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Posts Tagged ‘jason-goldberg’

Last week, Citibank found itself in the eye of an Internet storm after it was revealed that the bank had blocked the business account of Web startup fabulis over (non-existing) ‘objectionable content’ on the company’s blog.

The topic was all the more sensitive because fabulis operates a social network / lifestyle website targeting gay men.

A Citi representative was quick to apologize to fabulis founder Jason Goldberg (see updates to our previous story), but has now taken its official response a step further by reviewing and effectively making changes to its policies around Internet business account customers.

Here’s the note, straight from Citibank’s online discussion forum (emphasis ours):

Citibank Message About Internet Business Accounts

At Citibank, we have learned a great deal from recent customer issues related to Internet business accounts. Mistakes were made in some instances, in which we apologized and corrected the problem. These issues made it clear to us that the language in our branch procedures was not specific enough and left too much room for interpretation from one account to the next.

We recognized that we needed clearer and less subjective guidelines with regard to opening Internet business accounts. And there were clearly gaps in training and communications around these specific branch procedures. Based on all these learnings, we’ve taken action and this week we updated and clarified our procedures for opening all Internet business accounts.

Banks are required by law to conduct due diligence and understand the nature of business accounts. For Internet business accounts, we have made it clearer to our bankers what the due diligence process entails. For example, we will continue to reserve the right to decline or suspend an account if we find illegal or discriminatory content, or if the site involves gambling or pornography. Beyond that specific due diligence, however, we do not monitor or evaluate our customers’ web content.

We are providing additional training in this area to ensure the procedures are uniformly and correctly followed. Also, our bankers are now required to have additional consultation with senior level banking executives when questions arise about these accounts before making any final decisions. This will help to avoid misunderstanding and subjective decisions, and promote greater consistency throughout the process. And we remain committed to working with our customers to try to resolve any issues.

As a global organization, we also recognize the power and promise of diversity. In that spirit, we reiterate Citi’s commitment to serving customers, hiring talent and supporting a broad array of organizations that promote diversity. To learn more about our diversity efforts, please visit: http://www.citigroup.com/citi/citizen/diversity/index.htm.

These recent customer issues have been a useful learning experience for us. We again apologize for any misunderstandings that may have occurred. We are committed to improving every day and we’re working to better serve our customers.

I pinged Goldberg about the changes, which have also been communicated to him in an individual e-mail. He says he’s amazed that while the Obama administration can’t seem to get banks to change their ways, “we the people of social media” can. He adds:

How anyone at Citibank could have reviewed fabulis and classified it as “porn” is beyond us, and it speaks to how backwards and antiquated its policies were.

Amen to that.

Still, Citibank is being quite transparent about the whole ordeal and seems to be moving to make amends quickly.

What do you think about the whole situation?

We recently covered socialmedian, which late last year was acquired by European business social network XING, when they introduced a nifty application on the Facebook platform that allowed its users to share personalized news from across the web with their social graph.

At the time, I thought it was a bit of a strange move to support Facebook before powering the platform of its new owner, but former socialmedian CEO Jason Goldberg - who now has the position of Chief Product Officer at the public company - told me to expect an integration with XING to follow suite soon enough.

As of today, XING users can install the first two applications on its OpenSocial-driven platform: one (Xing News) takes the entire concept of socialmedian - personalized news filtering and sharing - and transforms it into a straightforward XING feature, the other one (Ask Xing) is a tool users can install to easily ask questions to the XING community and get responses without ever needing to leave the service.

These are arguably rather mundane applications, but the bigger news is that the social network now also features its very own application platform and is about to open it up to third-parties as well. In the near future, 10 current partners will get to distribute their own OpenSocial applications on the platform, and Goldberg tells me ultimately the plan is to open up more and finetune the approval process for new apps.

For reference: XING boasts 7+ million members, mostly in Germany and neighbor countries, of which over half a million actually pay a monthly subscription fee to access some of the premium features.

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“Punked” is one of those words that started out as a slang term, but was taken to a whole new level by a pop culture moment — in this case, the MTV show Punk’d. But as quickly as it heated up in 2003, it quickly burned out, lasting just 4 years. But the company behind it, Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst Media, may have found a way to revive the formula — take it live and online.

Katalyst is teaming up with Ustream, the online streaming video service, to bring “Punk’d-style experiences” to the platform. It would seem to have all the makings of a new web hit: People getting tricked and embarrassed on video, the whole thing happening live, interactivity and, perhaps most importantly to get it off the ground, star power. As we saw this past week with Kutcher’s race to a million Twitter followers, the guy knows how to leverage himself on the web.

Of course, content is still king. Kutcher and partner Jason Goldberg’s web cartoon show Blah Girls, hasn’t exactly exploded onto the scene after being unveiled at last year’s TC50. Traffic to the Blah Girl’s site does seem to be increasing nicely now, but it was in a rut for a while — and pales in comparison to say, the amount of pageviews Kutcher’s Twitter profile did just last week. And to be fair, Blah Girls is syndicated a bunch of different places, so website traffic doesn’t mean all that much for the show.

But Ustream knows a bit about huge viral shows itself. It hosts the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam, which is literally just a live stream of a puffy puppies sitting there being cute. That video has attracted some 10 million viewers, according to Ustream. And Ustream also did some major streaming during President Obama’s inauguration in January.

On top of their web partnership, the two sides plan to bring their videos to the iPhone in May, with a new live streaming aggregator app, taking all of these Punk’d-style live videos mobile.

As I said, it sounds like a winning combo, but I would caution Kutcher and company of one thing: There is still backlash on the web. If you overexpose yourself too much, users can get turned off, just as viewers do in Hollywood. Stay focused on what works, but don’t try to do too much. And please follow up on your promise to punk Ted Turner.

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