think we can do both. The magazine has historically been for an intellectual milieu. I do think we have to expand the coverage. To be a big-idea publication. We took down the paywall because some of the best content we have was hard to get to, and it didn't make sense as a way to reach subscribers. My goal for the publication is to be the magazine New York and D.C. and L.A. people read on the weekends. It's sort of for the crème de la crème.

Where do you think print fits in that mix?
It's key. Obviously, I came from the digital world, but print as a technology is pretty amazing-it's light, disposable, you can share it easily, it's colorful. I read more in print than online.

You and your partner, Sean Eldridge, are involved in a number of causes, like same-sex marriage and campaign finance reform. Is the magazine going to reflect your viewpoint?
I'm clearly a passionate person and believe in a lot of things. People know the difference between good journalism and something that's ideological. So I'm not bringing any particular vision to the magazine other than good journalism.

How annoying is it when people say, "You're so young"?
It goes with the territory. [pauses] I don't get carded anymore!

Actually, Mike Kinsley, Andrew Sullivan and Peter Beinart were all 28 when they started as editor of The New Republic, too. Is there a pattern there?
The titles have changed a little. But young, smart people have always been attracted to TNR. TNR is not a sleepy magazine.

You co-founded the world's biggest social network, but I read somewhere that you think people are too connected.
I think we have to be aware of how we use technology and not letting it control us. I struggle with it. A couple years ago I tried not to use the phone on Sundays. That didn't last long-a month or two.

Do you agree with people who are calling this campaign the Twitter election?
I think mobile in particular is changing this election. You can go canvassing and use phones to know who to talk to. There are a lot of stories that are made on Facebook or Twitter, but they're made for a certain set.

If you hadn't been a college roommate of Mark Zuckerberg, what do you think you'd be doing today?
I wish I knew the answer to that question. I think I would be in the world of journalism or politics.

Mark Zuckerberg has long encouraged other industries to follow the lead of the gaming business, which he believes has been transformed by social media. The Facebook CEO often points to companies like Zynga, which have built massive businesses entirely on Facebook's platform, as a model for industries like music, books and of course, media.

Over the past year or so, Facebook began intensifying its courtship of the media industry. So far, media definitely finds Facebook attractive but seems afraid of getting hurt. In fact, while it seems clear that while Facebook and the media business are becoming further intertwined, media has so far rebuffed Facebook's larger ambition-to be the place where media is consumed, talked about and shared for the majority of Web users.

Take Hulu for example. The Web video hub was one of the first companies to build an app on Facebook leveraging its Open Graph-the company's set of automated content-sharing tools. The thinking was, users could download the app, watch their favorite shows on Facebook, and their friends would be alerted instantly that Gregg loves Grey's Anatomy.

But last month, Hulu ditched what Facebook calls a "canvas app" and instead redirects users to Hulu.com. Hulu executives wouldn't comment, but its likely that Hulu didn't see any reason to cede some its traffic to Facebook, not to mention all that data on its users' habits.

Among Hulu's brethren, while most TV networks have dedicated (and quite popular) show pages, NBC doesn't have a viewing app, nor does The CW. Fox never even built one. Even when Hulu was streaming shows on Facebook, ABC never permitted its shows to be delivered on the site. Curiously, the non-Hulu network CBS does allow fans to stream full episodes of shows like The Big Bang Theory on Facebook-but that's using CBS' player, not within an app.

The movie business is being equally cautious. Take Warner Bros. The company made headlines last year when it announced that Facebook users would be able to pay $3 to stream The Dark Knight. Warner Bros. still offers 14 titles, but the offering hardly seems to have taken off and other studios have steered clear.

Magazine companies aren't exactly rushing to build Facebook editions either. Time.com has enabled frictionless sharing, and Sports Illustrated is looking to follow suit. But as far as delivering full-fledged magazines on the site? Not right now. "We're exploring ways to implement Facebook sharing in ways that make sense for us. Ideally we want it to benefit our properties," said SI.com editor in chief Paul Fichtenbaum.

What about the Web publishing world, which seemed to embrace the frictionless sharing made possible by the Open Graph in a big way? Early partners like Yahoo News and The Washington Post saw traffic referrals soar and their brand profiles blow up as their headlines flooded Facebook News Feeds. But look at what's happened lately.

Publishers ranging from ESPN.com, MSNBC.com and The Daily Beast have all implemented automatic sharing on their sites, but haven't built Facebook apps.

"It became apparent that a domain integration is better way to go than an app on Facebook," said Daniel Blackman, chief digital officer at The Daily Beast during Adweek's NexTech event a few weeks ago. "That should have a much better impact on traffic than a social reading app that keeps people in Facebook."

Even then, according to Ashley Wells, MSNBC.com's vp of creative development, the days of News Feed overload are probably over. As Wells explained, Facebook eliminated an Activity Feed box atop its site which showcased recently read stories, and also dialed back the frequency of news sharing, favoring other social activities on the site. That coupled with more publishers signing on means Facebook traffic is no guarantee. "Facebook doesn't want to flood people," Wells said. "The irritation factor played into these decisions. We've seen these changes effect referrals. If you book revenue against that traffic, you're in trouble."

Facebook doesn't book any revenue from any of its Open Graph partners, and that doesn't seem to be a priority. Take Vevo, for example. Since integrating with the Open Graph, it's seen traffic to Vevo.com jump 144 percent.

Vevo also serves and handles ad sales for videos on thousands of Facebook artist pages. "That helps us become one-stop shopping for brands, who can check off the video and the social box," said David Kohl, Vevo's evp of sales and customer operations.

But unlike with revenue generated by companies like Zynga, Facebook doesn't take a cut of Vevo's ad revenue, whether it's generated on or off Facebook. And that doesn't seem to be the plan for now. "They want to be a platform," said Jim Spanfeller, CEO of Spanfeller Media Group. "I don't think they are after media dollars just yet."

As one media executive explained it, "they are generating traffic and a business on the back of our content, and we're building a database on their backs. No money changes hands, but it works well."

For now at least. But wouldn't it make a lot of sense for Facebook to start taxing its media partners when and if they start making serious money on Facebook? Especially in light of the fact that Facebook seems to have a challenge on its hands in nabbing big branding dollars from the GMs of the world?

"I don't see the connection," said Wells. "They want to be the identity system of the Web."

The same thing could be said about Apple, and Google and probably Amazon. Whoever wins that battle, if one company can, could potentially influence the future of media and commerce on the Internet.

But unlike Apple and Amazon, Facebook doesn't have much of a commerce business-yet. The company's Credits currency claims 15 million users (out of roughly 900 million or so Facebook members). That's probably a big reason you don't see a lot of people renting The Dark Knight yet.

But post-IPO, Credits could become a much bigger priority for the company, argues Peter Vogel, co-founder at Plink (which just happens to maintain a Facebook Credits rewards business). If Credits becomes more widespread, it's easy to imagine more media companies looking to trade their wares on Facebook. Credits could theoretically pay for a day of Spotify listening, a week of the New York Times, or a few days worth of Hulu Plus. "Facebook has been very slow to promote the Credit economy," said Vogel. "But that's the next logical step following the IPO. You could see a big future in charging and hosting any sort of shareable media: UFC events, concerts, magazines, books."

Then maybe, the rest of the media business might start acting a lot more like the gaming business.

The hashtag's basic function is to serve as a content filter on Twitter. While useful, hashtags can also be uninspired. So Twitter is converting the hashtag into a content destination in its own right through a unique partnership with Nascar announced Friday.

Starting with the Pocono 400 the weekend of June 10, consumers who click on the #Nascar hashtag will be directed to a not-yet-live Twitter page that will aggregate tweets and photos related to the race to create what Nascar svp and CMO Steve Phelps called in a statement a "complementary live race experience."

"When sports fans around the world see a hashtag displayed on the air during a game or race, that's a signal to them that there is a bigger conversation happening on Twitter," said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in a statement. "Between the talented Nascar personalities on Twitter and the fact that they have some of the most loyal fans in the world of sports, they were a natural choice to partner with as we experiment with ways to create the best experience on Twitter during a big event."

Up until now when users click on a hashtag, they are shown a page littered with tweets which have included that particular hashtag. But in Nascar's case, Twitter will curate those tweets through an algorithm, and by hand to give users a behind-the-scenes look at the race.

The partnership appears to be part of a broader initiative by Twitter to take channel sports fans heavy usage of the platform during live games. Earlier this week Twitter announced a partnership with ESPN to launch during the NBA Finals that will have users tweeting their game faces with the #gameface hashtag.

Mark Zuckerberg started today a rich man. Then he rang the Nasdaq opening bell from Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters and two hours later his company made its stock market debut at $38, immediately surging to $42.05 per share before dipping to $41.31 an hour later. By the market's close, Facebook shares cost $38.23.

Before the market even opened on Friday Facebook had already nabbed $16 billion, having sold 421.2 million shares for $38 a pop in initial trading after the markets closed yesterday, according to Bloomberg.

In the week leading up to the IPO-that-everyone's-obsessing-over, questions have swirled around the sustainability of Facebook's business model. Advertising accounted for 82 percent, or $872 million, of the company's $1.06 billion in first-quarter revenue. Attention has focused on that period's ad revenue falling 8 percent from Q4 2011. There's usually a quarter-over-quarter advertising decline from the holiday-fueled fourth quarter, but that quarterly decline was limited to 3 percent for the previous year.

Facebook has fessed up to an "unproven" ability to monetize its mobile user base-Facebook received 488 million monthly active users (MAUs) on mobile devices in March versus 901 million total MAUs that month-but advertising's share of Facebook's overall revenue has trended down each year, dropping from 99 percent in Q1 2010 to 87 percent last year. And of course advertisers would have a hard time ignoring Facebook, considering that the social network accounts for 15 percent of U.S. users' time spent online and 16 percent of total page views, per a February 2012 comScore report.

Payments and other revenue from fees totaled the remaining 82 percent. Social games-which has users purchase in-game services or items such as virtual goods within Facebook games via Facebook Credits-"are currently responsible for substantially all of our revenue derived from Payments," according to a company regulatory filing.

But beyond social games in general, Facebook is especially tied to the performance of Zynga. That single social gaming company contributed 15 percent of Facebook's Q1 revenue through a mix of payment processing fees, in-game advertising and ads on Zynga's Facebook pages. Given the link between the two companies' performance, the good news is that Zynga's first-quarter revenue jumped 32 percent year-over-year to $321 million. The bad news is that Zynga is reducing its dependency on Facebook's platform, announcing in March that it was launching Zynga.com as a hub for users to play its games.

Specs
Age 45
Accomplishments Head writer and executive producer of Futurama, which premieres on Comedy Central on June 20 at 10 p.m.; former writer on The Simpsons
Base Los Angeles

What's the first information you consume in the morning?
I guess it would be the time and how late I am for work.

What do you read or watch or listen to at the breakfast table?
I watch my 5-year-old daughter spilling cereal on her face.

What occupies your mind in the car?
My big thing now is books on tape-actually books on download-because I have this long commute like everybody in L.A., and I was wasting it listening to the five-minute news cycle. So suddenly, I actually listen to books on tape coming and going. If there's one key change in my information diet, it's audio books.

Are you a TV junkie or on an airtime-restricted diet?
When I do watch TV, it's pre-recorded and DVRed. We have a joke on Futurama here and there about other TV shows, but I guess just because of the epic nature of our sci-fi stories, we tend to reference movies.

What do you consume on television?
Game of Thrones is my thing right now. I've been given all the books as a birthday present, but I don't want to read them because I don't want to ruin the show.

What do you bite into on the way home?
I just started listening to a science-fiction trilogy-Peter Hamilton's Void Trilogy-and I just finished Stephen King's JFK book 11/22/63. I quite enjoyed it, even though it felt like sci-fi for people who don't read sci-fi.

What tech from Futurama would you most like to see show up in the real world?
I just read about someone starting a company that claims to build transport tubes that can send you around the world in a tube like a letter in an old '50s office building. I think that would be cool-to just shoot over to Japan for a day in a tube.

Give us the skinny on your favorite app.
Oh, here's a good one: the Samsung TV remote app I downloaded, which I can use as a remote for my TV from anywhere in the house. So I can change the volume and stuff from another room and annoy people. It's one I was waiting for because the smartphone seems to be putting devices out of commission one by one, and the remote control just seemed ripe for that. My flashlight is gone now.

With such a bloated media universe, how do you cut out the fat?
I'm not good at cutting out the fat, but my schedule makes it a moot point. I have to be in a room talking to the writers all day, every day. My brain doesn't have the capability to do that while reading online. I do that every now and then, but then I see people looking at me saying, "Why aren't we working?" It's peer pressure, honestly.

Wednesday night, for the second year in a row, Time Inc. threw a party to fete its list of 10 NYC Startups To Watch. Several of the company's leaders sat down with Adweek to discuss how being based in Silicon Alley colors their businesses.

Nikhil Sethi, CEO and cofounder of social ad firm Adaptly
"Being in the ad space, we realized that there's only one city in the country that we can operate from. Literally 99 percent of our customers are within a block radius of our offices...In the Bay Area you walk into a coffee shop, and everyone talks about technology, but it's always about consumer apps. You go to a bar in New York, and everyone talks about media and advertising, just like randomly in a bar."

Vipin Goyal, CEO and cofounder of NYC-centric activity discovery platform SideTour
"Our business is New York City. We're a business all about the people and experiences in the city...Look at the stuff on SideTour. You can learn the art of graffiti with an aerosol artist in Queens who's been curating [famed street art locale] 5Pointz for years. You can have dinner with an investment banker-turned-monk in an East Village monastery."

Carter Cleveland, founder and CEO of art discovery platform Art.sy
"New York is the center of the art world, but it's also just a great place to start up....A lot of the best schools are on the East Coast and near New York City-my alma mater Princeton is very nearby-so there are plenty of really talented engineers, art historians, you name it, coming out of these schools. But until recently for startups the only option was going out West, but increasingly that's no longer the case because New York City has so much more to offer than the Valley does in terms of diversity of culture and industries."

Robby Stein, CEO and cofounder of location-discovery platform Stamped
"Stamped really can only exist in New York. The reason why is what we're about is recommending and putting your stamp of approval on those things you like the best: restaurants, books, movies and music. As part of that, a really important point for us is building a community around that, and what that means is being able to bring a lot of voices onto the service. A lot of times those are brands or other authorities in the area. We work closely with, for instance, New York magazine, Rolling Stone, Mario Batali, Michael Kors, all very New York personalities that can cultivate their recommended restaurants, books, movies and music."

Scott Ballantyne, CMO of social shopping company Fab
"The whole idea is basically reinvented social shopping. It's like walking down SoHo on Greene Street with your friends on Sunday, and you discover something in the shop window. We replicated that in an online experience...The heart and soul of the founders are here in New York, and obviously New York is a big deal for the design environment...New York was just a natural place for us to start, but we've got 250 people around the world and 170 of those are in New York."

MLB Advanced Media is a quietly powerful force in digital media. Like, really powerful. With some projecting revenue of $500 million in 2012 and clients like NCAA March Madness and even Glen Beck's online venture GBTV, Advanced Media's technology is the gold standard for live Internet broadcasting. President and CEO of MLB Advanced, Bob Bowman discussed the company's strategy for the future and offered his own wisdom about the shifting digital industry today at IAB's Innovation Days event.

Create Great Content and Get it On Every Available Platform

"As important as the ads are, they will never be as important as the content," Bowman told the audience. Bowman mentioned that there are 108 devices and operating system permutations on Apple's platform alone, and another 2,100 for Android. That's means a lot of customization for publishers. But Bowman believes media companies need to innovate at a breakneck pace or risk total irrelevance. "If you are a brand you want to be in front of people you have to go from Web to wireless, to social and then to the newest frontier: gaming," he said.

MLB Advanced Media Announces A 'Huge Gaming Business This Summer'

Almost on cue, Bowman told the crowd that MLB Advanced Media is delving into the gaming world to get their technology in front of a younger, more engaged demographic. Bowman announced only that the foray into gaming would be "huge" but said nothing more of it. Details should be emerging sooner than later, though.

We Don't Know How To Measure This Stuff

Bowman called attention to the difficulty of uniformly measuring audiences online. "The way we measure engagement and audience over all of these screens, some of which are on at the same time, is a real mess," Bowman noted.

Cordcutting And The Future

"The new generation will not cut the cord, they will never even plug it in," Bowman teased near the end of the talk. Yet, he doesn't see a future as a barren place for cable companies as there is great overlap between internet providers and cable companies. He noted that the transition though away from cable will have to take time and have the right processes in place. "Going straight from cable to an a la carte system would be problematic," he said.

**UPDATE**

In a follow-up conversation via phone, Bowman spoke to Adweek to further address the issue of the future and cable's role. He told Adweek "We believe that cable is a valuable partner, especially for baseball and we and many other ventures and have interests in becoming partners in large supply," he said. With respect to cable's role, Bowman continued to explain that he sees any a la carte system of programming as a difficult sell, especially right now. "consumers like the current bundles," Bowman said. "There is no evidence right now that consumers want an all a la carte system."