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  • Why is it so hard for us to imagine that a site like BuzzFeed could do serious journalism?

    BuzzFeed may be known to most for its “viral” posts about dogs who look like Richard Nixon and other ephemera, but the site has been making some significant moves into more serious fare over the past year, a wave that began with the hiring of Ben Smith from Politico. In a recent post at the Poynter Institute, writer Kelly McBride took the pulse of those efforts and also talked with Smith about the site’s ambition to produce long-form journalism. Some members of the mainstream media will no doubt scoff at these goals — but why is BuzzFeed any less likely to produce serious content than a newspaper?

    Since it hired Smith to broaden its editorial efforts, BuzzFeed has launched a British edition of the site — as well as new verticals aimed at sports and women — and introduced a business hub (which sparked some imaginative headlines) as well as made a move into longer-form content, such as a feature on the history and evolution of video games. As McBride notes, the site has also done serious investigative pieces about topics such as the failure of the new G.I. bill and the impact of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism on the election.

    BuzzFeed screenshot

    Serious and entertaining can co-exist

    When McBride asks Smith about the dichotomy between the site’s serious journalism and its “viral” entertainment content, the BuzzFeed editor says he thinks drawing that kind of artificial distinction misses the point, since it doesn’t really explain posts like the one about the most inspirational photos of 2011 — which is one of the most-read pieces in the site’s history. Was that post serious journalism or entertaining ephemera? One could argue it was both (and it should be noted that BuzzFeed has been criticized for how it aggregated those photos).

    In many ways, a realistic appraisal of BuzzFeed’s chances to become a home for “serious” journalism can only come when we stop thinking of BuzzFeed as a single media animal — the one that is hiring an “animals editor” and asks job applicants for another position to create an instruction manual for making a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich — and think of it as a media entity like any other. If the Huffington Post can win a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism, why couldn’t its offspring carve out a process for doing that as well?

    We like to think of newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post as monolithic bastions of “serious” journalism, but the reality is that newspapers have always been a blend of the ephemeral and the important. In most cases, it’s the entertainment column or the fashion feature on a drug-addled celebrity that pays the bills, and allows newspapers to send reporters to Afganistan or undercover to investigate a health scandal. But we ignore those aspects of what they do because we have come to see them as primarily engaged in “serious” journalism.

    BuzzFeed screenshot1

    Read some Sartre, pet a cute dog

    BuzzFeed co-founder Jonah Peretti (who was also instrumental in the creation of the Huffington Post) has said that he thinks of what the site does as similar to someone reading a serious novel at a cafe, and then stopping to notice a cute dog — in other words, appealing to the full range of human emotions. And McBride makes a good comparison when she notes that BuzzFeed is a lot like ESPN, a blend of pure entertainment and hard-hitting journalism:

    “BuzzFeed’s journalism model is a bit like ESPN’s, an organization I’m familiar with. They both produce a large volume of highly entertaining information, sprinkled with some regular journalism and some high-end stuff. BuzzReads reminds me of ESPN’s 30 for 30 film documentary series, not least because both are produced mostly by outsiders.”

    The Poynter writer also points out some of the ways that BuzzFeed needs to improve, including better editing and getting the attention of those in positions of power so that it can actually effect change. If that’s the goal, BuzzFeed may be closer than McBride thinks: a post at National Journal notes that the Republican National Committee is launching a site redesign — and they are doing their best to imitate BuzzFeed. “BuzzFeed’s eating everyone’s lunch,” a spokesman said. “They’re making people want to read and be cognizant of politics in a different way.”

    (Note: BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg will be joining us to talk about the site’s business model at paidContent Live on April 17)

    Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / wellphoto

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    • This May Or May Not Be Mark Zuckerberg’s Old Angelfire Site (But It’s Funny Either Way)

      The authenticity of this doesn’t appear to have been confirmed by anyone so far, but a link to an old school Angelfire site was posted at Hacker News (via Gizmodo), and it was allegedly created by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg when he was a kid.

      Again, it’s unconfirmed, and could be a fake, but either way, it’s pretty funny.

      The site has links for: Java Drawing Tool, The Web, GPA, The Vader Fader, Pong Game, Magnetic Poetry, Molecule Viewer, The Best…, About Me, Cow-a-Bungee, Monkey Theory and Base Converter. It links to the email address: [email protected].

      The about page says:

      Hi, my name is…Slim Shady. No, really, my name is Slim Shady. Just kidding, my name is Mark (for those of you that don’t know me) and I live in a small town near the massive city of New York. I am currently 15 years old and I just finished freshman year in high school. I have remodeled this website in an attempt that perhaps some search engine will recognize it. I am trying to promote my new AOL Program, The Vader Fader, which you can download elsewhere on this site. It is a decent fader. If you have any comments about this website, the java applets on it, or the Vader Fader which I am trying to promote, please contact me. My E-Mail address is at the bottom of this page.

      Zuckerberg’s hometown (as listed on his real Facebook Timeline) is Dobbs Ferry, New York. Born in 1984, he would have indeed been fifteen when Eminem’s “My Name Is” came out in 1999.

      Here’s his description of the Vader Fader:

      This is a fader that I made when I was a little bored and somewhat inspired on a long weekend in between finals. I am not sure what versions of AOL it works with but it has worked for myself and for all of my friends who have AOL 4.0. I am not sure if it works with AOL 3.0 though. This fader is a small download and it features a great AOL-Style Interface with many options. Its options are mainly limited to fading but the program can manipulate AOL in such a way that it can fade Chat Text, Instant Messages, and E-Mails. I first saw a chat fader and I thought that it was cool. However, it is very rare that one can find a program that fades Instant Messages as well. It is veritably impossible to find a program that fades E-Mails. So take advantage of this fader and tell your friends to download it as well!

      Of his “The Web” app, he says:

      As of now, the web is pretty small. Hopefully, it will grow into a larger web. This is one of the few applets that require your participation to work well. If your name is already on The Web because someone else has chosen to be linked to you, then you may choose two additional people to be linked with. Otherwise, if you see someone who you know and would like to be linked with but your name is not already on The Web, then you can contact me and I will link that person to you and put you on The Web. If you do not know anyone on The Web, contact me anyway and I will put you on it. In order for this applet to work, you must E-Mail me your name and the names of the two people that you would like to be linked with. Thank you!

      Sounds like something a 15-year-old Mark Zuckerberg might create. Hopefully Aaron Sorkin’s already planning the prequel.

      According to this version of Zuckerberg, the saying of the year at the time was “Suck it!”

      You can check out the site here.

      We’ve reached out to Zuck for comment, and will update if we hear back (which we almost certainly won’t).

      Image: Zuckerberg launching “The Wall” in 2004

    • HTC One now available for preorder

      HTC One Preorders AT&T
      HTC’s (2498) new HTC One smartphone is one of the most stunning handsets ever to hit the market and it is now finally available for preorder in the United States. AT&T (T) on Thursday became the first U.S. carrier to begin taking preorders for the upcoming flagship HTC handset, which is set to hit store shelves on April 19th. Sprint (S) will then follow AT&T’s lead and make the HTC One available for preorder beginning on April 5th ahead of the same April 19th launch date. The HTC One features a 4.7-inch HD Super LCD3 display, a 1.7GHz quad-core processor, up to 64GB of storage, 2GB of RAM, a 4-megapixel “Ultrapixel” camera and Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean. Links to AT&T and Sprint’s respective preorder pages can be found below.

    • See self-assembly and 4D printing in action

      A part on the outside of a spaceship that morphs, rather than requiring an astronaut to perform a risky maneuver. Plumbing pipes able to bend and flex based on the needs of the water flowing through them. Furniture that assembles itself, no screwdriver required. Buildings with the ability to repair themselves when something goes awry.

      Skylar Tibbits: The emergence of "4D printing"Skylar Tibbits: The emergence of "4D printing"These are just some potential applications of research being done at TED Fellow Skylar Tibbits’ Self Assembly Lab at MIT. In this lab, designers, scientists and engineers come together to work on new ways to make disordered parts become ordered — on their own, since the programming is part of the object itself.

      In today’s talk, give at TED University at TED2013, Tibbits introduces us to one of his most fascinating nascent ideas — what he calls “4D printing.” A collaboration between the Self-Assembly Lab and 3D printing giant Stratasys, 4D printing allows for the printing of objects that — when they have an energy force (say, touch or submersion in water) applied — transform themselves. Watch this intriguing talk to see exactly what this means.

      And below, see some very cool projects from Tibbits and his teams.

      This black strand was 3D-printed to lie flat. But when submerged in water, it folds itself into a square. Directly off the printer bed, this object has transformation embedded into it.

      This 3D-printed object looks like a black necklace. But when tugged, it folds to form the letters MIT.

      This flat, white matrix looks like it could be a potholder. But at a touch of its corners, it folds inward, as if it were alive.

      In this giant tumbler, the bent hexagonal pieces of a stool find each other and assemble themselves. A very cool demo from TED2012, using a model demonstrated on the microscale by the polio virus.

      Skylar Tibbits shows off his Biomolecular Self-Assembly kit. Revealed at TEDGlobal 2012, these flasks contain mock molecules, broken into components. As the flask is shaken, magnets allow the pieces to find their mates and become one molecule.

      In this demo, a pliable black substance is made to harden—then brought back to its original state.

      Protein strands have the ability to fold themselves. This object mimics that process.  When kinetic force is applied — i.e. when it’s thrown in the air — it folds in much the same way.

      Watch as this MacroBot transforms before your eyes.

      And here, the DeciBot.

    • Hayden Panettiere Rumored to Have Gotten a Boob Job

      Sometimes, judging whether someone has had plastic surgery can be easy.

      Take, for example, Valeria Lukyanova, the Russian woman who has had her body warped into the shape of a Barbie doll and doesn’t resemble a human being any longer.

      Determining the status of someone’s nose in Hollywood becomes a bit harder, where it seems every celebrity has had some sort of work done. While some will openly admit to having their lips done, others will go to their grave denying that certain parts of their body are not entirely flesh.

      This week’s Hollywood plastic surgery rumors are surrounding Hayden Panettiere. The actress was recently photographed on a Miami Beach wearing a skimpy bikini. The pics sparked rumors on the web that Panettiere’s breasts may have been augmented in the recent past, as they appear larger than they did around the time she was starring in the Network TV show Heroes.

      In an interview last fall, Panettiere stated that tabloid headlines had given her body dysmorphia in the past. The actress claims she is over her body issues, and she has not addressed the current speculation via her Twitter account. Everyone else on Twitter, however, has been talking about Panettiere’s chest quite a bit:

      (Image courtesy Hayden Panettiere via Twitter)

    • BlackBerry 10 Apps that Rock!

      BlackBerryRockinApps

      Since I’ve been using my BlackBerry Z10 for some time now, I’ve had the chance to try out lots of new apps. While my BlackBerry Z10 is a productivity workhorse, I’m also having a lot of fun with the games, music and photo apps available in BlackBerry World. I wanted to share a few of my top apps to get everyone as excited as I am, so read below for details on apps that will truly rock your device!

      For games, one of my favorites is Snake by Jan Hoffmann. The interface stays true to the game’s original build, but has the enhanced experience of the touchscreen on the BlackBerry Z10. I also like to remember my days in grade school by playing The Oregon Trail American Settler by Gameloft inc. – a game about conquering the Oregon frontier. While the interface on the BlackBerry Z10 is slick, it’s still challenging to cross rivers to take care of your oxen. And when you want to stay inside on a rainy day, try WordHero, a great cross-word puzzle app by Sven Studios.

      When it comes to music, there are tons of options for finding your favorite artists and songs. You can download full albums or songs directly from BlackBerry World or stream music through free apps like Songza by Songza Media, Inc., a must for those who love curated playlists. You can also use Slacker Radio by Slacker Inc. for access to a great radio stations from across the globe.

      You know I like to take photos, as evidenced by the many appearances of my dog George on Twitter and here on the Inside BlackBerry Blog. Now, my BlackBerry Z10 has some great native photo editing capabilities, but I also like using Photo Studio PRO by KVADGroup. I love the filters like “Old School” and “blur” (plus more than 100 other options), frames, and even making collages. And because every artist needs an audience, I’ve used BBM Integration to share my masterpieces with my social networks.

      These are just a few of my favorite BlackBerry Z10 apps. Based on what you’ve seen so far, what are your favorites? And remember, you can create your own favorite app for BlackBerry 10 using the BlackBerry App Generator!

    • Anatomy of a security fix: Postgres launches massive update to address vulnerability

      It’s the kind of call any software vendor — or open source project — dreads: A large customer (in this case NTT) flagged a vulnerability in PostgreSQL, the popular open-source database also known as Postgres. That happened March 12. The  next step for the Postgres community (and it is a community, not a single vendor, which complicates things) is to assess the vulnerability, evaluate whether it’s really an issue and then figure out what it takes to fix it.

      In this case, the security SWAT team deemed this to be a real problem and scrambled to address it. “The team evaluated it and wrote the code for the fix, which actually took very little time and then started scheduling the release,” Josh Berkus, Postgres core team member told me in an interview. And it’s in that scheduling and coordinating the rollout to thousands of Postgres repositories that was really tricky.

      herokustatus

      When it comes to any big fix or patch, the practice is to create an installer to ease its application. In Postgres’ case, because it runs on virtually every flavor of Linux as well as Windows, they needed to come up with 80 different packagers. “That’s why delay was built into the process,” Berkus said.

      “If it were a normal, minor update for bugs, we don’t worry about making them all available at once, but for this, we felt we needed to.”

      There  was also the issue of disclosure. You want users to be alert as to what’s happening but you don’t want to “provide a roadmap” of the vulnerability to the script kiddies, Berkus said.

      A March 28, message posted up on the Postgresql message board alerted folks of a patch to come April 4. Then Heroku the popular Platform as a Service, which supports lots of Postgres users, posted that it was issuing the patch starting April 1. That timing set off some of the Postgres faithful who felt that Heroku was getting special treatment. It also garnered some press attention and Hacker News comment.

      Berkus said there’s a reason for that. Heroku provides the database as a service, not the binary code itself. Heroku requested that early access because it has lots of machines. And, as it turns out, the vulnerability could impact any Postgres user that has port access to the database even if he or she does not have a valid account.

      The nature of that vulnerability meant Heroku — which runs on Amazon Web Services– or any Postgres user running on AWS or other public cloud could be vulnerable depending on how they set up their servers. Many customers running on public cloud leave ports open, probably because they don’t know better.

      From the Postgres FAQ about the issue:

      Any system that allows unrestricted access to the PostgreSQL network port, such as users running PostgreSQL on a public cloud, is especially vulnerable. Users whose servers are only accessible on protected internal networks, or who have effective firewalling or other network access restrictions, are less vulnerable.

      This is a good general rule for database security: do not allow port access to the database server from untrusted networks unless it is absolutely necessary. This is as true, or more true, of other database systems as it is of PostgreSQL.

      Berkus and the folks at Heroku who spoke to me on this issue were quick to assert  that while this was a big vulnerability — much bigger than the last vulnerability back in 2005 —  there was no sign of any exploits.

      So, net net net, Heroku rolled out its fix earlier this week. Minor drama ensued. But as of now, the rest of the world is covered as well.

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    • OpenStack Grizzly adds scale, storage options. Now, bring on the users

      OpenStack, the open-source cloud stack backed by nearly every tech vendor you can name, remains a work in progress, but the latest, seventh release dubbed “Grizzly” addresses some key pain points.

      Bring your own hybervisor

      For one thing, it adds support for VMware ESX and “especially” Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. Up till now OpenStack was largely KVM and XEN focused. Microsoft — one of the few non-OpenStack companies left — helped with HyperV. And VMware, which had been another OpenStack holdout but joined the effort last summer, helped with ESX, said OpenStack COO Mark Collier. Support for multiple hypervisors was a key customer request, both execs said.

      Grizzly also attacks (pardon the pun) scalability with a new “Cells” capability that lets customers manage multiple OpenStack compute environments as a single unit. “You expose a single API endpoint and a single control system but underneath that can be a whole nest of clusters,” Bryce said in an interview. And, a new “NoDB” architecture manages how data is shared within an OpenStack environment and reduces reliance on a single database.

      Grizzly also expands block storage options. “You can now create OpenStack block storage service that sits in your data center in front of your high-performance storage, your archival storage, your spinning disks and lets you intelligently put your work on different types of storage arrays as needed,” Bryce said. There is also better drivers and support for storage from Ceph, Coraid, HP, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Red Hat (Gluster), SolidFire and Zadara.

      And a new dashboard is there to expose and manage all these new features.

      The code is available now, two weeks in advance of the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Ore.

      As usual, the foundation touted the number of new contributors to this release — 517, up 56 percent from the last Folsom release.

      Wanted: real-world OpenStack users

      Here’s the thing though: What folks need to start seeing is real-live end users at companies beyond the tech vendors that support OpenStack as part of their cloud offerings. To claim Cisco/Webex as an OpenStack user does not hold the same weight as saying a huge bank is or a consumer packaged goods company is a customer. To date, Disney has been one charter end user. At this year’s show, Comcast, the country’s largest cable company and an OpenStack member and Best Buy will present case studies.

      The other — possibly related — concern is that myriad OpenStack implementations — from Rackspace, HP, IBM, Internap, Cloudscaling, Red Hat, Nebula, Canonical et al — may not be fully compatible with each other.  After all, the pressure will be on for HP to offer features and perks that distinguish its OpenStack cloud from IBM or Red Hat’s OpenStack clouds. Foundation members assure the world that will not be so, but doubts remain.

      OpenStackLogoMany companies are kicking the tires of OpenStack as an alternative or additional cloud to Amazon Web Services. GigaOM Pro Analyst David Linthicum sees three pools of potential OpenStack adopters:  companies looking to deploy a private cloud; companies that don’t want to move to AWS; and companies  that “think they’re protecting themselves by leveraging a standard.”

      He added: ”The key concern about OpenStack, as with other standards, is that the providers will move off into their own proprietary directions and thus hurt compatibility.  Clearly most of them won’t wait for the standard to mature to get to the features their users and the market demands. New releases, such as Grizzly, will curtail some of that, but there is not a chance that the standard will move as fast as the distribution providers need them to move.”

      To see a demo of the new OpenStack dashboard, check out the video below.


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    • How a Start-Up Can Succeed in a Mature Category

      There are a lot of reasons not to try to break into the soda industry right now.

      Soda, or Carbonated Soft Drinks (CSD), is dominated by huge multinationals like Coca Cola — only the most recognized consumer brand in the world. Their distribution systems make CSD items available in virtually every retail format, in every country in the world, and have cost efficiencies that emerging brands cannot achieve. At the same time, consumers have formed increasingly negative perceptions of soda, fueled by media attention about its negative impact on health. It is no surprise that the category is in a steady, multi-decade decline. With this backdrop, it’s clear why very few new CSD brands have achieved success in the last twenty years.

      And yet the positive attributes of the CSD category are attractive. CSD has immense scale — $74 billion in annual retail sales in the US alone — and soda is purchased by 96 percent of US households. If someone could figure out how to get skeptical consumers excited about a new brand, the upside could be tremendous.

      I was one of those consumers. In 2000, I realized that despite living what I believed was a health-conscious lifestyle, I was consuming over 200 grams of added sugar per day through ostensibly healthy products like energy bars and juice smoothies. My wife and I eliminated sugar from our diet and became daily users of the natural sweetener stevia, occasionally using it to make homemade ginger ale. When I saw Zevia, a new zero calorie soda, on the shelf at my local Whole Foods, I knew the brand could be a game changer.

      I had spent my career building emerging brands in the natural and organic consumer space, first leading sales and marketing for Kashi cereal, then founding SPINS, a market research firm for the natural products industry. I ran SPINS for eight years, tracking sales of over 300,000 natural packaged goods items for clients ranging from General Mills to startups, helping them understand sales and consumer trends in their categories. My time at both brands made clear that a healthy alternative’s best chance for success lies in keeping the product familiar, which allows you to educate consumers quickly and cost-effectively. Most purchasing decisions in packaged goods are made at the shelf, so it is critical for shoppers to easily identify how a new product fits into their diet.

      Zevia’s flavors were familiar soda favorites, such as Cola, Ginger Ale and Lemon/Lime, not novel concoctions like Blueberry/Pomegranate/Acai. The packaging was a classic 12-ounce aluminum can and the price point, while premium at about $1.00 per can, was still accessible. The key differentiator from conventional diet soda was stevia, the sweetener.

      Stevia is 200 times as sweet as sugar, but has no calories and no effect on blood sugar, so it offers the perfect alternative sweetener for those looking to avoid both sugar and artificial sweeteners. Though stevia was newer in the US, its global growth was explosive. Stevia had been grown and used for many years in its native South America before the FDA reclassified it from a “dietary supplement” to a “sweetener” in 2008. European, Latin American and Asian countries also have approved it.

      Excited about the opportunity, I bought the brand in the fall of 2010, became CEO, and our team immediately invested significant resources into understanding who was buying Zevia, and why. I think our data-based approach can help any small start-up achieve a greater chance of success, even in a mature category.

      First, we learned through data from a leading supermarket chain that a significant portion of consumers — over 30% — were buying multiple 6-packs of Zevia per shopping trip. Zevia was often a planned purchase, not an impulse buy. This led us to focus on distributing and merchandising the product on grocery shelves, instead of in refrigerated coolers like other successful brands such as Snapple and Vitamin Water. The result was a more cost-efficient distribution system, which avoided the resource-intensive teams of “feet on the street” servicing the product and shipped instead to centralized warehouses.

      Second, we surveyed consumers to understand what was appealing about Zevia. Whereas our marketing initially focused on Zevia being 100% natural, we found that familiarity with the absence of negatives was the key driver. Soda is a category focused around enjoyment, yet consumers told us their enjoyment was tempered by what they viewed as “bad stuff” in the sodas they drank. We repositioned the brand as fun, accessible, and guilt-free — “The Smarter Soda.”

      We also learned that several key consumer groups were attracted to Zevia’s promise of zero calories with no artificial sweeteners, most notably people with diabetes, those seeking to lose weight, and moms. We made moms our focus because they were more likely to share their discovery of Zevia with friends and family, more likely to make purchasing decisions for the household, and willing to spend more for healthy products.

      Finally, we learned that customers who bought Zevia were making it an incremental purchase — adding to their total shopping bill, instead of substituting it for something else on their list. We made that a core part of our message to retailers, many of whom are disenchanted with the thin margins they make on traditional soda. Across a range of retail channels, intense competition has all but squeezed the profit out of the category; a store may generate a gross margin of 10 percent or less on conventional soft drinks, compared with 25 percent or more on upscale products like Zevia. Once they heard our research, more retailers were willing to stock our products, even if we didn’t have the name recognition of the industry giants.

      Over the past two years, we have aggressively grown the brand, becoming the leading soda brand in natural products stores like Whole Foods, then expanding into conventional supermarket chains such as Kroger and Safeway, followed by mass merchandisers like Target and other retail formats.

      By definition, building an emerging brand is a high-risk proposition. We have mitigated those risks through careful planning, an iterative “test and learn” approach, and focused research. Economies of scale are clearly important — and we’re headed there — but we believe that an authentic brand offering a compelling new solution can compete, and win, against category leaders.

    • Apple Adds New Ratings Box Inside App Store Details

      Apple has made a small change to its App Store app details pages that puts a new ratings box right at the top of the page, just under the app’s name and directly on top of the app’s rating.

      Of course, Apple has always including its rating information in the details section of the app. There, you’ll not only find the rating but a detailed description of all the “offending” content that caused Apple to rate it as such. But of course, you have to scroll down to access this. The new ratings box is front and center at the top of the app screen.

      This slight tweak is just another example of Apple doing what it can to highlight mature content in the apps contained in its App Store. Apple has always had a nudity phobia when it comes to apps. But that focus on Apple’s apps has intensified as of late, after the whole Vine controversy.

      When Twitter’s six-second Vine video app first launched, it rather quickly became overrun by porn – which, on it’s own merits, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If that’s what people want, right? Vine doesn’t ban nudity in its terms (although they did make some moves to decrease its visibility inside the app). Some App Store users complained that Apple made the Vine app and editor’s pick, considering its association with adult content.

      Apple eventually bumped Vine’s rating to 17+ in response.

      AppleInsider, who first spotted the new ratings boxes, points out that this isn’t the first time that Apple has amended its App Store app details to make things more clear for users. Apple recently settled a lawsuit filed by angry parents whose kids were spending large amounts of cash in in-app purchases in freemium apps.

      In response, Apple added a small bit of text inside freemium apps letting parents knows that they supported in-app purchasing.

    • Facebook Introduces New APIs For Comment Replies

      In late March, Facebook launched a new commenting system for Pages that allows users to reply to comments. The new system is on an opt-in basis for now, and Facebook has a few API tips to keep in mind if you decide to take your Page into this new territory.

      Facebook announced that its comments API now supports “different “views” of the comments on posts through our updated comments API and FQL comment table.”

      The first view organizes what Facebook calls “top level comments,” or comments that are not replies. These comments can be ranked based “on the post and the number of top level comments on the post so far.”

      The second view is simply called “replies.” Facebook says developers can access replies by “querying for the comments on a comment id.”

      The third, and final view, is the comment “stream.” This is what you’re most likely going to see the most of as it combines top level comments and replies into a single stream of data. The “stream” is also organized in chronological order so the newest comments are shown first.

      If you’ve already been using the comments API, Facebook says that you should keep the following changes in mind:

    • comments’ field from ‘stream’ FQL table is deprecated. Please use the’comment_info’ column to fetch the ‘can_comment’ and ‘comment_count’ fields.
    • We are removing the fields on the FQL ‘comment’ table that were used exclusively for legacy Comments Plugins — ‘xid’, ‘reply_xid’, ‘username’ and ‘comments’.
    • We are removing the undocumented ‘count’ field on the ‘comments’ connection in the Graph API. Please request ‘{id}/comments?summary=true’ explicitly if you would like the summary field which contains the count (now called ‘total_count’)

      • If you need more information, check out the comments API documentation. If you want to start using the new API, you can opt in through the July 2013 Breaking Changes under the Advanced Tab of the app dashboard. On July 10, the new comments API will go into effect for everyone. Might as well get used to it now while it’s still voluntary.

  • The outrageous way many Americans rewrite mobile phone history

    American Mobile Phone
    The first mobile phone call was placed 40 years ago. So on Wednesday, we were treated to several “History of the Mobile Phone” articles by American journalists, most of them orgies of chauvinism and astonishing nationalistic bias. One pure product of this navel-gazing genre is the Wired magazine piece called “The 12 Cellphones That Changed Our World Forever.” In the revisionist history of the mobile phone, the actual nature of the device is obscured completely.

    Continue reading…

  • Will Google Ever Stop Dominating Search?

    Google stock is currently taking a hit after reaching an all-time high last month. Any number of factors could be contributors to this, but some think it’s directly related to people’s decreased dependence on finding information with Google.

    Can Google keep its edge in search for the long term? Let us know what you think.

    Forbes, for example, has a piece out today called “Four Reasons Google’s Stock Is Slowing Down“. The first two reasons listed in this article are directly related to this issue: 1. Losing search market share and 2. Shift to mobile search.”

    The author references a New York Times article making the rounds today, in which the case is made that people, particularly on mobile, are choosing other services first, based on the type of information they’re looking for.

    “Say you need a latté. You might pull out your phone, open the Yelp app and search for a nearby cafe. If instead you want to buy an espresso machine, you will most likely tap Amazon.com,” writes the Times’ Claire Cain Miller. “Either way, Google lost a customer.”

    This is a legitimate concern for Google. It’s been apparent, for years now, that any eventual decline in market share for Google would likely come at the hands of a combination of services chipping away at the need for consumers to rely upon one search engine for finding things. That is opposed to just switching search engines and using something like Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc.

    Google itself has acknowledged this in the past, and even today, Google’s Adam Kovacevich shared the NYT article.

    Of course it helps Google’s case against antitrust complaints when reports come out that suggest there is legitimate competition. The Times reported back in September that 1/3 of shopping searches start on Amazon vs. only 13% on general search engines. Kovacevich shared that too.

    Interestingly, when Google’s stock hit an all-time high earlier this year, analysts chalked it up to optimism for Google’s core business and mobile apps. Yahoo Finance said the market is convinced that these have “many good years ahead of them.”

    Still, the search landscape just isn’t what it used to be.

    As Miller writes, “No longer do consumers want to search the Web like the index of a book — finding links at which a particular keyword appears. They expect new kinds of customized search, like that on topical sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor or Amazon, which are chipping away at Google’s hold. Google and its competitors are trying to develop the knowledge and comprehension to answer specific queries, not just point users in the right direction.”

    That’s just a handful of the various services that are already replacing Google for certain types of searches for many consumers. There’s one app that just about everybody has on their smartphone, and it could potentially take an even bigger chunk out of Google’s mobile search share in time than some of these others.

    Facebook Graph Search’s impact on consumer behavior has been underwhelming so far, but Facebook is pretty much keeping it that way so far. While the number has probably increased some by now, at last count, only about 0.09% of Facebook users even had Graph Search yet. Facebook was clear from the beginning that the roll out would be slow, and that many more features and capabilities would be added in the future. In short, Graph Search has nowhere to go but up. It will only get better and return results for more types of information.

    As we’ve noted in the past, local search is one areas where Graph Search could make an immediate impact in the market. Interestingly, Facebook just renamed its “Nearby” feature on iOS to “Local Search”.

    Not only has Graph Search not rolled out to the majority of Facebook users yet, but it has also not rolled out to mobile. Local search is all the more relevant when used from a mobile device, and that will be key for Facebook’s search offering once it finally does hit its mobile apps.

    But its potential impact won’t be limited to local search. If Yelp can make a dent in Google’s market share from mobile for certain types of local searches, Facebook can surely make a dent across a broader spectrum of verticals (from both mobile and desktop). Graph Search recently has already started letting you search for things like movies “watched” by friends (or others), books “read” by friends or others, and TV shows “watched” by friends or others. That’s not just stuff people have “liked,” but stuff people have read and/or watched, regardless of whether or not they like them. Wondering whether or not you should watch “The Hobbit”? Search “my friends who have watched the hobbit” and ask them their opinions. You get the idea.

    Graph Search

    This is only going to expand to encompass more types of searches, and the more types of searches it works for, the more searches it can take away from Google. Is it going to replace Google in general? I’d say almost certainly not, but as a multitude of services chip away at Google’s searches, Facebook in particular is one of the few that has the potential to chip away at a bigger piece of the pie. Combined with the Amazon shopping searches alone, Google’s pie share could start looking a lot different.

    The Times piece cites comScore data, saying that searches on traditional services (dominated by Google) declined 3% in the second half of last year after rising for years, while the number of searches per searcher declined 7%. Meanwhile, searches on vertical search engines increased 8%. Do you think this pattern is going to reverse anytime soon?

    Will there come a time when the majority of searches aren’t performed using Google? Let us know what you think in the comments.

  • Business Value of Blade Infrastructures

    The modern data center environment is evolving to support more users, more data and a lot more services. As the data center becomes an integral part of any organization, the focus becomes efficiency and a reduction in management overhead. Furthermore, IT environments are continuously striving to increase user density while still improving data center efficiency.

    As more cloud computing projects and more emphasis are placed on the data center, administrators are going to look at more efficient ways to deliver data and user workloads. One of those very effective delivery means is through a highly scalable blade infrastructure. Not only are blades easier to scale, they bring other direct benefits to an organization. This includes:

    • Better density and computing resources
    • Improved network bandwidth control and utilization
    • Better IT facilities management
    • Simplifying the management process
    • Increase data center flexibility

    In this IDC research white paper, sponsored by HP, we are able to see how and where the blade infrastructure can bring direct benefits to an organization. For example, the HP BladeSystem enclosure utilizes Platinum Power supplies with 94% efficiency for increased energy efficiency. Additionally, the HP Dynamic Power Saver mode enables more efficient use of power by placing power supplies in standby mode during periods of low utilization. HP Power Regulator, built for ProLiant, dynamically changes each server’s power consumption to match the needed processing horsepower, thus reducing power consumption automatically during periods of low utilization.

    Download this white paper to see how IDC’s ROI analysis that customers can achieve considerable cost savings and improve the agility of their infrastructure by migrating to an HP BladeSystem environment. Remember, in building out any data center – one of the most important components will be the ability to scale and stay agile. Since the business environment can change at any time, it only makes sense to have an infrastructure that’s capable of the same flexibility.

  • Photon 3D Scanner Will Let You Turn Real Objects Into Printable Objects

    JulieScan_600px

    The Photon 3D scanner is a self-contained laser scanner that creates point clouds of real objects, allowing you, in turn, to create printable files of things you build or need to copy. It is $399 on Indiegogo and looks amazing. In short, you have no idea how badly I want to order one of these right now.

    Built by Adam Brandejs and Drew Cox, a pair of Torontonians, the device uses a small laser and a turntable to scan all the surfaces of an object. The scans are converted to STL or OBJ files – filetypes usable by most 3D printers – and can be printed.

    Similar projects are popping up these days, including a Makerbot-backed scanner – but none look as polished as this model. Some features:

    The Photon scanner uses a high definition camera and dual laser lines to capture 3D scans in as little as 3 minutes. The Photon can scan objects up to 190mm x 190mm x 250mm (7.5″ diamter x 9.75″ height), and yet folds up into a compact size. It’s lightweight, portable, and compact, making it easy to integrate into your workspace.

    I’m fascinated with the concept of in-the-field 3D scanning and it seems that we’re getting there faster than ever. We’re living in a world of miracles and wonder the fact that you can spend four Benjamins (or centiloonies or whatever they have in Canada) and get a 3D scanner is amazing to me.

  • U.S.-Canada Border Shooting Suspect Arrested

    The U.S. border with Canada is generally more peaceful than the U.S. border with Mexico, but an incident this week shows that the northern border is also used for drug smuggling. A drug bust that took place this week in both Washington state and British Columbia means that parties in the Northwest U.S. will be a bit more demure over the next few weeks.

    According to an Associated Press report, four people have been arrested in connection with an attempt to smuggle drugs across the U.S.-Canadian border.

    Two of those arrested were men caught by the American Border Patrol trying to smuggle a reported 58 pounds of MDMA (also known as ecstasy) into the U.S. near the small town of Sumas, Washington this week. They were dressed in camouflage clothing and carrying backpacks. One of the men was captured, and the other was reported by the border patrol to have fired gunshots and fled back into British Columbia, where he was later caught.

    The other two suspects are reported to be a man and a woman who told authorities they would be paid $11,000 to haul the MDMA to San Francisco.

  • Frommer’s Travel Guides Will Stay Alive as Arthur Frommer Buys Them Back from Google

    After reports that Google had quietly killed the print line of Frommer’s Travel Guides, the guidebooks have been given a new life as their creator has decided to buy back the brand.

    The AP reports that 83-year-old Arthur Frommer has reacquired the rights to his famed travel guidebooks from Google, and he plans to keep them alive in both print and ebook format.

    “It’s a very happy time for me,” says Frommer. “We will be publishing the Frommer travel guides in ebook and print formats and will also be operating the travel site Frommers.com.”

    Google bought Frommer’s back in August of 2012 from publisher John Wiley & Sons. The price of that deal was undisclosed, but reports indicate that it was somewhere around $22 million.

    Just a couple of weeks ago, reportes emerged that Google was killing the print line of the guidebooks – the last one having bee published in December of 2012.

    When Google bought the Frommer’s brand, they made it clear that they would incorporate its content into Zagat, and spread it among various Google services. The status of the print versions was always up in the air, and it appears that Google did exactly what they intended to do – grab the content and kill the rest.

    But Arthur Frommer obviously didn’t want to see that part of the brand die.

    Google confirmed that Frommer had reacquired the Frommer’s brand, and noted that the content had already been incorporated into many Google services, including Google+.

  • BlackBerry to shutter failed music service after less than two years

    BlackBerry BBM Music Shut Down
    Apple (AAPL) has Ping, Microsoft (MSFT) has Zune, and now BlackBerry’s (BBRY) BBM Music can be added to the list of failed music ventures embarked upon by consumer electronics companies. As the reinvigorated smartphone vendor fights to stage a comeback in 2013, it is also apparently still trimming the fat. The latest addition to the chopping block will be BBM Music, the curious service that gave users access to 50 songs of their choosing as well as songs chosen by each of their BBM contacts. “BBM Music service will be discontinued as of June 2, 2013,” BlackBerry said in a letter to customers picked up by CrackBerry. “For paying customers, April is the last month that you will be billed. In May, as your BBM contacts stop using the service, songs in your playlists will begin to turn grey and will no longer be available.”

  • Is Google’s new Blink browser engine good or evil? It depends

    Two large booms in the browser wars sounded on Wednesday; the loudest in a long time. First was the news that Mozilla and Samsung are partnering for a new mobile browser engine called Servo. Later in the day, before the echoes of that news disappeared, Google announced it would be forking the WebKit browser engine to create Blink. WebKit currently powers most browsers, so what gives?

    Sorry, Mozilla, the Google news is bigger … for now

    Depending on your point of view, this situation at its base level is either very good or very bad. On the positive side, both efforts are intended — at least partially — to create browser engines that take better advantage of multi-core chips and parallel processes to speed up the web on mobile devices. That’s great, but the biggest downside is the potential for websites to be rendered differently through different browser engines; that’s bad for users and for web developers, of course.

    The Mozilla/Samsung effort is a long way off from any public final releases. And Mozilla isn’t really a force in the mobile web space these days, even though it makes a solid mobile browser. Samsung’s Android devices can obviously run Google’s Chrome browser now and Samsung has also skinned a browser for its devices; personally, I find Chrome to be a better choice, but opinions will certainly vary.

    So the real story here, at least for the short- and medium-term, is Google’s effort. It has greater influence on more web users due to adoption of the Chrome browser on the hundreds of millions of desktops, laptops and mobile devices. And between Chrome and Safari, more people use the WebKit browser engine than any other. Here is worldwide browser/engine usage data from StatCounter, measured in March of 2013:

    • Chrome (WebKit): 38.07%
    • Internet Explorer (Trident): 29.3%
    • Firefox (Gecko): 20.87%
    • Safari (WebKit): 8.5%
    • Opera (Presto): 1.17%

    The current browser state and Google’s reason for the change

    The open source WebKit rendering engine is currently used by Apple’s Safari browser — both on OS X and iOS — Chrome, BlackBerry 10 and, ironically, Samsung’s Tizen platform. As a result, it’s the most widely used browser engine. But Apple owns the trademark for the name WebKit, and that tells you part of the reason Google is forking it. The other part? Google already has its own JavaScript engine in Chrome called V8, even though it uses WebKit for rendering.

    Google doesn’t want to use browser technologies that have been primarily used or built by others when it thinks it can fork or build its own code to make the web faster. And that’s a good part of the reason for the fork: speed. Not just speed the end user will see, which was partly why Chrome was built — the other part was clearly strategic — but speed of development. From the Chromium blog, emphasis mine:

    “However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation – so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.”

    As an open source project, WebKit has many chefs in the kitchen, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But it also has different customers on varying platforms, so in order to keep it working for all, it takes a larger amount of effort in coding and testing than if it were used by a single entity. Alex Russell, a Google developer explains:

    “Directness of action matters, and when you’re swimming through build files for dozens of platforms you don’t work on, that’s a step away from directness. When you’re working to fix or prevent regressions you can’t test against, that’s a step away. When compiles and checkouts take too long, that’s a step away. When landing a patch in both WebKit and Chromium stretches into a multi-day dance of flags, stub implementations, and dep-rolls, that’s many steps away. And each step hurts by a more-than-constant factor.”

    As Russell works directly on Chrome for Google, it’s fair to question his motives here. It’s up to you to believe him or not. For my part, I do. I worked for years as a Software Quality Assurance tester in a Fortune 100 company and I’ve seen exactly what Russell is talking about. Projects were routinely delayed because the primary team made software changes that had negative downstream effects on other teams using the same code. Coordination was a nightmare.

    The other side of the story: Web standards and bad intentions

    The obvious question here is how much of Google’s effort is truly meant to improve the web versus how much of it is to take a shot at Apple? That’s a business question that can have a negative impact on web users as a whole if web standards are ignored or changed in favor of a particular browser component. Out of all the reactions I’ve read, Rob Isaac’s interpretation of the Blink news illustrates this best. He translates Google’s effort as:

    We have a direct strategic interest in destroying Apple’s mobile platforms because their lack of participation in our advertising and social ecosystems does not benefit our long term goals. You should expect Chrome and Blink changes in the short term to be focused in this direction.

    In the longer term, we aim to have sufficient control over the installed base of web browsers to dictate whatever conditions we consider most appropriate to our business goals at the time.

    Snarky? Yes. But possibly part of Google’s rationale? Sadly, also yes. Google’s entire business is built upon the web, so exerting control over the web protects that business. In the Blink announcement Google says it will maintain transparency and use open standards, although it’s possible — likely even — that any new functions or features in Blink could be lobbied for becoming standards:

    In practice, we strive to ensure that the features we ship by default have open standards. As we work on features, we track their progress in the web standards community with the Chromium Features Dashboard, which lets us be transparent about the status of each feature and about how we make decisions about which features to enable by default for the open web.

    If, indeed, the Blink effort creates any new standards, it wouldn’t likely happen for a long, long time. For all the talk about HTML 5 over the past several years, the standard itself isn’t expected to be stable until 2014. But make no mistake: there’s clear potential for Google to have more direct influence over standard web browser technology as the result of Blink. And that’s something that no single company really should have.

    It’s too early to say if the good outweighs the bad

    For now, the situation is well worth watching over the next six to 12 months. We’ll see what Mozilla and Samsung actually produce with their collaboration, for starters. We should see a leaner and meaner Chrome as Google starts paring out code — up to 4.5 million lines and 7,000 files, says Google — from WebKit in Blink. Those are clearly good things. But we’ll also have to see what, if anything, from Blink looks like it could be pushed as a web standard. That will be the clearest warning flag that Google’s “Do no evil” theme is just a front in the new browser battle.

    Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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  • Anonymous Hacks North Korea’s Twitter, Flickr Accounts

    Did you know North Korea has a Twitter and flickr account? The nation uses these accounts to spread its propaganda, but recent world events have made the nation’s online presence a target for hackers.

    The Guardian reports that North Korea’s Twitter and flickr accounts have been compromised by hackers claiming to be a part of Anonymous. The reasoning behind the attacks seems to be in retaliation to North Korea’s most recent threat to attack the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons. In fact, one of the images posted on flickr calls out North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un for “threatening world peace with ICBMs and nuclear weapons” among other things.

    Anonymous Hacks North Korea's Twitter, Flickr Accounts

    Other images on the flickr account include an image of the North Korean flag with a Guy Fawkes mask, and a simple “We Are Anonymous” in white text on a black background.

    The Twitter hack is far less entertaining, however, as the only updates to it thus far have been multiple messages that say “hacked” while linking to North Korean Web sites that have been taken down by Anonymous.

    Unlike other recent hacks, I doubt that North Korea will try to wrestle away its accounts from Anonymous. I highly doubt that Twitter and flickr are in the mood to help them get the accounts back either.