Category: News

Maybe being honest doesn’t pay, after all: Switzerland-based file hoster RapidShare has laid off 45 of its 60 employees to cut down on costs as it tries to reinvent itself and focus more on B2B cloud storage services. The cuts were first reported by Swiss daily 20min, who was told by the company’s new CEO Kurt Sidler that RapidShare definitely won’t shut down. “Unfortunately, we have to part with a number of employees,” Sidler told the paper, adding: “But RapidShare will continue to operate, and we have concrete plans for our future.”

That future likely won’t look at all like RapidShare’s past: The company used to run the world’s most popular one-click file hoster, and was frequented by millions of file sharers looking for safer alternatives when music labels and others started to go after P2P users. However, Rapidshare quickly found itself in court, and fought long legal battles with rights holders in Germany and elsewhere.

The company tried to appease rights holders by putting restrictions on some aspects of its service; RapidShare was one of the first companies to get rid of its rewards program, which would compensate uploaders with especially popular files. It also pressured users to get registered accounts, and finally introduced bandwidth limits in late 2012, restricting users to 30 GB of bandwidth per day – not enough for people who were using the service to offer movies and other copyrighted files for download.

Rapidshare had hoped that all of these measures would get the company some love from rights holders, as it was looking to offer video games and eventually also movies through a paid download store. The idea was to redirect downloaders looking for free, unlicensed copies, and swerve up legitimate content instead. However, Holllywood apparently didn’t play ball, and RapidShare nixed its plan for paid downloads at the end of 2011.

The company is now looking to get a stronger foothold in the B2B cloud storage market, and sell personal file storage and backup solutions to consumers. However, the mass layoffs weren’t the first sign that these plans may not be going as expected: Sidler, who joined the company just two weeks ago, is RapidShare’s fourth CEO since 2010.

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Google went and pre-empted Apple’s long-rumored iRadio streaming music service with a subscription music service of its own at this week’s Google I/O developer conference. Apple’s own developer event, WWDC, starts June 10, but the word is that its music service may not be ready to go by then.

The Verge says Apple is still “bogged down in licensing talks” with music publishers. Two of the big ones are still holding out, Sony/ATV and BMG, according to the Verge’s sources. That’s partly because what Apple is trying to do is not the same as Google Play Music All Access. Google’s service is a standard subscription service, like Spotify, and it will cost users $10 per month. It’s also not clear what the music catalog will look like for that service because Google has not yet announced which publishers have signed up.

iRadio is reportedly more complicated because of what Apple is trying to build and how it likes to do business. iRadio won’t be a straight-up web radio service; there will also be some on-demand aspects to it. And Apple also isn’t willing to pay music publishers an advance for access to their catalogs. Instead, Apple has agreed to give them a share of ad revenue, per-play fees and a guaranteed minimum payment, according to the Verge.

Apple already makes billions from its current content service, iTunes. It’s not essential that Apple have its own streaming music subscription service as answer to Google in a few weeks. But the company does need to acknowledge that times and habits have changed when it comes to music ownership. The developers conference seems a perfect place to debut it, but a fall event later this year when new hardware is set to be announced would be fine too; three more months doesn’t make that big of a difference at this point.

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The original idea behind soap operas was that daily episodes would keep viewers hooked and advertisers happy. But few people have time to devote to mid-day TV any more, and as TV viewing shifts online, the model is changing.

It’s been just two and a half weeks weeks since popular soap operas One Life to Live and All My Children were reborn as online-only shows — but production company Prospect Park has already decided to cut back on the number of new episodes released online each week. The change in schedule, the company claims, is due to the fact that viewers are “binge-watching” instead of watching one episode a day, and this makes it too hard for them to keep up.

Starting on April 29, Prospect Park — which licensed the soaps from ABC — ran new, 30-minute episodes of each show every Monday through Thursday, followed by a recap on Friday. The shows are available on Hulu and Hulu Plus, or can be downloaded from iTunes. They’ve received “millions” of views, Prospect Park cofounders Rich Frank and Jeff Kwatinetz wrote in a letter to fans (PDF) this week, and have “consistently been in the top ten shows viewed on Hulu.”

But most viewers aren’t watching these shows the way they traditionally watched soap operas on TV. Instead, as with other TV shows online, “our shows are primarily consumed on different days than when they originally air,” Frank and Kwatinetz wrote:

“Primarily, fans have been binge viewing or watching on demand, and as a result, we feel we have been expecting our audience to dedicate what has turned out to be an excessive amount of time to viewing these shows. (As an example, for the substantial audience only watching on the weekends, we are currently asking them to watch five hours of programming to keep pace with our release schedule).”

In addition, viewers aren’t adhering to traditional soap-watching habits. When the shows were on ABC, “viewers watched only 2-3 episodes on average a week and picked up with whichever day’s episode it was.” By contrast, online viewers “seem to primarily start with the first episode and then continue forward episode by episode…yet starting from the beginning with the amount of episodes we are releasing is asking too much for viewers who need to catch up.”

Prospect Park is also concerned by the fact that, when the shows aired on ABC, viewers often watched both — but online things are different:

“The majority of our viewers are watching one show or the other, not both, and they aren’t viewing the shows when they did before. Part of the reason for choosing between the shows may be that the largest viewing takes place either between 12 PM and 1 PM (when people generally can only fit one episode during lunch time) or between 5 PM and 7 PM (when the vast majority of competing shows are a half hour long). We are finding that asking most people to regularly watch more than a half hour per day online seems to be too much.”

Overall, Frank and Kwatinetz conclude that “When it comes to online viewing, most of us are just trying to find time to watch series comprised of 13 to 22 episodes a season — so asking viewers to assign time for over 100 episodes per show is a daunting task.”

So starting Monday, May 20, the schedules will change. Each soap will now air just two new episodes a week: New episodes of All My Children will air online on Mondays and Wednesdays, and new episodes of One Life to Live will air on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a recap episode on Friday. “Because Hulu agrees with our findings,” the founders wrote, “for the meantime they will keep all of our episodes on Hulu.com for free to give viewers the opportunity to find us and catch up.”

Frank and Kwatinetz acknowledge that “our most dedicated viewers will be upset,” but “we need to devise a model that works for all viewers and follows how they want, and are actually watching, online” in order to ensure that the shows “not meet the fate they experienced previously.” The

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One of the, if not the greatest, thing about streaming services that carry multiple seasons of TV shows is that it’s all there, ready to be marathonned. You give me 10 hours, a pizza, and a 12 pack and I can get through an entire season of a show. Ain’t no thang.

But you might run into problems when you’re watching a series with your significant other, and your schedules don’t quite match up. Wife has to work late? Well, you could always watch a few episodes without her. She wouldn’t mind, right? Wrong. It’s ‘Netflix adultery’ and it’s a serious crime. This new Netflix ad tackles the temptation to “watch ahead.”

Netflix’s new ad comes along at a perfect time, when the temptation to blow through episodes behind your partner’s back is about to get even stronger…

Google announced a slew of new features (41 actually) for Google+ at Google I/O, including a new redesign. As you might imagine, this has implications for businesses, publishers and developers alike.

With that, you would probably do well to check out these three Google+ talks from the event, which dive into buttons, badges, etc. for publishers, getting the most out of Google+ in your organization, and a fireside chat with the Google+ platform team.

Here’s a basic walkthrough of all the new features.

Oh yeah, and today, Google revealed that it is bringing some new Google Offers visibility into Google+.

Singer George Michael was involved in a car crash on Thursday, May 16.

A statement posted to the singer‘s website and Facebook page states that Michael was a passenger in a vehicle that was part of a “traffic accident.” The statement also reveals that “no third party was involved,” implying that the crash did not involve another vehicle. Michael was injured only slightly, with “superficial cuts and bruises” for which he is being treated. The statement, in full:

George Michael16 minutes ago

George Michael was a passenger in a vehicle involved in a traffic accident yesterday evening, no third party was involved. He is being treated for superficial cuts and bruises but is fine. We have no further comment at this time. http://bit.ly/111VhuuPowered by socialditto  802 likes ·  351 comments

No other details of the crash have been officially released by Michael’s publicist, but a Sky News report states that the accident took place in Northwest London. The report also revealed that another man involved in the crash was taken to a London trauma center for head injuries.

Michael became famous in the 80s as half of the group Wham! He later embarked on a successful solo career and is now one of the best-selling pop singers in the world.

It was announced in February that Blizzard was returning to console development. Now some may have been disappointed that the developer was only bringing a port of Diablo III to the console, but it’s still a pretty big deal to have the fastest selling PC game of all time come to a new console.

As such, the guys at Blizzard spoke to Sony about what it’s like to develop for the PS4. In short, they really like the new console. They especially like how the PS4 (and PS3) allows them to bring couch co-op to the Diablo franchise.

I feel that I must point out that Blizzard is super cruel to keep alluding to The Lost Vikings without announcing a new entry in the franchise. We can only hope that Diablo III will be successful enough on consoles to convince Blizzard to begin work on a new entry in its best franchise.

Diablo III will be out on the PS3 later this year, with the PS4 version being out some time after.

Last month, Samsung officially announced a 7-inch Galaxy Tab 3, and today rumors are flying that they will soon announce an even bigger version. SamMobile says they have received their first photo of an 8-inch Galaxy Tab 3. As you can see above, it looks very similar to the Galaxy Note 8.0 without a pen, except for a thinner bezel and different camera and speaker placements.

The specs, though SamMobile warns they could change, include a 1280×800 screen with a an 1.3-megapixel camera on the front, and 5-megapixel camera on the back. The Android 4.2.2 powered device is supposed to have an unnamed 1.5GHz dual-core CPU , with 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage and a microSD slot. The tablet is expected by the end of June.

Source: SamMobile

Come comment on this article: Photo and details leak of 8-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab 3

Google has released a couple of recent webinars regarding AdWords Enhanced Campaigns. As advertisers continue to adjust to the changes ahead of the complete transition, there is plenty to learn.

These particular webinars deal with Google+ and Enhanced Campaigns and campaign management and strategies for upgrading. They combine for about 90 minutes of information.

Earlier this week, Google revealed that about two million AdWords campaigns have been set to enhanced, up from 1.5 last month, when Google held its Q1 earnings call.

If you haven’t made the transition yet, you might want to check out this tutorial on the Enhanced Campaigns Upgrade Center.

All campaigns will be upgraded automatically on July 22nd.

The Superior Court of Justice for the Federal District in Mexico agreed to overturn awards against Yahoo and Yahoo Mexico after Yahoo appealed a previous ruling that had ordered the to pay $2.75 billion in a suit brought by Worldwide Directories and Ideas Interactivas, who alleged that Yahoo had breached contract related to a yellow pages listings service. The companies claimed to have lost profits as a result of the alleged breach.

Yahoo announced the news with the following statement:

Yahoo! Inc. today announced that the Superior Court of Justice for the Federal District in Mexico has granted the company’s appeal and reversed the ruling of the 49th Civil Court of Mexico, which had entered a non-final judgment of $2.75 billion against Yahoo! and Yahoo! Mexico on November 28, 2012.

The appellate decision pertains to the lawsuit filed by World Wide Directories, S.A. de C.V. and Ideas Interactivas, S.A. de C.V. against Yahoo! Mexico and Yahoo Inc. in 2011. On December 12, 2012, and December 13, 2012, respectively, Yahoo! Mexico and Yahoo! Inc. appealed the judgment to a three-magistrate panel of the Superior Court of Justice for the Federal District.

This rounds out a pretty big week for Yahoo, who also struck a deal with Twitter to bring Tweets to the Yahoo Homepage newsfeed, and is reportedly been in talks to acquire Tumblr (though word is they face some serious competition from Facebook).

Last month, Chaz Bono revealed that he had lost 60 pounds in about five months. The weight loss was due, Bono said, to the help of a doctor and a change in eating habits. The former Dancing With The Stars contestant stated that diets don’t work for him, so he completely changed the foods he eats.

Now, one month later, Bono is down 65 pounds. According to an interview published in People magazine, Bono stated that he is “feeling really good” and really likes what he sees in the mirror, though he still misses some foods he can no longer eat. The 48-year old LGBT activist also said that he would like another chance to be on Dancing With The Stars, as he feels he would fare better in the competition with the weight off.

Bono also revealed that his health has improved as a result of the weight loss. He told People that he feels better in general when performing physical tasks and exercising. His blood pressure and cholesterol are now at normal levels, and his confidence is high.

Sergey Brin shows a demo video of Google Glass at TED2013. In today’s talk, he reveals the big idea behind the project. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

In today’s talk, Sergey Brin of Google shares the idea that motivated the development of Google Glass: that while smartphones inherently take us away from experiencing the real world, there could be a device that allows for a digitally-mediated experience within it. As Google heads into day three of its I/O developer conference in San Francisco, and as members of Congress express concerns about the new technology, it’s an especially fitting talk for today.

Sergey Brin: Why Google Glass?In this humorous talk, Brin checks his email and then says, “This position you just saw me in – looking down at my phone – that’s one of the reasons behind this project, Project Glass. We ultimately question if this is the ultimate future of how you want to connect to other people in your life, how you want to connect to information. Should it be by walking around looking down?“

Hunching over his phone, he asks, “Is this what you were meant to do with your body?”

TED’s media team was invited to purchase Glass after a team member attended Google I/O last year. So several people in the TED office have taken a turn trying it out since it arrived in our office in early May. Michael Glass, our Director of Film + Video, has much to say after test-driving the new device.

“Whatever its oddities and awkwardnesses, this is the first step in getting to that HUD Terminator experience that captured so many imaginations 30 years ago. If we had given up on the cell phone because its first users looked like schmucks holding up big grey bricks to their ears, we would never have met the iPhone or Nexus 4 or Droid DNA or Galaxy S4 or whatever your dream phone is,” he says. “The bit that blows my mind is its integration with Google Hangouts although to be honest it’s not been particularly useful in any specific way. Then again, neither was E=MC2. It’s mostly a toy right now, which is all the more reason to play with it. I think Google is smart to be humble and not cram the thing full of tools and functions — the crowd will figure out the most interesting ways to use it; they just needed to make the first leap into the hardware.”

His biggest complaint: “My last name is Glass and I walk around saying, ‘Okay Glass’ to activate the main menu.”

TED editor Isaac Wayton also tested out Google Glass.

“I really like the idea of Glass, in theory, but I’m worried that it’s a technology that will promote selfish user behaviors rather than real life human interactions. Also, since I need to wear prescription glasses — and couldn’t wear both Glass and my pair at the same time — I wasn’t able to see the tiny, projected screen very well,” he says. “That said, it is an amazing piece of technology and it deserves further development because I am sure that people will also find intelligent uses for Glass to help people in the real world.”

The bottom line: he looks forward to a version that somehow attaches to existing glasses.

Below, some videos that show more of what we know about Google Glass, which will be available in 2014.

Prototyping a new product can take eons. Or it can take … a day. In this talk from TEDYouth, Tom Chi – who was on the team that developed Glass – shares how the invention was rapid prototyped, with team members expressing desires, solving problems and eliminating dud ideas by mocking up the design using clay, paper, modeling wire, binder clips, hairbands and chopsticks.

Andrew Vanden Heuvel wanted to be an astronaut –– but instead he became an online physics teacher for schools without advanced science courses. In this video, which premiered at TEDxCERN, Vanden Heuvel takes students on a virtual field trip to the European Organization for Nuclear Research and shows them the particle collider that is longer than the island of Manhattan.

The official promo trailer, shown during Brin’s talk.

At Google I/O 2012, Brin gave a demo of Google Glass — when the device was still largely a mystery to the outside world. In it, he connects to parachuters in an airplane overhead via a Google Hangout. They then jump … and bring their prototypes into the event.

A how-to use video, posted on April 30.

David Pogue, who has given the TED Talks “10 top time-saving tech tips” and “On cool phone tricks,” reviews Google Glass for CBS News. “A lot of people are excited about this step into the cyborg future and other people are horrified,” he says. In this short video, he reveals some common misperceptions about Glass and it’s ability to distract. But he also point out a major potential flaw – that it allows people to record others without their knowledge.

And finally, Saturday Night Live’s sendup of Glass.

Ah, yes – the periodic table. Foe to all high schoolers who suck at chemistry. It’s important information, though, and it helps to know even a little bit about the elements that make up our great, big, beautiful world.

Thankfully, AsapSCIENCE is here to help with a catchy tune the highlights all the elements. I’m not sure that this is as helpful as the U.S. state song, alphabet song, or Spanish prepositions song (there are simply too many elements!), but damnit, it’s fun.

Asking for a second opinion is always a good idea when scanning suspicious files. With more than 40 antivirus engines available, Google’s VirusTotal online service makes for a great choice for checking a file for viruses.

Submitting an item for verification can be done easily either through the online interface or via their own desktop c… (read more)

Millions of people access Twitter every month, and the sheer volume of tweets flowing through the company’s platform is remarkable. Different companies have tried to harness the value of those tweets and derive information from the 140 character blips. But it would seem that making suggestions to users about the best book to read or movie to watch based on tweets isn’t an easy challenge.

Parakweet is a company that’s working to use natural language processing to cull through your tweets and make smart, targeted suggestions based on the data. On Friday, the company plans to announce the launch of two products. One is Bookvi.be, a consumer-oriented book recommendation engine, and TrendFinder For Movies, which is a social media dashboard primarily for entertainment companies to monitor conversations around movies. The latter is a paid product that provides the company with revenue, and the former is free for consumers.

“It’s a very hard problem we’ve tackled, which is accurately identifying sentiments,” CEO Ramesh Haridas said. “With 400 million tweets a day, there are 700,000 a day discussing movies, and if you tried text-matching techniques you’d come back with 40 million results. Many movies and books have very common titles, so you’d just drown in data.”

Both products use natural language processing to figure out how common a title is on Twitter, but also how a consumer is tweeting about a particular product, and they make recommendations based on those tweets. For instance, if I tweeted that a particular book is terrible and no one should ever read it, it would look ridiculous for a book recommendation engine to suggest that book to people. So Bookvi.be is structured to recognize the words I’m using in my tweet and know not to recommend that book. Users can choose to have a weekly email send to them with book suggestions, and they can type in their Twitter username to get book suggestions based on the people they follow.

“The bar on accuracy is very high,” Haridas said. “Especially if it’s sent via email, the precision needs to be intact.”

I’ve looked at a good number of social recommendation tools, and this one definitely stood out. For one, it was incredibly accurate — all the books it suggested were books I would actually read. But most importantly, it didn’t require me to create a new social network, or depend on friends for reviews, so you could get a lot of value from it right away. This is the obvious benefit of using someone else’s social graph, but Twitter seems perfectly suited to making content recommendations for things like books. Because unlike my Facebook friends, the people I follow on Twitter tend to accurately reflect my intellectual interests.

Of course, there are the obvious potential pitfalls of building a product around someone else’s platform, although Haridas said they support Facebook and are adding other platforms. But there’s a good deal of money to be made in accurately processing and understanding the words people are tweeting, as evidenced by Twitter’s acquisition of Lucky Sort this week, a similar company that also tries to figure out what people are talking about on social media.  As I’ve written before, as Twitter ramps up its advertising products it’s more important than ever for the company to be able to provide brands with more accurate ad targeting which hinges on the words people are tweeting and searching.

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Online advertisers have been nervous the past few weeks as Mozilla moved forward with its plans to block third-party cookies by default in its Firefox browser. Some advertiser groups have even claimed that Mozilla’s policy will “undermine American small businesses.” It seems that Mozilla listened as it has decided to postpone the implementation of its policy.

In a blog post from Thursday, Mozilla’s Brendan Eich said that Mozilla has delayed the implementation of its new anti-cookie patch in Firefox so that it can test for false positives and false negatives. As you may know, the new anti-cookie policy is meant to block third party cookies from sites you haven’t visited while leaving cookies from previously visited sites intact. Eich says that fales positives and false negatives may get in the way of how this policy is meant to work:

False positives. For example, say you visit a site named foo.com, which embeds cookie-setting content from a site named foocdn.com. With the patch, Firefox sets cookies from foo.com because you visited it, yet blocks cookies from foocdn.com because you never visited foocdn.com directly, even though there is actually just one company behind both sites.

False negatives. Meanwhile, in the other direction, just because you visit a site once does not mean you are ok with it tracking you all over the Internet on unrelated sites, forever more. Suppose you click on an ad by accident, for example. Or a site you trust directly starts setting third-party cookies you do not want.

The anti-cookie patch will be turned off by default in the Firefox 22 beta will Mozilla works on these issues. Users on the beta will be able to turn on the patch, however, and mess around with the settings. Mozilla, of course, encourages feedback as it works on it. Those who are using the Aurora release will find that the anti-cookie patch is turned on by default however.

In the end, Eich says that Mozilla’s work on the patch doesn’t represent any change to its previous anti-cookie philosophy:

We have heard important feedback from concerned site owners. We are always committed to user privacy, and remain committed to shipping a version of the patch that is “on” by default. We are mindful that this is an important change; we always knew it would take a little longer than most patches as we put it through its paces.

For those who read this as Mozilla softening our stance on protecting privacy and putting users first, in a word: no. False positives break sites that users intentionally visit. (Fortunately, we haven’t seen too many such problems, but greater testing scale is needed.) False negatives enable tracking where it is not wanted. The patch as-is needs more work.

[h/t: PC World]