Google’s Ad Campaign Uses Emotions, Not Search Terms

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AppId is over the quota

The search giant made its first push into advertising with a Super Bowl ad in 2010 about a young couple falling in love. But through last year it began a more focused national television campaign, as well as taking on other efforts, like hosting Google-themed conferences in an effort to represent its online brand in the offline world.

“This past year has really been a remarkable transformation for Google,” said Peter Daboll, chief executive of Ace Metrix, a firm that evaluates TV and video ads.

Though Google is a household name, it needs to tell its story now for a few reasons. It needs new businesses like the Chrome browser and the Google Plus social network to succeed if it is going to find sources of revenue beyond search ads.

The ads are also part of Google’s mission, led by Larry Page, its co-founder and chief executive, to pare down its product offering and make Google products more attractive, intuitive and integrated with one another.

Lorraine Twohill, Google’s vice president for global marketing, would not disclose how much the company had increased its advertising spending, but said there had been a shift in strategy.

“As we got bigger, we had more competition, more products, more messages to consumers, so we needed to do a bit more to communicate what these products are and how you can use them,” she said.

Also as Google comes under attack from antitrust regulators, it can’t hurt to tell heartwarming stories about Google to wide audiences.

“If we don’t make you cry, we fail,” Ms. Twohill said. “It’s about emotion, which is bizarre for a tech company.”

Some viewers may be hard-pressed to keep their eyes dry after watching “Dear Sophie,” Google’s ad for Chrome in which a father sends multimedia messages to his baby daughter, or to hold back a smile watching grandmothers and children dancing to Lady Gaga.

But that is not to say that Google, where data is religion, does not back up sentimental branding efforts with cold, hard data.

Before showing the Super Bowl ad, Google tested a dozen versions on YouTube and chose to broadcast the one that received the most views.

And Google events, which also fall under the marketing division, require immense spreadsheets, like one to choose a location for Google Zeitgeist, its annual conference for wooing its biggest advertisers. The spreadsheet charted 140 hotels from Manhattan to Phoenix, with color-coded tabs and columns for ballroom size, room rates and the number of layovers to fly there.

The winner was Paradise Valley, Ariz., where Google’s event planner, Lorin Pollack, brought the company headquarters’ preschool motif to the desert.

“Google’s an online brand,” Ms. Pollack said. “You can’t experience the brand except for typing keys. It’s a huge responsibility to actually bring that brand to life outside of the computer.”

The lanterns lining the steps at the nighttime parties were Google colors — red, yellow, blue and green — and oversized stuffed ottomans mimicked the office’s beanbags, where engineers sit with laptops perched on their knees. Attendees could climb on the giant tricycle that Google Street View engineers ride to take photos or design their own Android robot T-shirts. A vending machine dispensed primary-colored juggling balls, bought by swiping Android cellphones.

Even the tablecloths had to evoke Google, which meant no billowy linen, Ms. Pollack said.

“Google is a very clean, simple brand,” she said. “Linen gets sloppy. It gets dirty; it’s hard to sit under. I take a lot of inspiration from our home page. It’s just simple.”

Like Google’s events, its TV ads are light on details about products’ features. Instead, they are meant to evoke curiosity and emotion, Ms. Twohill said.

The first ads for Chrome, aimed at frequent Web users, were online and discussed the browser’s speed and security. But when it came time to take Chrome mainstream, she said, Google turned to television to reach those “who don’t get out of bed in the morning and think, ‘I’ll get a new browser today.’?”

Google broke the recent trend of 15-second television ads to tell stories in a minute or two.

An ad for Google Plus shows the arc of a couple’s courtship without spoken words. The man places the woman in a social circle titled “love of my life,” but he starts out in her circle called “creepers.” Over time, though, he graduates to “book club,” “ski house” and eventually “keepers.”

Another, which was broadcast just before Christmas, shows the Muppets in a Google Plus Hangout video chat singing along to Queen and David Bowie. A newspaper ad for Google Plus featured the Dalai Lama joining Desmond Tutu by Hangout after he was denied a visa to visit South Africa.

Google is also advertising its search engine, even though, with two-thirds market share in the United States, it is hardly an unknown brand to anyone.

“I still think it’s important to remind people why Google matters, how it’s had an impact on people’s lives, what life was like before this,” Ms. Twohill said. An added incentive is that Google’s main rival, Microsoft’s Bing, also has a new ad campaign.

One search ad shows a surfer finding the perfect wave, a teenager becoming the youngest person to discover a supernova and a man installing solar panels.

“We’re all searching for a different thing, even if we’re all trying to get to the same endpoint,” a voice says.

Google’s strategy has connected with viewers, Mr. Daboll said, because they would rather view a story than have products pushed at them. Google ads took five of the top 10 spots on Ace Metrix’s list of the most effective TV ads for Web sites last year.

“Google has been so dominant in its usefulness,” he said. “Now they want to make you feel something about search, as opposed to just relying on it as a useful tool.”

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DealBook: Despite RIM Takeover Talk, Hurdles Would Be High

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AppId is over the quota
Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesA selection of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry phones.

OTTAWA — For beleaguered investors in Research in Motion, the drastic collapse of the company’s share price through 2011 eventually became a cause for optimism. In December, shares of the BlackBerry maker spiked on reports that several technology titans could be suitors.

But the optimism has been fleeting; the company has grappled with service failures, weak product introductions and dwindling market share. Shares of RIM have dropped by 75 percent since February.

As the troubles mount and the stock drops, RIM is looking like a strong takeover candidate without suitable prospects.

“Before you talk about a buyer, you have to ask: do you have a seller?” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners in New York. “That is the overarching question.”

Any potential suitors would most likely face stiff resistance from Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, the co-chief executives. Collectively they own more than 10 percent, which makes them among the largest shareholders.

Eric Risberg/Associated PressMike Lazaridis, a co-chief executive of Research in Motion, co-founded the company in 1984.

RIM is also a point of pride for the Canadian government, which has been increasingly reluctant to let foreign companies buy major domestic corporations. In a recent news conference, Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, offered a note of support for RIM, saying “we all know this is an important Canadian company.”

RIM, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, said it does not comment on “rumors and speculation” as a matter of policy.

Despite the company’s well-publicized problems, RIM remains an attractive target. Even as its market share erodes in North America, the company continues to expand its customer base overseas and now reports almost 75 million users worldwide. And the BlackBerry brand is the first choice for security-conscious users like law enforcement agencies and financial services companies. In the first nine months of the year, RIM reported earnings of $1.29 billion.

At Wednesday’s close of $14.87, the price is also appealing. Alkesh Shah, an analyst at Evercore Partners, estimated that the company was worth closer to $22.50 a share, even assuming that the handset business is essentially worthless. Mr. Shah said that RIM’s network, which carries global traffic worldwide and generates monthly subscription fees, was worth about $12.50 a share, while he valued the company’s patents at roughly $7.50 a share. The company also has $2.50 a share in cash, he estimated.

Still, RIM is a large acquisition to swallow, limiting the pool of buyers.

“You have to remember that this would take $10 billion, $12 billion, $13 billion,” said Mr. Gillis of BGC. “That’s a lot of cash. There’s not a lot of people willing to spend that kind of money.”

The most obvious suitor for RIM would be a Chinese cellphone manufacturer. Such companies, which typically act as contract manufacturers for prominent brands, lack a significant presence outside of Asia. ZTE, for example, is small, low-end player in North America and Europe. But it is the fourth-largest handset maker in the world, according to IDC, a company that tracks technology markets.

With RIM, ZTE would add a recognized brand to its portfolio, reflecting its global ambitions. This year, the Chinese company announced plans to produce high-end phones under its own name, focusing in part on Western markets.

But the regulatory hurdles would be high for a Chinese company. In recent years, Canada has been quick to block acquisitions under its foreign ownership laws. In 2010, the Conservative government stopped BHP Billiton, the Australian mining company, from buying Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan. At the time, some politicians cited a foreign takeover of RIM as a worst-case outcome.

The American government could also scuttle a RIM deal. The country’s military personnel, law enforcement officers and White House officials rely on BlackBerry devices, making Chinese ownership difficult under the technology control restrictions in the United States. This year, Huawei Technologies backed away from acquiring technology assets from 3Leaf Systems, a server company, after the federal government raised concerns about the relatively small transaction.

A ZTE spokeswoman declined to comment.

Other potential RIM suitors have been rebuffed. Microsoft, which had previously tried to persuade RIM to adopt its mobile operating system, initiated deal talks this summer, according to one person with knowledge of the matter. The American technology company viewed RIM’s corporate business as a good distribution platform for its software. But discussions withered, as RIM pursued an independent course. Microsoft declined to comment.

Amazon also reportedly explored a RIM acquisition. Peter Misek, an analyst in New York with Jefferies and Company, said such a deal would allow Amazon to add phones to its Kindle line of tablet computers. While no deal materialized, he said that it remained possible that RIM might license its BlackBerry software.

Facebook is a dark horse candidate. Given that Google uses Android to promote its online services, Mr. Misek said that it was likely Facebook would introduce a rival mobile operating system, and RIM would offer Facebook a quick way into the business.

But even that situation is a long shot. RIM is struggling with its latest operating system, BlackBerry 10. An RIM acquisition would also be a costly way for Facebook to gain entry into a new area.

“For $10 billion they could subsidize a lot of Android phones,” Mr. Gillis said of Facebook.

Few deals are likely to pass muster with RIM’s chiefs. Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Lazaridis have remained steadfast in their strategy to reverse the company’s fortunes. The executives are focused on a new line of phone and operating system, which are not expected to be introduced until the end of 2012.

Adnaan Ahmad, an analyst with Berenberg Bank in London, said the pair seemed to have developed “founders’ syndrome,” a condition that makes them inflexible about taking their company in new directions and unwilling to yield control.

Both have reputations for being combative when challenged. In the middle of the last decade, the chiefs vigorously fought a patent case brought by NTP — actions that almost prompted a shutdown of BlackBerry service. RIM settled the matter for $612.5 million, a significantly larger sum than would have been necessary earlier.

While no major shareholder has spoken publicly about RIM’s management, some dissidents have privately expressed reservations. Big investors seem willing, for now, to see how the new operating system, BlackBerry 10, performs. Two top shareholders, the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank of Canada, rely heavily on domestic retail business and would be unlikely to push RIM to seek a foreign buyer — if only for public relations purposes.

In late December, Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Lazaridis made it clear that they intended to remain in control of RIM, even after announcing another delay in the new operating system.

“It is important for you to know that Mike and I, as two of RIM’s largest shareholders, understand investor sentiment, and we are more committed than ever to addressing the issues at hand,” Mr. Balsillie said before announcing that, as a good will gesture, they had cut their salaries to $1 a year.

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Disruptions: Resolved in 2012: To Enjoy the View Without Help From an iPhone

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AppId is over the quota
Nick Bilton/The New York Times

Last week, I drove to Pacifica, a beach community just south of San Francisco, where I climbed a large rocky hill as the sun descended on the horizon. It painted a typically astounding California sunset across the Pacific Ocean. What did I do next?

What any normal person would do in 2011: I pulled out my iPhone and began snapping pictures to share on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

I spent 10 minutes trying to compose the perfect shot, moving my phone from side to side, adjusting light settings and picking the perfect filter.

Then, I stopped. Here I was, watching this magnificent sunset, and all I could do is peer at it through a tiny four-inch screen.

“What’s wrong with me?” I thought. “I can’t seem to enjoy anything without trying to digitally capture it or spew it onto the Internet.”

Hence my New Year’s resolution: In 2012, I plan to spend at least 30 minutes a day without my iPhone. Without Internet, Twitter, Facebook and my iPad. Spending a half-hour a day without electronics might sound easy for most, but for me, 30 unconnected minutes produces the same anxious feelings of a child left accidentally at the mall.

I made this resolution out of a sense that I habitually reached for the iPhone even when I really didn’t need to, when I might have just enjoyed an experience, like the sunset, without any technology. And after talking to people who do research on subjects like this, I realized that there were some good reasons to give up a little tech.

For example, I was worried that if I did not capture that beautiful sunset and stuff it into my phone, I’d forget it.

“Even with something as beautiful as a sunset, forgetting is really important as a mental hygiene,” said Viktor Mayer-Sch?nberger, a professor of Internet governance at Oxford University and the author of the book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.”

“That things in our past become rosier over time is incredibly important,” he added. “As we forget, our memories abstract and our brain goes through a cleansing process.” Mr. Mayer-Sch?nberger said that keeping a perpetual visual diary of everything could slow down our brains’ purging process.

Constantly interacting with our mobile devices has other drawbacks too. There are more pictures in my iPhone of that 45-minute hike at Pacifica than most families would have taken on a two-week vacation before the advent of digital cameras.

As a result, I had no time to daydream on that hike, and daydreams, scientists say, are imperative in solving problems.

Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientist and the author of the soon-to-be-released book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” said in a phone interview that our brains often needed to become inattentive to figure out complex issues. He said his book discussed an area of the brain scientists call “the default network” that was active only when the rest of the brain was inactive — in other words, when we were daydreaming.

Letting the mind wander activates the default network, he said, and allows our brains to solve problems that most likely can’t be solved during a game of Angry Birds.

“Like everyone else, I really can’t imagine life without that little computer in my pocket,” he added. “However, there is an importance to being able to put it aside and let those daydreams naturally perform the cognitive functions your brain needs.”

Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has focused his research on daydreaming, put it this way: “Daydreaming and boredom seem to be a source for incubation and creative discovery in the brain and are part of the creative incubation process.”

I don’t intend to give up my technology entirely, but I want to find a better balance. For me, it’s that 30 minutes a day for daydreaming.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and tell my Twitter followers about my New Year’s resolution.

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Workstation: For Multitaskers, 2012 May Be a Year of Revenge

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AppId is over the quota

DEVICE BACKLASH As workers add more electronic devices, Web sites, software programs and apps to their arsenals, there is a point at which efficiency and satisfaction suffer. More devices can lead to more multitasking, which, though viewed by many as a virtue, has been shown to interfere with concentration.

More devices also harbor more vortexes of distraction, like Facebook, shopping sites and cute animal videos. Maintaining focus may well be one of the biggest daily challenges that workers will face this year, now that smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous.

More workers will probably revolt against the idea that they must be “on” all the time, recognizing that both their work and personal lives will improve if they create stricter boundaries. Sometimes this expectation is self-imposed; at other times, it’s part of the corporate culture. Look for more companies to address the issue directly. Last month, for example, Volkswagen agreed with labor representatives in Germany to limit work-related e-mails on BlackBerrys during off-hours.

THE TRAINING ADVANTAGE More technology necessitates more training. During the recession, too many workers learned new technology imperfectly, on the fly, or not at all. Fortunately, corporate spending on training rose in 2011 over the previous year, according to a report in Training magazine.

The pace at which new technology emerges and becomes paramount is quickening as never before. Last year, HTML 5 for the Web was the hottest skill that a job seeker could have; now it’s a knowledge of apps, said Alison Doyle, a job search specialist for About.com, which is owned by The New York Times Company.

Both the employed and the unemployed cannot be complacent about their skills, and must be assertive about keeping up with the latest computer languages and applications, she said.

THE RISE OF THE INDEPENDENT WORKER Both by necessity and choice, more workers are deciding to go it alone as consultants, contractors, freelancers and other independent operators. Look for that trend to intensify this year.

Thanks to technology, it’s easier than ever for “people to find projects and projects to find people,” and they aren’t restricted by geography, said Gene Zaino, president and chief executive of MBO Partners, which deals with issues surrounding independent consultants.

That’s great for people who seek flexibility and autonomy. But working alone can be lonely, and a lack of structure can slow productivity. That’s why the phenomenon of co-working — where independent workers in a range of fields gather in one room to conduct business and drink lots of coffee or tea — is likely to spread.

Of course, not everyone chooses to be independent. Many people have been forced into becoming contractors as more companies with limited budgets hire on a project basis, Mr. Zaino said. Often, these workers’ pay is lower than it would be if they were full-time employees, and benefits are nonexistent.

Now enter the federal government, which doesn’t like how these fuzzy arrangements affect tax collection. Expect a big government push to classify contract workers as employees, Mr. Zaino said.

THE UNEMPLOYMENT DIVIDE The overall unemployment rate is 8.6 percent, but break down the number by educational attainment and the picture looks different. Those with college degrees are the lucky ones: the jobless rate for them is 4.4 percent. That compares with 8.8 percent for those with only a high school diploma and 13.2 percent for those with no diploma at all.

Consider, too, that less than 30 percent of the United States population age 25 or older has a bachelor’s degree or higher. Large groups of Americans will continue to be unemployed or underemployed unless more training and educational opportunities become available.

Another disadvantaged group is the long-term unemployed, who are having trouble rejoining the work force as employers show a preference for hiring people who currently hold jobs or have been laid off only recently.

More than 30 percent of jobless Americans have been unemployed for a year or more, according to federal data. Congress will continue to wrestle with their plight, and their benefits, this year. Without help, this group risks falling so far behind that it can’t catch up.

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Hacker Attacks Like Stratfor’s Require Fast Response

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AppId is over the quota

In the film “Pulp Fiction,” Harvey Keitel plays the Wolf, a fast-talking and meticulous man who is called in to deal with the aftermath of an accidental shooting.

In the messy world of computer security breaches, Kevin Mandia is something like the Wolf. Mr. Mandia has spent his entire career cleaning up problems much like the recent breach at Stratfor, the security group based in Austin, Tex., that was hacked over the Christmas weekend.

Hackers claiming to be members of the collective known as Anonymous defaced Stratfor’s Web site and published over 50,000 of its customers’ credit card numbers online. They have threatened to release more card details and a trove of 3.3 million e-mails between Stratfor and its clients, which include Goldman Sachs, the Defense Department, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the United Nations.

That means Stratfor is in the position of trying to recover from a potentially devastating attack without knowing whether the worst is over.

“They’re in a bad place,” said Mr. Mandia, who is not involved in the Stratfor case. “If the attacker is going to release their e-mails, there’s no way to shut them down.”

Stratfor joins a list of other hapless prominent organizations that have recently been breached by so-called hacktivists — hackers whose goal is to embarrass and expose them. Among its predecessors are Sony, the security company HBGary and the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

Unlike extortion cases, in which hackers typically demand a fee for not disclosing specific proprietary information, attacks by hacktivists put companies in a potentially more precarious and vulnerable waiting mode. The companies do not know precisely what has been stolen, how destructive its disclosure will be, when it will be dumped online or even whether the hackers are still roaming through their internal networks. All the while, they must reassure anxious clients and try to minimize the inevitable public relations fallout.

“We call it a three-alarm fire,” said Jamie May, chief investigator at Debix, the identity protection company that was hired by Sony after its breach earlier this year.

“It’s easy for companies to get ahead of themselves and rush into bad decisions that make a situation worse,” she said, “which is why it is often helpful to work with a company that has done this before.”

The breach at Stratfor, which markets its security expertise, could be particularly embarrassing if hackers can prove their claims that they were able to gain access to the company’s sensitive data because it was not encrypted — a basic first step in data protection.

Stratfor has not clarified whether its data was encrypted, and did not respond to requests for comment. With its Web site still down, the company has been using its Facebook page to share updates about matters like its offer of identity-theft protection for customers. But some customers have left comments on the page complaining that they did not hear directly from Stratfor about the breach, and found out that their card information was compromised only when their banks notified them of unauthorized charges.

Mr. Mandia’s computer security and forensics firm, Mandiant, has responded to breaches, extortion attacks and economic espionage campaigns at 22 companies in the Fortune 100 in the last two years alone, Mr. Mandia said. He calls the first hour he spends with companies “upchuck hour.”

“I need to get as much data as I can get. I come in and say ‘Get me your firewall logs. Give me your Web logs. Tell me what you know so far. Who do you think might have done this? Give me your e-mails,’?” he said. “Everybody’s vomiting information on a table. It’s never pretty and it’s always unstructured.”

Time is of the essence. “Every minute you take to figure this out, you could be losing more e-mails and more credit data,” he said. The goal is to determine quickly the “fingerprint” of the intrusion and its scope, Mr. Mandia said: “How did the guy break in? What did he take? When did he break in? And, how do I stop this?”

The first thing a forensics team will do is try to get the hackers off the company’s network, which entails simultaneously plugging any security holes, removing any back doors into the company’s network that the intruders might have installed, and changing all the company’s passwords.

“This is something most people fail at,” Mr. Mandia said. “It’s like removing cancer. You have to remove it all at once. If you only remove the cancer in your leg, but you have it in your arm, you might as well have not had the operation on your leg.”

Likewise, if a company misses one back door or one compromised password, the intruders can immediately come back in.

Once the network has been secured, a forensics team will comb through a company’s data to determine the impact of the breach, so it can begin notifying affected customers, determine its liability and try to get ahead of the news cycle.

But in a hacktivist case like Stratfor’s, in which hackers are threatening to disburse more credit card details and sensitive correspondence, Mr. Mandia said there comes a point when “you just have to sit back and hope.”

“If anybody was any good at preventing leaks, we would have never seen WikiLeaks,” Mr. Mandia said. “The U.S. government would have stopped it and that data would never have been dumped.”

Meanwhile, Stratfor’s hackers have taken to Twitter to announce that they plan to release more Stratfor data over the next several days.

That may offer at least one possible silver lining. In the world of computer security, experts say, the most dangerous breaches are the quiet ones — the ones in which hackers make off with a company’s intellectual property and leave no trace.

“The hacks that do the most damage,” Mr. Mandia said, “don’t have Twitter feeds.”

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Gadgetwise: Publishing Your Own E-Book

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AppId is over the quota

I want to publish my own e-book and sell it online on a major Web site. Where do I start?

Writing, editing and proofreading your book manuscript is the first step. Once you have finished your book, perhaps one of the easiest ways to get it out there for sale is to use publishing tools from the major online bookstores like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Amazon has a Kindle Direct Publishing service that lets you self-publish your own e-books and sell them in its online Kindle store. The site has tutorials for properly formatting and uploading your book file to make it compatible with the Kindle, Amazon’s own e-reader hardware. You need an account to use the service, but you can use your existing Amazon.com account if you already buy things from the site. Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing Help page has the information you need to get started, including an explanation of the royalties you can earn and Amazon’s share of the profits.

Barnes and Noble has its own publishing platform called PubIt that can be used to upload and distribute e-books in its Nook online bookstore. The PubIt site accepts files in the ePub format, but it also has tools that convert Microsoft Word, RTF files, HTML documents and plain-text files into ePub. It doesn’t cost anything to use PubIt, but you do need an account, and Barnes and Noble takes a percentage of your book’s list price in exchange for selling your work. The PubIt Support page has information on prices, percentages and using the service.

If you do not want to use a publishing tool dedicated to a specific online store, an e-book distribution service like Smashwords can help you get your work out to a variety of online bookstores, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple’s iBookstore and the Sony Reader store.

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Keeping Your Reading List in Sync

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AppId is over the quota

How do you sync the Safari Reading List? I have iCloud turned on, but I don’t see a setting for syncing my Reading List stories between copies of the Safari browser running on my iPad, Windows 7 PC, and Mac OS X Lion.

Apple’s Safari Reading List, which lets you save stories for later perusal, is basically an area for temporary bookmarks. While it does not have its own switch to turn on or off in the iCloud settings, you can keep your Reading List in sync across devices by turning on the iCloud option to sync Bookmarks.

You get to this on the iPad (or other iOS 5 device like an iPhone or iPod Touch) by tapping the Settings icon on the Home screen and tapping the iCloud icon. On the iCloud settings screen, make sure you are logged into your iCloud account and tap the button next to Bookmarks to On before closing the screen.

On the Windows PC, (which needs to have the iCloud Control Panel for Windows installed ahead of time), go to the Start menu and choose Control Panel. On the Control Panel screen, click on Network and Internet and click on the iCloud Control Panel. Log into your iCloud account with the same user name and password used on the iPad and put a check in the box next to Bookmarks to sync them between devices. (If the box indicates that iCloud is set to sync with Internet Explorer bookmarks instead of Safari, click the Options button and choose Safari instead.) Click the Close button then finished.

On the Mac, go to the Apple menu and choose System Preferences, or just click the System Preferences icon in the Mac’s Dock.
On the System Preferences screen under Internet and Wireless, click the iCloud icon. Again, make sure you are logged in with the same iCloud user name and password that you used on the iPad and Windows computer and then put a check in the box next to Bookmarks. Close the iCloud preferences box when you are done.

Once you have properly set up all your participating computers and iOS devices, the stories you add to your Safari Reading List should sync up within a few seconds; try closing and reopening the Reading List if you do not see the new additions. If you are having other issues with iCloud, Apple has a general iCloud support page that may help with the troubleshooting.

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