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/

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

Google 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

It’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

The Coming Meltdown in College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Any Time Soon
This is what I see when i think about higher education in this country today:

Remember the housing meltdown ? Tough to forget isn’t it. The formula for the housing boom and bust was simple. A lot of easy money being lent to buyers who couldn’t afford the money they were borrowing. That money was then spent on homes with the expectation that the price of the home would go up and it could easily be flipped or refinanced at a profit. Who cares if you couldn’t afford the loan. As long as prices kept on going up, everyone was happy. And prices kept on going up. And as long as pricing kept on going up real estate agents kept on selling homes and finding money for buyers.
http://blogmaverick.com/2012/05/13/the-coming-meltdown-in-college-education-why-the-economy-wont-get-better-any-time-soon/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogmaverick%2FtyiP+%28blog+maverick%29

Facebook Said Set to Finish Taking IPO Orders Tomorrow (Update 2)
Facebook Inc. (FB) plans to stop taking orders for its initial public offering tomorrow, two days ahead of schedule, according to a person with knowledge of the transaction.

Facebook will likely finish taking orders for the IPO after U.S. markets close May 15, said the person, who declined to be identified as the plans are private. The company is offering 337.4 million shares at $28 to $35 each. Spokesman Jonathan Thaw didn’t answer a call outside of regular business hours.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-14/facebook-said-set-to-finish-taking-ipo-orders-tomorrow.html

Yahoo! Names Fred Amoroso Chairman and Appoints Ross Levinsohn Interim CEO
Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) today announced that the Board of Directors has named Fred Amoroso as Chairman of the Board of Directors and Ross Levinsohn as interim Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. The Company also announced that its Board has reached an agreement with Third Point LLC (“Third Point”) to settle its pending proxy contest related to the Company’s 2012 annual meeting of shareholders.

Mr. Amoroso replaces Roy Bostock, who has stepped down from his role as Non-Executive Chairman in order to accelerate the leadership transition for the new Board. Mr. Levinsohn replaces Scott Thompson, former Chief Executive Officer, who has left the Company.
http://pressroom.yahoo.net/pr/ycorp/233946.aspx

Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops!
Here is the first missive to Yahoo’s troops from new interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, which I obtained from 653 sources at the company. (Joke alert! Sort of!)

“Importantly, today’s announcements lay to rest the unfortunate and serious distractions surrounding our senior leadership and the composition of our Board going forward,” said Levinsohn, who has been head of global media at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, in part. “In spite of the very bumpy road we’ve traveled, we are achieving genuine and meaningful successes in the marketplace every day and heading in the right direction.”
http://allthingsd.com/20120513/heres-new-yahoo-ceos-first-note-to-troops-the-leaking-internal-memos-to-atd-policy-remains-in-place/

Dynamic Content Support in Amazon CloudFront
In the past three and a half years, Amazon CloudFront has changed the content delivery landscape. It has demonstrated that a CDN does not have to be complex to use with expensive contracts, minimum commits, or upfront fees, such that you are forcibly locked into a single vendor for a long time. CloudFront is simple, fast and reliable with the usual pay-as-you-go model. With just one click you can enable content to be distributed to the customer with low latency and high-reliability.

Today Amazon CloudFront has taken another major step forward in ease of use. It now supports delivery of entire websites containing both static objects and dynamic content. With these features CloudFront makes it as simple as possible for customers to use CloudFront to speed up delivery of their entire dynamic website running in Amazon EC2/ELB (or third-party origins), without needing to worry about which URLs should point to CloudFront and which ones should go directly to the origin.
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/05/cloudfront-dynamic-content-support.html

The Apple-Intel-Samsung Ménage à Trois
Fascinating doesn’t do justice to the spectacle, nor to the stakes. Taken in pairs, these giants exchange fluids – products and billion$ – while fiercely fighting with their other half. Each company is the World’s Number One in their domain: Intel in microprocessors, Samsung in electronics, Apple in failure to fail as ordained by the sages.

The ARM-based chips in iDevices come from a foundry owned by Samsung, Apple’s mortal smartphone enemy. Intel supplies x86 chips to Apple and its PC competitors, Samsung included, and would like nothing more than to raid Samsung’s ARM business and make a triumphant Intel Inside claim for Post-PC devices. And Apple would love to get rid of Samsung, its enemy supplier, but not at the cost of losing the four advantages it derives from using the ARM architecture: cost, power consumption, customization and ownership of the design.
http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/05/13/the-apple-intel-samsung-menage-a-trois/

Insider tells why Anonymous ‘might well be the most powerful organization on Earth’
Christopher Doyon, a.k.a. Commander X, sits atop a hillside in an undisclosed location in Canada, watching a reporter and photographer make their way along a narrow path to join him, away from the prying eyes of law enforcement.

It’s been a few weeks of encrypted emails back and forth, working out the security protocol to follow for interviewing Doyon, one of the brains behind Anonymous, now a fugitive from the FBI.
http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/news/blog.html?b=news.nationalpost.com/2012/05/12/insider-tells-why-anonymous-might-well-be-the-most-powerful-organization-on-earth

Intel Windows 8 tablets to hit retail stores in November
The first wave of Intel-based Windows 8 tablets are expected to land in retail stores in November, a source familiar with device makers’ plans told CNET.

“The schedule is tight,” said the source. “Looking at what Windows is trying to achieve not only with a new OS, but a new OS that needs to run four to five architectures — three ARM, Intel, and AMD,” according to the source.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57433269-92/intel-windows-8-tablets-to-hit-retail-stores-in-november/

Iran forbids banks and other firms from corresponding with users of Gmail and other foreign email services
Iran has continued its online crackdown, and its move towards a national Internet, by introducing a new regulation that instructs banks, insurances firms and telecom companies to cease dealing with messages sent from foreign email addresses, AFP reports.
http://thenextweb.com/me/2012/05/13/iran-forbids-banks-and-other-firms-from-corresponding-with-users-of-gmail-and-other-foreign-email-services/

Old tech on new: Kickstarter project Etcher brings Etch A Sketch to the iPad
Much as we love new technologies, there’s something about nostalgia that is so persuasive that it can cross time and new ideas. This is why we expect the Etcher Kickstarter project to do well.

You’re probably familiar with the old toy that was difficult to master but strangely engaging as you turned two knobs to move a cursor on a screen and make pictures. The original Etch A Sketch required some patience to create anything that didn’t look like a slightly scribbly approximation of anything you wanted to draw.
http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/05/09/old-tech-on-new-kickstarter-project-etcher-brings-etch-a-sketch-to-the-ipad/

Facebook’s IPO already oversubscribed: source
Facebook Inc’s record initial public offering is already oversubscribed, a source familiar with the share listing said, days after the world’s largest social network embarked on a cross-country roadshow to drum up investor enthusiasm.

Despite concerns about slowing growth, a lofty valuation and signs the company is having trouble ramping up revenue from mobile advertising, institutional investors have so far indicated demand for more shares than Facebook has available, the source told Reuters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/11/us-facebook-ipo-idUSBRE8470TL20120511

Foxconn chief says company is preparing for Apple television – report
Foxconn is preparing to manufacture Apple’s anticipated television set, the manufacturing company’s chairman reportedly said in a speech.

The comments allegedly made by Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou were summarizedon Friday by China Daily, an English-language daily newspaper in China with a circulation of more than 500,000, in a report discovered by How To Arena. Gou reportedly said that his company is “making preparations” for an Apple television, but development or manufacturing has not yet started.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/05/11/foxconn_chief_says_company_is_preparing_for_apple_television___report.html

Microsoft’s Sneaky Success: The Xbox Is the Most Popular Video Player in the U.S.
More evidence that Microsoft is increasing its lead in the digital living room race: Data that shows its Xbox gaming console is the most popular non-PC device to watch Web video.

That is, more people are watching Web stuff on Microsoft’s machine than on the iPad, iPhone or any Android machine, anywhere. And when it comes to home viewing, competitors like Apple TV, Google TV and Roku are so far behind they’re not even competitors.
http://allthingsd.com/20120510/microsofts-sneaky-success-the-xbox-is-the-most-popular-video-player-in-the-u-s/

OMG, is Amazon going to kill tech blogs too?
Is Amazon seriously launching a tech blog that aims to compete with gadget blogs like the Verge and Gizmodo? According to a new report from “The Daily,” yes. The funny thing is that Amazon already has a gadget blog called End User (although it hasn’t been updated in almost exactly a year), as well as seven other blogs on topics like food and music.
http://gigaom.com/2012/05/10/omg-is-amazon-going-to-kill-tech-blogs-too/

Video-sharing sensation Viddy rockets toward 30M users, banks $30M
Smoking-hot mobile video-sharing startup Viddy has closed a $30 million financing round and is fast-approaching 30 million registered users.

If you’ve taken a two-month hiatus from the Internet, then you’ve most certainly missed Viddy’s overnight comeuppance. The one-year-old company makes an iPhone-only application for shooting 15-second clips that can be enhanced through video effects called “production packs.” In just over two weeks, Viddy has rocketed from 10 million registered users to more than 27 million and is adding 500,000 new folks to the fold each day.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/11/viddy-30m/

Google, Twitter quizzed on Facebook-Instagram: source
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has reached out to Google Inc and Twitter in an investigation into Facebook Inc’s $1 billion acquisition of photo-sharing service Instagram, a source familiar with the probe told Reuters.

It was not immediately clear what specific information the FTC was looking for, the source said. The Commission automatically initiates a review of any acquisition of significant size.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/11/net-us-facebook-idUSBRE84A01N20120511

Pay To “Highlight” Your Facebook Status Updates To More Friends – A Reckless New Ads Test
Only 12% of your friends see your average status update, but Facebook is testing an option called “Highlight” that lets you pay a few dollars to have one of your posts appear to more friends. Highlight lets the average user, not Pages or businesses, select an “important post” and “make sure friends see this”, but not color it yellow asStuff wrote when it first spotted the feature. A tiny percentage of the user base is now seeing tests of a paid version of Highlight, but there’s also a free one designed to check if users are at all interested in the option.

Highlight could show Facebook’s willingness to try more aggressive ways of making money, which should delight potential investors. But Facebook is playing with fire here. The service has always been free for users, and a pay-for-popularity feature could be a huge turn off, especially to its younger and less financially equipped users who couldn’t afford such narcissism.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/10/highlight-facebook-status-updates/

Facebook App Center: More showcase than store, actually
The app store model is winning the evolutionary battle for software businesses. It’s how operating system manufacturers are making ongoing money, especially on mobile devices. But now Facebook, which has a social networking platform and not an operating system of its own, has figured a way to take advantage of the model.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57431426-93/facebook-app-center-more-showcase-than-store-actually/

A Circle of Tech: Collect Payout, Do a Start-Up
Matt Cohler was employee No. 7 atFacebook. Adam D’Angelo joined his high school friend Mark Zuckerberg’s quirky little start-up in 2004 — and became its chief technology officer. Ruchi Sanghvi was the first woman on its engineering team.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/technology/a-circle-of-tech-collect-payout-do-a-start-up.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Amazon launches Vegas trade show for AWS developers, users
Amazon is looking more like old-school IT vendor every day. In November, it will host its first-ever partner and customer conference at the Venetian in Las Vegas. The web services giant posted a “save the date” for the three-day AWS re:invent show on its blog Wednesday. The event will run from November 27 through 29.
http://gigaom.com/cloud/amazon-launches-vegas-trade-show-for-aws-developers-users/

FBI Fears Bitcoin’s Popularity with Criminals
The FBI sees the anonymous Bitcoin payment network as an alarming haven for money laundering and other criminal activity — including as a tool for hackers to rip off fellow Bitcoin users.

That’s according to a new FBI internal report that leaked to the internet this week, which expresses concern about the difficulty of tracking the identify of anonymous Bitcoin users, while also unintentionally providing tips for Bitcoin users to remain more anonymous.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/fbi-fears-bitcoin/

Pirate Bay Scolds Anonymous Hackers For Cyberattacks On Its Behalf
Some hackers aim to free the flow of information, while others aim to stifle it. The Pirate Bay has taken a moment to remind the hacker group Anonymous of the difference.

Anonymous has been launching a series of distributed denial of service attacks that took down the website of Virgin MediaWednesday following a court order that British internet service providers like Virgin must block access to the PirateBay.org, one of the world’s most popular source of pirated downloads.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/05/09/pirate-bay-scolds-anonymous-hackers-for-cyberattacks-on-its-behalf/

New York State Pensions Are Funding Startups: The Limited Partners VCs Rarely Discuss
When a startup raises a round of funding, the news typically includes a list of venture capital firms and angel investors that participated. But when a private equity or venture capital firm is raising money for its own fund, the process is much more opaque. Thus it often goes unmentioned that VCs count state-run common retirement funds among their limited partners.

To remind everyone of that fact, State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, who manages the New York State Common Retirement Fund, dropped by the offices of two local startups yesterday afternoon: Movable Ink, which lets users serve up dynamic live content in their email, and Truveris, a software company that helps customers with pharmacy costs. We’re guessing his motivation for the tour went a little something like: Why should El Bloombito get all the credit?
http://www.betabeat.com/2012/05/10/dinapoli-new-york-state-common-retirement-fund-startups-venture-capital-05102012/

Introducing the New Bing: Spend Less Time Searching, More Time Doing
In 2009, we launched Bing with a simple proposition: people should expect more from a search engine.

Our aim has always been to help you do more with search, and over the past three years we have made exciting strides to realize that vision. Today we are taking a big step forward as we begin rolling out what is the most significant update to Bing since we launched three years ago. Over the coming weeks, we will be introducing a brand new way to search designed to help you take action and interact with friends and experts without compromising the core search experience.
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2012/05/10/spend-less-time-searching-more-time-doing-introducing-the-new-bing.aspx

Joe Weisenthal vs. the 24-Hour News Cycle
Joe Weisenthal wakes up around 4 a.m. most weekdays, afraid that in the five or six hours he has been sleeping, something happened that could move financial markets. His alarm is his cellphone, and after he silences it so that his wife can sleep, he rolls from bed and starts to type, still in his pajamas, in the darkness of his apartment at the edge of the Financial District. And the first thing he types, the first of about 150 daily messages he posts on Twitter, is almost always this: “What’d I miss?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/joe-weisenthal-vs-the-24-hour-news-cycle.html?pagewanted=all

Apple, supplier Foxconn to share costs on improving factories
Apple Inc and its key supplier Foxconn Technology Group will share the initial costs of improving labor conditions at the Chinese factories that assemble iPhones and iPads, Foxconn’s top executive said on Thursday.

Foxconn chief Terry Gou did not give a figure for the costs, but the group has been spending heavily to fight a perception its vast plants in China are sweatshops with poor conditions for its million-strong labor force. It regards the criticism as unfair.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/10/us-foxconn-idUSBRE84907J20120510

Google agrees with Mozilla’s Windows RT browser concerns
Mozilla says only a crippled version of Firefox could run on Windows for ARM chips, effectively restricting user choice to IE10, and now the maker of Chrome says it’s worried, too.

Google has joined Mozilla in its attempt to push Microsoft to permit full-fledged browsers other than Internet Explorer on Windows RT, its operating system geared for devices running ARM processors.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57431475-92/google-agrees-with-mozillas-windows-rt-browser-concerns/

How Amazon saved Zynga’s butt—and why Zynga built a cloud of its own
Five years ago, the social gaming company Zynga was cruising along with a fairly standard IT infrastructure. Servers were racked and stacked in a retail data center where Zynga rented space. Customer demand for games like Zynga Poker, launched in 2007, was being met.

Then along came FarmVille. After the game’s 2009 release, 10 million users were hitting FarmVille servers within six weeks, and 25 million within five months.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/how-amazon-saved-zyngas-buttand-why-zynga-built-a-cloud-of-its-own/

Brazil’s Startup Industry: Impressions, Insights & Lessons from Israel (Part II)
In Part I, we outlined some of the challenges facing the Brazilian startup community as it sets-out to reap the massive opportunity the local market has to offer. In Part II below, we’re going to suggest a course of action, and how it could benefit through the experience of the Israeli startup industry.

Step One: The nascent Brazilian startup community must embrace the fact that it’s going to take approximately 10 years and a lot of work and coordination to become competitive with the likes of Silicon Valley & Israel (and there aren’t any guarantees).
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/09/brazil-israel-part2/

DDOS attack: Ustream down, Bambuser under heavy load
Updated. Ustream has been unavailable this morning, and Bambuser has been under a heavy load of unusual traffic due to what looks like a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack against both live streaming providers. Ustream issued the following statement via Twitter:
http://gigaom.com/video/ustream-down-bambuser-ddos/

Lost Vegas
LOVEBIRDS Steven and Kathryn share a well-organised home in bustling Las Vegas.

They have a neat, if compact kitchen, a furnished living area, and a bedroom complete with double bed, wardrobe and bookshelf featuring a wide selection including a Frank Sinatra biography and Spanish phrase book.

And they make their money in some of the biggest casinos in the world.
But their life is far from the ordinary.

Because, along with hundreds of others, the couple are part of a secret community living in the dark and dirty underground flood tunnels below the famous strip.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/2651937/The-people-living-in-drains-below-Las-Vegas.html

Two weeks of smartphone charging in your pocket
Retailer Brookstone this year will start selling a portable fuel cell able to charge smartphones a dozen times before running out.

Fuel cell maker Lilliputian Systems today announced that Brookstone will be the first retailer to carry its portable USB power source, which will be sold under Brookstone’s brand. The fuel cell device is about the size of a thick smartphone, and the lighter fluid-filled cartridges are about the same size as a cigarette lighter.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57428080-76/two-weeks-of-smartphone-charging-in-your-pocket/

Abraham Lincoln Filed a Patent for Facebook in 1845
You guys are gonna love this story. It takes a few minutes to get to Lincoln, but it’s well worth the read.

Here’s how it all started…

I’ve been working nonstop for a while, so I wanted to take yesterday off. I decided to head out the door early in the morning and see where the day would take me. I left my phone at home because I wanted to go old-school, just the worn-out atlas in my car and no one able to bother me. I would later regret that decision.
http://natestpierre.me/2012/05/08/abraham-lincoln-patent-facebook/

Zuckerberg’s hoodie rankles Wall Street
Facebook has raked in billions and will make a splash when its stock hits the open market next week. So, what are folks on Wall Street concerned about?

Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie, apparently.

Michael Pachter, an analyst for Wedbush Securities, told Bloombergthat the Facebook CEO’s decision to show up for a meeting with potential investors dressed down in his trademark casual outerwear suggests that he’s too immature to run a massive corporation.

“He’s actually showing investors he doesn’t care that much; he’s going to be him,” Pachter said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. “I think that’s a mark of immaturity.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/09/tech/social-media/zuckerberg-hoodie-wall-street/index.html

Search engines have same speech rights as the New York Times, says Google report
Just as the New York Times can decide “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” search engines have a free speech right to choose who or what to put in their search rankings.

That’s the conclusion of a prominent First Amendment scholar commissioned by Google to make the case that the government can’t tell search engines how to design their results.
http://paidcontent.org/2012/05/09/search-engines-have-same-speech-rights-as-new-york-times-says-google-report/

Google Maps For Android Gets Google Offers, Business Photos & Indoor Walking Directions
Google just launched an update for Google Maps for Android that brings three interesting new features to the app: integration with Google Offers, support for Google Business Photos and indoor walking directions.

With the new Google Offers integration, Android users will now be able to see which nearby stores currently offer deals. This, says Google, includes both offers that can be purchased, as well as “free” offers that are available immediately. Users can also opt-in to receive notifications when there are offers near them.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/09/google-maps-for-android-gets-google-offers-business-photos-indoor-walking-directions/

Hulu To Users: Connect Your Facebook Account Or No Social For You
Last month, video provider Hulu made changes to its social sharing features. For Facebook users, it was great — Hulu made it easy to turn sharing on and off so that you don’t accidentally tell all of your Facebook friends that you just watched a video about ‘sex dice.‘

But for non-Facebookers, it was awful. The latter lost all their social features (including their friend lists) and were told they have to connect their accounts to Facebook if they want them back.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/05/07/hulu-to-users-connect-your-facebook-account-or-no-social-for-you/

Brazil’s Startup Industry: Impressions, Insights & Lessons from Israel (Part I)
Initial Capital was launched in 2011 as an investment firm targeting early stage startups in Israel and Brazil. The unlikely investment focus is the result of three friends — two Israeli and one Brazilian — turned professional investors.

Our Israeli investment network was rather mature when we launched, so we were able to hit the ground running and in the eleven months since our launch, Initial has invested in six Israeli-based startups. In Brazil, however, we spent our first months developing a similar network from scratch. Slowly but surely learning and embracing the state of, and the challenges facing, the Brazilian startup industry.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/08/brazil-israel-part1/

Robert Herjavec: Top 10 tips for budding entrepreneurs
Robert Herjavec, one of the hosts of CBC’sDragons’ Den, has lived the classic rags-to-riches story. He currently heads The Herjavec Group, listed as one of Canada’s fastest growing IT security and infrastructure integration firms. He has a 50,000-square-foot mansion valued at $15 million in Toronto’s Bridle Path. For thrills, Robert jets to a private island near Miami or cruises Toronto’s Yorkville area in one of his many luxury cars.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2009/10/05/f-small-business-robert-herjavec-dragons-den.html

Yahoo Employees Are Angry At Thompson: ‘How angry? LIVID!’
Yahoo employees are angry, disappointed, and feeling pushed to the limit because of CEO Scott Thompson’s resume scandal.

For at least eight years, Thompson allowed people – employers, employees, and shareholders of eBay and Yahoo – to believe that he had a computer science degree from Stonehill College when he did not actually have one.
http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-employees-are-livid-over-thompsons-resume-scandal-2012-5?op=1#ixzz1uIDlyiQO

Viddy hits 26M users, consistently registering over 500K a day
On April 16th, I wrote an article about how popular video sharing app Viddy had hit 6.5M users. Less than a month later, the company tells me that it’s starting to consistently sign up over 500K new users a day, and currently boasts a userbase of 26M.

That’s pretty impressive growth in less than a month, isn’t it? Mark Zuckerberg joined Viddy to see what all of the hype was about, and investors are quite happy with its growth.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/05/08/viddy-hits-26m-users-consistently-registering-over-500k-a-day/

Facebook Social Readers Are All Collapsing
The Washington Post was the first publication to experiment with a “frictionless” social reader app, whichlaunched last year. If you use Facebook you’ve probably come across it: it manifests as a clustered list of stories that are almost completely unrelated except for the fact that they all come from the same publication.

If you decide to click on a link it doesn’t take you to the story. Instead, it shunts you over to a signup screen for Social Reader, which you have to accept if you want to make it through to the site. This forceful behavior is how the Post’s reader app gained tens of millions of users in a few short months; it’s also how, as Jeff Bercovici at Forbes pointed out this morning, the Washington Post seems to have worn its readers — or Facebook — out. They’re annoyed, and they’re quitting in droves:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/facebook-social-readers-are-all-collapsing

The Race: Build the Instagram of Video
Facebook Inc.’s $1 billion acquisition of photo-sharing start-up Instagram has shifted the spotlight to the newest phenomena in mobile apps: uploading personal videos from smartphones.

A growing number of start-ups are providing easy ways to share videos taken from a smartphone, enabling people to add music and text and to share the results on Facebook or another social network.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702304451104577390333679922236-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwNzEwNDcyWj.html

ON THNEEDS AND THE “DEATH OF DISPLAY”
It’s all over the news these days: Display advertising is dead. Or put more accurately, the world of “boxes and rectangles” is dead. No one pays attention to banner ads, the reasoning goes, and the model never really worked in the first place (except for direct response). Brand marketers are demanding more for their money, and “standard display” is simply not delivering. After nearly 20 years*, it’s time to bury the banner, and move on to….
http://battellemedia.com/archives/2012/05/on-thneeds-and-the-death-of-display.php

Google infringed Oracle copyrights, jury finds, but deals a blow to Oracle’s quest for $1 billion
A federal jury Monday delivered a messy split verdict in the trial over Google’s (GOOG) popular Android mobile software, by finding that Google infringed copyrights held by tech rival Oracle (ORCL) but failing to answer a key question that Oracle needed to press its case for nearly $1 billion in damages.

The result was a blow to Oracle’s quest for a share of profits in the world’s leading smartphone operating system. And it put some of the most important issues of the case back in the hands of a judge to decide.
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_20566834/google-infringed-oracle-copyrights-jury-finds

A Detailed Look At Tizen on Samsung’s First Prototype Device
Tizen just hit the 1.0 release last week (codenamed Larkspur), and at the Tizen Conference I’ve had the chance to play with the prototype device that Samsung has been handing out to developers to test their applications. Its basically a super large screen device, (my guess is about 4.3-4.7″ inches, 720p HD) that’s running on an ARM chip. In some cases it contains a cellular radio, while some device are WIFI only. There’s no word on what clock speed are they running at, or the the size of battery that’s inside.
http://thehandheldblog.com/2012/05/08/tizen-phone-demo/

Google: AT&T’s CEO doesn’t understand how Android phones get updated
Like us, Google appears to be confused by last night’s report—where AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson told a questioner that the fault of Android smartphones not receiving updates is Google’s.

Stephenson blamed Google, claiming, “Google determines what platform gets the newest releases and when. A lot of times, that’s a negotiated arrangement and that’s something we work at hard. We know that’s important to our customers. That’s kind of an ambiguous answer because I can’t give you a direct answer in this setting.”
http://9to5google.com/2012/05/07/google-atts-ceo-doesnt-understand-how-android-phones-get-updated/

Facebook’s power play
Facebook’s business is built on fun and games and the childhood belief that sharing is caring, but there’s nothing cute about its lobbying operation: Its D.C. shop has been built for battle.

Founded in 2004, Facebook has put in place a sophisticated policy and political support network to wage war on potential privacy regulations — one of the greatest risks to the company’s post-IPO future.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/75974.html#ixzz1uCeKhxTB

Zynga sues Microsoft-backed social gaming startup Kobojo over ‘PyramidVille’ game
Last week, social gaming juggernaut Zynga filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against one of Europe’s leading social games companies, venture-backed Kobojo.

The Paris, France-based social games studio last year released a Facebook game called PyramidVille, and, in partnership with a company called BulkyPix, brought the game to mobile devices (PDF) at the beginning of this year.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/05/06/zynga-sues-microsoft-backed-social-gaming-startup-kobojo-over-pyramidville-game/

Warren Buffett advised Mark Zuckerberg, won’t buy Facebook shares
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently asked Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett for advice. Although the two men talked for hours, Buffett doesn’t plan to invest in Facebook.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/warren-buffett-advised-mark-zuckerberg-wont-buy-facebook-shares/12610

AT&T to launch $49.99 Focus 2 Windows Phone on May 20th
Samsung and AT&T on Monday announced the Samsung Focus 2, a budget-friendly Windows Phone launching on May 20th for just $49.99 on contract. The handset features a 4-inch Super AMOLED display, a 5-megapixel camera, Windows Phone 7.5 and 4G LTE connectivity. “AT&T offers our customers the broadest Windows Phone portfolio of any carrier, with three 4G LTE Windows Phones – the only 4G LTE Windows Phones in the U.S. – now at a variety of price points and form factors,” AT&T SVP of devices Jeff Bradley said. “The Samsung Focus 2 brings the people-first Windows Phone interface together with AT&T’s fast 4G LTE network for an unbeatable experience.” Samsung’s full press release follows below.
http://www.bgr.com/2012/05/07/samsung-focus-2-att-49-99-may-20/

Pirate island attracts more than 100 startup tenants
Over 100 international tech companies have registered their interest in the floating geek city, Blueseed, which will be launched next year in international waters outside of Silicon Valley.

The visa-free, start-up friendly concept launched late last year aims to create a fully commercial technology incubator where global entrepreneurs can live and work in close proximity to the Valley, accessing VC dosh and talent as required.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/06/floating_geek_cruiser_recruits_aussies/

The venture capital model is broken, and this damning report explains why
Industry watchers have been talking for a long while now about how the venture capital industry is broken,highlighted by poor returns that in many cases don’t even exceed that of the major stock indices.

Now, thanks to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation — which has invested in nearly 100 venture capital firms across the country over the past 20 years — we’re getting an inside look into the problems rattling the industry.
http://www.geekwire.com/2012/venture-capital-model-broken-damning-report-explains/

Google Gets Deeper Into the Content Business, by Putting Money Into Machinima
Google has been handing out money to video makers so they’ll make more stuff for YouTube. Now it’s putting money into a video maker itself.

The search giant is set to invest in Machinima, one of the most popular networks on YouTube, via a funding round that should close within a month. Machinima focuses almost exclusively on YouTube videos for and about videogame players, and generates more than a billion views a month.
http://allthingsd.com/20120507/google-gets-deeper-into-the-content-business-by-putting-money-into-machinima/

LG Electronics to launch Google TV in U.S. in late May: executive
LG Electronics Inc, the world’s No.2 TV maker, plans to launch Internet-enabled TV based on Google’s platform in the United States in the week of May 21, as the South Korean firm seeks to gain a larger share of the emerging Internet TV market, a senior LG executive said on Monday.

The move reflects an aggressive push by the duo to defend against a potential threat from Apple Inc, which reshaped the handset market with its iPhone smartphone and is widely expected to unveil a full-fledged TV product later this year or early next year.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/07/net-us-google-lg-idUSBRE84602Y20120507

Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps
By the time Apple released the iPad in April of 2010, just four months after Steve Jobs first announced his “magical and revolutionary” new machines in San Francisco, traditional publishers had been overtaken by a collective delusion. They believed that mobile computers with large, colorful screens, such as the iPad, iPhone, and similar devices using Google’s Android software, would allow them to unwind their unhappy histories with the Internet.
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/40319/

Apple reportedly to release US$799 MacBook Air in 3Q12
Apple is reportedly considering responding to the upcoming second-generation ultrabooks by launching a US$799 MacBook Air in the third quarter of 2012, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

Although Acer has recently reduced its ultrabook shipment target, Intel continues to aggressively push ultrabooks and is aiming to have the devices priced at US$699 in the second half of the year. However, if Intel is unable to bring down ASPs to its goal, the price gap between ultrabooks and the US$799 MacBook Air may further postpone the time ultrabooks become standardized, the sources noted.
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120507PD214.html