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Two years after arriving in iOS devices, HBO may be coming to Apple TV. Apple is said to be in talks with Time Warner to bring its HBO Go app to its set-top box, according to a report from Bloomberg on Thursday. It could arrive by sometime around the middle of this year.

HBO Go, which requires a subscription, is only available to users who get HBO from their cable provider, so it’s not a solution for cord cutters to simply pay for a la carte HBO programming separate from cable or satellite. But it’s a boon for HBO subscribers that who want to access the provider’s backlog of content: HBO Go makes every episode of every season of every HBO show available to subscribers.

Apple has been reportedly in discussion with U.S. cable companies, including Time Warner, for many months about ways to bring cable content to its set-top box. The news that HBO Go could arrive by mid-2013 is the most significant sign that the two are making headway in the negotiations yet.

This would not be the first time Time Warner has made HBO Go available on a set-top: it’s already on Roku set-top boxes and on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console. Neither is it a first for Apple customers. HBO Go has been available as an app on the iOS App Store since 2011.

But it would be a possible selling point for Apple as it continues to figure out what it wants to do with its television strategy. Though it sold 2 million set-top boxes during the final quarter of 2012, the company’s leadership won’t commit publicly to what the future holds for the device. CEO Tim Cook has moved from calling Apple TV a hobby to “an area of intense interest.”

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• How consumer media will change in 2013
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If you want to watch the Crunchies tonight, you’re going to have to tune in, as tickets have sold out for the annual awards show co-hosted by GigaOM, Techcrunch, and Venturebeat.

The livestream below should kick off around 7pm, and the event starts at 730pm at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. Most of our San Francisco-based crew will be in attendance, probably just to get a chance to hear comedian John Oliver of Daily Show fame host the show.

A list of nominees follows below.

Free desktop streaming application by Ustream

Best Technology Achievement
Baumgartner Jump
Google Glass
Mars Curiosity
SpaceX docks with International Space Station
Tesla Supercharger Network

Best Collaborative Consumption Service
Airbnb
Get It Now/Postmates
Lyft
TaskRabbit
Uber

Best E-Commerce Application
Fab
Hotel Tonight
Karma/Facebook Gifts
Warby Parker
Zulily

Best Mobile Application
Evernote
Google Maps
Grindr
Instagram
Square

Fastest Rising Startup
Exec
Lyft
Pinterest
Snapchat
Stripe

Best Content Discovery Application
Flipboard
Instapaper
Pinterest
Prismatic
Tumblr

Best Design
Facebook Timeline
Medium
Paper by FiftyThree
Square
Svbtle

Best Bootstrapped Startup
FreshBooks
Instapaper
Nimbus
Techmeme
Upverter

Sexiest Enterprise Startup
Asana
Box
Cloudera
Plexxi
Zendesk

Best International Startup
Hailo
Rovio
Soundcloud
Spotify
Xiaomi

Best Education Startup
Codecademy
Coursera
Edmodo
Khan Academy
Udacity

Best Hardware Startup
Lit Motors
Lockitron
Makerbot
Nest
Raspberry Pi

Best Time Sink
Angry Birds Star Wars
Buzzfeed
Letterpress
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Biggest Social Impact
Donors Choose
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Kiva
Reddit

Angel of the Year
Michael Arrington
Chris Dixon
Paul Graham
David Lee
Chris Sacca

VC of the Year
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Matt Cohler
Jim Goetz
Michael Moritz
Peter Thiel

Founder of the Year
Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb)
Kevin and Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla)
Kevin Systrom (Instagram)
Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks)

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Phil Libin (Evernote)
Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!)
Larry Page (Google)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best New Startup of 2012
Coursera
Crowdtilt
Lyft
Snapchat
Waze

Best Overall Startup of 2012
Fab
Github
Instagram
Palantir
Square

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Manhattan may have the most high-powered corporations in the world, but it doesn’t even have the most powerful mobile data networks in New York City. That distinction goes to the borough on the other side of the Harlem River.

A recent round of speed and performance tests in New York from RootMetrics revealed that data speeds from mobile broadband networks averaged 13.5 Mbps, nearly 2 Mbps faster than any in any of the other four boroughs. The home of the Yankees also clocked the best upload speeds in the city, averaging 5.8 Mbps.

Manhattan actually had the lowest download speeds of the five, though it sat right in the middle in terms of upload. It’s doubtful that the big four operators are neglecting Manhattan. Rather, its lower performance is probably a reflection of its much greater density of people and smartphones along with the difficulty of finding tower space in the overbuilt borough.

When broken down by carrier, things get interesting. In all five boroughs, Root recorded the fastest average speeds on AT&T’s LTE networks. Verizon’s LTE came in second in all five cases, while T-Mobile and Sprint were a distant third and fourth respectively (neither carrier has LTE in NYC yet). But in Root’s overall testing of the NYC metro region – which by Root’s definition spans northern New Jersey, bits of southern New York and most of Long Island — Verizon came away with the speed prize, averaging 13.4 Mbps to AT&T’s 10.3 Mbps. While AT&T has built LTE over ever inch of NYC, that coverage seems to fall off when you leave the city.

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Apple might not need to make a TV set to make a big splash in the television market: a brand new report from Bloomberg claims that the company is negotiating with Time Warner Inc. to bring HBO Go to Apple TV by the middle of this year, citing two people familiar with the plans. That would still mean that the ability to watch HBO shows on Apple’s set-top box would be limited to people who already subscribe to the network in cable and satellite packages, but it’s a promising step.

HBO Go currently provides mobile access to HBO shows and content, which would mean that Apple TV users who are also subscribers would have access to the more than 600 hours of video currently available on the service, which includes hit shows like Game of Thrones and True Blood. The move wouldn’t be unprecedented, as Apple already currently offers Hulu Plus and Netflix access on the platform, and HBO Go is already on Roku and Xbox.

And in the end, it would still mean that customers are shackled to traditional cable and satellite distribution methods, even if the delivery mechanism for their HBO content is actually Apple’s standalone streaming video player. But turning the Apple TV into a platform with access to a broader content library is a key step in making it a better value proposition for consumers: AirPlay is a good selling point, but content options are more plentiful on other devices, even given the fact that the iTunes library is among the largest for digital video.

Many have wondered also whether Apple would open up the Apple TV to third-party apps in a way similar to how it’s running on the iPad and iPhone. This sounds like just another hand-selected partner, however, so it’s unlikely we’ll see an opening up of the platform anytime soon.

 

Passmark Software has released OSForensics 2.0, the latest edition of its excellent computer forensics package. And while it’s more about improving on what’s gone before than adding any major new functionality, there are still some very useful additions here.

While previously the program could only index the documents on one drive at a time, for instance, OSForensics 2.0 now allows you to specify as many drives per index as you like, and search them in a single operation later: seems like a small change, but this makes the program much more convenient to use.

If you regularly use the indexing feature then the good news is it’s no longer necessary to configure its fine details each and every time. A new Template option allows you to define the file extensions you’d like to check, what exactly you’d like to index (title, content, file name, metadata), exclude filters, stemming rules and more, and you can then reload the template you need for a particular job in a couple of clicks.

And while indexing itself can still take a very long time, improved caching means file searches can sometimes be as much as 500% faster than the previous release.

Elsewhere, there have been various improvements to the email, raw disk and internal file viewers. Many are small, but still very welcome, such as the new ability to maximise the file viewer window. And a further key change sees the program now able to open Office documents directly, another positive step which should significantly improve performance.

The OSForensics internal web browser has been extended with the ability to add or save complete web pages, as well as a region of the screen.

And there are the usual stack of smaller enhancements, from performance improvements with FAT volumes, to enhanced compatibility with Opera, and a lengthy list of bug fixes (the official What’s New page tells all).

What hasn’t changed, though, is the generous licensing model, where an enormous amount of functionality is available for free, with only minimal restrictions (the new web page images have watermarks, for instance).

OSForensics 2.0 offers file search tools, undelete functions, memory and disk viewers, password recovery options, drive imaging tools and a whole lot more, for instance, so you may find the program useful even if you’ve no specific interest in computer forensics. Take a look: it’s one of the most powerful free tools of its kind available anywhere.

Photo Credit: Phil Holmes/Shutterstock

For some time we’ve been hearing about small cells and the big capacity boost they’ll bring to mobile data networks, but what we haven’t seen so far are any actual commercial small cell launches. That will change this summer, according to Ericsson EVP and head of networks Johan Wibergh.

Starting his summer Ericsson, the world’s largest mobile infrastructure vendor, will begin shipping its first commercially viable small-cell base stations and remote radio heads, Wibergh said in an interview with GigaOM. He wouldn’t name any particular customers, but in the U.S. at least, it’s not hard to guess. Both Sprint and AT&T have committed to large-scale small cell rollouts starting this year (Ma Bell has already begun experimenting with the technology in Missouri and Wisconsin). Both are major Ericsson customers, as is Verizon Wireless, which has also talked up small cells in the past.

Before we go any further, I should probably explain what Wibergh means when he says small cell. There are a lot of things out there that are called small cells such as home femtocells and distributed antenna networks. Also, carriers have been deploying the building blocks of small cell networks, picocells and microcells, for years. But ultimately those have been coverage solutions, injecting mobile signals into nooks and crannies where big tower-based macrocells can’t reach.

What the true small cells networks of our near future will bring is the creation of an alternate yet complimentary high-capacity network. Instead of cramming picocells onto cellular gaps, carriers will mount picocells on lampposts and buildings, right under the gaze of towers with which they’ll share the same airwaves. That’s a hard feat to pull off because any time two signals use the same frequency in the same space, you get interference. For the last several years, Ericsson and rest of the mobile industry have been trying to figure how to mitigate that interference. That’s why it’s taken so long to convert an ordinary picocell into a true small cell.

The industry, however, appears to be the ready, at least it better be. AT&T has promised to have 40,000 small cells transmitting away by the end of 2015. Ericsson probably doesn’t want to leave egg on the face of one of its most important customers.

Wibergh, however, cautioned that small cell technologies still have some evolving to do. At first, small cell network will function much like an extension of the large cell counterparts. The network will pass us from big cell to small and vice versa. The key difference is that when we occupy that small cell we’ll have a lot more bandwidth at our disposal.

But as cellular standards evolve networks will be able to pull off an even neater trick. Our devices will be able to link to multiple cells simultaneously, Wibergh said. The same signals that once interfered with one another will reinforce one another creating an even more powerful connection. High-capacity Wi-Fi will get layered in, creating into a heterogeneous network in which our devices can establish multiple simultaneous connections using multiple radio technologies. What that boils down to is an awful lot of bandwidth.

Density image courtesy of Shutterstock user higyou

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• New solutions for the evolving mobile network
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An interview with Jeanne Meister, partner at Future Workplace and contributor to the HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across.

Download this podcast

A written transcript will be available by February 8.

The Department of Energy is putting a collective $9 million into 7 projects being developed at universities and government labs that will us big data to lower the cost of solar in various ways. The projects, at places like Yale, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, will be focused on using analytics to lower the cost of solar installations and making solar cells more efficient.

Here’s the 7 projects:

• A solar financing model: NREL and solar financing startup Clean Power Finance will use $2.26 million to analyze data from 1,300 solar installation companies to try to create new types of community and regional financing methods.
• A publication and patent reader: SRI International, the University of Toledo and GE will use $600K to create software that can read and analyze science publications and patents to unearth innovations that can lower the cost of solar.
• Articulate a solar theory: Gordan Moore had his own law for chips, and some in the solar sector talk about a Swanson’s Law for the dropping cost of solar, but folks at MIT will use close to $500K to study the tech evolution process of solar and to create an overarching theory.
• Better forecasting of production costs: Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Arizona State University and the University of Oxford will use almost $950K to analyze data about patents, prices and production to create better forecasts of solar cell, wafer and panel prices.
• A model for solar markets: Sandia National Labs, the University of Pennsylvania and the California Center for Sustainable Energy will use $2.3 million to process data about solar markets and to create a model looking at how economic and social issues impact solar installations.
• Better strategies for community-led solar purchasing: Yale and SmartPower’s New England Solar Challenge will use $1.9 million to develop new strategies to that can make community solar buying programs work better.
• More effective solar installation in Texas: The University of Austin will use close to $500K to collaborate with six Texas utilities to create more strategic ways to install and interconnect solar in the state.

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Martin Casado, co-founder and chief technology officer of Nicira, which VMware bought last year for $1.26 billion, has gotten tired of people discussing and agreeing on the importance of virtualizing networks. He wants to get out there and start solving networking problems with network virtualization.

He said as much on Wednesday at a Churchill Club forum entitled “Is Software-Defined Networking the Next Revolution?” at Ericsson’s office in San Jose, Calif.

It turns out Facebook wants to make networking more efficient, too. Najam Ahmad, director of network engineering at Facebook, said so while sharing the stage with Casado and others at the event. Ahmad is looking for potential solutions to problems such as getting applications to send packets onto servers’ network-interface cards and getting confirmation that that’s happened. No more lost packets that you don’t know are lost.

“We’re just starting out (with software-defined networking),” Ahmad said. “I wouldn’t say by any means that we’re using it wide-scale. We’re looking at use cases and developing that more prototype stage in that sense.”

But use cases are hard to come by, even though AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, NTT and Rackspace have implemented Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform, as my colleague Stacey Higginbotham reported. But software-defined networking and network virtualization hasn’t exactly gone mainstream. As Casado himself put it, the conversation needs to move toward actual use cases and how to change people’s lives with network virtualization, just as server virtualization has changed people’s lives — or at least IT.

For now, the hype around SDN continues. We’d like to see some network virtualization use cases, too.

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Fans of Star Wars can take their love of droids and kitten heels to the streets with this DIY Instructables project. Created by Mike Warren, an editor at the site, these are the droid shoes you’re looking for.

DIYers take note: this isn’t easy stuff. Note the tools list, for example:

MIG welder
soldering iron
propane torch
rotary tool
elecric drill
rubber cement
foam glue
2-part epoxy (extra strength – not “quick setting”)
white spray paint

Seriously. A MIG welder. For shoes.

You’ll also need a pair of shoes, some R2-D2 toys, and a little thinger that will light up like R2′s weird eye thinger. More important, the shoes Warren used came from outside his house because someone threw them away. In short, they were almost free!

So whether you’re trying to please your own Princess Leia or need to stab one of Jabba’s Daleks with your stiletto, now you have the perfect tool.

This afternoon, Cecilia Muñoz, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, sat down with a group of immigration reform advocates and leaders from across the country to discuss President Obama's plan to fix our broken immigration system in a live Google+ Hangout. During the virtual roundtable discussion, participants asked questions about the President's vision on topics ranging from creating an earned path to citizenship, the DREAM Act, Startup visas for entrepreneurs, and the role of the faith community in the immigration reform debate.  In case you missed the live event, check out the full video and learn more about the plan.

This "Fireside Hangout" was moderated by Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and founder of Define American, and guests included America Ferrera, co-chair of Voto Latino's I'm Ready for Immigration Reform campaign, Jim Wallis, President and CEO of Sojourners, Cristina Jimenez, Managing Director of United We Dream and Shervin Pishevar, Managing Director at Menlo Ventures and co-founder of Start Up Visa Movement. 

The hangout is part of an ongoing series of conversations with administration officials on Google+. In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll continue to host hangouts with White House staff on a range of second term priorities. Follow us on Google+ for updates from the Administration and opportunities to participate in online engagement events.

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During recent days we have had the honor as part of a U.S. Presidential Delegation to accompany more than 150 U.S. Special Olympians to the 2013 Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea. In addition to the Opening Ceremonies of the games on Tuesday, the Presidential Delegation had a unique chance to spend time with the athletes and view some of the events.

While we have made a special effort to cheer on the U.S. athletes on behalf of the President, the Special Olympics is about far more than winning – it’s about encouraging diversity, celebrating inclusion and recommitting to the human rights of persons with disabilities around the world.

People with disabilities come from all walks of life, genders, every social class, and all religious traditions. Most of us have a family member, friend or acquaintance with a disability. People with disabilities make tremendous contributions to our society, to our families, to our neighborhoods – adding to the diversity that makes America a unique and special place to call home.

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Uber and Lyft have come to agreements with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) this week, establishing ride-sharing companies in the state in another development on the bumpy road toward government acceptance. In October, the CPUC issued a cease-and-desist orders against rideshare companies like Lyft and Sidecar, which it said did not have the right permits to carry customers, but now it looks like those companies can continue in California.

While Uber is not currently offering peer-to-peer ride-sharing, the CPUC agreement allows for “drivers not specifically licensed to drive a limousine or taxi” to provide rides, which could include Uber’s drivers, the company notes. And Uber wrote that it could pave the way for ride-sharing in the future.

Update: As TechCrunch first reported and Uber later confirmed with us, the company plans to expand into ridesharing, although it has no immediate specifics to announce. “It would be natural to expect us to go into competition,” an Uber spokesman said.

Lyft’s parent company Zimride announced Wednesday that it had entered into an agreement with the state where the CPUC would drop its earlier cease-and-desist order and fine against the company. Lyft wrote in a blog post that the company has worked to improve safety measures, increasing liability insurance and performing background checks on drivers, and is pleased the state will let them continue operating for the time being:

“This agreement supports the continued legal operation of Lyft and sets a precedent for the upcoming rulemaking process. This agreement would not have been possible without the outpouring of support from the community,” wrote the company co-founders.

Uber announced Thursday that they also have reached an agreement with the CPUC over the company’s technology used to hail rides and has confirmed that its legal in California:

“This settlement agreement is part of a steady drumbeat of progress in which pro-consumer, pro-innovation jurisdictions like Washington D.C., New York City, and Massachusetts are recognizing that everyone wins when new technology that fosters efficiency, affordability, and choice in transportation is allowed to flourish. California has always been on the cutting edge. The CPUC agreement further demonstrates how the Golden State welcomes and supports not only technological advancement, but a better future for drivers, riders, and our cities.”

Rideshare and next-generation taxi companies like Uber and Lyft have struggled to gain acceptance in cities across the country even as users embrace their services, with Uber facing regulatory challenges in D.C., push-back from cab drivers in San Francisco and Chicago, and earlier problems in the more stringent New York City market. With Lyft and Sidecar, questions revolved around how the companies would properly insure drivers and riders.

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RIM BlackBerry revealed its new BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 handsets at a packed press conference Wednesday morning. The event was live streamed, but it also took place at 10 a.m. EST/7 a.m. PST so some of you on the West Coast may have still been in bed for it. Fear not, lovers of sleep, you can now watch the keynote in its entirety.

Sit down, grap some popcorn, and watch the obviously scripted keynote that caused BlackBerry’s stock to fall by 11 percent. Those without nefarious intentions might want to check out the keynote to see all the new features coming to BlackBerry 10, like Hub or BBM Video Chat.

If the keynote has ignited your interest in BlackBerry 10, be sure to check out our extensive coverage of the new mobile platform from BlackBerry.

Court records show that startup Coda Automative, already wrestling with layoffs and very slow sales of its first electric car, has been fending off a number of lawsuits for not paying its bills on time. Vendors, including car engineering and development company RLE International (as well as an affiliate contract work company RTECH), vehicle development services company EDAG, and vehicle testing company FEV, have all filed lawsuits against Coda within the last six or so months, alleging that Coda owes them money for services.

When RLE filed its lawsuit in late October it said Coda owed RLE $356,500; when EDAG filed its lawsuit last June it said Coda owed them $608,770; and when FEV filed its lawsuit in December it said Coda owed them $268,200. RTECH, an affiliate of RLE, also has a lawsuit against Coda for failing to pay for contract workers, which it filed December 2012.

The parties agreed to dismiss three of the cases. In the RTECH lawsuit, the dismissal occurred after Coda filed papers stating that the contract in question forced RTECH to resolve the issue through arbitration. It’s possible this is why the other two cases settled. The FEV case is ongoing.

While Coda lawyers seem to be dealing with these suits, it’s the latest bad sign for the electric car maker, which in December laid off staff. While press reports at the time said the layoffs were massive, Coda tried to soften the blow and said it had laid off 50 employees, or 15 percent of staff.

The problem is that the company hasn’t been selling its cars. Some reports have put the number of Coda sedans sold at less than 100 since it went on sale in March 2012. That launch was actually delayed, from late 2010, then to late 2011, and then early 2012. The company also had a recall of the cars it had sold in August due to a mis-installed side curtain air bag.

The car itself isn’t that competitive in a market where you can buy a Tesla Model S, a Nissan LEAF or a Chevy Volt. As auto reporter Jim Motavelli described it:

The strategy of buying a bargain Chinese car sounded good at the time, but it’s plain that making the Coda competitive was a Herculean task, despite a larger battery, battery management and more range than the Nissan Leaf. One big problem is that Chinese styling is 20 to 30 years behind the West, and attempts to dress up the Coda didn’t do much to disguise the 1985 Toyota Corolla design. The car looks dated.

We’ll see what happens to Coda. Fisker Automotive, another struggling electric car startup, is heads down trying to sell itself to Chinese auto companies. Coda already has deep partnerships with Chinese firms — the company has a joint venture with China battery maker Lishen, called Lio (oil spelled backward), and a deal with auto maker Great Wall Motors Company to co-develop a low cost electric car. Given these relationships Coda probably has a better chance than others to find a Chinese acquirer.

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• Green IT Q1: Cleantech Breaking Out — and Bracing for Hard Times
• Green IT Overview, Q2 2010

Remember that $4 per month modem fee time Warner Cable implemented — the one that had Wall Street all excited about its potential boost to revenue? Well, it seems that people were miffed enough about the charge to affect how many subscriptions the nation’s second largest cable company added during the quarter — 75,000, which is less than the 129,000 Wall Street anticipated. But before feeling vindicated, know this — the fee generated about an extra $1.83 per month from each subscriber.

And in the long term, analysts think it will pay off for the cable giant, which reported financial results Thursday. Especially as consumers find themselves stuck between Time Warner Cable’s modem fee and slower DSL-based service offering. From an analyst note issued today by Stifel Nicolas:

Residential PSUs declined by 20,000 versus our estimate of +48,802, primarily due to weaker-than-expected HSD [high speed data] adds. We believe that the company’s residential HSD net adds (+75,000 vs. estimate 129,000) were negatively affected by higher-than-expected churn as a result of the company’s recent introduction of a modem fee (~$4). While the “fallout” from the modem fee could spill over into 1Q13 results, we don’t expect this to be a long-term issue for the company’s residential HSD product. In fact, the modem fee contributed ~3/4 (~$1.83) to the 6.3% increase in HSD ARPU during Q4.

So there you have it. Customers clearly are put off by the modem fee, but it won’t last. Likely because they don’t really have another option for broadband in many areas. Yet, plenty of people are still unconvinced that ISPs engage in anti-competitive behavior in the broadband market.

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Facebook may be getting a little more specific with their suggestions for how to properly celebrate your friend’s birthday.

Soon after launching their new ecommerce platform Facebook Gifts, the social network began suggesting that you send friends a gift when it’s their birthday. Suddenly, a cheesy Timeline post ceased to be enough. Facebook wanted to promote the new Gifts platform by attaching it to birthdays – which is understandable.

Now, it looks like they’re taking it a step further by suggesting that you gift friends with a Starbucks e-gift, specifically.

Facebook told Business Insider that this is an “experiment.”

We’ve noticed that if the birthday boy or girl “likes” Starbucks, that information will show up alongside the Starbucks logo. That way, you’ll know that getting him/her a Starbucks gift card would be a good idea. You know, because they “like” it.

It’s unclear what the arrangement is here, and whether Starbucks (and presumably any other Facebook Gifts partner) would pay for the birthday suggestions placement in the future. As with all Facebook “tests” or “experiments,” there’s always the chance that it will never reach a large audience. But something about this one makes me feel like we’ll be seeing more and more of it as Facebook looks to further promote and monetize Gifts.

A new study from the University of Adelaide has shown that humans, not diseases, were responsible for the extinction of the Tasmanian tiger.

The Tasmanian tiger, also known as thylacine, was a marsupial carnivore found in Tasmania until the species went extinct in the 1930s. According to researchers, the Tasmanian government encouraged the hunting of the animals from 1886 until 1909, paying bounties for thylacine carcasses. The last known wild Tasmanian tiger was captured in 1933.

“Many people, however, believe that bounty hunting alone could not have driven the thylacine extinct and therefore claim that an unknown disease epidemic must have been responsible,” said Thomas Prowse, leader of the project and a research associate at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Environment Institute. “We tested this claim by developing a ‘metamodel’ – a network of linked species models – that evaluated whether the combined impacts of Europeans could have exterminated the thylacine, without any disease.”

The researchers used a modified version of mathematical models developed by conservation biologists to simulate extinction risks to populations of endangered species, called a population viability analysis (PVA). Prowse and his colleagues added species interactions to the normal PVA model.

“The new model simulated the directs effects of bounty hunting and habitat loss and, importantly, also considered the indirect effects of a reduction in the thylacine’s prey (kangaroos and wallabies) due to human harvesting and competition from millions of introduced sheep,” said Prowse. “We found we could simulate the thylacine extinction, including the observed rapid population crash after 1905, without the need to invoke a mystery disease. We showed that the negative impacts of European settlement were powerful enough that, even without any disease epidemic, the species couldn’t escape extinction.”

(Image via Wikimedia Commons)

Facebook, as you may know, released its Q4 and full-year earnings on Wednesday. Between the release and the earnings call, the company provided plenty of info for us all to absorb, including various statements made by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

COO Sheryl Sandberg had plenty to say during the conference call as well, discussing Facebook’s focus on building products and tools for brand marketers, direct marketers, local businesses and developers.

There are some key points Facebook wants marketers to take away from what she talked about, so here are the highlights, via an email from the company:

• For brand marketers, Facebook is now working with every one of the Ad Age Global 100 advertisers. Wal-mart used this target block over the Thanksgiving weekend to deliver 50 million mobile ads to their existing and potential customers. Michael Kors used Facebook to launch a new line of sneakers. Many of the sneakers sold out online and in stores, and they achieved a 16-point increase in awareness of the new sneaker among the 36 million people that the campaign reached on Facebook. That’s the equivalent of 5.8 million new people in the brand’s target audience who are now aware of the new line of shoes.
• For direct marketers, tools including Offers, Custom Audiences and FBX are fueling growth. Nearly 42 million unique users are claiming an Offer. Costs per redemption compare favorably to those from email, newspaper, paid search, and display media based on data from the Direct Marketing Association. JackThreads, an online shopping site for men, used Custom Audiences to target specific segments of its customer database and target them with ads for products in categories the company knew were most relevant to them such as sneakers. As a result, the company achieved a 30% lower cost per acquisition than other platforms and saw a 6x return on advertising spend. And despite only becoming available to all marketers in September, by December, FBX served nearly one billion impressions daily and supported over 1,300 advertisers each day.
• Revenue from local businesses was particularly strong in the fourth quarter: local business Pages that advertise on Facebook nearly doubled since the beginning of 2012, fueled by Promoted Posts, which makes it easier for businesses to create and purchase ads directly from their Facebook Page. Almost 500,000 Pages have used Promoted Posts. About 30% of those are new advertisers to Facebook and more than 70% have become repeat customers.
• Developers are seeing success with mobile app install ads, launched in October and already being used by 20% of the top 100 grossing iOS apps to accelerate growth. According to research conducted by comScore in December, Facebook is the top driver of awareness of new mobile app downloads and, among people who learn about new apps on Facebook, 48% click directly from the Facebook app to download new mobile apps. A new game, Car Town Streets broke into the Top 10 Games list on iOS in many countries while achieving a 40% lower cost per installation compared to their other advertising with mobile app install ads.
• Research from Aggregate Knowledge showed that Facebook is an increasingly powerful tool to help marketers reach more people and drive sales. In a study of fourth quarter marketing campaigns, they found that media plans that included Facebook reached people who would not have seen the campaigns otherwise. In fact, 45% of those reached were reached exclusively through Facebook. The study also found that Facebook had a 68% lower cost per acquisition and drove 24% more new sales than other online channels.
• Facebook built a deep relationship with PepsiCo, working with its Lay’s brand to drive sales significantly ahead of plan and a 5x return on advertising spend for their “Do Us A Flavor” campaign on Facebook.

According to Sandberg, 65% of Facebook’s advertisers are using ads in News Feed (mobile and desktop). That’s a 50% increase from the end of the third quarter. News Feed ads drive over eight times the incremental offline sales than ads on the right hand side, according to the company.