Maryland Becomes First State To OK Facebook Password Protection Bill
Maryland is poised to become the first state to ban employers from demanding applicants or workers hand over their log-in information for social media sites like Facebook.
The measure, which handily passed the legislature earlier this month, keeps managers from snooping on password-protected content, a practice advocates of the bill say violates privacy and intimidates job seekers and employees.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/20/maryland-becomes-first-st_n_1439866.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003
Google Drive Interface Leaked in Employee Presentation [EXCLUSIVE]
Tuesday we heard rumors that Google will soon be launching Google Drive — its own cloud service — and now we have an exclusive screen shot of the Google Drive interface that seems to confirm that rumor.
A Google employee giving a presentation at a university in Brazil Tuesday appears to have accessed that presentation via Google Drive. Pedro Henrique Moschetta was at the keynote, and sent Mashable a shot of what may be Google’s cloud service in action.
http://mashable.com/2012/04/19/google-drive-leaked/
YouTube faces massive music royalty bill in German copyright case
YouTube could be forced to pay royalties to those whose music copyright was infringed upon. It was also ordered to install word-based filters to bolster its existing filtering system to prevent further infringement of copyrighted work.
But YouTube warned that the measures would slow down the upload process, which could lead to a knock-on effect to citizen journalists in particular, who rely on the site to break user-contributed news.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/youtube-faces-massive-music-royalty-bill-in-german-copyright-case/4243
Top mobile apps showcased at DEMO 2012
As is generally the case at trade shows today, mobile technology has been top of mind at the DEMO conference in Santa Clara, taking up the first half of the event’s first day. Here are some of the mobile apps that stood out.
The TourWrist iOS app is basically a Google Street View equivalent for any location the user decides to document; the app captures 360-degree panoramic images and shares them online. Aside from the sample panorama from what was supposedly Ryan Seacrest’s view from the stage of “American Idol,” the demonstration previewed some potentially valuable real-world use cases, such as the Grand Canyon for the travel sector and a multimillion-dollar home for real estate.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/041912-demo-mobile-258462.html
Anontune: The New Social Music Platform From Anonymous
In a move sure to attract attention from the music industry, a small group of coders claiming to be part of Anonymous is putting together a social music platform. The rather ambitious goal: Create a service that seamlessly pulls up songs streaming from all around the internet.
The project, called Anontune and still in its infancy, is designed to pull songs from third-party sources like YouTube and let anonymous users put them into playlists and share them — while keeping the service from being shut down by music industry lawsuits.
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/04/anontune-anonymous/
Skype recruiting Xbox developers for ‘next generation services’
A llsting on Microsoft’s job site reveals that it’s looking develop Skype products for the Xbox. The company has kept pretty quiet on its plans for integrating its Skype purchase into its various hardware pockets. While a beta for Windows Phone continues to tick along, this is the first salient sign that Skype and Xbox are looking to team-up. According to the listing: “As a member of the Skype Xbox Engineering Team in London, you will have a strong technical background developing client and/or embedded software.”
http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/20/microsoft-recruits-xbox-devs-for-skype/
Google’s Tim Lindholm faces off with David Boies on Java license
David Boies, Oracle’s lead lawyer in the Silicon Valley trial of titans, had a nice set-up for day four of the proceedings. On day three, Wednesday, Boies probed Google CEO Larry Page about his familiarity with Tim Lindholm, a software engineer working on the Android team who was involved in determining whether Google should acquire a license for Java.
Boies asked Page about a 2005 document stating, “Google/Android, with support from Tim Lindholm, negotiates the first OSS J2ME JVM license with Sun.” Lindholm had just joined Google from Sun.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57416282-94/googles-tim-lindholm-faces-off-with-david-boies-on-java-license/
A daily dating deal? Say hello to Coffee Meets Bagel
Tired of the pithy online dating profiles, messaging systems, quick match games, “algorithmic matching,” and rating random people you’ve never met in real life? Take a big sip of Coffee Meets Bagel, the newest refreshing online dating play, which launched this week in New York City.
Arum Kang, the female founder and Harvard Business School graduate wanted to make online dating easier, less random and more private. She was inspired by daily deals sites and her sister Soo’s frustrations with dating in New York. Rather than having to search a database of daters, she wanted to deliver a date per day, at noon on the spot, to your email inbox. By linking through Facebook authentication, CMB is able to set the user up with a friend of a friend, instead of just some random stranger, hopefully vetting for quality.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/20/daily-dating-deal-coffee-meets-bagel/
