May 18th, 2012
Rob’s Radar 5/18
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Facebook Says Haters Gonna Hate, Likers Gonna Like
Facebook knows what’s best for you, sometimes before you do. That’s the meaning of a new “Likers Gonna Like” inspirational mini-poster printed by the Facebook Toronto Office. If you don’t approve of something Facebook’s doing, fine, there’s millions of other people who do. And just as with the launch of the news feed, if you hate some change to the Facebook interface, wait a few months, and you’ll probably end up Liking it too.
It’s a cavalier statement, one based on several old hip-hop songs including “In Da Club” by 50 Cent, where he raps “If [they] hate then let ‘em hate and watch the money pile up”. It’s a mentality that has gotten the company into privacy trouble. But the idea that Facebook and its visionary CEO Mark Zuckerberg should push forward with bold ideas because “Likers Gonna Like” is what’s let Facebook move faster than its older rivals, and kept it from being disrupted these last eight years.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/18/likers-gonna-like/
Facebook IPO: Live Updates On FB’s Big Day
Eight years, 900 million users, and several Winklevoss lawsuits later, Facebook isgoing public in what will be the third largest IPO in history.
Facebook, which will begin trading on the Nasdaq under “FB,” will raise over $18 billion and will be worth more than $100 billion when it makes its stock market debut. By comparison, Google raised $1.67 billion in its 2004 IPO, which valued the company at $26.4 billion.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/18/facebook-ipo-live-updates-fb_n_1526829.html?1337343820#1_rise-and-shine-hackers
Reticent Rich: Preferred Style in Silicon Valley
Wealth is here if you know where to find it.
Fabulous home theaters are tucked into the basements of plain suburban houses. Bespoke jeans that start at $1,200 can be detected only by a tiny red logo on the button. The hand-painted Italian bicycles that flash across Silicon Valley on Saturday mornings have become the new Ferrari — and only the cognoscenti could imagine that they cost more than $20,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/technology/a-start-up-is-gold-for-facebooks-new-millionaires.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
Zynga, LinkedIn, Yelp All Down After Facebook IPO Debut
Facebook‘s long-awaited IPO appears to have dragged down other social media stocks.
A few minutes after Facebook’s shares started trading, shares of Zynga, LinkedIn, Yelp, Renren and Pandora Media were all tanking.
http://mashable.com/2012/05/18/zynga-linkedin-yelp-all-down-after-facebook-ipo-debut/
GM ad move followed failed Facebook pitch: sources
Facebook may only have itself to blame for why General Motors rained on its IPO parade this week.
GM announced the decision to drop Facebook paid ads on Tuesday in what was the first highly visible crack in Facebook’s strategy and illustrated doubts about its perceived advantage over traditional media.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/18/net-us-gm-facebook-idUSBRE84H03S20120518?irpc=932
2012 Venture Capital Funding to Facebook Mafia Up 137% vs. 2011. Greylock is Most Active VC FB Mafia Investor So Far.
The Facebook Mafia isn’t waiting for an IPO to strike out on their own as company alumni have already raised $271 million of venture capital funding since 2006. And the Facebook Mafia’s momentum appears to be accelerating with the group pulling in $130 million in just the first 5.5 months of 2012, a 137% increase over all of 2011, and the highest total in the last 6.5 years (graph below). For those unfamiliar with the term, the Facebook Mafia refers to alumni of Facebook who’ve gone on to found new startup companies.
http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/facebook-mafia-greylock
Mark Zuckerberg Worth $21B on Facebook IPO Debut
In less than an hour, Mark Zuckerberg has jumped from number 29 to number 24 — and then back to 29 — on the list of wealthiest people in the world.
Facebook set an opening share price of $38 on Thursday evening, which valued Zuckerberg’s 503.6 million shares and options at about $19.1 billion. Trading opened on Friday at about $42.
http://mashable.com/2012/05/18/mark-zuckerberg-rich/
Facebook hit with $15B class-action suit over user privacy
Just hours before Facebook opened on the public market today, a group of Facebook users sued the company in a $15 billion class-action lawsuit over privacy, according to Bloomberg.
Facebook has attracted scrutiny for quite some time when it comes to user privacy and how well it protects the data of its users. The new lawsuit, which was filed in Federal Court in San Jose, Calif., contends that Facebook improperly tracked users even after they were logged out of their personal accounts.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/18/facebook-ipo-day-lawsuit-user-privacy/
Nasdaq Delayed Facebook IPO for 30 Minutes
Although Facebook was scheduled to go public at 11:00 a.m. ET on Friday, it didn’t officially hit the stock market until a half an hour later. A rep from Nasdaq declined comment on the issue.
The IPO caused a series of issues for finance sites, including Nasdaq.com and etrade.com.
http://mashable.com/2012/05/18/facebook-ipo-delay/
The Facebook IPO: What it looked like inside the company’s headquarters
Facebook began trading on the public markets for the first time today, and at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., excitement levels were high.
After an all-night hackathon designed to send the message that Facebook cares more about coding and shipping products than it does about the public markets, Facebook held a bell-ringing ceremony early in the morning. Using a specially-hacked remote-control NASDAQ button, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg simultaneously rang the bell on the trading floor of the stock exchange, 3,000 miles away, and updated his (and his company’s) Facebook status.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/18/the-facebook-ipo-what-it-looked-like-inside-the-companys-headquarters/#s:facebook-ipo-opening-bell-3
UK government staff caught snooping on citizen data
Don’t worry about hackers illegally accessing government systems. It turns out government workers and civil servants who are trusted with private citizen data are more likely to access your data illegally.
The U.K. government is haemorrhaging data — private and confidential citizen data — from medical records to social security details, and even criminal records, according to figures obtained through Freedom of Information requests.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/uk-government-staff-caught-snooping-on-citizen-data/4716
iHeartRadio Hits 10 Million Users Faster Than Facebook or Twitter
Digital radio platform iHeartRadio announced its user stats for the first time ever on Thursday, citing growth in an eight-month period that was faster than other popular services including Facebook and Twitter when they first opened up registration.
http://mashable.com/2012/05/17/iheartradio-stats/
Exclusive: Yahoo Finally Set to Strike Alibaba Share Deal — Half Now, Then Half of What’s Left After Eventual IPO
Yahoo is in the final stages of selling a large chunk of its stake in the Alibaba Group back to the company — in a complex deal that is set to include a multibillion-dollar share buyback to investors of the Silicon Valley Internet giant and an eventual IPO of the Chinese company — according to multiple sources close to the situation.
http://allthingsd.com/20120517/exclusive-yahoo-finally-set-to-strike-alibaba-share-deal-half-now-then-half-of-whats-left-after-eventual-ipo/
May 17th, 2012
Rob’s Radar 5/17
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Facebook to set final IPO price Thursday
Facebook’s long road to an initial public offering is coming to an end. Late Thursday, it will fill in one last piece of the puzzle: Its final IPO price.
That’s the price at which Facebook’s underwriters (including lead bankerMorgan Stanley) will sell shares to their clients, which typically include large institutional investors, mutual funds and hedge funds. Some shares were made available to individual investors, but getting them typically requires either a lot of money or a lot of trading experience.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/17/technology/facebook-ipo-pricing/index.htm?hpt=hp_c1
How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked the Valley
In 2006, when he was 22, Mark Zuckerberg gave up writing computer code to focus on managing his rapidly growing startup. Like Jim Brown retiring from football at 29 or E.M. Forster abandoning the novel in his forties, the prodigy who programmed the very first version of Facebook was walking away from his transcendent talent. Or so it seemed. A few years later, Zuckerberg began setting annual tests of discipline for himself, vowing to wear a tie to work every day in 2009, learn Mandarin in 2010, and personally kill any animal he ate in 2011. Earlier this year, unbeknown to all but a few friends and co-workers, he gave himself a new challenge with unknown ramifications for what is soon to be Silicon Valley’s newest public company. Mark Zuckerberg pledged to return to his roots and spend time programming each day.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-17/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-the-valley
US-citizenship renouncing Facebook cofounder Saverin may be effectively banned from the country
Oh dear, I don’t think that too many people saw this coming. I do hope that Eduardo Saverin did, however, as his move to renounce his US citizenship may carry a penalty – the knowledge of which is currently coming to the fore: once you tell the United States that you would like to cash out and leave, you might not be able to return to the table.
http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/05/16/us-citizenship-renouncing-facebook-cofounder-saverin-may-be-effectively-banned-from-the-country/
Ahead of Facebook I.P.O., a Skeptical Madison Ave.
With Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has created a seemingly perfect home on the Web, one where people feel comfortable chatting with friends, playing games, sharing photos and videos, listening to music and revealing the most intimate details of their lives.
The $100 billion question is whether Facebook will be a perfect home for advertisers, as well.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/ahead-of-facebook-i-p-o-a-skeptical-madison-ave/
Facebook rolling out new “Pages Manager” app for iPhone
Facebook has just broken out another feature of their main app and released Pages Manager for the iPhone. The app appears to function just like the main Facebook app, but with all of the features dedicated to fan pages. It also features some new features like access to Facebook’s Insights for tracking analytics data, such as the number of people sharing your page and the total number of people who have been exposed to your brand through the page. Pages Manager available right now in New Zealand, and will be out in the US soon.
http://9to5mac.com/2012/05/16/facebook-rolling-out-new-pages-manager-app-for-iphone/
Even as Settlement Hopes Appear, Facebook Blames Shoddy Checking in Answer to Yahoo Patent-Fraud Claim
When last we tuned in to the ongoing drama that is the patent-infringement lawsuit that Yahoo aimed at Facebook, Yahoo had a CEO — Scott Thompson — who was full steam ahead in pressing the controversial legal action.
Now, multiple sources said, the Silicon Valley Internet giant has got a new one — interim CEO Ross Levinsohn — who is already reaching out to top execs at the social networking giant in hopes of finding a settlement.
http://allthingsd.com/20120516/even-as-settlement-hopes-appear-facebook-blames-shoddy-checking-in-answer-to-yahoo-patent-fraud-claim/
The Rise of Europe’s Private Internet Police
In 2005, Peter Mahnke, a resident of the English town of St. Margaret’s, Middlesex, set up a community website. For the past seven years, he and a handful of local volunteers have been publishing regular updates about local events, parks, new businesses, weather, and train schedules. All G-rated and uncontroversial.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/05/16/the_rise_of_europe_s_private_internet_police?page=0,0
Google’s bots learn to read interactive webpages more like humans
Google feeds its search engine’s index with site data from a virtual army of “bots”—Web-crawling applications that scour sites for content. But in the past, Google’s bots hit a wall when they ran into interactive content that was loaded through JavaScript—especially on pages that use Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) to allow users access to additional content without reloading pages. But now, according to Vancouver-based developer Alex Pankratov, it appears Google’s bots have been trained to act more like humans to mine interactive site content, running the JavaScript on pages they crawl to see what gets coughed up.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/googles-bots-learn-to-read-interactive-web-pages-more-like-humans/
Coffee May Help Drinkers Live Longer, U.S. Study Suggests
Coffee, caffeinated or decaffeinated, may help extend the lives of people who drink it daily, a U.S. study found.
Men who drank 2 to 3 cups a day had a 10 percent chance of outliving those who drank no coffee, while women had a 13 percent advantage, according to research published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-16/coffee-may-help-drinkers-live-longer-u-s-study-suggests.html
Rakuten CEO on why Pinterest is worth $1.5bn
Rakuten has led a $100m funding round into Pinterest, which values the online “curation” community at around $1.5bn.
The Japanese ecommerce giant won out over major US venture capital firms who were vying for a piece of Silicon Valley’s new sweetheart, which lets users clip images to a virtual pinboard.
http://blogs.ft.com/tech-blog/2012/05/rakuten-ceo-pinterest/#axzz1v8lzQUZB
Say hello to the real real-time Web
It started with a simple idea—an online version of the classic arcade game Asteroids, but on a massively multiplayer scale.
It would support hundreds of players at once, thanks to a scalable network backend. It would be real-time, meaning that every player would see every shot and every movement simultaneously without delay.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/say-hello-to-the-real-real-time-web/
Twitter Implements Do Not Track Privacy Option
It’s no secret that Facebook is worth about $100 billion because it collected personal data about its users. A lot of data.
Although Twitter tracks its users too — albeit in a much less aggressive way — the company has decided to take a different route. It announced Thursday that it is joining Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox Web browser, and giving its users the ability to opt-out of being tracked in any way through Twitter.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/twitter-implements-do-not-track-privacy-option/
White House’s cybersecurity official retiring
The White House’s cybersecurity coordinator said Thursday that he is stepping down at the end of this month after a 2 1 / 2-year tenure in which the administration has increased its focus on cyber issues but struggled to reach agreement with lawmakers on the best way to protect the nation’s key computer networks from attack.
Howard Schmidt, who oversaw the creation of the White House’s first legislative proposal on cybersecurity, said he is retiring to spend more time with his family and to pursue teaching in the cyber field.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/white-houses-cybersecurity-official-retiring/2012/05/16/gIQAX6fmUU_story.html
May 16th, 2012
Rob’s Radar 5/16
TweetGoogle Revamps Search With Massive ‘Real World Map of Things’
Google has grown a brain, and users in the U.S. will soon begin to see new search results starting Wednesday, where Google will display a widget of information about a topic or thing, instead of just a list of links.
It’s called the Google Knowledge Graph, which the company says includes some 500 million persons, places and things — and their billions of relationships to one another.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/05/google-knowledge-graph/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=twitterclickthru
For Facebook-boosted video apps, reality checks in
When Facebook made it easy to share what videos you were watching, companies like Socialcam, Metacafe, DailyMotion and Viddy rocketed up the app-charts and saw a sharp increase in the usage and downloads of these apps. Of course, with this friction-less sharing actions came howls of complaints from Facebook’s users.
Well, it seems the party has come to an end. The reality check is eerily reminiscent of the decline in attention for social news-reader applications. AppData.com statistics show a sharp decline in the number of daily active users of these services.
http://gigaom.com/2012/05/15/for-facebook-boosted-video-apps-reality-checks-in/
Apple Moves Toward Larger iPhone Screens
The new iPhone that Apple Inc. is expected to unveil this year is likely to have a larger display than its current models have, with the company ordering bigger screens from its Asian suppliers, people familiar with the matter said.
The new screens measure at least 4 inches diagonally, the people said, compared with 3.5 inches on Apple’s latest model, the iPhone 4S. Production is set to begin next month, the people said. Analysts have predicted that the next iPhone will come out in the fall.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702303360504577407610487811698-lMyQjAxMTAyMDEwNjExNDYyWj.html
Admitted file-swapper begs Supreme Court for help
“Joel Tenenbaum is a fine and courageous young man who has just received his doctorate in statistical physics,” begins Tenenbaum’s recent plea to the Supreme Court (PDF). He is also anadmitted file-swapper. At trial, a jury of his peers decided that he should pay the record labels $675,000 in statutory damages.
Tenenbaum’s lawyer, well-known Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson, wants the Supremes to understand that the industry’s “litigation assault” on people like Tenenbaum is “procedurally unfair and profoundly unethical.” Such damage awards, Nesson continues, seek to:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/admitted-file-swapper-begs-supreme-court-for-help/
How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit
A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A beer enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe for Brown’s Ale, salvaged decades before from the wreckage of the old brewery–the very building where the Star-Spangled Banner was sewn in 1813. A student buys a sandwich called the Last American Pirate and unearths the long-forgotten tale of Edward Owens, who terrorized the Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/how-the-professor-who-fooled-wikipedia-got-caught-by-reddit/257134/
Samsung loses $10 billion market value on Apple order report
Shares in Samsung Electronics Co slumped more than 6 percent on Wednesday, wiping $10 billion off the electronics giant’s market value, on a report that Apple placed huge chip orders with troubled Japanese chip rival Elpida.
Taiwan’s DigiTimes, an online trade news site, reported that Apple recently placed large mobile dynamic random access memory (DRAM) orders with Elpida’s 12-inch plant in Hiroshima, Japan, securing around half the facilities total chip production. It cited unnamed industry sources in its report, which hit shares of major chip suppliers to Apple.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/16/us-samsung-chips-idUSBRE84F0BT20120516
Facebook increases IPO size (again)
Facebook has significantly increased the size of its initial public offering, just two days before it is expected to begin trading on the NASDAQ.
According to an amended registration document, Facebook (FB) will now offer over 421 million shares to investors. That is around 83.8 million shares more than originally offered, which would work out to another $3.19 billion in proceeds if Facebook prices at the top of its $35-$38 per share offering range.
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/16/facebook-increases-ipo-size-again/
Microsoft Gives Windows a Clean Sweep
For a long time, some Microsoft officials have privately griped that PC makers don’t present Windows in its best light. They clutter desktops with icons that are often little more than ads for third-party products; include confusing utilities that duplicate functions already in
Windows; require lengthy setup; and configure PCs in ways that slow them down.
One consequence, in the eyes of these Microsoft executives, is to confer an advantage on the company’s main operating-system rival, Apple
http://allthingsd.com/20120515/microsoft-gives-windows-a-clean-sweep/
Fab.com relaunches, and it buries other social shopping experiences
Today, Fab.com is launching its third and most ambitious version of the site, and CEO Jason Goldberg said it’s going to remind you of window-shopping with your best friends.
“Imagine you’re shopping with your friends, and one of them picks up a shirt and says, ‘Oh, that’s cute!’ We think we can replicate that online,” the founder told VentureBeat in a recent phone call.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/16/fab-com-social-shopping/#s:fab-1
Pirate Bay Under DDoS Attack From Unknown Enemy
With court-ordered ISP blockades popping up all over Europe, The Pirate Bay is no stranger to being silenced. However, for the last 24 hours the site has been largely inaccessible world wide due to a completely different type of censorship. After the site openly criticized Anonymous last week for DDoS’ing UK ISP Virgin Media, The Pirate Bay itself is now under attack.
Although Pirate Bay downtime happens a handful of times each month, it rarely persists for more than a few hours. When it goes beyond that the steady flow of reader emails to TorrentFreak quickly transforms itself into a torrent.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-under-ddos-attack-from-unknown-enemy-120516/
Bitly readies real-time viral search engine, raises $20 million in new funding
Bitly, a New York company that lets users shorten, share, and track URLs, is raising around $20 million in a new round of funding, we have learned from multiple sources. That’s twice the amount the company raised in its last round, and shows a mature startup closing in on a working business model. We also hear Bitly is about to launch some new consumer products, including a real-time, viral search engine.
The company began life at the Chelsea-based innovation lab, Betaworks, but moved out this week into its own, much larger office. Bitly is best known as a link shortner, but investor Joshua Stylman says that’s not why venture capitalists are interested in funding it. “The link shortening has always been a bit of a Trojan Horse. Bitly is really an analytics tool for tracking content across the open, distributed web, and doing it at a massive, real-time scale.”
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/16/3023802/bitly-real-time-viral-search-engine-20-million-funding
May 15th, 2012
Rob’s Radar 5/15
TweetIt’s official: Facebook offers 50.6m extra shares, confirms new $34-$38 price range
Facebook has just filed a seventh amendment to its S-1, which you can read here.
TechCrunch yesterday reported that FB was going to sell extra shares, and they were spot on. AllThingsD reported the price range, and they were also spot on.
http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/05/15/its-official-facebook-offers-50-6-million-extra-shares-price-range-34-38/
Those suave Google glasses are now patent-protected
Google has successfully patented the “ornamental design” of its augmented reality eyewear. To you, me and Aunty Dee they might look almost like regular Ray-Bans, but there’s a lot of secret technology concealed within those sleek lines and Google evidently wants to prevent others from copying their appearance. After all, if people started faking Project Glass, it’d be impossible to tell if we’re being properly scanned or merely checked out.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/15/google-glasses-design-patent/?m=false
Does Yahoo even know how to be a modern media company?
Now that Yahoo has managed to make its way through yet another CEO shuffle — its sixth in just five years — the former portal has to get back to the main task at hand: namely, figuring out what its future looks like. By replacing Scott Thompson with Ross Levinsohn, who currently runs Yahoo’s global media business and used to be a senior executive at News Corp., the company seems to be indicating that it wants to focus (again) on being a media player. But does Yahoo even have what it takes to succeed as a new-media entity? There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, and the company’s knowledge gaps are not going to be easy to fill.
http://gigaom.com/2012/05/14/does-yahoo-even-know-how-to-be-a-modern-media-company/
Finnish court rules open WiFi network owner not liable for infringement
A Finnish District Court has ruled that the owner of an open WiFi network is not liable for copyright infringement by others using that network.
“The applicants were unable to provide any evidence that the connection-owner herself had been involved in the file-sharing,” the defendant’s attorneys wrote in an English-language press release on Monday. “The court thus examined whether the mere act of providing a WiFi connection not protected with a password can be deemed to constitute a copyright-infringing act.”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/finnish-court-rules-open-wifi-network-owner-not-liable-for-infringement/
If You Can Copyright an API, What Else Can You Copyright?
What does an API look like?
Sometimes, says Brian Pagano, it looks like this: /users. Or this: /products.
Brian Pagano is a software architect at Apigee, an outfit that does nothing but help companies build and operate APIs, interfaces that let one piece of software talk to another. In describing the APIs his company deals in, he wants to lend some perspective to another question, a question that may soon be answered by the federal judge overseeing the ongoing legal battle between Google and Oracle: Can you copyright an API?
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/api-copyright/
Made In New York: Mayor Bloomberg shows off NYC’s vibrant tech scene with an online map
If there’s a significant week-long event occurring in New York City, you can bet that Mayor Michael Bloomberg will make a showing at some point. So it was no surprise when I got a call last night about a mysterious Bloomberg press conference scheduled for this morning at Internet Week New York.
At the event’s swanky SoHo headquarters, Bloomberg announced a new online map — the Made in New York Digital Map — that makes it easy to find the city’s tech startups and job opportunities. Given that new NYC startups and incubators are popping up like crazy, the map will be a useful way to make sense of everything tech going on in the city.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/15/made-in-new-york-nyc-digital-map/
Student Debt Signals College Meltdown to Cuban: Chart of the Day
Colleges and universities are due for a meltdown as students are increasingly saddled with debt they can’t repay, according to Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the HDNet cable-television channel.
As the CHART OF THE DAY illustrates, the amount owed on loans for tuition and other educational expenses exceeds the comparable totals for credit-card or auto debt, according to quarterly data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-15/student-debt-signals-college-meltdown-to-cuban-chart-of-the-day.html
A TV Schedule in the Hands of Whoever Holds the Remote
This week, when they ring the bell on the television upfronts, the annual orgy of advertising buying, I hope the industry isn’t counting on my house to lift ratings.
So far in the month of May, our household has watched exactly two minutes and one second of live television. NBC’s broadcast of “the most exciting two minutes in sports,” as the Kentucky Derby is described, was epic, unfurling on the big flat panel we finally bought. But I doubt our spasm of live viewing is enough to keep the television business in business.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/14/business/media/audiences-now-rarely-drawn-to-live-television.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Google’s Chrome Browser Is Coming For iOS, Says Macquarie
Macquarie analyst Ben Schacter has a surprising report out this morning.
He writes, “Google Chrome browser for iOS is coming.”
He adds, “Apple may already be reviewing Google’s submitted code for a Chrome browser for iOS.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-chrome-browser-is-coming-for-ios-says-macquarie-2012-5?op=1#ixzz1uxUpcc1w
Personalized Music Video Service Cull TV Acquired By Twitvid, CEO Departs
Social video network Twitvid has closed another acquisition today, following its March deal which involved bringing the team from daily deals aggregator Frugalo on board. Today, the company is announcing it has acquired Cull TV, an independent music video sharing site, which CTO John Hurliman describes as a little bit like Pandora mixed with MTV.
Cull TV, founded in early 2011, currently offers a catalog of some 2 to 3 million videos, with 100 brand-new ones appearing per day. The service offers 25 prominent channels devoted to various genres, but gets more specific than just “indie rock” or “hip hop.” Some of the featured channels today, for example, include “Euro Popped,” and “New Chilean Rock,” to give you an idea of how niche some of the content can be.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/15/personalized-music-video-service-cull-tv-acquired-by-twitvid-ceo-departs/
Please Don’t Learn to Code
The whole “everyone should learn programming” meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012.
A noble gesture to garner the NYC tech community vote, for sure, but if the mayor of New York City actually needs to sling JavaScript code to do his job, something is deeply, horribly, terribly wrong with politics in the state of New York. Even if Mr. Bloomberg did “learn to code”, with apologies to Adam Vandenberg, I expect we’d end up with this:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/please-dont-learn-to-code.html
