The cool thing about the TechCrunch Disrupt conference is that the biggest names in technology come to mingle with some actual garage operations on a somewhat level playing field. One of the simplest but also brilliant micro-startups there this year was Storify , founded by a former AP Bureau chief, it's another possible way to save the ailing journalism industry. But even if it doesn't save the world, it's still a pretty powerful little tool for anyone who publishes anything on the web, which is almost everyone these days.
Storify is in private beta right now, but we got access to try it out. It's basically a dashboard with a story template that allows publishers to easily ping Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and a handful of other sources for content, opinions and anything else the crowd has to say about the story in progress.
Stories created with Storify can easily be embedded into HTML and Storify tracks where that embed code travels around the web. There's also a powerful API that allows developers to crunch the data behind all the elements of a story in numerous ways.
We talked to founder Burt Herman at Disrupt to get a more detailed low-down:
Daniweb - Where did the idea for Storify come from?
Herman - I worked as a correspondent and bureau chief for the Associated Press for 12 years, reporting around the world covering lots of different stories and saw …
For years now, we've been promised new technologies that would merge the idea of virtual payments with actual brick and mortar retailers, but inevitably we just keep swiping those plastic cards. Meanwhile, the Japanese and others leapfrog ahead, happily waving their phones and other gadgets in front of those cool Near Field Communication (NFC) payment systems without ever having to fumble for a wallet.
The problem, according to MobilePayUSA Founder Randy Smith , is that while financial institutions and others have tried to push adoption of NFC here, retailers have balked at the up to $500 price tag to replace existing terminals with the new technology.
Smith says he's come up with a solution, and the folks attending this week's TechCrunch Disrupt conference named MobilePayUSA's geolocation-based work-around an audience favorite.
We spoke to Smith at Disrupt about the advantages of his system, which will be centered around a GPS-enabled smartphone app.
"It requires no new hardware, no new software or custom integration... no Bluetooth, no bar codes, so no changes to existing merchant systems with our solution," he explains. "We'll be able to get a merchant signed up in a matter of minutes once we're into our beta and launching commercially. We just need to capture basic merchant account information in order to achieve that."
Smith explains that using a phone's geolocation tools, the merchant is automatically displayed through the app. A payment is initiated by tapping a …
Swedish start-up Saplo wants to put the entire online world into context to help slice through the deluge of irrelevant information - and they're trying to do it by shifting from syntax-based search to algorithms based on high-profile academic research that understand the semantics underlying all that overwhelming amount of text on the Internet.
Saplo's latest effort to that end is Saplo Stream , which went live in an alpha phase Tuesday afternoon, right in the middle of TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. Saplo Stream's aim is to deliver only the most relevant news headlines and blog posts to users, weeding through all the slush and saving time.
We caught up with Saplo's Founder and CEO Mattias Tyrberg at TC Disrupt to get the scoop on the new service.
Daniweb - Really briefly, explain how Saplo Stream works - sell us on why someone would want to opt for it over some of the other many services that say they can filter the universe of online information for us.
Tyrberg - In this alpha release we are targeting the people using Twitter to read news. Say you have been away for one week and you have a meeting in 20 minutes, how can you possibly know what have happened with services such as Twitter and Google Reader? We solve this problem by adding a time and relevance filter on your news stream. Saplo Stream is about getting …
It's official - Apple says it will be offering individual TV episodes for download 'rental.' While many are already heralding the announcement from yet another much-hyped media event in California as another nail in the coffin of old school television, Daniweb spoke to Dan Rayburn , a principal analyst at Frost and Sullivan who also runs streamingmedia.com . He told us that despite all the hype, he doesn't see today's announcement as any sort of breakthrough.
"You hear things like 'Cable is Dead' or 'People are cutting the cord for online video,' or 'The TV Model is broken...' but when you look at the actual numbers, it's just not accurate."
Rayburn points to figures that put the online video advertising market at half a billion dollars, versus 60 billion for TV advertising.
Another challenge for the streaming media sector that is preventing the total demise of the television industry for the time-being is the issue of fragmentation. Unlike with traditional television, where a variety of services and content are all distributed through the same big living room flat screen, online video is offered through myriad different devices, platforms, operating systems and with widely varying levels of quality.
As Apple's announcement comes today, rumors are swirling that Amazon may offer video on demand, and Google is also planning a Google TV platform. Blockbuster, Best Buy, Hulu Plus and Netflix further crowd the market.
Rayburn says no one stands to …
Lately, we've been feeling rather sorry for Dell's media relations people - they keep having to put out press releases about how their employer has purchased data storage company 3Par, only to learn later that it hasn't actually happened.
Dell first announced its acquisition of 3Par a couple weeks ago , when it made an $18 per share bid for the company. But a week later, HP triggered a frenzied bidding war when it offered $24 a share for the company. The back and forth bids have continued, increasing first to $27 per and now the latest offer from HP is $30 per share, made over the weekend to trump Dell once again and make yet another press release obsolete.
Making the competition all the more interesting is that it comes on the heels of the high-profile ousting of HP CEO Mark Hurd, who many believe would have avoided such a deal. Many analysts say they believe the company is trying to show its board is unified in the absence of a CEO, and most predict HP will win the bidding war.
But what's really driving the (attempted) deal-making is growth in cloud computing. Both giant companies see massive growth potential in the cloud, and among the names making the related data storage hardware, tiny 3Par is the most logical target for acquisition (bloated IBM and EMC are among the other leaders).
The Wall Street folks will also point out that …
What's a billionaire to do when he's not in the spotlight so much anymore and maybe getting a little, well... bored? Sue everyone that people are paying more attention to than you, that's what!
Interval Licensing, the company owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is suing nearly every big name in tech - the lawsuit names AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube as defendants, alleging violations of patents related to search, multimedia, database management and "screen activity" (e.g. pop-ups.)
No specifics just yet on exactly how each company violated the patents, but a release from Interval says they cover "fundamental web technologies first developed at Interval Research in the 1990s, which the company believes are being infringed by major e-commerce and web search companies."
The patents named in the suit include:United States Patent No. 6,263,507 issued for an invention entitled "Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data."
United States Patent No. 6,034,652 issued for an invention entitled "Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device."
United States Patent No. 6,788,314 issued for an invention entitled "Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device."
United States Patent No. 6,757,682 issued for an invention entitled "Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest."
"Interval …
Just weeks after Research in Motion installed servers in Saudi Arabia to allow authorities there to monitor Blackberry messaging traffic and avoid being shut down in the Kingdom, an encore of the drama is playing out in India.
The Indian government has pledged to shut down RIM's encrypted services in the country at the end of the month, citing security concerns just as a handful of other Asian countries have done this summer. Now it appears RIM is employing a stalling technique with the deadline less than a week away. On Thursday the company proposed a forum with industry and government officials to try and sort out the security issues.
“Finding the right balance to address both regulatory and commercial needs in this matter is an ongoing process and RIM has assured the government of India of its continued support and respect for India’s legal and national security requirements,” the company said.
Throughout the ongoing conflicts over security and data in the region, RIM has insisted that it has no simple way of just "giving authorities the key" to decrypt and monitor the stream of instant and text messages being sent on Blackberries within the country; although installing servers in Saudi Arabia seemed to do the trick. The company also complains that it is being singled out from among a number of other mobile messaging providers.
Most analysts agree that the insistence on the part of the Indian government is …
The good people at Mozilla have read our minds, again. The latest beta version of Firefox 4 , released on Tuesday, has a new tool to help you get out from under that unruly pile of browser tabs. It's called 'Panorama,' a shortcut-accessible drag-and-drop workspace that allows you to move and organize your browser tabs into named groups. The workspace is also scalable, so you can increase the size of the group of tabs that you're currently working on, or shrink those that are less important and don't require attention.
Not to underestimate our ability to overwhelm ourselves with multitasking, however, when a group of tabs becomes too large to manage even on Panorama's whiteboard, it collapses into a pile, which can be quickly browsed a la the Windows 'Aero' concept.
Tab candy designer Aza Raskin breaks down the design principles behind Panorama in a blog post , including the need to remove distractions from your work flow:
... out of sight, out of mind. This is the corollary to seeing is remembering. We, as humans, are bad at multitasking. As practitioners of GTD know, the secret to productivity is removing distractions and focusing. Piles let you visually hide the pages by which you don’t want to be visually distracted, which strategically requires recall-based memory. When you are in a group, you only see the tabs related to the task at hand, again allowing you to focus. Strategic hiding is …
The Apple rumor mill is in full motion this morning, folks. Bloomberg News is reporting that two of the world's most powerful cult leaders and their companies are considering a partnership to take network television programs one big step closer to breaking free from the box for good.
The rumor is that Steve Jobs' Apple and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. are working on a deal that would allow users to pay 99 cents to download an episode of a Fox show and be able to watch it for 48 hours. Other networks including NBC, CBS, and ABC (owned by Walt Disney, where Jobs is a board member and largest shareholder) are rumored to be interested in joining the service, too.
The addition of the iPad to the Apple lineup no doubt helps the odds of getting such a deal done, with the tablet screen not much smaller than the average netbook or small notebook. The service would compete with the Netflix monthly subscription service, which includes an online streaming option; and Hulu, which is currently free to users and supported by an ever-increasing amount of advertising, and has also made moves towards implementing a subscription model, beginning with its mobile streaming offerings.
Episodes would reportedly be available 24 hours after their initial broadcast, which is roughly the same timeframe most networks begin to offer online video on their own websites or on Hulu. The new Apple service is expected to be unveiled …
Manufacturers of mobile devices are gearing up to fight possible legislation that would require phones, tablets and many other wireless products be built with an FM receiver. Half a dozen tech industry associations (CTIA-The Wireless Association®, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)®, the Information Technology Industry Council, the Rural Cellular Association, TechAmerica and the Telecommunications Industry Association) signed a letter to the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the U.S. House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Monday, urging them to resist the idea, which is being pushed as a compromise between the National Association of Broadcasters and the Recording Industry Association of America.
The arguments for requiring the chips include access to emergency FM broadcasts and a pretty thinly-veiled attempt to secure a vast audience for the broadcast and recording industry, which are both struggling to stay relevant in the face of increasingly cheap and abundant mobile devices and broadband access.
“Calls for an FM chip mandate are not about public safety but are instead about propping up a business which consumers are abandoning as they avail themselves of new, more consumer-friendly options,” the associations wrote. “It is simply wrong for two entrenched industries to resolve their differences by agreeing to burden a third industry - which has no relationship to or other interest in the performance royalty dispute - with a costly, ill-considered and unnecessary new mandate.”
Recording and broadcasting are at odds over royalties for airplay issues, and the FM chip requirement …
Not long ago we reported how Plancast represented the future of social networking , both literally and figuratively. Over the past month, the plan broadcasting service has continued to grow, even drawing in many Daniweb devotees . We tracked down one of Plancast's founders, Mark Hendrickson , to ask him about how the start-up came together and see if they were willing to let us broadcast some of their plans to you. (BTW, we found out after this interview that Plancast is hiring. The gig is pretty sweet , starting at $120k and an equity stake.)
Daniweb: Briefly, what was the genesis of Plancast?
Mark Hendrickson: When I left my job at TechCrunch last year, I set out to build something that would help me connect with people in real life instead of just virtually. I played with a lot of different concepts, but Plancast arose as the most straightforward idea -- a service that made it easy for people to share the actual things they were doing in real life and discover what everyone else was up to.
Daniweb: What was your elevator pitch to get funded?
Our pitch centered around the idea that there's a lot of personal information locked up in people's calendars that has immense social value. Intentions are powerful things, not only because our friends care about them, but other people -- such as marketers -- do as well. By unlocking this …
The holiday shopping season has apparently come early to the tech world. First came the big and stupefying news that Intel was purchasing security leader McAfee for $7.68 billion earlier, and now the end of the week brings a new flurry of acquisitions from three more industry leaders.
Google Likes What it Sees in Like.com
It's been a long, tortured romance between the two search engines. The Mountain View Monster originally courted Like.com's visual search service for retail back in 2004 when the brand new company was known as Riya.
As Like.com itself explains, its technology...
lets us understand visually what terms like "red high-heeled pumps" and "floral patterned sleeveless dress" mean and created algorithms to understand whether those pumps complement or clash with that dress.
Google has been keeping mum on the acquisition, which has been rumored for weeks now if not years. Like.com finally confirmed the deal on its site late Friday with a note from CEO Munjal Shah on its site:
“We were the first to bring visual search to shopping, the first to build an automated cross-matching system for clothing, and more,” Shah wrote. “We didn’t stop there, and we don’t have plans to stop now. We see joining Google as a way to supercharge our vision and supercharge our passion.”Nokia Grabs Motally's Mobile Analytics Business
The Finnish mobile leader has officially acquired the U.S.-based wireless traffic tracker, in what's a …
Looking to build on the success of efforts like Cosmopolitan's Sex Position of the Day app , Hearst has launched what could be the world's first "app think tank" - or at least the first anchored in the world of traditional print publishing.
The "App Lab" is slated to open in New York's Hearst Tower next month to be a space for marketers, advertising reps and perhaps even technical and editorial types to collectively bang their heads against a wall and see what sticks.
Hearst corporate types say the lab is the next step in the media giant's inevitable march into digital media, which, if you count the digital versions of Hearst's 14 magazine titles, includes nearly two dozen products for smartphones, tablets and other devices.
“As we continue to roll out new apps and content to expand our brands across this constantly evolving digital landscape, it makes sense to create a Hearst initiative to inspire, share, learn, and most importantly develop,” said David Carey, president, Hearst Magazines. “The App Lab is a digital think tank to bring together innovators, both inside Hearst and across the media and technology industries, in order to create the smartest content, ad models and platforms that resonate with consumers today.”
Hearst claims to have sold at least 40,000 downloads of its iPad app for Popular Mechanics at $1.99. Up next for the iPad are Esquire, Marie Claire, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan and Harper’s Bazaar.
The …
Many new iPad addicts out there have certainly had the idea: It would be so great if there were an easy way to mount that thin tablet on your car's dash to use all those apps on the go.
Now, one California start-up has announced it's making the dream come true. T3 Motion 's main business is in "green security" - creating electric and hybrid vehicles and Segway-like personal transporters for law enforcement and security personnel. But they're also planning a plug-in hybrid consumer car called the GT3, with an interior that will be centered around an iPad where you might normally expect to find the stereo or control panel.
"In today's advanced mobile communication environment, people on the go demand clear and consistent connections as well as in-car access to information and the Internet," said T3 Motion CEO Ki Nam. "As a next-generation consumer vehicle, the GT3 will incorporate technologies that address both these design requirements."
The iPad provides the GUI for that set of technologies, while CelLynx' 5BARz cellular network extending technology provides the wireless service up to 3G speeds within the vehicle. CelLynx CEO Daniel Ash claims the service will work with nearly any phone and will be integrated with the vehicle iPad.
"5BARz delivers clearer calls so GT3 drivers are always on, always connected for business or managing their personal lives," says Ash.
In another statement released last week, the company explained that the two-passenger, …
Remember Lycos? One of the earlier leaders in search, it was sold to Spanish firm Terra for more than $12 billion ten years ago. This week it sold again to an Indian company, for a paltry $36 million. Ouch. That got us wondering how some tech companies seem to go so easily from standing on top of the world to the digital bargain bin.
For at least part of the answer, we contacted Ernest von Simson, a guy we like to think of simply as the brains behind many of the world's top CIOs, although his official bio puts it more eloquently. He told us about a few of the potential pitfalls for new kings of information and also looked into his crystal ball to see what could be in store for a few big names currently on top of the information universe.
Daniweb: Why do those companies coined the “great ones” by the press so often fail within a year or two of their initial success?
von Simson:There are many reasons, including journalistic naiveté and even conflicts of interests with major advertisers. But more frequent are two recurrent phenomena which are missed for understandable reasons but inevitably lead to business collapse:In assessing start-ups, there’s often too much focus on the newest technology and too little attention paid to the newest business model that’s of equal importance to success. In other words, the much touted first mover advantage is in reality …
Facebook really dislikes that new 'dislike' button that's been popping up across the social network, and you should, too. That's because it could be a fake - a malicious little app that's actually a survey spam scam of the same ilk as that " Free iPad event " invitation you've likely received from at least one of your Facebook friends lately.
Basically, if you encounter a dialog asking you to grant the 'Dislike' app access to your profile and other information, you can expect to be asked to fill out a survey while your account is being transformed into yet another of its multitudes of spammy tentacles, which are then used to try and entice more of the online populace to fill out the surveys that earn revenue for the scammers.
There is a little twist to this scam that makes things all the more confusing. After taking the spam survey, users will be directed to a Facebook Dislike Button plug-in for Firefox . Turns out this plug-in actually is legit as far as anyone can tell.
So, to be more precise, the scam here is kind of like those dudes in New York City who used to pose as taxi drivers outside Port Authority Bus Terminal, asking tourists for a few bucks in cash upfront to secure a ride before disappearing (the nice ones actually did hail a cab for the unwitting travelers before disappearing) - the cabs …
We got the news in our Firefox browsers this week that a beta release of the next version of Microsoft's stodgy Internet Explorer is due out September 15th. In Redmond's classic trying-too-hard style, the launch will come at an invitation-only event in San Francisco, according to PC Magazine . The invitation site for the event features some snazzy HTML5 coding action, including an animated word game.
The invitations went out less than ten days after Microsoft released its fourth preview of the new IE platform at the beginning of August. The company has been touting the speed advantages of background compiled JavaScript and the good times to be had with HTML5 as evidence of IE9's relevance. It claims that the improved speed catches IE up with its competitors and is as much as 11 times faster than IE8. The new browser is also expected to have support for SVG and CSS3.
We decided to live dangerously, ignore the seizure warnings and test drive the speed capabilities of the preview using the Psychedelic Browsing demo and can safely report that everything seemed to handle just fine and no one got hurt.
The beta launch announcement also comes just as the browser turns 15 and is still technically on top of the browser world, with more than 60 percent of market share. But IE faces a major challenge from Google's Chrome, which currently has less than ten …
In the wake of the Wikileaks scandal , the National Guard has announced new " social media guidelines " for the nation's citizen soldiers. While a lot of the guidelines are the same sort of common sense, don't-embarrass-your-family's good name restrictions we might place on our teenagers' use of Facebook and MySpace, there's also this passage in the official press release that would seem to be aimed directly at would be WikiLeakers:
Posting internal documents or information that the National Guard has not officially released to the public is prohibited, including memos, e-mails, meeting notes, message traffic, white papers, public affairs guidance, pre-decisional materials, investigatory information and proprietary information.
Guard members are also not allowed to release National Guard e-mail addresses, telephone numbers or fax numbers not already authorized for public release.
That said, Jack Harrison, the director of public affairs for the National Guard Bureau says it is fine for Guardsmen and women to have a life online.
“Access will vary among the states, but DoD has granted access to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube as long as users don’t compromise operational security, participate in illegal activities or try to open prohibited Web sites.”
No word on what any of those prohibited websites might be. Civilians online can also begin to expect to see more disclaimers like this one, which the Guard encourages its members to use:
“The postings on this site are my own and don’t …
This week, the world's most famous search and everything else company waded into a ballot battle in Google's home state of California. At an event held at the company's Mountain View HQ , Google 'Green Energy Czar' Bill Weihl and a handful of other green business personalities announced their collective opposition to California's Proposition 23. Prop 23 will be on state ballots this November and, if passed, would block a previously passed law that sets out plans to reduce the state's greenhouse gas emissions. It would suspend that law, known as A-B 32, until the state's unemployment rate dips below 5.5 percent and stays there for a year.
We called Weihl to ask - why does the world's foremost information company care so much about promoting clean energy and fighting climate change, anyway? Here's part of what he had to say:
Weihl: We think that climate change is a vital issue facing California, facing the nation, facing the world. And it's something that we feel is important to address. We particularly feel a responsibility because we are now a pretty big company. We use a lot of energy to run all the servers that drive all the services that we provide - Gmail, search, Calendar, Documents, etc.. All of those things rely on servers and data centers and all of those things consume energy and we want to be as responsible as we can in the use of that energy. …
Earlier this week, information and telecommunications giants Google and Verizon were nice enough to work out a deal on Net Neutrality, outlined in a "joint policy proposal" for Congress. As we reported , one of the most controversial parts of the proposal is the suggestion that service providers should be permitted to engage in "reasonable network management."
In the past, providers like Comcast have gotten in trouble for slowing or prioritizing certain types of traffic. Open Internet advocates say such network management will lead to an Internet with multiple tiers of service that can be abused and would be a major blow to freedom of information. Verizon and Google say such measures are needed to deal with network congestion, ensuring network security, addressing traffic that is unwanted or harmful to users and ensuring service quality to subscribers.
For an expert take on the Google/Verizon proposal, we spoke to Susan Crawford , former special assistant to the President for science, technology, and innovation policy (2009). She now teaches at the Cardozo Law School and is a visiting researcher at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.
DaniWeb: What was your first reaction to news of the Google Verizon Deal?
Crawford: The key takeaway from this deal is that it's going to serve as a catalyst for the Federal Communications Commission to get involved. We can't have large companies regulating themselves in such a crucial area for the American economy.
DaniWeb: …
The DARPA geeks are at it again . On Friday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced it is developing what it calls an "ExtremeScale" SuperComputing system . The project is part of what DARPA refers to as its Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program -- that's Pentagon speak for "badass," which the agency itself says has the modest goal of simply "re-inventing computing."
It (the UHPC program) plans to develop radically new computer architectures and programming models that are 100 to 1,000 times more energy efficient, with higher performance, and that are easier to program than current systems.
And DARPA says the trickle-down effect of having ultra quick, efficient and powerful computers that don't melt under the heat generated by their own awesomeness will amount to......at least 50-times greater energy, computing and productivity efficiency, which will slash the time needed to design and develop complex computing applications.
Specifically though, here's the specs DARPA is looking for, courtesy of the UK's Channelregister :
...DARPA wants a petaflops supercomputer, including networking, storage, and compute elements as well as cooling, to be crammed in a space a little larger than a standard server rack - 24 inches wide by 78 inches high and 40 inches deep - and consume only 57 kilowatts to power and cool the device.
The machine has to deliver a peak petaflops of performance and 50 gigaflops per watt sustained power efficiency while running the Linpack …
Alcohol remains off limits, but it looks like Saudis will still be allowed to feed their Crackberry addiction after all. The Saudi government had said that it would begin blocking Blackberry's instant messaging services on Friday - claiming that by not being allowed to monitor messages, the popular devices and service from Canada's Research in Motion represented a national security risk to the Kingdom. That Friday deadline was extended to today, and then that extended deadline came and went without any reported disruption in service.
Then, just in the last few hours, comes news from the State Department that the Saudi government and RIM had reached a deal. It appears that RIM has installed three servers (one for each carrier operating in the country) in Saudi Arabia to meet the Kingdom's regulatory requirements.
If these reports are true, it would seem that RIM has acquiesced to the Kingdom's desire to essentially install a "Big Brother filter," allowing the government to monitor e-mails and instant messages in the name of preventing terrorism and other security risks.
Previously, RIM Co-Chief Executive Mike Lazaridis had expressed frustration in a Wall Street Journal story with the governments of Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region considering similar bans.
"This is about the Internet," Mr. Lazaridis said. "Everything on the Internet is encrypted. This is not a BlackBerry-only issue. If they can't deal with the Internet, they should shut it off."
The United …
Demand Media , a name that isn't well-known but tends to stir existential emotions in those who do know the Santa Monica-based content farm and domain services company, confirmed some longstanding gossip and rumor on Friday when it filed for its initial public offering (IPO).
Demand operates something called Demand Studios , which is essentially a backend content production system with over 10,000 registered freelance writers, editors and video producers working for wages often well below industry standard to churn out content for Demand-owned, operated or partner sites like eHow.com , Trails.com , Travels.com , LIVESTRONG.com and others.
(Full disclosure: I'm a registered Demand Studios writer, although I haven't written or edited anything for the company for over a year. I wrote a few dozen how-to articles for eHow, most at $15 a pop, but now many writers earn as little as $3 per article. The income was very handy when several of the publications and programs I was contributing to at the end of 2008 suddenly went dark as the economy fell off a cliff.)
Demand raises the ire of many in the content creation community because its entire business model is driven by SEO and Google's mysterious search algorithm. It's not unusual to do a search on eHow for something like “how to open a checking account online” and have results returned that look something like this:
A former sales director with the Taiwan-based Chi Mei Optoelectronics Corporation has entered a plea-bargain in a San Francisco Federal Court related to charges of participating in a global conspiracy to fix the price of thin-film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) panels, according to the Justice Department .
Under his plea agreement, which has yet to be approved by a court, Chen-Lung Kuo has agreed to serve nine months in jail, to pay a $35,000 criminal fine and to assist the department in its ongoing TFT-LCD investigation.
Kuo is arguably getting off easy, considering that violating the Sherman Act (a primary antitrust law) is a felony that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine for individuals - the fine can also be increased to twice the amount of damages in a case.
According to DOJ:
Kuo conspired with others to suppress and eliminate competition by fixing the prices of TFT-LCD panels. Kuo, a resident of Taiwan and the former vice president of sales of Chi Mei, participated in the conspiracy from as early as April 2004, to on or about Dec.1, 2006.
... Kuo participated in a conspiracy in which the participants met and agreed to charge prices of TFT-LCD panels at certain predetermined levels. The participants in that conspiracy also issued price quotations in accordance with the agreements reached and exchanged information on the sales of TFT-LCD panels for the purpose of …
Just a day after Research in Motion gobbled up all the day's buzz with the release of its new OS version 6 and Torch Blackberry , King Crackberry has been dethroned.
Smartphones running Google's Android OS were the top-seller in the US during the second quarter of 2010, accounting for a third of all such sales, and pushing RIM from the top spot for the first time since 2007. Blackberry's share of the market dropped from 37 to 28 percent, but if the new OS lives up to its hype, it could be a very steep dip and quick recovery in the company's market share history.
Android phones have a few key factors working in their favor and plenty of reason for continued optimism going forward. Foremost is having Verizon as a carrier for some of the most popular phones, especially in the wake of the negative publicity endured over AT&T's iPhone "death grip" flap.
The future for Android phones remains bright, given the fact that many observers believe the Google OS could have posted even better numbers were it not for shortages of the HTC Droid Incredible in the spring.
That said, folks in the Apple camp are unsurprisingly optimistic as well. iPhone sales held the bronze position, with a 22 percent share. Sales also increased but did not keep pace with Android's acceleration, although the numbers inevitably do not reflect the bulk of iPhone 4 sales that came after the data …
Lately there's been lots of buzz over how to keep the flood of online content coming and allow the people and companies that create it to eat, too. This led the Center for the Digital Future at USC's Annenberg School to rehash an old meme in its annual report released on July 23rd - should Twitter become a pay service? The findings seem statistically impossible and sent film critic Roger Ebert flying into action.
The USC report found "0.00 percent" were willing to pay for using Twitter . But that didn't sit well with Ebert, so he did his own impromptu survey over the past week, via Twitter , of course.
The results of the film critic's non-scientific survey would seem to indicate that something may have been amiss in the Annenberg report, which polled around 1,900 people. Ebert has nearly 200,000 followers on Twitter, of which, almost 4,000 took his SurveyMonkey poll and 20 percent said they would consider paying to tweet.
As Ebert notes, "they're no great figures for Twitter." But the company probably isn't too concerned, since it has no plans to begin charging for use of the service anyhow. And as Ebert and his followers point out, that's likely a very good thing:
"Those opposed (to the notion of paying for Twitter) made two good arguments (1) Twitter's strength depends on it being universal and free, so that countless witnesses can tweet …
The Federal Bureau of Investigations and Wikipedia are going head to head. The great open-source compendium of human knowledge's crime? Displaying the FBI seal .
The bureau sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation in July, asking that the seal be taken down from all Wikipedia pages within 14 days and threatening legal action. The letter seems to indicate that the FBI is worried about an army of teenagers, stay-at-home moms and seniors running around with fake FBI badges derived from the Wikipedia image.
Regulations governing authorizations to use the seals of Department of Justice components, including the FBI, are published in Title 41, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 128-1.5007(b), and require requests for authorizations to use the FBI Seal to be referred to the Director of the FBI. The FBI has not authorized use of the FBI seal on Wikipedia. The inclusion of a high quality graphic of the FBI seal on Wikipedia is particularly problematic, because it facilitates both deliberate and unwitting violations of these restrictions by Wikipedia users.
The FBI was even nice enough to include the specific text of US code it felt Wikipedia was violating:Unauthorized reproduction or use of the FBI Seal is prohibited by 18 United States Code, Section 701, which provides:
Whoever manufactures, sells, or possesses any... insignia, of the design prescribed by the [Department head]... or any colordble imitation thereof, or photographs, prints, or in any other manner makes or executes …
More smartphones could soon be headed to Kandahar, Baghdad or other hotspots where U.S. Troops can use a little technological assistance - not to be able to Tweet or check for the latest news from their brigade on Wikileaks - but for communicating with the locals.
DARPA - the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - perhaps best known for creating a little thing called the Internet, has been testing three voice recognition and translation technologies for use by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the bureaucratically-named project TRANSTAC.
Judging by a video from the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) , which has been conducting "performance evaluations" for speech translation technologies for the past few years, at least one of the systems appears to be running on a Google Nexus One mounted with some sort of microphone and/or speaker attachment.
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According to NIST project manager Craig Schlenof, all the new TRANSTAC systems work in a similar fashion:
An English speaker talks into the phone. Automatic speech recognition distinguishes what is said and generates a text file that software translates to the target language. Text-to-speech technology converts the resulting text file into an oral response in the foreign language. This process is reversed for the foreign language speaker.
NIST says that currently the project is focused on Pashto, one of the national languages of Afghanistan, but work is also being done in Dari, the country's other …
No more shortcuts for hackers - that's the word from Microsoft, which plans to release a patch today that the company says will fix a security loophole. The issue is tied to the way the Windows OS handles shortcuts, or .lnk files, or as Microsoft explains it in the official security advisory : "The vulnerability exists because Windows incorrectly parses shortcuts in such a way that malicious code may be executed when the icon of a specially crafted shortcut is displayed. This vulnerability can be exploited locally through a malicious USB drive, or remotely via network shares and WebDAV. An exploit can also be included in specific document types that support embedded shortcuts."
In other words, all it takes is viewing the contents of a USB drive to embed a malicious shortcut in your system.
Microsoft says the loophole is present in Windows XP Service Pack 3 and x64 Service Pack 2, right on up through Windows 7, including Windows Server 2003 and 2008. Consumers were first notified of the problem in the middle of July, along with detailed directions for a temporary workaround . Company managers say that in the interim they've seen an increase in attempts to exploit the vulnerability, prompting today's "out of band" release of the patch (out of band is Redmond-speak for outside the regular monthly update schedule).
Microsoft's Holly Stewart says that Malware in the Sality family , especially …
The federal government and almost all these United States are broke, and so they're considering something we've all at least thought about from time to time: making money off the Internet. There's a fight brewing in Washington, D.C. over an attempt to collect sales tax from online purchases... yet again.
The idea is pretty simple - states haven't been able to collect sales tax on most Internet purchases thanks to a 1992 Supreme Court Decision holding that retailers can only charge tax in states where they have a physical presence (yes, all the folks in Kentucky have been getting screwed on their Amazon orders for many years now), so now they're turning to Congress for help getting around the ruling. The result is H.R. 5660, the Main Street Fairness Act , introduced by Massachusetts Democrat William Delahunt, which would essentially do an end run around the status quo to give states the power to force Internet retailers to collect and remit sales from customers in those states, making it a whole lot easier to tax them.
Not surprisingly, everyone from Amazon to individual eBay powersellers seem to oppose the idea. The Computer and Communications Industry Association, which claims its members employ more than 600,000 workers and generate annual revenues in excess of $200 billion, had this to say:
CCIA has long opposed taxes on e-commerce, which would burden on-line vendors with the task of sorting through the policies of thousands of taxing authorities …
Foursquare is so hung up on where we are now or where we've been... Never fear, Plancast is here to fill the void in the location-based future social networking space. Actually, it's much cooler than that, and it's beginning to pick up steam. As its name infers, Plancast is all about broadcasting your plans, just to friends or to the entire world. Think of it as a sweet combination between Twitter and an events calendar.
It also has nifty mapping features, integrates well with Facebook and Twitter and comes as an app for iPhone or Android. To see one of the best examples of Plancast at work, check out Robert Scoble's (of Scobleizer fame) page .
Plancast's parent company, Worldly Developments, is made up of former TechCrunch blogger Mark Hendrickson and programmer Jay Marcyes. Since opening a public beta in late 2009, they received a lot of attention at South by Southwest in March and $800,000 in seed funding. In the ensuing months, the site has continued to grow, announcing an API earlier this summer, and receiving an ever-increasing amount of attention. This week, Ford even Plancasted its new Ford Explorer reveal in New York's Herald Square.
The obvious reaction may be "why do we need another online planning tool?" John Greene at Springwise points out the key Plancast advantage:
...most of those tend to focus on formal ones; when it's just drinks and dinner …
A new Facebook feature is gearing up to waste more of your time very soon. Facebook Questions has been launched in a limited beta test, naturally begging the important question, "What the Heck is Facebook Questions?" We looked to the Facebook blog for answers:
Facebook Questions helps you tap into the collective knowledge of the more than 500 million people on Facebook. For example, if you're vacationing in Costa Rica and want to know the best places to surf, you can use Facebook Questions to get answers from nearby surfing enthusiasts. Because questions will also appear to your friends and their friends, you'll receive answers that are more personalized to you.
For the 1 percent or so of Facebook users that will be able to become beta users, a new question dashboard will appear on their profile page. Here's more on how it will work from Blake Ross, director of product management at Facebook.After you ask a question, you have the option of adding a photo or a poll. Want to know what type of flower is growing in your back yard? Take a photo and attach it to the question. Wondering which video game system is better for your 8 year-old cousin: Nintendo Wii or XBox? Make a poll.
Keep in mind that all questions and answers posted using the Questions application are public and visible to everyone on the Internet. If you only want to ask a question to your friends …
At a time when newspapers are having a hard time convincing people to pay for online access to their news, one site is having much better luck getting people to go online and pony up some cash to give directly to journalists who use the donations to then go out and report stories.
The site is Spot.us , it originally got going a few years ago with a Knight Foundation grant and a mission to experiment with the idea of using crowdfunding via the web to report stories that were going unreported in the San Francisco Bay Area. After successfully crowdfunding some reporting of big stories, including sending a journalist the Pacific Garbage Patch who chronicled her voyage in a story in The New York Times , the site secured more funding and expanded its local coverage to Los Angeles, Seattle and Minnesota.
Then, this week Spot.us announced that the site would begin accepting pitches to crowdfund stories of a local or regional interest from across the country. Founder David Cohn said he had initially envisioned the site continuing to expand market by market, a la Craigslist, but in a blog post this week he announced an about face and Spot.us' expansion nationwide, apparently effective immediately.
...it makes little sense for me to tell a good pitch from Illinois or Alamo Texas that they can’t put their pitch up until we find a handful of other pitches …
Today on Google News' Top Stories front page you could find plenty of coverage of the ruling allowing the "jailbreaking" of iPhones as well as some discussion of the soon to be released update of the Android operating system and continued skepticism about Microsoft's upcoming Phone 7. Just above most of these headlines was a link to Google News' Mobile Technology "section," a new feature and a slight alteration to the way Google News' algorithms organize its thousands of headline links into something useful.
Clicking over to the front of the Mobile Technology section , however, brought to light the shortcomings of Google's insistence on the ability of lines of code to do a better job at curating news than actual human beings.
In the lead spot of the section were a handful of colorful headlines including: "Cheap mobile phone deal, Go crazy" and an invitation to click through and see the 179 similar "news" stories. Only a fool refuses such an invitation, and following the link did indeed transport me to one of the best spammy, not-written-by-a-native-English-speaker press release parties ever, featuring such headline gems as "Cheap iPhone deals,celestial feeling." or the strangely suggestive "Blackberry 8520 Curve deals-Easy to fill your pocket."
Perhaps Google's algorithms include code that assign a higher relevance score to anything with a "celestial feeling?" Or maybe it's the fact that the source of the poorly written releases (If yu make …
A day after Wikileaks dropped one of the biggest leaked bombshells on the U.S. government, perhaps since the Pentagon Papers, typing wikileaks.org into a browser is likely to get you nothing more than a blank browser window.
The somewhat mysterious collective site released over 91,000 secret reports related to the Afghan War that paint a bleak picture of the war effort. The New York Times, (UK) Guardian and Germany's Der Spiegel were given access to the documents a month previous to their going live on Wikileaks. The New York Times released its reporting on the document on Sunday.
The posting of the secret documents online drew condemnation from the White House, has put "wikileaks" or "wikileaks afghanistan" at the top of Google Trends for much of the past 48 hours, and has brought Wikileaks' servers to their knees.
In Monday's early morning hours, a post from the Wikileaks Twitter account redirected the world to another one:
WikiLeaks is tremendously overloaded. Please use http://bit.ly/9RlJQA
Under the mask is a new subdomain - http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/ which is located, well, who knows where. Wikileaks founder, Australian Julian Assange (also quite popular on trends today) has said that the organization has servers on several continents and that packets to and from the site pass through countries like Iceland and Sweden whose laws have strong free speech and information rights protections.
Since the "War Diaries" went live, it's been reported …
The past few years, there hasn't been much great news for the airlines to report in those periodical newsletters they send out to their frequent fliers -- unless you count fees for everything, fewer flights and higher fares as good news. But lately, an awful lot of airlines have been thrilled to finally have something new and exciting to report, namely inflight wireless internet and/or cell phone service on more of their planes. Some carriers are even considering offering the new service for free to try and convince fliers that it'll be worth the $5 - $13 they'd prefer to be charging.
A year ago, wi-fi was only available on a few hundred planes in North America, but that number is quickly growing into the thousands and Aircell, the parent company of GoGo Inflight Internet that provides services on almost all major carriers, has seen a big jump in revenues as a result in recent months.
Some skeptics point to estimates that only ten percent of passengers on web-enabled flights that carry a fee to use the service have been willing to pony up the cash, but there are several factors working in favor of a brighter future for in-flight Wi-Fi.
As the economy improves, travelers are likely to be willing to be a little more loose with spending. Also, airlines are likely to add more flights, bringing down fares and perhaps even fees.
The millions of new Kindles, iPads and …
As if carpal tunnel, driving while texting and the possibility that your cell phone might be seeding a tumor in your brain weren't enough, meet another new ailment of the information age -- Text Neck .
The phrase was coined by Florida chiropractor, exercise physiologist and entrepreneur Dean Fishman, who tells Daniweb that he came up with the phrase after beginning to see "an increase in frequency of younger people presenting to my office with complaints of headaches, neck and arm pain and discomfort."
He says all the young patients used texting as a primary form of communication and spent a lot of time in front screens such as laptops and gaming systems. In other words, they were spending an inordinate amount of time with their head tilted forward and down and that poor posture puts extra pressure on bones, muscles and joints, leading to the symptoms of text neck.
But Fishman tells us a sore neck is just the beginning of the potential health problems tied to too much texting and screen time.
"Medical research has shown that long term forward head posture will cause early spinal arthritis, disc degeneration, headaches, up to a 30% decrease in lung capacity to just name a few conditions. A survey was conducted with 6,000 chronic headache sufferers and the only common finding among them was the loss or reversal of the normal curve in the neck."
Like any good doctor (or …
Just as we were finally getting to know all the ins and outs of Windows Mobile 6.5, Windows Phone 7 is getting ready to drop - ain't that just like Microsoft? According to the guys at PC Magazine , who recently got some hands-on time with the new platform, we've wasted all that time fiddling with Windows Mobile (as we had already suspected), because Phone 7 is nothing like Mobile, especially its earlier versions.
The concept behind the Windows Phone system - acting as a 'hub' for all of your digital everythings - is far from groundbreaking, and it's an idea Microsoft has been trying forever with its desktop Windows OS, as millions of users and the Justice Department know well.
Still, the upcoming new mobile OS iteration is one giant leap for Redmond-kind in catching up with Apple and the Android, even if the privilege of being able to sync with your Zune doesn't matter so much in an iTunes world.
Built-in Facebook integration is already a part of the beta test Phone 7 version being passed around now, with seamless integration with contacts and similar support in the works for Linkedin, Twitter, MySpace and other social networks. That's a major upgrade from the days of Mobile 6.1, which essentially assumed you'd continue to use a clunky version of Internet Explorer on a tiny screen to get what you needed online onto your phone. And only with Mobile 6.5 …
