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A woman in the U.K. has reportedly given birth to a humongous baby more than twice the size of a normal infant.

According to a BBC News report, Jade King of Bristol gave birth last month to a baby George. The newborn was reported to have weighed 15 pounds, 7 ounces at the time of his birth.

As you might imagine, a baby that large caused some complications during childbirth. George’s shoulders became stuck during birth, and the baby reportedly went five minutes without oxygen. Doctors told the couple that George had only a 10% chance of survival as they transferred him to St. Michael’s Hospital in Bristol. Luckily, doctors were able to help the baby and George was allowed to go home for the first time only four-and-a-half weeks after his troubled birth.

George is getting regular check-ups and Jade stated that an MRI did not reveal any major brain damage to the child. She did relate, though, that none of the clothes they had bought before his birth were able to fit him.

Well, cider ads to be more precise.

Less apps, more apples. That’s the tagline for Somersby Cider, the new cider brand from Carlsberg, who just released the beverage’s first U.K. advert. In it, fans eagerly await the opening of a minimalistic store so they can be the first to experience the new product.

Sound like anything familiar? Cider. Apples. Apple. There you go.

Part homage and part ridicule, the new ad for Somersby Cider looks and sounds like a cross between an actual Apple ad and those Samsung ads that lampooned Apple fanboys. Anyway, check it out below:

[Somersby Cider UK via Mashable]

For the longest time, HTML5 was far behind Flash in terms of game development as it didn’t offer a native experience. Mozilla and others have been bridging that gap over the last year, however, and the non-profit’s latest move inspires more hope that HTML5 can deliver native gaming experiences sooner rather than later.

Mozilla and Epic Games announced at GDC that Unreal Engine 3 is now available to HTML5 developers. The epic achievement (pun so intended) was made possible through Mozilla’s work in developing “a highly-optimized version of JavaScript” that allows game developers to bring graphically intensive content to the Web.

To see it in action for yourself, check out this quick run through of Epic Citadel running on a Web browser:

It’s Mozilla’s hope that developers will use this to bring more visually striking, and maybe even AAA games, to the Web. Of course, HTML5 is still in its infancy and developer adoption is low. Still, it’s incredibly encouraging to see HTML5 progressing this fast especially when Flash only just got Unreal Engine 3 support at last year’s GDC.

Google news, at least for some of us, recently is grim (Reader goes bye-bye). In fact, I no longer trust the search company will keep anything, while my colleague Wayne Williams dumps Google for Microsoft. Trust is essential and Google has lost it for me. Microsoft, on the other hand, is on a roll, of sorts, with its Windows Blue “leak” and now another cloud win for its Office platform.

Microsoft announces eight more government offices have adopted its Office 365 platform, further rubbing salt into the Google Docs wound. At today’s CIO Summit, the company welcomes aboard: metros Kansas City and Seattle; counties Dupage and King; colleges California State University Sacramento, University of Colorado Springs and University of Miami; and San Diego County Regional Airport Authority.

“The rapidly increasing public sector adoption rates for Microsoft Office 365 are directly tied to current budget realities and the fact that our customers need to be more productive at a lower cost”, Curt Kolcun, vice president of Microsoft U.S. Public Sector, says.

These latest moves join a number of other high-profile adopters that include the city of Chicago, among others. And, with Office 365 recently receiving a major overhaul with the Office 2013 release, it has become a tempting proposition for individuals and business alike. Now the ball is in Google’s court awaiting a big update to Docs and Apps to counter this move.

Photo Credit: Dudarev Mikhail/Shutterstock

Last year was a pretty quiet year for solar thermal startup eSolar, which makes solar plant gear that converts the sun’s heat into electricity (solar panels convert sun light into electricity). But perhaps the company is about to try to kick it up a notch. According to a filing, the company is raising a $30 million round, and has closed on close to $13 million of that round.

Founded in 2007 and incubated in Bill Gross’ Idealabs, eSolar has already raised a lot of money over its lifetime. It’s raised at least $170 million from a combination of Indian telecom and solar company ACME group, power company NRG Energy, Oak Investment Partners, Quercus Trust, Google.org, and GE.

To its credit, the company built one of the first solar thermal power plants in the U.S. in Lancaster, Calif. We covered the launch of the Sierra SunTower back in the Summer of 2009. That project was small, at 5 MW, and a pilot, but is still in operation. However, commercial scale versions of these projects are on the hundreds of megawatts level like the one BrightSource is building near Las Vegas called Ivanpah.

eSolar also told Greentech Media last Summer that it has a live solar power tower project in Bikaner in India, which it says has been in operation since April 2011. I’m not sure the size of that project, but will update this when I hear more. ACME has an exclusive license to build power plants with eSolar’s technology in India.

After its Sierra SunTower was built, eSolar appears to have spent some time regrouping and focusing on using molten salt storage technology to make its gear more cost competitive with solar panels. The price of solar panels have plummeted over the past two years, making solar thermal less competitive. According to this article, eSolar has been hoping to deploy its first commercial solar power tower with molten salt storage in the 2014 and 2015 timeframe.

It’s hard to track if eSolar still has claim on some of the deals it announced over the years. The company announced a 245 MW project with Southern California Edison back in 2008, but I think that project was sold to NRG Energy in this deal in 2009. Back then, eSolar decided to become an equipment supplier and not a project developer, and now works with big companies to manage project development. It’s not clear, but NRG might have sold that one off or switched the technology it will use to solar panels. I’ll update this when I hear more.

eSolar also had announced a whopping deal with Chinese power equipment maker Penglai Electric to build 2 GW of solar thermal projects in China over the next decade. eSolar still lists Pengali Electric as a partner on its site, but also writes that the first solar plant out of that deal in China would be a 92 MW project that would break ground in 2010. I haven’t heard that that was under construction.

Over the past year, it’s been hard for solar thermal technology to compete with solar panels because solar panels have gotten so incredibly cheap. Solar thermal can be more cost competitive if it’s built on a massive scale like BrightSource’s Ivanpah, but many power developers are opting to use solar panels instead of solar thermal tech these days.

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Google has just launched version 2.1 of their Gmail for iOS app and it comes with two really nice improvements.

First, you can now swipe to view messages, meaning that you don’t have to navigate back to the inbox. The swiping works intuitively – swipe left to bring up newer messages and right for older ones.

Though swiping is fun and much more efficient, the biggest improvement coming along with v2.1 is probably the new edit mode. With the new app, it’s much easier to perform the same action on different messages. This includes archiving, deleting, marking as read, and so on. All you have to do is enable edit mode by tapping a message in your inbox and then you will be able to select multiple messages.

These small, but important updates are going to make Gmail for iOS a lot more user-friendly.

Here’s the full list of what’s new in Version 2.1:

• Swipe left or right to move between messages without returning to the inbox
• Take action on multiple messages more quickly: Selecting a message in the inbox now enables edit mode. Once in edit mode, tap on messages to select them and then choose to archive, delete, or more, from the new actions bar. You may select Cancel at any time to leave edit mode.
• And of course: performance improvements and bug fixes

As you may remember, Gmail for Android just received an update with one-tap replying, as well as archiving from notifications. It also received better search suggestions and faster search.

You can snag the new Gmail for iOS today from the App Store.

Google just announced the launch of offline language packages for Google Translate for Android. With the feature, you don’t need an Internet connection to translate your way out of a jam.

If you open the app, and select “offline languages” from the menu, you will be able to choose a package for download. You should probably do this while you do have a connection, so you have it ready.

“To enable offline translation between any two languages, you just need to select them in the offline languages menu,” says associate product manager Minqi Jiang. “Once the packages are downloaded, you’re good to go.”

“While the offline models are less comprehensive than their online equivalents, they are perfect for translating in a pinch when you are traveling abroad with poor reception or without mobile data access,” adds Jiang.

The packages are only available for Android 2.3 and up. 50 languages are supported.

OUYA is coming soon (tomorrow is the planned ship date for the earliest Kickstarter backers), and recent reports of emulators of classic gaming consoles made for the Android device are generating some buzz. Today, emulator developer Robert Broglia, who’s responsible for some of the most popular Android emulators including Snes9x EX+, has revealed to OUYAForum that he’s working on emulators for Game Boy Advance, Sega Genesis, NeoGeo and more.

Snes9x EX+ is the first he’s hoping to release, with a test APK (Android file package) due soon, though he says he won’t have his own OUYA to test out the emulators before April, since he pre-ordered the console only after it finished its Kickstarter run. Broglia plans to port versions of most of his Android-based game console emulators, however, including ones for TurboGrafx-16, Atari, Sega Saturn and ColecoVision, in addition to those mentioned above.

Broglia charges for the emulators he offers on Android, but OUYA has its rules about content that stipulate content must have at least some kind of free-to-play or free-to-try. Also on tap are an x86 PC emulator that will allow use of classic DOS gaming software on the OUYA, as well as a Commodore 64 emulator, both from separate developers. In other words, the OUYA is set to become a nostalgia machine for gamers who grew up in the 80s and 90s.

Already one OUYA emulation project has been approved for inclusion in the official marketplace, but when I contacted OUYA directly to learn about whether or not they have an official stance on emulation, I received no response. As mentioned, the Google PLay store has emulation apps available, and developers have commented in the past about how open the marketplace is for the upcoming Android console.

Past devices have built their entire existence around game emulation, including the GP2K Wiz and Canoo from South Korea’s GamePark holdings. OUYA’s focus is much broader, but as a simple, living-room based way to bring games of old back to people’s televisions (even if the method of doing so isn’t strictly legal), it could hold significant appeal to niche audience above and beyond its other merits.

Update: OUYA got back to us with the following regarding its official position on emulation:

OUYA will accept emulators as long as they adhere to our content guidelines and are not submitted with any games.

For the past several years, EU politicians have been locked in shortsighted and often self-defeating policies for bailing out troubled euro zone countries. They have insisted (in principle, correctly) that troubled countries get their financial house in order as a condition for receiving bailout money. But the specific austerity measures chosen are killing any chance these countries have to grow, and therefore repay their lenders. This creates a vicious cycle, as the less borrowers are able to pay, the tougher the repayment terms get. Clearly, a new approach is desperately needed.

The economist Robert Shiller has suggested issuing bonds that are linked to GDP, arguing that “the opportunity to participate in the uncertain economic growth of the issuer might well excite, rather than scare off, investors — just as it does in the stock market.”

A good way to make that link is to tie the interest from rescue loans to the rescued country’s rate of economic growth. So, when the economy is in recession, the interest payment will be lower, helping the country to boost growth; when the economy picks up, interest payments will in turn go up, precisely when the country can afford it.

Let’s suppose that Cyprus’ average GDP growth rate is 4% and that the fixed interest rate on their rescue loan is 3%. Instead of applying for the 3% fixed rate loan, Cyprus could consider issuing bonds paying an interest rate set at its GDP growth rate (4%) minus 1% (i.e., the difference between the average growth rate and the fixed rate).

If Cyprus’s GDP growth rate next year is 0%, then the buyers of the bonds would actually pay the Cypriot government 1%, providing Cyprus with a subsidy in hard times. But if after, say, 10 years, GDP growth were to hit 7%, the bondholders would receive 6%. In essence, during recession, lenders will be subsidizing troubled euro zone members, giving them a much needed influx of cash, in exchange for a potential higher payout during good times. A side benefit is that the increased interest payment in good times would make it harder for Cyprus to get into bad spending habits when they feel flush with cash.

You can tinker with this idea a bit, too, adding options such as a floor below which interest payments would not fall or a cap that would limit excessively high payments. Such features can be (and routinely are) priced in the financial markets.

Of course, certain investor safeguards are needed. Loan issuers should not have the right to redeem bonds when there’s a ton of growth (as was done in Bulgaria), because that would effectively eliminate the investor’s upside. There would also need to be protections in place to guard against the manipulation of reported GDP growth numbers. In these cases, countries with resource-driven growth prospects (such as agriculture, minerals, or oil) could also consider making the bonds convertible into the relevant commodities. Cyprus, for instance, could make its bonds convertible into natural gas — one of the country’s most abundant resources.

Here’s how it might work. International and local investors would be invited to buy these convertible bonds (through the investment solidarity fund just set up by the Cypriot government) at various denominations, which would correspond to specific quantities of future natural gas delivery. Each bond would have a maturity of, say, 15 or 20 years. In the first 10 years, the bond would simply pay a variable interest rate linked to Cyprus’s GDP growth as explained above. After 10 years, the bondholder would be allowed to covert his bonds into natural gas at a 10% discount to the going rate.

This conversion option would give investors more confidence in the loan’s potential upside. Gas prices are less subject to manipulation or mismanagement by the government than GDP growth statistics, government budgets, or the future state of the domestic economy. In effect, the gas — a freely-traded commodity — serves as collateral for the loan, making it less risky.

So, why would anyone be interested in buying these bonds? One reason is that they offer an equity-like stake in Cyprus’s growth prospects. Sure, the country may have a struggling banking sector and stock market, but it also has promising long-term growth prospects because of its natural gas discoveries. We know that investors are willing to accept lower returns in the short-term in exchange for the chance at a higher payout later. Just look at the venture capital industry, the pharmaceutical industry, or the movie industry — all of which owe their success to actively managing portfolios with low probability/high growth prospects.

The rest of the world would benefit from the GDP-linked, commodity-convertible bonds described above, too, because they’d help stabilize the global financial system by reducing the risk of sovereign defaults and contagion effects. They also offer a way for rich but low-growth countries to buy a stake in high-prospect countries currently in trouble — encouraging support of the recovery in exchange for a potentially higher payout in the future.

There’s no reason why many types of institutional investors wouldn’t be attracted to such an arrangement. Sovereign and hedge funds would be natural customers, but one could also imagine pension and insurance funds taking an interest. These investors are already familiar with the concept of indexed bonds protecting returns from price inflation. But inflation-linked bonds offer little upside in good times. Bonds linked to nominal GDP growth can offer both protection and potential upside in a single package.

The events unfolding in Cyprus could mark an important inflection point for the euro zone. A loss of confidence in the safety of bank deposits in Cyprus could not only destroy the local banking system, but would also set an ugly precedent for larger euro zone countries. Surely, it is worth considering alternative win-win solutions that effectively allow these countries to borrow revenues against a more productive future, rather than condemning them to decades of no growth.

Using Google Translate just became much easier for travelers having a hard time finding internet access while abroad: Google announced the addition of offline language support for the Android application. Fifty languages gain the offline support, which does need to be first enabled while online. After that, however, no web connection is needed to use the translation program.

Google says the offline translation dictionaries found in the new version “are less comprehensive than their online equivalents” but that’s a small price to pay. And in the future, I could see the offline language data grow in scope as flash storage decreases in cost while expanding in capacity.

While the new feature is handy in areas with limited data coverage, I see the biggest use case for travelers. Often finding, paying for and configuring connectivity on a smartphone can be challenging in another country; particularly for users based in the U.S.

By pre-installing the proper offline language packs, you can be chatting and translating right away upon arriving in a new land. The limited translations should get you communicating until you can find a persistent connection and then you can use the app’s full online capabilities.

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Lance Armstrong-backed photo sharing service Mobli is giving people a chance to win $100,000 by giving up Instagram. The company has just kicked off a campaign called #mylastinstagram, complete with a new site at MyLastInstagram.com.

Users are encouraged to download Mobli (of course), upload a “creative/funny/original” photo, use Mobli’s #mylastinstagram filter, post that photo to Instagram, and tag it with the same hashtag.

“Say goodbye to Instagram, their boring filters, and cropped photos (for at least 3 months, you won’t miss it… we promise!),” Mobli says.

The official contest rules are here.

According to NBC Bay Area, Mobli is going so far as to fly a plane over Facebook headquarters repeatedly with a 100-foot banner advertising the contest.

I doubt the contest will do much to reduce Instagram’s share of the photo sharing space (if the privacy freak out didn’t), but it’s a clever way to get some app downloads, I suppose.

Last month, Instagram topped 100 million monthly active users.

Here’s our review of some of this week’s noteworthy links for the global data center industry:

Oracle opens Japan data center. Oracle (ORCL) announced that it is opening a data center in Japan, to support its RightNow Cloud Service. With a data center in the region Oracle can manage service level objectives and data governance for local customers. Oracle RightNow Cloud Service combines Web, Social and Contact Center experiences for a unified, cross-channel service solution in the Cloud, enabling organizations to increase sales and adoption, build trust and strengthen relationships, and reduce costs and effort. “We are dedicated to simplifying IT so customers can focus on driving business innovation,” said Oracle President Mark Hurd. “Oracle’s latest data center is a signal of our commitment to the success of Japanese companies. It will free them from the burden of software management, allowing them to have more resources to engage with their customers.”

Akamai and Korea’S KT expand partnership.  Akamai (AKAM) and Korean telecommunications company KT announced that the companies will expand their strategic partnership. Using Akamai’s Aura Managed CDN, KT will have dedicated CDN capacity that is available for its own content applications or third party CDN services. ”The era has come where culture and digital content are leading the market. Our main priority is to ensure access to content from any device, at anytime, anywhere,” said Heekyung Song, Senior Vice President, Enterprise IT BU, KT. “Through this partnership with Akamai, KT will provide a CDN platform specializing in media delivery, web performance and security so companies can focus on developing quality content and web applications without concerns about delivery.”

ITG expands with Interxion in London.  Interxion (INXN) announced that ITG, an agency brokerage and financial markets technology firm, has expanded its hosting relationship with Interxion by adding a new London based data center. ITG currently maintains data center space with Interxion in Stockholm, and selected Interxion London for its central city location and access points to leading trading venues. “We are committed to continued investment in technology where performance benefits can be passed to our clients,” said Rob Boardman, CEO of ITG Europe. “Whether you’re looking for sophisticated automated tools, the highest quality dark block liquidity, or personalised high-touch trading, you can rely on our continuous history of innovation to improve your performance while reducing costs.”

Flipboard, one of the leading magazine-style news apps, released an update on Tuesday with a number of interesting features, all of which are designed to make it easy for users to curate content with the app and create their own custom magazines. There was a lot of press about the launch, but I think most of the coverage missed a couple of crucial aspects of the new features and how disruptive they could be — not just to traditional media but to all kinds of media.

As we tried to point out in our post, Flipboard’s new version is more than just an evolution, it’s a significant departure from what the service was all about. Until now, it has been about making it easy to discover and consume content from multiple sources, but the new features are all about turning readers into publishers — by giving them curation tools like those used by Flipboard’s own editors.

When advertisers become publishers

Flipboard’s move may seem like an obvious step, and one which combines some of the appeal of services like Pinterest or Tumblr. But depending on how Flipboard decides to proceed with these features, they could be very disruptive indeed. Here’s a couple of ways they could do that:

1) Advertising: Flipboard’s curation and publishing tools are not just for individual users, but corporations, existing publishers and brands — and one overlooked element of the launch is that Flipboard is building e-commerce functionality into the app. Chief technology officer Eric Feng said some advertisers are already creating their own magazines using both their own ads and content from other sources. Those magazines could then be selected and highlighted by Flipboard’s algorithms just like any other effort by a Flipboard user.

We’ve written a lot about the phenomenon of “native” advertising (and will be talking more about it at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York) as well as related concepts like sponsored content and what some call “brand journalism.” The idea is that brands and advertisers now have all of the same tools that traditional publishers used to have a monopoly on — that is, the ability to create and distribute interesting content and reach audiences directly. If a brand can curate content itself, and have its own ads with e-commerce features built in, why does it need a traditional magazine?

Revenue sharing with curators

2) Revenue: Flipboard already has some partnerships with media companies in which it gets to use more of their content directly in the app (instead of showing just short excerpts and then a “web view” in a browser) in return for a share of advertising revenue. When I asked Eric Feng whether Flipboard might consider doing a revenue share with individual users if they create compelling magazines from curated content, he said “that is something we are thinking about doing at some point in the future.” That’s not a promise, but it’s still an interesting idea, and potentially very disruptive in a number of ways.

If Flipboard provides the content and the tools, and the users who curate that content are generating a lot of value in terms of pageviews or “likes,” or whatever metric you want to use, shouldn’t those users get some benefit? Where this gets problematic is how Flipboard decides who gets what share of the revenue. If the ads come from a traditional media outlet, do they get the largest share or does Flipboard? And if media companies don’t want to play ball, does Flipboard just monetize their content anyway, the way Huffington Post and other aggregators do?

The idea that advertisers now have many of the same tools as publishers and traditional media companies do, and that readers and consumers of content also have much more power over that content than they used to, are two pretty inescapable facts about the new media landscape — and Flipboard has just staked a claim to some significant territory on both of those fronts.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / JJ Studio and Shutterstock / Eldorado3D

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Every morning at DoSomething.org, our computers greet us with a report containing over 350 million data points tracking our organization’s performance. Our challenge as data scientists is to translate this haystack of information into guidance for staff so they can make smart decisions — whether it’s choosing the right headline for today’s email blast (should we ask our members to “take action now” or “learn more”?) or determining the purpose of our summer volunteer campaign (food donation drive or recycling campaign?).

In short, we’re tasked with transforming data into directives. Good analysis parses numerical outputs into an understanding of the organization. We “humanize” the data by turning raw numbers into a story about our performance.

When many people hear “Big Data,” they think “Big Brother” (Type “big data is…” into Google and one of the top recommendations is, “…watching you.”). Central to this anxiety is a feeling that what it means to be human can’t be tracked or quantified by computers. This fear is well-founded. As the cost of collecting and storing data continues to decrease, the volume of raw data an organization has available can be overwhelming. Of all the data in existence, 90% was created in the last 2 years. Inundated organizations can lose sight of the difference between what’s statistically significant and what’s important for decision-making.

Using Big Data successfully requires human translation and context whether it’s for your staff or the people your organization is trying to reach. Without a human frame, like photos or words that make emotion salient, data will only confuse, and certainly won’t lead to smart organizational behavior.

Data gives you the what, but humans know the why.

The best business decisions come from intuitions and insights informed by data. Using data in this way allows your organization to build institutional knowledge and creativity on top of a solid foundation of data-driven insights.

For DoSomething.org, mapping our communications data gives us an amazing window to view our audience. We have over 1.5 million users, and for each one we have hundreds of data points to what and how they respond to new volunteer opportunities via email and texting. Here’s how we go from 350 million data points to organizational change, and how organizations grappling with similarly huge amounts of information can do the same:

1. Look only for data that affect your organization’s key metrics. At DoSomething.org, our goal is increasing teens’ engagement in volunteering. So when we did a deep dive on our data last fall to determine how to increase that metric we started with simple questions: Who currently volunteers the most, and how can we find more people like them? We were able to ignore larger volumes of data that didn’t answer our questions and hone in on what really mattered.
2. Present data so that everyone can grasp the insights. Hint: never show a regression analysis or a plot from R. In fact, our final presentation had very few numbers. We focused on telling a clear story with simple slides and visuals. While we used regression analysis to find a list of significant variables, we visualized data to find trends: even data analysts are much better at discovering geographic (and underlying demographic) trends on maps than in regression tables, especially when there are multiple underlying patterns with ambiguous relationships.

   By presenting the data visually, the entire staff was able to quickly grasp and contribute to the conversation. Everyone was able to see areas of high and low engagement. That led to a big insight: Someone outside the analytics team noticed that members in Texas border towns were much more engaged than members in Northwest coastal cities.

3. Return to the data with new questions. Once we learned who our most engaged members were, we returned to the data to see what campaigns those members liked best; in other words, what led those members to get involved. The answer turned out to be campaigns around improving community health, an issue that disproportionately impacts minorities. This information allowed us to better tailor our volunteer campaigns going forward to engage new members, reach out to the right partnerships for those campaigns, and also highlight another potential area for growth — white, male college students in the Northwest.

Data scientists want to believe that data has all the answers. But the most important part of our job is qualitative: asking questions, creating directives from our data, and telling its story.

Please join the conversation and check back for regular updates. Follow the Scaling Social Impact insight center on Twitter @ScalingSocial and give us feedback.

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If Instagram is helping birth a new breed of paparazzi, we might need a new breed of privacy law to counteract it.

As an examination of the evolving economics of snapping celebrity photos, Jenna Wortham’s Tuesday New York Times blog post about how a recent candid pic of Beyonce spread across the internet is pretty revelatory. Lurking below the surface, though, I think there’s an even bigger story about how easy it is to snap and publish photos of everyone — not just celebrities — and for those photos to spread further and faster than ever before possible.

Just recently, for example, some relatively harmless (albeit juvenile) “big dongle” jokes put two unwitting conference attendees in the public eye and cost one of them his job. He wasn’t on stage; he was sitting in the 10th row during a talk. The woman who tweeted their images and her complaint ultimately lost her job, too, but her misfortune doesn’t cover his rent.

Even ten years ago, that woman wouldn’t have had a cellphone with a camera and an internet connection and a platform to spread the pic to thousands of Twitter followers — and their followers — in seconds.

I’m not certain privacy laws created at the dawn of the photography era and advanced during the print-media era are well suited to protect our solitude and anonymity in the Instragram era. I actually wrote about this in September 2011, but now seems like a good time to re-raise some of the tough legal questions that phenomena such as self-publishing, social media and viral content raise. Here are some situations where the social web confuses traditional definitions of public and private, and publication versus publicity:

If a celebrity’s friend tweets a photo of that celebrity smoking pot in his own house, is that information protected because it’s newsworthy?

If I’m an individual who simply wants to keep to myself — no Facebook, no Twitter, not even an email address — is writing about me on a personal blog or Facebook page, or uploading (and/or tagging) photos of me, “highly offensive to a reasonable person?”

Even if a disclosure is highly offensive, does publication via social media constitute publicity? What if the publisher only has 3 friends? Or 100? Or 2,000?

Does something going viral change a publication among friends into publicity?

What if a Flickr photo from an intimate dinner with friends, not highly offensive, but potentially embarrassing just because someone is ugly, goes viral and the subject becomes a laughing-stock? What’s the recourse?

You can insert Instagram, Tumblr or Pinterest into those example and the questions remain essentially the same.

And with photos, especially, there’s a lot to consider:

[T]he confluence of facial-recognition technology, cloud computing and big-data processing could soon make it possible to determine a person’s name and any publicly accessible information about them via a mobile app. Nefarious types with some data-science skills could predict your Social Security number knowing just your name, age and hometown. And it all starts with a single photo on Facebook.

For someone who has intentionally kept a low profile online to avoid sharing personal information, the advent of such technologies completely undermines that personal decision. Far from being just a face in the crowd or a guy at the end of the bar, anyone with a mobile phone and $4.99 app could know more personal information than that person would ever share willingly. All because his friends are sharing the details of their own lives online.

A Google Image search for “fat guy speedo.” Public? Yes. Fair to be presented to the entire world with one click? I don’t know.

For us everyday, non-celebrity types, going out in public used to provide anonymity because we were just another face in the crowd. A dinner or party with some friends, even a family reunion, used to be a relatively private affair. Now, we’re just an Instragram post away from being part of the digital record and possibly the subject of public ridicule.

It used to be there was public and then there was public. There was private and there was private. For better or for worse, social media and smartphones are blurring those lines. Maybe we need some boundaries.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Zurijeta.

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The Samsung Galaxy S 4 will launch very soon and starting March 28 in the UK, Carphone Warehouse will give pre-order customers a free Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 tablet. To qualify for this exclusive deal, you’ll have to be one of the first 2,000 to pre-order the Galaxy S 4 which is expected to launch April 26. Customers will also receive a free car charger, screen protector, and case. Carphone Warehouse COO Graham Stapelton believes its retail stores could be even busier than the holiday season during the launch of the Galaxy S 4. Considering Samsung’s Galaxy S 4 destroyed pre-registrations for the Galaxy S III, Graham could be right.

Source: Carphone Warehouse

Come comment on this article: Free Tablet From Carphone Warehouse When You Pre-Order The Galaxy S 4 Starting March 28

After WebEx founder Subrah Iyar sold his company to Cisco five years ago, he spent some time helping with the transition then became an investor in companies such as Huddle. About a year ago his daughter suggested the idea of shared virtual binders for college students — and around the same time, Iyar got back together with some of his former WebEx colleagues, who were keen on the idea of helping people access all their personal information from mobile devices.

The result, which launched in January, was Moxtra, a service for students and small businesses that combines collaboration capabilities with the ability to access data not only from cloud services such as DropBox, but also from the user’s desktop computer.

And now the company has made a big global push, releasing versions of the iOS app in 18 new languages, namely Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese. This should help a lot more people join in the service’s collaboration aspect.

Moxtra has some pretty clever features on that front, starting with the range of things that can be rolled into these “binders” and the sources from which they can be derived: they could be photos from the tablet’s camera, or documents from the user’s remote desktop, or audio from a cloud storage account. In true Evernote style, web clippings can also be added. Updates from any member of the collaborating team will show up in a Facebook-like activity stream.

There’s also an ad-hoc meeting facility in there (again: WebEx guy) and the ability to share binders publicly or within a private group. However, the cleverest feature in my view is Moxtra Note, which lets you annotate files and binders with your voice (video is apparently also on the horizon, Iyar told me). You can then send out the annotated result to people who aren’t even themselves Moxtra users, who can then view it like a video clip.

With Evernote continually adding new features, and with rivals such as Wunderlist in hot pursuit, this personal information management space is getting quite frisky. Moxtra’s collaborative take gives it an interesting new avenue to go down.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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PeopleLinx said it raised $3.2 million in Series A funding in a deal led by Osage Venture Partners, Greycroft Partners and MissionOG. Angel investors also participated in the oversubscribed round.

PRESS RELEASE

PeopleLinx Announces $3.2 Million In Series A Funding Led by Osage Venture Partners, Greycroft Partners and MissionOG, Funding Propels Social Business Application for LinkedIn

PHILADELPHIA, March 19, 2013 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — PeopleLinx, the provider of the world’s first LinkedIn engagement and analytics software, announced today that it raised $3.2 million in Series A funding led by Osage Venture Partners, Greycroft Partners and MissionOG. A number of strategic angel investors also participated in the oversubscribed round. The investment will be used to accelerate the company’s growth and customer success with Fortune 1000 clients.

“There is a very large and unaddressed market for third-party LinkedIn Social Business solutions like PeopleLinx, especially among organizations that already have hundreds or thousands of employees active on LinkedIn,” said Nate Lentz, managing partner at Osage Venture Partners. “PeopleLinx is unique in its ability to enable enterprises to harness the potential of the combined social reach of their employees.”

According to Ian Sigalow, partner and co-founder of Greycroft Partners, “LinkedIn has become the leading search tool for information about people and the companies they work for. PeopleLinx is raising the bar, helping our customers represent themselves online and manage their online reputations. The opportunity for PeopleLinx to create value for the enterprise within LinkedIn is similar to what we saw Buddy Media do in the early days of Facebook.”

Founded in 2009 as a Social Business consulting company by former LinkedIn employees Nathan Egan and Patrick Baynes, PeopleLinx re-launched in early 2012 as a scalable software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform designed to help corporations and their employees use LinkedIn. By providing dashboards to deliver best practice information, gaming functionality, detailed reporting and other tools needed to optimize their social presence, PeopleLinx helps enterprise employees in sales, marketing and human resources succeed in their roles.

Since their initial product launch in early 2012, PeopleLinx has seen rapid adoption by forward-thinking, vertical-market leaders, including Experian, FMC Corporation and Prudential. Fully customizable for each client, PeopleLinx fills a gap for the enterprise, helping them understand, among other things, their connectivity to key clients and target verticals. For LinkedIn itself, PeopleLinx is a significant driver of network health and performance metrics. With PeopleLinx, consumers spend more time-on-site, view more pages, add more profile data and grow their networks. PeopleLinx also promotes new account sign-ups and reactivations.

“In creating PeopleLinx, our goal was to build a solution that would be good for LinkedIn, good for companies and most importantly, good for employees,” said Nathan Egan, chairman, CEO and founder of PeopleLinx. “With this strategic investment we can continue to scale our platform to meet the needs of our rapidly expanding customer base.”

“We have worked closely with PeopleLinx over the past 18 months,” commented George Krautzel, co-founder and general partner at MissionOG. “They have successfully transformed a compelling vision into a product that is delighting customers. Leadership has done a great job of building a talented team to embrace the opportunity with Social Business Optimization. PeopleLinx has the potential to be integrated into the workflow of every employee in the enterprise.”

In conjunction with this financing, Dave Hanna from Hanna Ventures and Nate Lentz of Osage Venture Partners will join PeopleLinx’s Board of Directors. Mr. Hanna recently served as chairman of Blue Coat Systems (acquired by Thoma Bravo) and chairman of Tropos Networks (acquired by ABB). Ian Sigalow of Greycroft Partners will join as an observer.

About PeopleLinx PeopleLinx provides a scalable software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that empowers enterprise professionals to optimize their social presence and exceed their business goals using tools like LinkedIn. This customizable and flexible Social Business Optimization (SBO) software can quickly be deployed across the enterprise to provide employees with information about best practices, ongoing assessments, interactive tutorials, content libraries and other tools to help them be as effective as possible when navigating social networks for business. When integrated into the daily workflow, these features and capabilities produce tangible and measurable results across sales, marketing and human resources. For more information, please visit www.peoplelinx.com and follow them on LinkedIn and Twitter.

About Osage Venture Partners Osage Venture Partners (OVP) is a venture capital firm located just outside of Philadelphia, Pa. that invests in early-stage enterprise technology companies in the Mid-Atlantic region. OVP raised its first fund in 2005, and has invested almost exclusively in enterprise software companies since that time. With over $100M under management, OVP seeks to invest in determined and creative entrepreneurs and provide them with the assistance required to build high growth businesses. For more information, visit www.osagepartners.com

About Greycroft Partners Greycroft Partners is a leading early stage venture capital firm focused on investments in digital media. With offices in the two media capitals of the world – New York and Los Angeles – Greycroft is uniquely positioned to serve entrepreneurs who have chosen us as their partners. We leverage our extensive network of media and technology industry connections to help our entrepreneurs gain visibility, build strategic relationships, successfully bring their products to market, and build successful businesses. Greycroft manages $400MM and has made over seventy investments in leading companies including Huffington Post, Paid Content, Buddy Media, Glam Media, Trunk Club, M5 Networks, Maker Studios, Viddy, Babble, Collective Media, Pulse, and Klout. For more information please visit the Greycroft Partners website at www.greycroft.com.

About MissionOG Mission Operators Group provides human and financial capital to build B2B companies that have proven feasibility. MissionOG applies the capabilities of proven operators, instills a market driven approach to development, and leverages a highly engaged group of investors to help portfolio companies scale well beyond commercialization. Headquartered in the Philadelphia region, the MissionOG Fund is managed by entrepreneurial operators who have effectively built early-stage businesses and guided them through successful acquisition. www.missionog.com

For additional information, please contact: Sarah Otterstetter Davies Murphy Group, Inc. +1-781-418-2416 [email protected]

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