Google Finance: MARKET SNAPSHOT: U.S. Stocks Mostly Lower As Consumer Spending Slows

U.S. stocks on Friday wavered mainly lower, on track for their worst month in 28 years, as generally bleak economic data showed consumers spending less and Electronic Arts Inc. joining the list of companies cutting forecasts and employees.

Up and down during the morning, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI) was recently ahead 12.1 points at 9,192.79, with 17 of its 30 components trading higher.

JP Morgan Chase (JPM) gained the most, up 4%, while General Motors Corp. (GM) proved the blue-chip index's biggest decliner, down 3.1 %,

The S&P 500 (SPX) fell 1.71 points at 952.38, while the Nasdaq Composite ( RIXF) dropped 2.9 points at 1,695.62.

The energy, materials and utilities sectors led the losses among the S&P's 10 industry groups. Telecommunication services and consumer discretionary and staples fared the best in early action.

Among the energy sector's biggest laggards, Rowan Companies Inc. (RDC) fell 7.6%.

In the telecommunication services sector, American Tower Corp.(AMT) shined, its shares lately up 6%.

Volume on the New York Stock Exchange neared 267 million, with advancers just ahead of decliners. On the Nasdaq, 225 million shares were exchanged, with advancers topping decliners roughly 7 to 5.

Stock futures pared declines after some of the economic data, including the Commerce Department's report that U.S. consumer spending in September tallied its largest drop in four years. .

U.S. consumer sentiment fell in October from the month before to reach a record monthly decline, according to the University of Michigan/Reuters index. .

The Chicago Purchasing Managers reported the Chicago Business Barometer plummeted to 37.8 in October, its lowest level since May 2001.

U.S. stocks closed with strong gains Thursday as amid indications of furthering easing in troubled credit markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 189 points, the S&P 500 rose 24 points and the Nasdaq Composite added 41 points.

But over the course of October, the S&P 500 has lost 18% of its value, its worst month since 1987.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will speak later Friday on mortgage finance. San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen, who doesn't vote on rate decisions this year, said U.S. rates could go "a little lower."

Overseas, the Bank of Japan defied expectations a bit, cutting rates to 0.3% from 0.5%, rather than the 25 basis point cut many expected. .

The Nikkei 225 dropped 5% in Tokyo. .

In London, a profit warning from telecoms group BT Group (BT) sent the U.K. firm down around 20%. The FTSE 100 turned 0.6% higher in afternoon trade.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, crude-oil futures fell 85 cents to $65.11 a barrel.

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On the earnings front, oil giant and Dow industrials component Chevron Corp. ( CVX) fell 2.4% after reporting third-quarter income rose 114% to $7.9 billion.

Washington Post Co. (WPO) said its third-quarter profit fell sharply to $10.3 million from $72.5 million.

Electronics Arts Inc. (ERTS) tumbled 16.4% after it late Thursday posted a wider loss and reduced its annual forecast, while saying it would lay off 6% of its workforce. .

Shares of Sun Micro Systems Inc. (JAVA) also fell, down 13.8%, after the software company reported a $1.68 billion quarterly loss.

Article from Techcrunch: What Did Voters Google During The Last Presidential Debate?

Right after each Presidential Debate both sides and all the big news organizations immediately conduct polls to determine how each candidate did and which issues resonated the most with voters. It is an expensive process that keeps an entire cottage industry of pollsters in business. But one of the best forms of instant voter feedback might be Google.

The most popular search terms during the last debate on Wednesday included “Roe v. Wade” and “Joe the Plumber.” But, less predictably, “charter schools” and “school vouchers” also seemed to hit a nerve. Or at least people wanted to learn more about them. When the candidates talked about a “litmus test” for nominating Supreme Court Justices that too sent people to their keyboards.

Maybe some people just wanted to know what a litmus test is and what it has to do with picking judges, or what the difference is between a charter school and a school voucher. The fact that people are searching for these terms tells us nothing about how they feel about them. But it does suggest that they want to learn more about them. That is an opportunity for each side to hone their message around education and judges, for example, in the final weeks of the campaign. Or they can just keep going negative. That seems to work too.

Now, what would be really great is if Google Trends offered up the option to see such live search trends by the hour. (The most granular you can get right now is the last 30 days). Maybe an engineer there can turn that into a new 20-percent project to disrupt the polling industry.

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From Techcrunch: Glam Teams With GumGum To Serve Free, Legal Images

Image licensing platform GumGum has scored a deal to serve free legal images across Glam Media’s publishing network. Glam publishers will have access to photos from Splash News’ catalog of celebrity images, many of which run from $75-500 apiece under standard licensing deals. In lieu of these fees, GumGum will allow publishers to display their images with ad overlays free of charge (publishers will receive around 20% of the revenue from these ads - the rest will go to GumGum, Glam, and Splash).

The deal comes two months after GumGum annouced a major shift in the technology used to power its platform. In the past, the site would issue photographs as Flash objects, which made them easy to track and monetize with ads. But Flash-based images are slow and clunky compared to a normal image file, which made the system unappealing to publishers.

In July GumGum dropped the Flash technology in favor of a system that uses standard image formats. Now, publishers are free to crop and modify their images (which they couldn’t do with the Flash version). GumGum uses a combination of photo metadata and image recognition to identify the licensed photos, and overlays ads accordingly. If a publisher doesn’t want ads to appear on their images, they can pay a modest fee tied to the number of times an image is viewed, rather than the one-time bulk fee typically associated with image licensing.

While GumGum acknowledges that it’s probably possible to fool the image recognition system, it has shifted its business to appeal to legitimate publishers - anyone who wants to pirate an image probably wouldn’t sign up for the service in the first place.

Glam Media is an advertising/publishing network that focuses almost exclusively on content for women. With over 600 member blogs and sites across Glam’s network, GumGum stands to see its userbase grow dramatically - the company speculates that the number of images it serves could potentially double with the deal.

GumGum competitor PicApp forged a similar deal with blog network b5media earlier this year. And Glam’s biggest rival Sugar Inc allows its bloggers to use images from Getty images.

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From Techcrunch: Why The Online Music Industry Should Move To a Rev-Share Model

Memo to the Copyright Royalty Board: a bigger pie fills more bellies. Tomorrow, the three-judge panel that sets rates on music copyright fees is scheduled to announce new rates on digital music downloads for the next five years. The fees, which go to music publishers (the actual owners of the copyright to each song), are currently set at 9 cents per track. Music publishers want to raise that to 15 cents per track. Apple has vaguely threatened that it might have to shut down iTunes if the new rates go into effect (yeah, right).

Apple still controls about 85 percent of the digital download market, but these fees are also being paid by Amazon, Rhapsody, MySpace Music and others. The music publishers (who are often the artists themselves) want to future-proof their cut of the action and thus want to lock in as high a rate as possible. Apple and the record labels are arguing that the rates should be changed from a flat fee per song to a percentage of revenues. Apple wants to pay 6 percent of revenues, while the labels are suggesting 8 percent. Since, in the case of iTunes, this percentage would come out of the current 99 cents charged for each track, it actually amounts to a reduction in per track fees (6 cents and 8 cents respectively).

On its face, it looks like Apple and the record companies are once again trying to stick it to the little guy (artists, song writers, and other music publishers). But in this case, Apple and the recording industry are actually right. Music on the Web is currently crippled by the fees set by the Copyright Royalty Board (not just for downloads, but for streaming Internet radio as well). As it is, Apple pays 70 cents from each track sold to the record companies (which then pay the music publishers their cut). There is not much margin left out of which to take that extra 6 cents, and charging $1.05 per track will have an impact on sales.

Moving to a revenue-sharing model makes a lot more economic sense. That way digital music sales has more breathing room to establish itself, and the artists will be able to grow with the industry. Eight percent of a bigger pie is better than nine percent of a smaller one. Rather than focus on how much each publisher gets per track, the Copyright Royalty Board should try to maximize the total amount of fees that publishers will get. A rev-share model is the way to go.

from Techcrunch: SoundCloud Streamlines Music Sharing For Industry Professionals

Transferring large files on the web has always been a hassle, especially when you need to do it frequently. One field especially prone to this problem is the music industry - artists often collaborate with eachother by sending rough versions of tracks, but have to rely on clunky services like YouSendIt or FTP servers. SoundCloud, a German startup that launches on October 10, is looking to streamline this process by allowing an artist to upload a file once and easily distribute it to whomever they’d like. The site is currently in private beta, but you can grab one of 500 invites here.

SoundCloud isn’t meant as a consumer site - rather, it’s a service for industry professionals, including artists, music labels, and producers. From the outset, it’s clear that SoundCloud is very well designed, with an intuitive interface that falls firmly under “Web 2.0″. The site revolves around artist profiles and the tracks they’ve uploaded, which are presented in an embeddable basic music widget (you can see one below). Aside from standard playback, the widget also allows artists to open up their tracks to comments from outside visitors, which can be appended to specified times.

Rock Your Body (alex dogmatic remix) by Alex

Artists can specify how much control their users will have over their content, setting their music to stream-only, or as available for download. The site also supports listener analytics, so artists can see how many visitors have listened to their tracks. And the site supports a wide variety of audio formats, with no restrictions on file size.

SoundCloud also includes some basic social features, with artist profiles detailing professional contact information, much like a musician’s social network, and a follow system that allows you to receive alerts whenever a friend or colleague uploads a track. There’s also a Dropbox that allows visitors to submit songs to you for review - it’s a digital version of the mailed-in demo tape.

Provided SoundCloud can get a foothold in the music industry (which isn’t an easy thing to do), it seems poised for success. There are many other options for media sharing, but SoundCloud has executed extremely well, with an interface that should make sense to even the most technically-challenged users. Major producers and music labels may be hesitant to embrace it in the near future, but there’s a massive market for indie artists and fledgling musicians that will pounce on the service immediately.