Category: News

After spending the last six months boosting its small-town cred, Sprint is focusing more 4G attention on larger markets. On Monday it took its LTE network live in Boston and Austin, joining Chicago and Indianapolis, which Sprint turned on right before the Christmas holidays.

When Sprint first launched LTE this summer, it started with six large cities, but it quickly shifted its focus to smaller cities, towns and suburbs, getting 4G markets online as soon its Network Vision upgrade was complete. Sprint’s LTE network is now live in 58 cities, but most of them are small markets.

Sprint may be returning to the urban zones, but it isn’t abandoning the places in between. In addition to Boston and Austin, Sprint launched LTE in seven other areas: Bryan/College Station, Texas; Columbia, Tenn.; Emporia, Kan.; Farmington, Mass.; Fort Wayne, Ind.; Gettysburg, Pa.; and Western Puerto Rico (including Aguadilla, Isabela, Cabo Rojo, Mayagüez).

In fact, Sprint plans to double its current number of LTE markets in the coming months, targeting both big and small areas. Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., are all on the list, as are Kerrville, Texas, and Shelby, N.C.

While the promise of Passbook was intriguing, the first release of Apple’s mobile ticket, gift card, coupon and loyalty card repository in September was an underwhelming user experience. It wasn’t listed as a new addition in the release notes, but I was pleased to see in the iOS 6.1 update on Monday that Apple has addressed one of my biggest concerns: helping people understand what Passbook does, why they would want to use it, and where they can find apps that work with Passbook.

Apple has thankfully restored the Welcome screen to Passbook that explains what it does as well as the vital link “Apps for Passbook” that takes users to a special page in the App Store listing apps that are Passbook compatible. There you’ll find apps from companies like Sephora, Fandango and United, that were available upon launch. But Apple has many more available for download now.

The change is that Apple has kept this page and accompanying link around permanently: in the initial version of iOS 6, after you downloaded your first Passbook app, the link to the section of the App Store with Passbook-enabled apps disappeared. Simply searching the App Store from the iPhone itself for “Passbook apps” yielded nothing, however. The release lacked Apple’s typical attention to detail, which is why it stuck out as a particularly bad experience.  (For users who already understand the utility of Passbook and want to delete this Welcome pass, there’s also now a button to do that.)

It’s a small thing, but if Apple truly wants to get its users used to paying for coffee or boarding planes or scanning a baseball game ticket with their iPhone, it’s important to guide them through it.

BlackBerry Developer Group Balkan has announced a worldwide BlackBerry game developer challenge. Submit your best game published in the last year on BlackBerry World and you could be one of three winners of business passes to Germany’s biggest game developer conference: Quo Vadis as well as mentorship from two industry veterans.

To enter, email your submission before February 5th to [email protected] along with your game’s BlackBerry World link with the subject: “Challenge For all Great BlackBerry Game Developers”.

Free passes to a game developer conference is amazing but the mentorship package featuring Michael Liebe and Dan Romescu is fantastic for any promising game developer.

Winners will be announced on Dan Romescu’s blog: Augmented Citizen.

Click here for some good developer community articles at the BlackBerry Developer Group Balkan page.

The first of many lawsuits filed against Johnson & Johnson over the company’s 2010 recall of hip replacements has begun in Los Angeles.

According to a Reuters report, 66-year-old Loren Kransky is alleging that Johnson & Johnson subsidiary DePuy knew their implants could release metal into patients’ bodies. DePuy contends that Kransky was a life-long smoker with diabetes and kidney cancer, and that the company’s tests did not find that their implants released enough metal to be a health problem.

Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning about all-metal hip implants. Those types of implants can release small bits of metal particles when patients walk or run while using them. The particles can cause damage to the soft tissue and bone around the implant and joint. The metal debris can also cause adverse reactions in some patients, causing the implant to fail and requiring surgery to replace it. The agency warned doctors against all-metal implants, suggesting instead that alternative hip implants, such as metal-on-polyethylene, ceramic-on-polyethylene, ceramic-on-ceramic, or ceramic-on-metal implants, be used instead.

Opening arguments in the trial began on January 25. According to Reuters, more than 10,000 lawsuits have been filed since the hip implants were recalled. The recall was a voluntary one by DePuy, and the company also set up a patient reimbursement program to pay for patients’ medical bills and other costs related to the recall.

Apple announced today that it has updated iOS to version 6.1, adding LTE capabilities to 36 more iPhone carriers and 23 more iPad carriers around the world. Now, more iPhone 5, iPad Mini and iPad with Retina Display users can utilize faster wireless performance.

“iOS 6 is the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, and with nearly 300 million iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices on iOS 6 in just five months, it may be the most popular new version of an OS in history,” said Apple SVP Philip Schiller. “iOS 6.1 brings LTE support to more markets around the world, so even more users can enjoy ultrafast Safari browsing, FaceTime video calls, iCloud services, and iTunes and App Store downloads.”

According to Apple, iOS users have uploaded over nine billion photos to Photo Stream, sent over 450 billion iMessages and received over four trillion notifications to date.

iOS 6.1 is now available as a free software update, an dis compatible with the following devices: iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad (third and fourth generation), iPad mini, iPad 2 and iPod touch (fourth and fifth generation). Still, some features are not available for all products.

LTE, specifically, is available on iPhone 5, iPad mini and fourth generation iPad Wi-Fi + Cellular models through certain carriers.

Last week, we heard that Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to hold his first-ever political fundraiser at his Palo Alto home. The lucky recipient of the funds? Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

But not everyone credited with co-founding the biggest social network in the world is completely on board the Chris Christie endorsement.

Chris Hughes think that Christie’s stance on gay marriage (current opposition) is cause to “raise serious concerns about supporting someone like him.”

Here’s what Hughes told ABC News:

“I, for one, have a lot of questions about Chris Christie, particularly because less than a year ago he vetoed a marriage equality bill in the New Jersey state legislature. Which for me personally, I got married to my husband last June, [it] was just really personally frustrating. I mean, there are tens of thousands of couples in New Jersey that can’t share their love and be recognized under the law because of that decision. I’m not a single issue voter, and I think most people aren’t either, but for me personally, it would raise serious concerns about supporting someone like him.”

Hughes married his longtime boyfriend Sean Eldridge last July. His wedding was attended by Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and some other notables including House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi.

Hughes, along with Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin launched Facebook from a Harvard dorm room nearly nine years ago. Hughes is currently the publisher and editor-in-chief of The New Republic.

Until now, Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t really thrown his weight behind any particular politician. He’s attended dinners with President Obama, and has been linked to Newark, New Jersey’s Democratic mayor Cory Booker. Some Democrats are upset with Zuckerberg over his choice to host the Christie Fundraiser.

Facebook, as an organization, spreads the money around pretty evenly across both parties when it comes to how they utilize their political action committee, Facebook Inc, PAC. They are also one of the most outspoken pro-LGBT companies around.

Two hundred years ago today, Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice, the classic tale of Elizabeth Bennett. Though the book has now sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, Austen (above) received £110 for the copyright from publisher T. Egerton, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

While Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, just four years before Austen’s death, she lives on in TED Talks. Here, five speakers who’ve mentioned Austen on stage:

• Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0
  “And at the end of my talk, you would all stand up and you would go, ‘Thank you Plato, thank you Shakespeare, thank you Jane Austen.’”
  .
• Beeban Kidron: The shared wonder of film
  “Consider Citizen Kane as valuable as Jane Austen. Agree that Boyz n the Hood is like Tennyson.”
  .
• David Brooks: The social animal
  “So they’ve got these furry 160-pound dogs — all look like velociraptors, all named after Jane Austen characters.”
  .
• Denis Dutton: A Darwinian theory of beauty
  “A stunning match-winning goal in a World Cup soccer match, Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night,’ a Jane Austen novel, Fred Astaire dancing across the screen.”
  .
•  Liz Coleman’s call to reinvent liberal arts education
  “You may think you know what is going on in that Jane Austen novel – that is, until your first encounter with postmodern deconstructionism.”

It’s still a week before Andrew Sullivan’s new independent site goes live with the subscription-based model he announced earlier this month, and the star political blogger says he has already raised close to $500,000 from readers. Sullivan’s move was like a shot across the bow of traditional media, one that is no doubt being watched closely by many high-profile writers and journalists — such as New York Times statistics blogger Nate Silver, whose contract with the newspaper is coming up for renewal soon. Where will the continents lie after this tectonic shift is over?

The reality is that individual brands like Sullivan and Silver now arguably have as much or more power as the traditional brands they used to align themselves with. The big question is how outlets like the Times and others will handle that re-balancing of power, and whether they will ultimately win or lose — and with the ongoing decline of print revenue, the stakes for traditional outlets are higher than they have ever been. (Note: We’re going to be discussing this with Sullivan and several other star bloggers at our paidContent Live media conference on April 17 in New York).

What does the NYT have to offer Nate Silver?

After announcing his split from The Daily Beast on January 2, Sullivan raised more than $300,000 for his new site in a matter of days, and was widely hailed as the harbinger of a new movement towards reader-supported independent writing. The pace of subscriptions has fallen off sharply (not surprisingly), but he is still signing up readers for his $20-per-year plan, with the latest total being $489,000 according to a recent update:

Silver hasn’t said much about his plans for the future since his emergence as a blogging superstar during the recent U.S. federal election, when his statistics-based blog — called Five Thirty Eight, after the number of members in the U.S. electoral college — got so much traffic that at one point it accounted for more than 20 percent of all the visits to the entire New York Times website. But he has hinted that he is considering whether to remain with the NYT or strike out on his own.

And why wouldn’t he consider it? With a book just published to some acclaim, Silver arguably has the kind of personal brand that could be successful as a standalone property like the one Andrew Sullivan is trying to build. And despite the attention the New York Times got from his content during the election, there has been some tension between the newspaper and Silver — including a reprimand from the paper’s public editor over a humorous wager that the blogger wanted to offer to MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on the outcome of the election (a bet that the NYT said was unseemly for a journalist).

Silver said this incident wasn’t a big deal, and that he appreciates being part of the New York Times. But how much does he really need the NYT, and how much does the NYT need him and others like him? That’s the question at the core of the Sullivan model: at what point does it become more of a hindrance than a benefit to be associated with a traditional media brand?

If Sullivan can do it, who else might be able to?

There are a number of other bloggers and columnists who could arguably pull off a standalone, Sullivan-style model: New York Times foreign correspondent Nick Kristof, for example, has a huge following through social media like Twitter and Facebook and is a popular author — although whether he would get access to the people and places he needs to access if he were independent is a question mark. Other columnists at the NYT and similar mainstream outlets like Tom Friedman or Ezra Klein could probably make a go of it, as could some writers such as Felix Salmon at Reuters.

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson told a media panel on Friday that the newspaper wants to work closely with high-powered writers like Silver, and in the past has used DealBook blogger Andrew Ross Sorkin as a model for what the paper wants to do by building events and other value-added offerings around individuals with star power. But at some point, writers like Sorkin and others are going to ask whether they wouldn’t be better off running such businesses on their own.

In a sense, this is just the latest evolution of a tension that has existed between traditional media and the web since blogging was invented — writers like our own Om Malik gain a profile in traditional media and then go off to start their own media entities, and some high-profile bloggers like Josh Marshall or Mike Masnick manage to turn their blogs into standalone businesses like Talking Points Memo and Techdirt. It’s a little like the music industry: labels try to nurture star talent, knowing full well that in some cases that talent will leave and go independent.

And as the music industry has discovered, there is even less incentive for talent to stick around now than there ever has been, and the barriers to entry for those who decide to leave are lower. Sullivan may have been the first over the wall in this latest iteration, but he is unlikely to be the last.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / ollyy and Shutterstock / Allies Interactive

OpenNebula, the European answer to the likes of Eucalyptus and OpenStack that counts CERN and China Mobile among its customers, is moving to differentiate itself from competitors by freely releasing OpenNebulaApps, a suite of cloud application management tools that sit on top of its traditional infrastructure management toolkit.

The OpenNebulaApps tools were previously available only to OpenNebulaPro customers but, according to project director Ignacio Llorente, OpenNebula realized there was more value in opening them up:

“Most customers are interested in our enterprise support – they want us to provide them with commercial support and a service-level agreement. These components weren’t so important for them, so we realized it was more important for us to release these components to the community, to compete [with OpenStack, Eucalyptus etc].

“As we are an open-source community, it is much easier for us and our customers to be fully open-source and not to have special add-ons only available for customers. We have a quality assurance process for all open-source technology and also have the community as testers.”

There are three tools in the OpenNebulaApps collection: AppStage allows automated software stack installation and configuration for virtual machines (VMs); AppFlow is for automatically executing and managing multi-tiered applications that consist of interconnected VMs; and AppMarket lets users build and deploy private marketplaces, so that users can share virtual appliances across multiple OpenNebula instances.

The suite is being released under the Apache license and will become part of the main OpenNebula distribution. It’s not the first move OpenNebula has made recently to boost enterprise uptake by opening up functionality to more users: a couple of weeks ago, sponsor company C12G said the community would get access to every maintenance release and service pack.

Llorente described the target users of this latest release as enterprises that see cloud computing as an extension of data center virtualization and that want to, for example, use the VMware hypervisor while avoiding the vCloud VMware component because OpenNebula is “more cost-effective” and supports other hypervisors as well. He suggested that this was a different type of customer from those who want to build an Amazon Web Services-like cloud on-premises.

“While OpenStack and Eucalyptus can be seen as an open source incarnation of the Amazon cloud model, OpenNebula can be seen as an open source incarnation of the VMware vCloud cloud model,” he explained.

The open-sourcing of OpenNebulaApps will have some casualties in OpenNebula’s own ecosystem – after all, there’s overlap with projects such as RIM’s Carina environment manager that were designed to run on top of OpenNebula.

“Yes, this is going to be a problem,” Llorente said. “[Various users] are providing functionality on top of OpenNebula and we are now releasing components with similar functionality, but this is an open ecosystem. Users can decide which solution they want to use.”

Chances are, the quad-core processor powering your desktop computer or high-end laptop is vastly underworked. But it’s not your fault: Writing code that executes in parallel is difficult, so most consumer applications (save for some compute-intensive video games that really need help, for example) continue to run on just one core at a time. Which makes it all the more impressive that a group of Stanford researchers recently ran a jet-engine-noise simulation across 1 million cores simultaneously.

As anyone even casually familiar with parallel processing knows, running applications across more nodes means jobs execute faster because they’re able to share the computing workload. The more cores, the faster it runs. This what makes Hadoop, for example, so great at processing large chunks of data. The MapReduce framework on which it’s based divvies up the work across nodes and everything they find is stitched back together as the result of a job.

But even Hadoop can only scale to tens of thousands of nodes and, because of its focus on “nodes,” actually isn’t really good at utilizing multi-core processors to their fullest (expect to hear more about the limitations of Hadoop at our Structure: Data conference March 20-21 in New York). The IBM-built Sequoia supercomputer (housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) that the Stanford team used consists of 98,304 processors (or nodes), each containing 16 computing cores. That’s a grand total of 1,572,864 cores, and the researchers were able to use the majority of them, which they claim is a record of some sort.

But record or not, that’s an incredibly complex undertaking. Programming the jet-engine simulation meant figuring out how to divvy the code into more than a million different tasks that could run across tens of thousands of nodes and 16 cores within each of those nodes. If even one of those processes is buggy, it could slow down or ruin the whole simulation.

Even in the world of supercomputing, where systems now regularly contain hundreds of thousands of cores — some of them special-purpose GPU co-processors — there’s a shortage of programming talent to actually use them all to their fullest potential. As my colleague Stacey Higginbotham explained in some time ago, the world of high-performance computing is hurtling toward exascale computing but a bigger problem than energy-consumption might be finding applications that need that much computing power and the algorithms capable of operating at that scale.

Still, the implications of advances in parallel programming are huge — like potentially life-altering huge. This is true not only because of the scientific questions we’ll soon be able to answer at speeds inconceivable even a decade ago, but also because of the computing power we’ll all soon be carrying around in our pockets and purses. If you think those multi-core smartphones and tablets are great now because they can run multiple applications at the same time, just wait until their processors are even bigger and badder and we have more applications — photo- and video-editing, computer-aided design, games and who knows what else — that can actually get the most out of them.

Needless to say, photo ownership is a sticky topic. Just ask all the people who left Instagram in December over Instagram’s terms of service and the question of photo ownership and rights.

So not surprisingly, one of the biggest champions of personal data ownership and paid services when it comes to social networks is forging an experiment in file storage and ownership. Dalton Caldwell plans to announced Monday that App.net will be launching a file storage API, giving each of its existing users 10 GB of file storage space connected with their accounts, so they can personally host their own photos and files and then authorize App.net apps to access those files.

App.net launched in the summer of 2012, and it’s still a little unclear exactly how Caldwell’s vision for the network is going to play out. He is currently committed to a paid network strategy where users have access to all the apps created on top of the App.net API, including everything from group texting apps to a network that looks pretty much like Twitter. Developers are paid from users subscription fees based on the popularity of the apps developers build.

Central to Caldwell’s thesis is that a paid network creates more value for the developers and gives users more ownership over their data and information. For instance, if you have an Instagram or Flickr account, you upload photos to the services which are then hosted on those companies servers even if you retain copies of the photos yourself. With App.net’s storage API, you would host your own photos in the cloud, and give authorization to different apps to access your photos (just as you give an app access to photos on your iPhone’s camera roll, for instance.)

“It’s like your personal Dropbox,” Caldwell said. “You want to maintain the originals and feel like they’re yours.” He noted that allowing for photo and file apps will be an important part of growing the App.net developer network, which is now fairly focused on text-based apps.

Caldwell said he thinks moving into photo and file storage will provide App.net developers a good deal of flexibility in what they design with the service’s API, and moves App.net into a potentially more useful and lucrative area for both users and developers.

“It’s an attempt to get away from some of the downsides of a siloed data storage,” he said.

Apple kicked off this week with its first big update to iOS 6 since it was released in September. iOS 6.1 includes several feature updates related to LTE coverage, Siri, iTunes in the cloud, and advertising.

The updates:

• More LTE carrier coverage. CEO Tim Cook announced this was coming on Apple’s earnings call last week.
• Purchase movie tickets via Siri. You could previously search for movie times via Apple’s voice interface, and get showtime results via Fandango — now you can buy tickets in the same interaction.
• iTunes Match subscribers can n download individual songs from iCloud.
• A new button that allows users to reset the Identifier for Advertisers. In iOS 6, Apple tried to wean advertisers off of UDIDs with the new IFA. It also gave users more control over whether their in-app behavior was transmitted to app developers or advertisers.

The update is available via iTunes or over the air update. iOS 6.1 is available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users.

The German high court has weighed in on the value of a web connection (as well as faxes and VoIP lines) and determined that the internet is pretty much essential to modern life (hat tip to TechDirt). This puts the German court closer to agencies such as the ITU and countries such as Finland where internet access is considered a right.

Apparently back in Dec. 2008, a German citizen found himself disconnected from his DSL line because of some error and was stuck without a connection for two months. He sought compensation for his expenses (he spent more time using his mobile phone instead of his wireline VoIP service) as well as €50 ($67) per day he had no connection. He didn’t get that much because the courts felt he was overeaching in seeking compensation from his ISP beyond actual costs for his fax line and VoIP line, but it did send the case back to a lower court telling it to set the fine accordingly.

The court’s rationale was that so much of modern life is conducted via the internet that going without was worthy of some compensation when it was cut off. A Google translation of the court’s press release notes:

The internet replaces, because of the easy availability of information, more and more other media, such as encyclopedias, magazines or television. It also allows the global exchange between its users, for example via e-mail, forums, blogs and social networks. In addition, it is increasingly for the initiation and conclusion of contracts, used for making transactions and to fulfill public service obligations. The majority of people in Germany uses the Internet daily.

The release goes on to say that because of these things it is not easily replaced and essential to modern life. Thus, it sent the case back so the man might get his compensation. In light of AT&T’s massive service failure last week that affected thousands of users, I’m curious how our own court system might view access to the web and what type of compensation — above and beyond a service credit — might be due those affected by multiday outages.

January 28 is Data Privacy Day. It’s a topic that has become increasingly more important in recent years as more of our information moves to the Internet. Consumers are largely untrusting when it comes to Internet companies, but one has at least earned more trust than others.

A study from the Ponemon Institute found that Mozilla was the most trusted Internet company for privacy in 2012. The non-profit ranked number one in the Internet & Social Media category and number 20 overall. The study doesn’t detail the competition, but we can assume that Mozilla beat out the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter.

In accepting the award, Mozilla says that it doesn’t strive to win awards when it comes to its users’ privacy:

This is certainly quite a distinction and the product of a user-centric philosophy implemented by contributors to the Mozilla project over the past decade. Engineers, UX designers, security, engagement, IT and privacy folks have made thousands of small decisions over the years that have collectively created the user trust reflected by this survey. This recognition is not something we sought, as we don’t view privacy as an end unto itself, but it’s greatly appreciated given all the complexities and nuances associated with privacy and security today.

That being said, Mozilla finds that the rankings only detail the inherent distrust consumers have for online services. It hopes that itself and others can fix that perception going forward:

The rankings have another implication. It means we as an industry all have a lot more work to do. It’s unfortunate that users largely distrust the ecosystem of online service and application providers. What we really want is an environment where those of us developing Internet and social media services and applications deepen trust in a way that empowers and protects users and engenders confidence. We all have to continue our efforts — both big and small — to create a more trustworthy environment of online products that seamlessly integrate ease of use, transparency, and user choice.

Speaking of other companies, Google and Facebook both detailed new privacy initiatives today to coincide with Data Privacy Day. Google says that it requires search warrants whenever law enforcement requests a user’s information. It also notifies users when their information is being requested. As for Facebook, the company’s Chief Privacy Officer, Erin Egan, will be accepting questions from users to keep the privacy dialog transparent and accessible to all.

Twitter announced today that it is launching a new Transparency Report home page at transparency.twitter.com. The announcement comes on Data Privacy Day, and the week following the latest release of Google’s Transparency Report.

Twitter first released a Transparency Report of its own last July, publishing six months of data. We should be seeing these regularly from here on out, but you can go to the new destination anytime.

“In addition to publishing the second report, we’re also introducing more granular details regarding information requests from the United States, expanding the scope of the removal requests and copyright notices sections, and adding Twitter site accessibility data from our partners at Herdict,” says Twitter Legal Policy Manager Jeremy Kessel.

“We believe the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact,” he adds. “To that end, it is vital for us (and other Internet services) to be transparent about government requests for user information and government requests to withhold content from the Internet; these growing inquiries can have a serious chilling effect on free expression – and real privacy implications.”

Google, in addition to putting out its latest data last week, also addressed data privacy today, highlighting three initiatives that it is focusing on. More on all of that here. Meanwhile, the company is facing new legal action in the UK related to its privacy conduct.

Additionally, Facebook has launched its “Ask Our CPO” (Chief Privacy Officer) initiative.

If you’re on Facebook, you likely received a mysterious email late on Friday that says you might get some money in a lawsuit. The email is the real deal — Facebook is indeed paying out and you could get up to $10 (maybe). So how do you collect? Here’s a plain English guide to what that email means:

Why am I part of a Facebook class action in the first place?

The social network got sued for using you as a product pitchmen for “Sponsored Stories” without your permission. For instance, if I “Liked” Justin Bieber’s page, my Facebook friends might have seen a big ad saying “Jeff likes Beeb’s new eyeliner.” Today, Facebook can still do that because it changed its privacy terms — it’s the earlier ads it’s on the hook for.

How do I collect?

Go to the settlement page and fill out the claim form by May 2.

So how much will I get?

Facebook is paying $20 million all-in to make this go away. Under a revised deal (the judge rejected the first one), Facebook users are eligible for up to $10 each — so long as there’s enough money to go around.

Oh, and that $20 million isn’t just for Facebook users. The lawyers are asking for nearly $8 million. Then there are people like the “escrow agent” and the “settlement administrator” who get a cut too. If the judge okays all this, it will be more like $10 to $12 million to go around.

To look at it another way, if there is $12 million left after the lawyers, there is enough money left to pay 1.2 million Facebook users.

Well, what if more than 1.2 million people make a claim?

You have to share. If 2 million Facebook users sign up, everyone would get about $6. If 2.4 million sign-up, it’s $5. If more people than that sign up, everyone gets nothing.

So what are my chances to get some money?

There are about 165 million Facebook users in America. If even 2 percent decide to make a claim, you’re likely out of luck.

Well, that doesn’t seem fair. Who gets the money then?

The class action says it’s not very efficient to cut $4.99 checks to everyone. So, if too many people are eligible, they’re just going to give the money to your friends at Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and the EFF instead. These groups will then use your money to advocate for privacy.

Well, damn it. It was my privacy that was violated — don’t I even get to be involved?

That’s a good question. This keeps happening again and again — Google, Facebook, etc. violate everyone’s privacy and the money from the resulting lawsuit goes to lawyers and a bit of it goes to “charity.”

To be fair, this isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Many of the privacy advocates do good work and the class action lawyers, even if they’re in it for themselves, do keep the tech companies on their toes.

The bigger problem here is that these legal deals don’t do a good job of involving the people who are affected. Nor do they produce solutions such as a “pay-for-privacy” option. Would you pay $5 a month for an ad-free, non-creepy version of Facebook? I might. But the class action settlement doesn’t allow us to raise these sort of options or to ask Facebook directly about what they’re doing.

If I don’t get any money, does any good come out of this lawsuit?

A bit. The settlement claims it will force Facebook to create a tool to see which products you’re endorsing and to remove your endorsements. But we’ll have to see if this tool will be easy to use in practice.

Google Chromebooks, not Microsoft Windows 8 computers, are selling well for Acer. In a weekend report, Bloomberg noted that Chromebooks account for between 5 and 10 percent of Acer’s recent shipments to the US; an interesting data point considering the timing. Microsoft’s Windows 8, hoping to re-ignite the PC market, launched in late October, or just about the same time Acer began selling Chromebooks.

Acer’s president, Jim Wong, has been one of the most vocal critics of Microsoft’s partners of late, first announcing disappointment in Microsoft’s decision to launch its own Surface computers and now suggesting that Windows 8 “is still not successful.” For its part, Microsoft has turned the finger-pointing back at PC makers, with The Register reporting last week that Microsoft feels partners didn’t build enough attractive Windows 8 tablets for the 2012 holiday season.

Blame game aside, the numbers are telling. This month, Microsoft announced sales of 60 million Windows 8 license sales, but that figure includes sales to hardware makers for new PCs that may not have been sold yet. And the overall PC market is down in terms of sales. In the final quarter of 2012, the industry experienced a decline of 6.4 percentage points over the year ago quarter.

A few reasons explain the sales decline. For starters, consumers and businesses may be holding on their older computers longer; unless you have a budget PC from a few years ago, you can very likely upgrade to Windows 8 or simply keep using Windows 7 for now.

Cheaper options for PC-like tasks are available as well: Smartphones to some degree and tablets to a much larger extent can handle many activities once reserved for computers. Plus, you can remotely connect to and use a computer from these tablets if needed.

The popularity of Google’s Chromebook is another example of less need for a traditional computer. It’s clearly not a full computer replacement but after using one since June of last year, it fits nearly all of my needs, for example. So much of today’s computing activities take place in a browser that the Chromebook can be a secondary device allowing an old computer to suffice for more resource intensive tasks or apps.

Ironically, Acer’s Chromebook entries are simply low-priced Windows laptops repurposed for Google’s Chrome OS. That cuts out any licensing fees to Microsoft, which if the market for Chromebooks grows, can hurt the company down the line. No Windows also means no Office; essentially a double whammy for Microsoft revenues if Acer’s Chromebooks become a hot seller. Samsung sells both Windows 8 computers as well as Chromebooks and it appears HP is entering this non-Microsoft market too.

Don’t think Acer is divorcing Microsoft, however. The company still builds Windows devices and surely makes the bulk of its PC division revenues from these.

In fact, I just received a Windows 8 tablet review unit from Acer — the Intel Atom-based W510 — and my initial impressions are mostly positive. The $599 tablet offers the benefits of touch when desired plus full Windows compatibility and an optional keyboard dock: A handy combination. But if that’s too much money for you, Acer’s Chromebooks start at a low $199; a price that will command more attention than any Windows 8 laptop on the market.

As human beings, we are born with a creative impulse, with an innate desire to use our imagination to better the world around us. Yet, all too often, our organizations end up being less innovative than the people within them. The dozens of in-the-trenches innovators who responded to our Innovating Innovation Challenge embody the first assertion and are working relentlessly and fearlessly to overturn the second.

We asked for real-world case studies and bold new ideas that will help us make innovation a deep-rooted, systematic competence in every kind of organization. In other words, how do we make innovation more of a natural act and less of a happy accident?

Of course, that’s easier said than done. The disciplines of management were invented, more than a hundred years ago, to drive variety out of organizations. The goal was to excise the irregularities, in an effort to ensure conformance to work rules, quality standards, timetables and budgets. Today, though, it’s the irregular people with their irregular ideas and irregular methods who create the irregular successes and profits. All too often, the quest to routinize the irregular ends up squelching innovation. The goal? Organizations that are paragons of penny-pinching efficiency and bastions of rule-busting innovation.

We received more than 140 entries from a diverse group of thinkers, practitioners and experimenters from around the world in pursuit of that goal. The judges and the MIX editorial team pored over the stories and hacks looking for depth, boldness, originality, clarity, and the ability to inspire and instruct in equal measure. We found those qualities in abundance — and are delighted, along with our partners at Harvard Business Review and McKinsey & Company, to announce 24 finalists (in alphabetical order):

Don’t Use Your New Innovation Project to Change Your Business Model — Build On What You Do Well and Ensure Your Success
Hack by Jean Angus, Saint-Gobain

Managing for 21st Century Crime Prevention in Memphis
Story by Toney Armstrong, Memphis Police Department

Democratizing Entrepreneurship: Village Capital’s Peer Selection Model
Story by Ross Baird, Village Capital

iMentors — Innovation belts spreading innovation within the organization
Story by João Manuel Brito Martins, co-authored by Jose Alberto de Oliveira Pereira, EDP Brazil

Keeping the Start-Up Spirit Alive at Red Gate
Story by Alice Chapman, Red Gate Software

Shell GameChanger — A Safe Place to Get Crazy Ideas Started
Story by Russ Conser, co-authored by Hans Haringa, Henk Mooiweer and Wim Schinkel, Shell

Case Coelce — Inspiring Innovation for Traditional Work Environments
Story by Luiz De Gonzaga Coelho Junior, co-authored by Odailton Arruda, Coelce

Fail Forward
Story by Ashley Good, Engineers Without Borders Canada

Making Innovation part of the DNA
Story by Jens Hauglum, co-Authored by Bente Mari Kristiansen, Bjørn Henrik Vangstein and Eyvind A. Larre, FINN.no

Blank Checks: Unleashing the Potential of People and Businesses
Hack by Sanjay Khosla, Mondelez, co-authored by Mohanbir Sawhney, Kellogg School of Management

Sustainability as Innovation Strategy: How Sustainability and Innovation Drive Each Other and Company Competitiveness at Danone
Story by Monica Kruglianskas, Danone, co-authored by Marc Vilanova, ESADE Business School

Innovation as a Business: How to Create a Repeatable and Sustainable Innovation Engine
Story by Lawrence Lee, PARC

Transforming Corporate Culture through Pervasive Innovation at KT
Story by Misook Lim, Korea Telecom

Democratise Innovation — for sustained Innovation culture
Story by Lalgudi Ramanathan Natarajan, Titan Industries

Whirlpool’s Innovation Journey: An on-going quest for a rock-solid and inescapable innovation capability
Story by Moises Norena, Whirlpool

Unleashing Inclusive Innovation at Cisco
Story by Kate O’Keeffe, co-authored by John Marsland, Carlos Pignataro and Lisa Voss, Cisco

Global solutions, local failure — Overcoming barriers in implementing open innovation
Hack by Frank Piller, co-authored by Patrick Pollok, David Antons and Dirk Lüttgens, RWTH Aachen University

Project Bushfire — Focussing the might of an entire Organization on the Consumer & Customer
Story by Stephen Remedios, The Stephen Remedios Company, co-authored by Aswath Venkataraman, Sandeep Ramesh, Shruti Kashyap and Shashwat Sharma, Hindustan Unilever

21st Century Play Dates: How USC Annenberg’s Innovation Lab brings together diverse communities to provoke innovation
Story by Susan Resnick West, co-authored by Erin Reilly and Jake de Grazia, USC Annenberg School

Innovation is not coincidence; it is built systematically every day and everyone can take part in it
Story by Óscar F. Rodríguez, Banco Davivienda

Is managed innovation an oxymoron?
Story by Kumar Sachidanandam, Cognizant

Crafting one of the world’s largest ideapreneurship — seeding a grassroots revolution in service innovation
Story by Pranay Shah Singh, co-authored by Puneet Ramaul and Annu Talwar, HCL Technologies

“Ever Forward” Extreme Makeover — DPR Construction Rebuilds their Continuous Improvement Process from the Foundation Up
Story by Dan Tran, DPR Construction

Innotribe — a tribe of innovators in the financial industry
Story by Peter Vander Auwera, SWIFT

Please check out the finalist stories and hacks and add your comments and ratings ̬ they’ll make a difference as finalists update and build on their entries for final judging. We’ll announce the winners of the challenge here the week of February 11th.

Note: This post was originally published on SBA.gov blog. To see the original post, please click here.

The Affordable Care Act will help small businesses by lowering premium cost growth and increasing access to quality, affordable health insurance. Depending on whether you’re a small employer or a larger employer, different provisions of the Affordable Care Act may apply to you as described below.                                           

1.  Businesses with Fewer than 25 Employees- Small Business Tax Credits

The Affordable Care Act does not require that businesses provide health insurance, but it offers tax credits for eligible small businesses that choose to provide insurance to their employees. To qualify for a small business tax credit of up to 35 percent (up to 25 percent for non-profits), you must have:

• Fewer than 25 full-time equivalent employees
• Pay average annual wages below $50,000
• Contribute 50 percent or more toward employee health insurance premiums

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Google announced back in November that it was rolling out changes for AdWords Impression share reporting (the number of impressions received in a campaign or ad group divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive).

The company added new columns to separate search and display impression share, and added hour of day segmentation and the ability to apply filters, see charts and apply automated rules using impression share metrics. They also improved the accuracy of how data is calculated.

Today, Google reminds users that it is continuing its plans to phase out the old impression share columns on February 4th, which is coming right up.

“Any saved reports using the old IS columns will need to be updated to use the new columns,” says product marketing manager Rob Newton. “If you don’t remove/replace those columns before they’re retired on February 4th, you won’t be able to run those saved reports.”

Saved reports will be updated to use the new columns.