Mozilla is all about Web standards. The non-profit has made it clear that it wants to move the Web away from plug-ins and third party services to Web APIs that will work across any browser. It’s latest venture tackles a service that many probably never thought needed fixing – Web payments.
So, what’s wrong with our current Web payment services? Sure, services like PayPal can sometimes be a pain, but it’s not like the entire system needs to be uprooted, right? Mozilla objects to that line of thinking and offers three reasons why the current Web payment system is broken:
Users cannot choose how to pay; they have to select from one of the pre-defined options.
In most cases, the user has to type in an actual credit card number on each site. This is like giving someone the keys to your expensive car, letting them drive it around the block in a potentially dangerous neighborhood (the web) and saying please don’t get carjacked!
Merchants typically have to manage all this on their own: payment processor setup, costly processing fees, and possibly even PCI compliance.
To help solve these problems, Mozilla has introduced navigator.mozPay() in Firefox OS. Mozilla says the JavaScript API was inspired by Google’s Wallet API, but contains a few modifications that support multiple payment providers and carrier billing.
Here’s how navigator.mozPay() works in its current incarnation on Firefox OS:
When a web app invokes navigator.mozPay() in Firefox OS, the device shows a secure window with a concise UI. After authenticating, the user can easily charge the payment to her mobile carrier bill or credit card. When completed, the app delivers the product. Repeat purchases are quick and easy.
If that sounds interesting to you, you can start testing it out right now on test builds of Firefox OS. The API can’t accept payments just yet, but Mozilla encourages developers to start working on implementing the API into their Firefox OS apps now.
Since 9/11 and the implementation of the Patriot Act, the FBI’s use of National Security Letters to obtain info has skyrocketed.
National Security Letters (NSL) are a form of a demand letter that are used by the U.S. Government (mostly the FBI) to extract information from an organization in the name of national security. The kind of info requested in NSLs includes stuff like transactions, phone numbers, and email addresses.
And it shouldn’t surprise you that a company like Google finds itself at the receiving end of many of these letters.
But according to a report, Google is fighting back against them in court.
Last week, Google filed papers in the case In Re Google Inc. Petition to set aside Legal Process. Although most of the documents are sealed, Bloomberg reports that Google is in fact challenging Section 2709 of Titles 18, which deals with National Security Letters. Section 2079 gives the FBI the ability to issue NSLs that force services like Google to give up user info that “relevant to an investigation” into national security issues.
The law also allows NSLs to come complete with gag orders, barring the recipients from even discussing them with their users.
The case is in front of US District Judge Susan Illston, who just a couple of weeks ago ruled NSLs unconstitutional.
Last month, Google began to include National Security Letter requests (demands?) in its Transparency Report, which also discloses users data requests made by governments using search warrants and subpoenas, as well as content removal requests. The NSL info is vague – Google reported somewhere between 0 and 999 NSLs affecting between 1000 and 1999 users last year. This info is vague because of the laws concerning NSLs and their inherent secrecy.
Google said that they worked with the FBI to lossen this secrecy ever so slightly to allow for their inclusion in the Transparency Report.
“You’ll notice that we’re reporting numerical ranges rather than exact numbers. This is to address concerns raised by the FBI, Justice Department and other agencies that releasing exact numbers might reveal information about investigations,” said Google.
But it appears that Google is now actually fighting the NSLs in court.
“The people who are in the best position to challenge the practice are people like Google,” said EFF attorney Matt Zimmerman. “So far no one has really stood up for their users.”
On Thursday, after weeks of building up to it (and years of Facebook phone rumors), Facebook unveiled the closest thing to a “Facebook Phone” that exists. This comes in the form of a new “family of apps” for Android, and an actual phone from HTC with the family pre-loaded. The experience is called Facebook Home.
What are your first impressions of Facebook Home? Future of Facebook and mobile communications or meh? Let us know in the comments.
Facebook’s mission with this offering is to make your phone more about people rather than about apps. The core feature of Facebook Home is the Cover Feed, which takes over as your home screen, and lets you swipe through the latest photos and updates from your Facebook News Feed. You can also interact with the posts from there (liking, commenting, etc.).
But it doesn’t end there. Notifications appear on the home screen in a visual way. As our own Zach Walton explained, “All notifications will show up on the home screen as separate entries. Tapping the notification will bring up the Facebook app for further interaction. If you want to get rid of it, you can just toss it off the screen. Holding one of the notifications will lump them all together if you so wish to disregard all of them at once.”
To even access your other apps in the first place, you have to hold the image of your face that appears (see that little image of Mark Zuckerberg below) and swipe it up to the appropriate place.
There is a feature called “Chatheads,” which allow your Facebook and text messages to follow you through your other apps. Messages (via these little heads of your friends) will show up at the top right of your screen regardless of what app your’e in.
For a more hands-on look, you might want to check out this demo from The Verge:
Okay, some of you are probably thinking: I don’t even use Android, so why do I care about this? Fair point, but Facebook indicated that it wants to provide an experience like this across all phones. This is easier said than done, however.
Facebook chose Android because of its open source nature that allows it to take over your phone in the manner it does. It’s not so easy for all operating systems. Zuckerberg specifically talked about how Apple’s control over iOS simply does not allow it to offer this kind of experience on an iPhone. It would take a partnership for that to happen.
We’d love to offer this on iPhone, and we just can’t today, and we will work with Apple to do the best experience that we can within what they want, but I think that a lot of people who really like Facebook — and just judging from the numbers, people are spending a fifth of their time in phones on Facebook, that’s a lot of people. This could really tip things in that direction. We’ll have to see how it plays out.
Of course only a select few Android users even get access to Facebook Home at this point. It’s only launching on a handful of phones, which is somewhat ironic given Facebook’s desire to have it on every phone. It’s coming to the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III and Samsung Galaxy Note II, as well as the newly introduced HTC First, which features Facebook Home pre-installed.
For developers, Facebook has created some new opportunities with Home. The Cover Feed feature lets users access app content as soon as they turn on their phones. More on that here.
For Businesses, not only will your Page’s posts and photos be more readily available to users due to the in-your-face nature of Facebook Home, but Zuckerberg says ads will be coming to the feature at some point.
Another thing that could make Facebook Home more useful to both users and businesses is the eventual addition of Graph Search. Graph Search has not even been launched on mobile devices yet, and it remains to be seen how long that will take. It will happen, however. Facebook said as much when that was introduced. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land quotes Zuckerberg from the Home launch:
“When that’s available, hopefully we’ll be able to make that available here [in Home]. But even Graph Search, Graph Search is not web search. People still need Google or Bing of whatever they use for web search.”
Is Zuckerberg perhaps being cagey, holding back on a secret-uber plan to eventually have Graph Search take over on these devices. Perhaps. And I do think Graph Search is going to come. But really, the impression I got was that search has largely been overlooked with the launch of Home.
As Google faces the real risk of losing search market share little by little to numerous vertical services, it’s possible that Graph Search will play a big factor in that. We discussed this more here.
Sullivan makes a good point in that same article in that Facebook Home makes users have to work harder to get to the search experiences on their devices. Just as users have to take an extra step to access their apps, they have to take an extra step to get to the search function (which could very well turn people off of the offering on its own).
Fortune goes so far as to call Android “Facebook’s new weapon against Google” because of Facebook Home; the point being that Google wants you to live in Google’s world and use Google’s services when you’re on an Android device, and Facebook Home puts you squarely in Facebook’s world, distancing you more from Google’s products even on its own operating system. It’s a fair point, and it’s really a similar (but more in your face) strategy to what Amazon is doing with its Kindle Fire devices, which use Amazon’s version of Android and its own app store.
If Facebook is able to get a substantial amount of people using Facebook Home, even if only on Android, it might push Graph Search even further into users’ search habits, especially if it’s available on their devices in less steps than a Google search.
But search isn’t the only Google service Facebook Home pushes to the background. As mentioned, it essentially pushes every other app on your phone to the background, but as Pocket Lint points out, it even eighty-sixes Android notifications, except for on the HTC First (another reason a lot of people might steer clear of Home).
There are real questions about whether or not people even want this kind of Facebook experience on their phones.
And of course, like with just about anything Facebook does, privacy is in the discussion. Even some of the most veteran of tech journalists are raising concerns.
Om Malik, for example, writes, “In fact, Facebook Home should put privacy advocates on alert, for this application erodes any idea of privacy. If you install this, then it is very likely that Facebook is going to be able to track your every move, and every little action.”
“The new Home app/UX/quasi-OS is deeply integrated into the Android environment,” he continues. “It takes an effort to shut it down, because Home’s whole premise is to be always on and be the dashboard to your social world. It wants to be the start button for apps that are on your Android device, which in turn will give Facebook a deep insight on what is popular. And of course, it can build an app that mimics the functionality of that popular, fast-growing mobile app. I have seen it done before, both on other platforms and on Facebook.”
“But there is a bigger worry,” Malik adds. “The phone’s GPS can send constant information back to the Facebook servers, telling it your whereabouts at any time.”
As some noted in response to Malik’s points, Google already does this stuff.
Martin Bryant at TheNextWeb counters Malik’s argument asking, “Is that really such a bad thing?” His point is essentially that targeted ads are better ads.
All in all, you have to really, really like Facebook to want to have Facebook Home dominating your phone. Luckily, there are a lot of people that really, really like Facebook. The social network has over a billion users. It’s unclear how many of them love it to that extent. Home adoption could prove to be an interesting window into that kind of data.
Even without having access to it, it’s clear that many view the offering as intrusive and an inconvenience to the rest of their phones’ functionality. It’s going to be quite interesting to see how the product evolves and whether or not users get on board.
What do you think of Facebook Home? Is this the future of how we’re going to interact with Facebook? What are the bigger implications? Share your thoughts in the comments.
The Raspberry Pi microcomputer has already put more than a million Pis in the hands of makers, tinkerers, parents and kids in its first year on sale. Which is an impressive feat for a device that’s designed to get more people dabbling in electronics and thinking about how software works. The Pi Foundation actually wanted to create a device that U.K. kids could cut their coding teeth on. But here’s a sign of how much more potential Pi has, above and beyond its original mission: Pis are been used to power a secondary school computing lab in rural Cameroon.
In a guest post on the Pi Foundation’s blog, a volunteer from a Belgian group that raised the funds to build and equip the school writes how they took 30 Pis out to Cameroon in their suitcase and used them to create a computing lab — along with screens, keyboards and mice bought locally. This Pi-powered computing class is itself powered by an on-site generator since the school is not connected to the public power network.
The school in question — Saint Marcellin Comprehensive College — is located in a small village called Binshua, close to Nkambe in the Northwest region of Cameroon. At present the Pis are being used for teaching the children how to use office productivity software but the aim is to get the kids coding too, in time:
All of the systems run on the Raspbian image from December, with LibreOffice and CUPS installed. The Pis are currently used to teach the children the basics of working with an Office suite. But we made sure that we gave the teacher a little introduction (and a good book) on programming in Scratch. So, now we are hoping that this will get Scratch introduced in the school curriculum as well.
The school’s lab doesn’t currently have an Internet connection but that’s something the Belgian group is working to change too.
The computers are all connected in a network. The central point of the network is a router that’s ready to be connected to a WAN modem. We hope to be able to provide a connection to the internet in the near future, which would certainly bring a small revolution into this rural area. Even without an internet connection, we believe that we created an advanced computer lab in this underdeveloped area. Giving the children in the area a chance to work their way to a better future. And that is our motivation.
It isn’t a stretch to say this small, low cost, low power microcomputer has the potential to provide a first computing experience for many more people in developing countries. The Pi hardware is cheaper than most mobile phones, let alone most smartphones — the other device touted as the likely first computing experience for the “next billions”. And it’s a lot cheaper than another Linux-based low cost computing project: the one laptop per child’s XO laptop (albeit, the price of the peripherals needs to be factored it).
In the following video, a teacher at the school is shown introducing the Pi to the class, and even though she mentions Microsoft’s Windows OS the reference is not likely to put smiles on many faces in Redmond: ”This small box is not working with Windows operating system… It works with another type of operating system. It’s Linux. It’s also very popular — and it’s for free.”
The European Union has cleared the merger of publishers Random House and Penguin, saying it does not pose a risk to competition.
The EU said the merger “does not raise competition concerns, in particular because the merged entity will continue to face several strong competitors,” according to the AP.
As I reported last month, Random House and Penguin announced their merger last October and the U.S. Department of Justice approved it in February, followed by Australia and New Zealand. Random House’s parent company Bertelsmann would own 53 percent of the combined company, and Penguin parent company Pearson would hold 47 percent. Random House Penguin’s goal is to enter emerging markets and expand its digital business.
It’s finally Friday! So that means it’s time for a little data center humor. We run our caption contest on Fridays, with cartoons drawn by Diane Alber, our fav data center cartoonist! Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor.
The caption contest works like this: We provide the cartoon and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion.
This week, we are voting on suggestions for Raised Floor Adventures. Please scroll down and vote.
For the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel.
Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have long been considered the future of computing and a new projection from market research firm Gartner shows just how important the mobile market has become. According to the firm’s estimates for 2013, Apple (AAPL) devices will outsell Windows devices for the first time this year. The estimate takes into account sales of Apple’s iPhones, iPads and Mac computers as well as desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones powered by Microsoft’s (MSFT) various Windows operating systems. In 2012, Windows device sales totalled 175 million units while combined sales of iOS devices and Mac PCs reached 159 million. As The Financial Times noted, Gartner also projected that tablet sales will overtake traditional PC sales by 2015.
Earlier this week, The Walt Disney Company announced that it has closed down the LucasArts games studio and laid off a large number of employees. While layoffs and studio closings in the games industry have not been rare over the past year, the closure of LucasArts came as a shock to many gamers who remember classic games such as Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island, and a plethora of Star Wars Games. Today it has become clear that Disney is not limiting its layoffs to its newly-acquired LucasFilm properties.
According to a Reuters report, Disney will be expanding its layoffs to its studio and consumer products divisions. According to Reuters’ unnamed “two people with knowledge of the matter,” the layoffs will begin within two weeks and will primarily affect marketing and home video units, though the “animation wing” will also be affected.
It is unclear whether Pixar Animation Studios will be affected by the layoffs. Walt Disney Studios just announced this week that Pixar is creating a sequel to Finding Nemo due out in 2015, titled Finding Dory.
Reuters’ sources stated that Disney began conducting an internal review last year to identify jobs that have become superfluous due to technological improvements or recent acquisitions.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has invested in Henry Blodget’s website Business Insider, according to a report first published by Bloomberg and then confirmed with an internal memo at Business Insider. Bezos led a $5 million series E round that also included participation from RRE Ventures and Institutional Venture Partners.
The new investment brings the total amount of money that Business Insider has raised to $18.3 million. In the memo to staff, Business Insider CEO and editor-in-chief Henry Blodget writes, “This capital will allow us to continue to invest aggressively in many areas of the business, including editorial, tech/product, sales and marketing, subscriptions, and events. As we mentioned last night, it will also allow us to expand our office.”
Blodget tells AllThingsD that “the new deal values the company above the $50 million valuation it earned during its last round in 2011.”
Business Insider reportedly lost about $3 million, or a quarter of its revenue, in 2012, though Blodget says the site turned a small profit in the first quarter of this year. Business Insider is known for its short news pieces and slideshows. According to the BI memo, Jeff Bezos said that he “sees some parallels with Amazon.” Blodget said the site will now include a disclosure statement whenever it writes about Amazon.
A new Kickstarter campaign from San Antonio-based Ubertronix, Inc. aims to turn your Android smartphone into a wireless trigger for your DSLR. The project follows others that offer similar devices, but this one, the brainchild of Josiah Leverich, who founded Ubertronix a little over a year ago to build camera remote hardware, has some unique elements, including a way to use your smartphone as a lightning sensor for capturing impressive storm photos.
Ubertronix began as a way for Leverich to build and market his Strike Finder camera trigger product, which is a dedicated piece of hardware that features built-in sensors to help capturing high-speed photography, and lightning specifically. The ShutterBox is an extension of that tech, which features a hot shoe-mounted receiver box that communicates wirelessly with your Android smartphone via Bluetooth. It uses the phone’s built-in sensors for triggering automatic shutter activation, including light sensors for lightning, as well as motion detection for capturing wildlife or other movement-based events.
The ShutterBox can also be used as a standard wireless remote for triggering single shots, time lapse, bursts of exposures and more. It’s even designed to be able to work with multiple slave units for capture across multiple cameras at once, or for triggering remote flashes in a studio setting.
The idea behind ShutterBox is to leverage the devices already in users’ hands instead of making them invest in and learn new proprietary hardware. The ShutterBox receiver will still cost you $199 as a pre-order (or $249 retail), but since a lot of its features are app-based, there’s ample potential for later capability improvements and expansion.
Ubertronix has already manufactured hardware in the past, and has already penned an agreement with a Texas-based company to build the PCBs required for the ShutterBox. It’s got a wide range of camera compatibility, and the startup is only seeking $25,000 in initial funding with an initial target ship date of June 2013. More cameras are coming with Wi-Fi remote functions built-in, like the Canon 6D, but if the ShutterBox can truly leverage smartphone sensors as well as it claims to be able to, that would add considerably to the value of a remote trigger app.
Android is still the king when it comes to OS market share in the U.S., but all indications show that it has peaked since the last few comScore reports show Apple gaining slightly at the expense of Android. For February 2013, Google’s Android came in at 51.7%, which is down from 53.7% from November 2012. Last month Android came in at 52.3% so you can see they are dropping a little each month. Even so, they are still the dominate OS as Apple came in at 38.9%, up from 35% 3 months ago. The rest of the pack includes the usual suspects, BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Symbian.
As far as smartphones go, 133.7 million people in the U.S. owned one at the end of February 2013, which is 57% of all mobile phones. Apple continues to be the top manufacturer (OEM) with 38.9%, which is up from 35% in November 2012. Samsung was up slightly at 21.3%, as opposed to 20.3% in November. HTC, Motorola, and LG were next in line, but it should be noted that their respective market shares all dropped, while HTC was the biggest loser of the three.
3D printing has performed some miraculous feats in the field of medicine. Researchers are already playing around with the idea of growing organs with 3D printers, and now one university has proven that you can make human-like tissue with the technology.
Oxford University revealed this week that its researchers have built a custom 3D printer that prints out a new material that’s composed of thousands of connected water droplets inside lipid films. This new material can perform some of the functions of the cells within our bodies, and may one day be used to either deliver medicine to targeted areas, or repair damaged tissue.
“We aren’t trying to make materials that faithfully resemble tissues but rather structures that can carry out the functions of tissues,” said Professor Hagan Bayley of Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry, who led the research. “We’ve shown that it is possible to create networks of tens of thousands connected droplets. The droplets can be printed with protein pores to form pathways through the network that mimic nerves and are able to transmit electrical signals from one side of a network to the other.”
The custom 3D printer, built by Gabriel Villar, is unlike anything we’ve ever see in the field. The printer is able to create networks of up to 35,000 droplets with each droplet only being 50 microns in diameter. These droplets, when combined into networks, can fold into unique shapes after being printed.
The folding of these droplets is similar to another form of 3D printing called 4D printing. The highly experimental technology allows objects, after being printed on a 3D printer, to self assemble into new shapes.
You may think you already know how others view you — as a skilled communicator, or an incisive numbers guy, or a manager who always brings out the best in her team. But then again, you might be surprised. One modest, self-deprecating executive was shocked to learn, after engaging an executive coach who examined his professional relationships, that his habit of interrupting people led his colleagues to perceive him as arrogant and haughty — almost the exactly opposite of the truth.
Particularly for high-ranking executives, it can be hard to recognize how you’re really viewed by others. For one thing, employees who don’t want to jeopardize their standing may conceal any negative perceptions and “put on a happy face”; for another, power has been shown to dramatically distort leaders’ self-awareness. “Studies of the effect of power on the power holder consistently find that power produces overconfidence and risk taking, insensitivity to others, stereotyping, and a tendency to see other people as a means to the power holder’s gratification,” Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer writes in his book, Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t.
Yet when it comes to your personal brand — your professional reputation — it’s not about how you view yourself. What matters is how the world sees you. “If three people tell you you’re a horse, buy a saddle,” says angel investor Judy Robinett. In other words, listen to what the outside world is telling you, because they’re probably right. So how can professionals get that honest feedback, especially if you don’t have access to an executive coach?
Seek out patterns in your paper trail. If you have access to copies of past performance reviews or recommendations letters that others have written for you, you can scour the written record for patterns. Of course everyone will have a slightly different take. But if you see multiple mentions of a particular skill set (“Lisa is a brilliant public speaker”) or shortcoming (“Martin has a hard time accepting feedback”), you should take heed.
Examine your online presence. Next, search for yourself online. What comes up first? Is it what you expected? Is it what you’d like to convey to the world? What would a person who didn’t know you think? If there are any damaging or erroneous links, it’s better to find out now (so you can take action), rather than having a potential client or employer discover them.
Conduct your own “360 interviews.” This is the first step most executive coaches would take — and if you don’t have a coach, you can do it for yourself. Invite trusted colleagues, your boss, and your employees out for coffee, tell them you’re working to raise the bar professionally, and ask for their honest feedback: What do you do well? Where could you grow? What three words would they use to describe you? Their perspective is likely to be revealing.
Hold your own focus group. In my book Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future, I profile a woman named Mary Skelton Roberts who — searching for more clarity in her professional life — held a focus group with a mix of her friends and colleagues. Mary sat back and listened for several hours as the participants shared their thoughts about her strengths, abilities, and areas they’d like to see her explore (the session was moderated by a friend, and Mary wasn’t allowed to respond — only to ask clarifying questions). Other people “almost have a bird’s eye view, and they can see your life in ways you may not be able to, because you’re involved in day-to-day living,” she told me. The focus group “took me to the next level in terms of my professional development.”
We simply know too much about ourselves; we can’t separate the signal from the noise enough to grasp how the outside world really sees us. But by retracing the paper trail of what’s been written about us and asking our colleagues for their honest opinions, there’s a lot we can learn about how we’re viewed by others. And if what we discover doesn’t match up to how we’d like to be seen — like the executive whose habit of interrupting others was derailing his career — we can finally take action to fix it.
The Nebula One brings together hardware with OpenStack software in a package that seeks to simplify cloud computing deployments. (Photo: Nebula)
As the tagline on his website reads, Chris Kemp is descending from space into the clouds. As former CIO of NASA Ames Research Center, Kemp has focused on the Nebula project, and transitioned into making it a new kind of computer company. This week Nebulaannounced the general availability of Nebula One, an enterprise cloud computer.
“The Nebula One delivers on Nebula’s mission to democratize cloud computing by bringing the simplicity, agility, and operational efficiency of the world’s largest Internet companies to all enterprises at a fraction of the cost of public cloud services,” said Kemp, co-founder and CEO of Nebula.
Built from the ground up to power the next generation of big data, web, and mobile applications, Nebula One is a turnkey private cloud system that provides compute, network and storage services through a simple self-service interface and popular APIs. It uses standard servers from vendors such as HP, IBM and Dell. At the core of the product is the Nebula Cloud Controller, a hardware appliance that turns racks of servers into a scalable on-premise infrastructure-as-service cloud system. Running a distributed enterprise cloud operating system, Nebula Cosmos, Nebula One builds on OpenStack to provide a rich self-service user experience and compatibility with Amazon Web Services and OpenStack APIs.
Xerox PARC has selectedNebula to power their private cloud infrastructure. “PARC researchers can now use and reuse the readily-available compute resources they need from the Nebula One cloud, provisioning in minutes what once took days to manually provision or months to procure,” said Walt Johnson, Vice President, Intelligent Systems Lab, PARC.
In 2009 the NASA Nebula project combined a 40-foot Verari (now Cirrascale) FOREST container and Cisco Unified Computing Systems. Its intent was to automatically increase the computing power and storage available to science- and data-oriented web applications as demand rises. Fast forward a handful of years and the “next generation” Nebula One has launched, complete with a video introduction from Star Trek Next Generation actor Patrick Stewart.
Sorry, Pandora — you won’t be able to escape Apple’s (AAPL) iRadio after all. CNET reports that Apple is close to signing a deal with two major record labels that would pay the labels half the per-song royalties that they receive from Pandora but would also add sweeteners to the deal that would give the labels added revenues. Among other things, CNET says that Apple will provide “a quick way for consumers to buy a song they hear, potentially boosting download sales from iTunes” and also give the record labels “a revenue share of new audio ads Apple is planning to add to the free service.” Given that the service will be centered around iTunes and available on all iOS devices, it seems that the labels are willing to take less in per-song royalties in exchange for potentially much wider exposure than what they get from Pandora.
For the last century, the U.K. has had what is known as a legal deposit law requiring a copy of every book, pamphlet, magazine and newspaper to be sent to the British Library, and allowing five other major libraries to also request copies. Now the rules are being updated: from Saturday, the same will apply to digital content, including blogs and other content published online.
The idea, much as it was with printed content, is to archive the U.K.’s cultural and intellectual output. The libraries — including the British Library, the national libraries of Scotland and Wales, Trinity College Library Dublin, the Bodleian Libraries and Cambridge University Library — will be allowed to scrape and store everything on the .uk domain, and to demand copies of ebooks, e-journals and even CD-ROMs published in the U.K.
“Legal Deposit Libraries will copy U.K.-published material from the internet, including freely accessible material on the open web. They are also entitled to harvest copies of password-protected or paid-for material, but are putting alternative arrangements in place for any publisher who prefers to deliver such material to them instead.”
A British Library spokesman confirmed to me on Friday that this was a reference to paywalled content. However, given that people will only be able to access the archive by physically visiting the libraries in question, and that there will be a seven-day lag between publication and archiving, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem for the publishers.
The spokesman said social media output would also be included, “as long as it is U.K.-based and openly available on the web,” and confirmed that this includes identifiably U.K.-based individuals’ Twitter feeds, although “we’d need to select people because it’s a .com” — no Library of Congress-style catch-all approach, then.
“The main thing we’re trying to capture first time round is .uk domain websites,” the spokesman added, while also stressing that no non-public social media material would be scraped.
On the book publishing side, The Bookseller reported that priority will be given to ebook-only publishers. This is presumably because those who aren’t ebook only are already submitting their books under the previously existing legal deposit scheme.
So why is this all happening? As my colleague Mathew Ingram pointed out last year, digital content can often be ephemeral and easily lost. That sentiment was echoed on Friday by British Library chief executive Roly Keating:
“Ten years ago, there was a very real danger of a black hole opening up and swallowing our digital heritage, with millions of web pages, e-publications and other non-print items falling through the cracks of a system that was devised primarily to capture ink and paper.
The regulations now coming into force make digital legal deposit a reality, and ensure that the Legal Deposit Libraries themselves are able to evolve — collecting, preserving and providing long-term access to the profusion of cultural and intellectual content appearing online or in other digital formats.”
The U.K. is not the first country to update its legal deposit rules in this way – similar requirements are in place in Denmark, Finland, Sweden and New Zealand.
While more work remains to be done, today’s employment report provides further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression. It is critical that we continue the policies that are helping to build an economy that creates jobs and works for the middle class as we dig our way out of the deep hole that was caused by the severe recession that began in December 2007.
Today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows that private sector businesses added 95,000 jobs last month. Total non-farm payroll employment rose by 88,000 jobs in March. The February and March employment numbers were revised up by a total of 61,000 jobs. The economy has now added private sector jobs every month for 37 straight months, and a total of nearly 6.5 million jobs has been added over that period.
The household survey showed that the unemployment rate fell from 7.7 percent in February to 7.6 percent in March, the lowest since December 2008. The labor force participation rate decreased by 0.2 percentage point to 63.3 percent in March.
Back on March 28, Rich Products Corporation issued a recall for Farm Rich-branded products such as Mini Quesadillas, Mini Pizza Slices, Philly Cheese Steaks, and Mozzarella Bites. The recall was issued over concerns that the food could be contaminated with E. Coli, and included nearly 200,000 pounds of frozen food made between November 12, 2012 and November 19, 2012. Rich Products stated that it would continue to work with the Food Safety and Inspection Service.
This week, the recall has been expanded to include over 10.5 million pounds of frozen snacks.
Rich Products has voluntarily recalled all products produced at its Waycross, Georgia plant with “Best by” dates from january 1, 2013 to September 29, 2014. The recall includes all sizes of Farm Rich-branded Mini Quesadillas, Mini Pizza Slices, Mozzarella Bites, Mini Bacon Cheeseburgers, and Philly Cheese Steaks. Other products from Farm Rich, such as Mozzarella Sticks and Stuffed Pretzel Bites, are made in separate plants and are not part of the recall.
The recall was expanded when the source of the contamination could not be determined. Farm Rich called this “unacceptable” and voluntarily recalled everything made in the Georgia plant.
“It saddens us deeply that anyone has become ill after consuming Farm Rich products,” said Bill Gisel, CEO of Farm Rich. “When it became apparent to us that despite the expertise of the USDA, FDA, the scientific community and our own experts, that identification of a specific cause was not going to be a simple or short process, we decided to act proactively to expand the recall.”
No reports of sickness due to the products have been reported. Farm Rich has stated that customers can call the company’s customer relations helpline to receive a refund or replacement of the potentially-contaminated products they have had to throw out.
In the U.S., the HTC First is an AT&T exclusive, but in the UK it’s going to be EE. No word on pricing or availability, but we are assuming it will become available soon after the U.S. April 12 launch.
The HTC First is the first and only phone to have the complete Facebook Home experience out of the box. Of course, people can still enjoy Facebook Home on other phones by downloading the app (starting April 12), but it will only be available on the Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy S 4, the One X, and the One X+, at least for now.
There are plenty of circumstances in which you may find yourself perturbed with Netflix. Maybe one of their apps is screwing up, or maybe the stream quality on Breaking Bad won’t regulate to full HD and you’re 100% sure that it’s not just your internet connection. Maybe Netflix just removed a movie that you wanted to watch, but put off just a bit too long.
Curse you, Netflix.
But when you take your complaints to Twitter, just know that Netflix also has a Twitter account. And they’re listening. And they might just hit you with this burn. Need some aloe for that?
