Apple will release the iPad 3 early in March (AllThingsD)

Alibaba will take its online unit private as it buys shares back from Yahoo! (Reuters)

Senior House member Spencer Bachus will be probed over insider trading charges (WaPo)

Google is testing a wireless home entertainment device (WSJ)

Douglas A. McIntyre

The old consumer of media was happy to remain at home or on a commuter train with a copy of the New York Times or a TV set with a cable box, and perhaps a TiVo machine. According to studies from Nielsen and other research groups, these people spent as much as six hours in front of their TVs. Some listened to drive-time radio and had a subscription to Time magazine. They were passive consumers of media. Information and entertainment flowed to them inbound. The most outbound activity they might display was a letter to the editor.

The digital omnivore is an expert at two-way communication. Video games are set up on the internet so that many gamers can play against one another in real time. People with smartphones can talk to one another, text or share observations and opinions with one another on Facebook and Twitter. They can watch movies and vote on whether they like them, even scene by scene.

It is important for markets to study the new class of digital omnivores. Comscore points out:

Understanding today’s multi-device consumer, or what is known as the “Digital Omnivore,” will be increasingly important for advertisers and publishers in 2012 with an eye on the two critical factors to building effective digital strategies: the incremental effect and platform cannibalization.

What has not been proven is whether advertisers will get any more in terms of purchasing activity and returns on their investments from new-age consumers, compared to what they got from a consumer who is stationary in his living room. Omnivores may eschew marketing messages because they can. The omnivore can watch video without commercials, or can skip over them. TV viewers cannot without a lot of effort. Neither can newspaper readers. Whether they read the advertisements or not, the messages are there on most pages.

Omnivores also consume media that have no advertisements at all. One of the criticisms of Facebook is that mobile versions carry no ads. Many videos on YouTube also do not run commercials. Twitter has not found a highly effective way to embed marketing messages in tweets. Omnivores may spend six, seven or eight hours on their devices. Their new habits, and the change in the way that marketers try to take advantage of those habits, may not help sell products and services any better than old media did. As a matter of fact, consumer choices in media are now spread across so many platforms that the consumer may be extremely hard to reach, at least effectively.

Markets were better off with the couch potato. He was not a moving target.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Provisions in the deal offer banks incentives to aid homeowners in the first 12 months after the deal is signed. There were also incentives for banks to use the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) and other government programs. Big banks that do business across many states from thousands of offices will have to process tens of thousands of mortgage applications. That is a formula for slow relief. “There were many small wrongs that were done here,” U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said as the deal was announced. “This does not resolve everything. We will be aggressive about going after claims elsewhere.” But HUD hardly can control the pace at which the banks operate.

Home prices may not have reached bottom, but many economists think they will soon. The home value market may not recover for years, and in some regions it may never recover entirely. But housing experts expect a recovery to be well underway by 2014. The millions of homes with underwater mortgages may remain underwater, but as the activity of buyers increases and foreclosures drop, the ability to sell a house for more than the mortgage on it will increase. Mortgage rates that are at all-time lows should help the sales process across the nation.

Many homeowners still will need help two or three years from now. The ones in the most financial distress cannot wait that long. And many of those with the burden of homes with underwater mortgages will have some relief two or three years from today as home prices slowly rise. In both cases, the money from the government settlement will be too late.

Douglas A. McIntyre

More disturbing than the figure that politicians, the media and economists debate are the ones that show joblessness by state and city. In some geographic areas, more than one person in five is still out of work. The improvement in those numbers does not match the overall national improvement. The jobs problem is more local than it is national.

A new set of data from Gallup shows that unemployment was 21% or higher in 2011 in five states: California, Florida, Nevada, Mississippi and Michigan. Five states does not seem like many. It just so happens, though, that the total population of these states is just over 70 million. Some 23% of all Americans are among their residents. And figures are not much better in several other states.

No federal program address joblessness in the regions that have been hardest hit by the recession. Most of the states with the greatest trouble do not have the money to help. As a matter of fact, states including Michigan and California have their own budget problems, as do many of their cities.

Whatever the national unemployment numbers show, underemployment and people who drop out of the job market are not as acute a problem as they are in California, Florida, Nevada, Mississippi and Michigan.

Methodology: Results are based on telephone interviews conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking January to December, 2011, with a random sample of 214,822 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Still No Greek Deal

The situation with Greece’s debt, which seemed better for a few hours as its leader met with European Union, European Central Bank and IMF officials in Brussels, is bad again. It appeared that those three groups would release the money Greece needs to cover its March obligations so as not to default. But that capital comes with strict restrictions, and the Greeks may be unable to accommodate them. Greece has to show its financiers that planned austerity programs are well underway and that all of the political powers in the country have endorsed them. That broad political endorsement is by no means assured as leaders jockey for the approval of sullen voters who believe austerity measures have gone too far.

Google Home Entertainment

Rumors have started to spread across the tech world that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) will release a home entertainment system that can stream music throughout people’s homes. The press has speculated that the world’s largest search company believes it can follow Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) into the hardware business. Apple is widely admired for its ability to marry devices with apps and entertainment. Google has started down the path of hardware integration with it purchase of handset firm Motorola (NYSE: MMI). Google may find the going rough, though. Most hardware companies have very modest margins, or make no money at all, as companies that make products to compete with the iPhone and iPad have already discovered.

Additional Job Cuts

PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP) and Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) are the latest multinationals to “reorganize” their businesses for the future. At Alcatel this means a cut of 1,800 people. At Pepsi it means dropping 8,700 workers. These restructurings are presented to investors and the press as ways to drive efficiency and margins. A look below the surface at most companies that take this path reveals that sales have faltered and management needs a way to show investors that they can make even modest returns.

Douglas A. McIntyre

The Hong Kong division of Alibaba may go private as part of a refinancing and a buyback of Yahoo!’s (NASDAQ: YHOO) shares. (Reuters)

Financial backers of Greece say they are concerned about whether a deal to lend the company more money will hold. (Reuters)

Economists concerned about the U.S. economy a few months ago change their opinions. (Reuters)

A fall off in investment bank activity hurts Barclays (NYSE: BCS) earnings. (Reuters)

China’s imports fall, raising demand concerns. (Reuters)

The new CEO of Sony (NYSE: SNE) will try to marry hardware and software for many of the firm’s products, just as he did with the PS3. (Reuters)

The head of Xstrata is under pressure to get a better deal for a Glencore merger. (Reuters)

A new settlement between banks and the government could help one million homeowners. (WSJ)

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) to launch a home entertainment system as it moves into the hardware space as Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has. (WSJ)

An insider trading bill is broadly supported by Congress members. (WSJ)

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) expands its use of web-based software products. (WSJ)

The FDA will speed the approval of biosimilar drug treatments. (WSJ)

An Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) reorganization could cost 1,800 jobs. (WSJ)

Weekly unemployment benefits numbers improve steadily. (WSJ)

Greek unemployment rises to 20.9%. (WSJ)

The head of the European Central Bank pushes banks to take inexpensive loans to stabilize eurozone financials. (WSJ)

Canada will allow uranium exports to China. (WSJ)

A Hasbro (NASDAQ: HAS) and Zynga (NASDAQ: ZNGA) partnership to marry physical games with online ones. (WSJ)

Southern Co.’s (NYSE: SO) plan to build a reactor in Georgia receives NRC approval. (WSJ)

Apple’s market cap passes that of Google and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) combined. (WSJ)

New research suggests the education gap between rich and poor has widened. (NYT)

German officials are worried that the ECB has cut lending standards too much. (FT)

Douglas A. McIntyre

The US and state attorneys general are close to a settlement with five majors banks which include Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo over accusations of improper foreclosure practices The amount of the settlement will be $26 billion (WSJ)

The US will sue six large banks for the sales practices they employed with mortgage backed securities, often blamed for the start of the credit crisis (WSJ)

Greece has reached a final agreement with creditors (FT)

Douglas A. McIntyre

Read The Eight States Where Companies Are Hiring

To develop the Job Creation Index, Gallup asked those surveyed whether companies are hiring or letting employees go. While the national score reflects that most states believe employers are hiring, 24/7 Wall St.’s analysis suggests that self-reporting by workers may not perfectly align with reality.

These states are not experiencing the greatest recoveries — including in employment — as they have little to recover from. The states’ strong economies may be affecting their residents’ perception of the economy. Five of the eight states on this list are among the top nine states on another recent Gallup poll ranking states’ confidence in the national economy. Those who live in states that are doing well see the entire country as doing well.

The majority of states where high percentages of workers reported job creation also have extremely low unemployment rates to begin with. Six of the eight states have among the 10 lowest unemployment rates in the country. North Dakota, the state where the largest share of workers reported that their employers are hiring, has the lowest unemployment rate in the country.

And while unemployment rates are low, the majority of these states have had relatively low unemployment rates for some time. Most did not have particularly impressive improvements in unemployment last year. Other than Utah and West Virginia — the only states with exceptionally large drops in unemployment — the rest have had low unemployment rates since 2006 and throughout the recession.

Housing markets in most of the states where respondents believe jobs are plentiful also have been stable. Seven of the eight states on the list are among the 15 markets that suffered the least from the third quarter of 2006 to the third quarter of 2011. Five of the states actually experienced increases in home prices over this period.

These are the eight states where workers say companies are hiring.

Groupon’s shares dropped 15% after its announcement that it lost money in the fourth quarter of last year. It said its “active customers” rose 275% from the same period a year ago to 33 million. Revenue jumped 194% to $506.5 million. And Groupon said sales in the first quarter would be as little as $510 million, up “only”73% from last year. Then Groupon claimed it would continue to have outsized investments for marketing. Many investors are worried that the use of online coupons is a model that consumers adopted only briefly, as well as that rivals like Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) have similar services. Beyond that, the lingering issue is whether people clip coupons more than they watch videos, communicate by text or hang out on Facebook. There are only so many hours in an internet day.

People clearly spend a lot of time on Facebook, but there is a debate over what they do. A set of research from Citi released last fall said that people are on Facebook for 16% of their time online, on average. The number eclipsed time spent on Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO). But how long does it take to do a successful search on Google before the user moves to a site the search uncovered? Google remains a utility as much as anything else, with search results mixed with ads on similar subjects. It is a nearly perfect match of content and marketing messages, as Google’s numbers have shown. Facebook’s 850 million users interact with friends and acquaintances, for hours it seems, but wandering people are hard to target, even with data on behavior and demographics. Facebook had less than $4 billion in revenue last year. So Wall St. wonders whether the people on the social network care at all about the ads that they see.

There is a cottage industry of research about why people visit online sites, whether they watch video on PCs or TV, and why some websites are better for advertisers than others. None of the research is conclusive enough, at least from the standpoint of many people who review it, to convince experts that time spent on Facebook or Groupon can ever yield the kind of revenue garnered by Amazon.com and Google. At least Amazon and Google can demonstrate a long history of interaction that yields a steady and growing stream of revenue. Each has a future likely to be as good as its past as far as revenue and profits are concerned. Facebook and Groupon have not yet cleared that hurdle.

Douglas A. McIntyre

The trouble with relying on China as the future of the global car industry is that the people in the People’s Republic have lost some of their voracious appetite for new vehicles. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers reports that, in January, sales of cars and light vehicles dropped 23.8% year-over-year. Analysts blamed the lunar holiday. But sales rose only 5% in all of 2011. So, the market has softened considerably.

China may produce sales of 18 million vehicles per year, well above the 13 million or so in the U.S. But car companies realize that American car sales are rising rapidly, while Chinese sales are not. The U.S., just two years ago the black hole of car sales, has become a foundation for revenue of multinational manufacturers. China has become a market where large investments in factories and marketing is a problem, at least for awhile.

Another challenge for foreign car companies in China is that local companies have grown tired of watching manufactures from the U.S., Japan and Europe exploit their market. All of the large local firms have learned manufacturing from their joint venture partners like GM and VW. That gives them the ability to stand on their own, and that can only hurt the sales of outsiders.

China has lost some of its luster for foreign car companies — that is, sales there have faltered — for a a number of reasons. Among them is that China’s middle class faces the effects of an economic slowdown and an inflation rate that hit 4.5% last month. And many Chinese cars are still relatively new. The factor of the replacement of cars that are six years or older, which is the cause for much of the improvement in sales in the U.S., is not as large a factor in China. There, the really huge volume in annual sales only happened in the past several years. The Chinese may not be ready to trade their cars in yet.

China, once the biggest hope for sales by global car companies, cannot sustain the revenue increases that the industry hoped it would.

Douglas A. McIntyre