VentureBeat |
- Slick news reader Pulse heads to Windows Phone, taking its time with ads
- HealthTap’s social network of 5,000 doctors is ready to give free advice
- Facebook offers up to $10M in free ads for small businesses
- Samsung ships 10M Galaxy S II phones, announces slick HD LTE variant
- Tumblr grabs another $85M in fresh funding
- Zynga takes its most popular game, CityVille, to Google+
- Amazon Prime streaming video gets Fox titles, one step closer to Netflix
- Why music video games aren’t dead
- Evri brings topic-based news discovery to the iPad
- Quantance raises $11M to create efficient power supply chips for mobile phones
- Beating out HBO, Netflix cuts streaming movie deal with DreamWorks
- Facebook tracks what you do online, even when you’re logged out
- Google about to make Google Docs into a virtual hard drive called Google Drive
| Slick news reader Pulse heads to Windows Phone, taking its time with ads Posted: 26 Sep 2011 09:01 AM PDT
The free app will join Pulse’s family of iPhone, iPad and Android apps, bringing with it the same slick grid-based design for perusing news. The Windows Phone Pulse app will have a few features exclusive to the platform, including the ability to follow your favorite news source as a live tile on your phone’s home screen. The company tells me that the app is expected to land in the Windows Phone Marketplace early this week. The news reader has come a long way since its infamous debut in 2010, when the New York Times objected to the app because it felt Pulse was stealing its content. Now, publishers are eager to get on board with the app, co-founder Akshay Kothari told me during a recent trip to New York City. That makes sense, since tablets are now a much bigger computing segment than a year ago, most due to the success of Apple’s iPad over the past year. And for media companies, who sometimes have trouble adjusting to new technology, it’s also much clearer what tablets have to offer consumers now. Kothari tells me that Alphonso Labs, the company behind Pulse, is thinking hard about how to implement ads into the app. Pulse used to cost $3.99 on the iPad, which was part of the reason the NYT and other media companies took issue with it. Now, the app is freely available on all platforms, but the company is in need of a revenue stream. Kothari says he’s not in a rush to implement ads though — Alphonso Labs is more concerned with making sure they integrate well into Pulse’s elegant user experience. He showed me a few prototype ads, which I can’t say much about here, but which definitely adhered to Pulse’s slick aesthetic. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Pulse recently raised $9 million from New Enterprise Associates, Greycroft Partners, and Lerer Ventures.  Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat        
      This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| HealthTap’s social network of 5,000 doctors is ready to give free advice Posted: 26 Sep 2011 08:45 AM PDT
“Facebook and Twitter are dangerous for doctors, but everyone wants to take part in social networking,” says HealthTap CEO and founder Ron Gutman, referring to the perils of patient confidentiality and lawsuits for giving wrong advice. Social and medicine haven’t boded well under the shared banner of technology, but Gutman is creating a social environment that works for doctors and patients.
Getting these doctors to become part of a social network was no small task. HealthTap began 20 weeks ago (Gutman refers to the time in “weeks,” similar to the way a new parent refers to the age of their child) as a network for OB/GYNs and pregnant women. This was a smart vertical to tackle first; as many doctors in this field are some of the industry’s most vocal about preventative medicine, patient rights and universal healthcare. Word spread of the network, like it does for all successful social networks, and today HealthTap’s app has grown to incorporate 82 healthcare fields. The app is available for iOS and Android, smartphones and tablets. To help encourage doctors and patients to participate in the network, the app uses gamification elements. Doctors are able to showcase their specialties in a way that cannot be expressed on review sites like Yelp. They are able to show how much they know and lend a bit of their own voice and style to their profiles and answers. They get points and higher visibility the more helpful they are. There’s the potential for doctors to connect with new patients locally and grow their practice. Meanwhile, HealthTap patients get free answers to medical questions and can then make the most of doctor-visits. There’s no time wasted, neither the patient’s nor the doctor’s, on general questions. Patients can spend their face-to-face time getting to the root of their medical issues. They can also learn when they can skip a visit or absolutely need to see a doctor. That goes for some of the most embarrassing health questions, too. “My teenage daughter suggested I start reaching out to teenagers on MySpace,” says Dr. Jeff Livingston who runs MacArthur OB/GYN in Irving, Texas. He was one of the first physicians in the HealthTap network, but has experimented with social media as a way to help people for more than a decade. “We created a page and suddenly kids started asking questions they were embarrassed about asking in person,” says Livingston. “I think we are in the beginning of the social media revolution. It's not the technology that’s important. It's patient engagement. You don't just go online to read something. You go on to interact; to have a dialogue. Doctors are trying to figure out their social media presence, but we haven't yet connected the dots.” Connecting the dots between health and tech hasn’t been easy. This year search and social network giant Google shut down its health records project called Google Health. Social networks for health have struggled to gain acceptance or have failed all together. For example, Trusera shut down in 2009, a year after it go started. Its problem was lack of funding and the shaky foundation of peer-to-peer medical advice (not expert). Healthcare accounts for almost 1/5 of the United States’ GDP and has been troubled and regulated to the extent that only the most experienced entrepreneurs can cut through the thicket. The cost to entering the industry has been to high, but the potential rewards are higher. Angel investors are getting more interested in health tech. Esther Dyson, a renowned angel investor, is backing HealthTap. She has also invested in 23andMe and Medstory (sold to Microsoft). Venture capitalists are also starting to invest in health tech, i.e. not just health companies or tech companies. “We’ve invested in both healthcare and technology and done very well,” says Patrick Chung, a partner at venture capital firm NEA. “But there wasn’t a migration. There was a healthcare investment team and an IT investment team. In the last two to three years we’ve been seeing exciting cross sections of the two.” Chung says entrepreneurs are now “casting their eyes to the giant, aging patient of healthcare” and points to companies not regulated by healthcare legislation, like 23andMe, that have carved a path for information that can be acted upon. Lots of smart people are jumping on this bandwagon. “All good venture capitalists should follow the talent,” says Chung. “The most promising entrepreneurs had not yet gotten into this space. There weren’t a lot of health it startups period. But now some of the most promising, high-energy entrepreneurs are getting into it.” Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Facebook offers up to $10M in free ads for small businesses Posted: 26 Sep 2011 08:36 AM PDT
The stated goal of the program is to help “invest, educate, and connect” with small businesses by giving 200,000 companies $50 each in ad credits. The company wants to show businesses how Facebook advertising works and how it can help their businesses if they spend more ad dollars targeting social networkers. Facebook also wants to pull ad spending from the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo. The program to give businesses free ad credits starts in January 2012. Until that time, Facebook, NFIB and the U.S. Chamber said they will provide businesses with webinars, tips and case studies that show how to reach new customers using Facebook. Facebook uses the example of Minneapolis-based CM Photographics as a star small business that used Facebook ads to generate greater revenues. Facebook claims the small company generated about $40,000 in revenue from $600 spent on Facebook ads. Facebook made a lot of headlines last week as it introduced several major changes to its service, including Timelines, which are re-imagined user profiles that show years of activity on Facebook. No doubt the changes were also partially focused on making it easier for advertisers to better connect with Facebook’s more than 750 million users. What do you think of Facebook’s initiative to offer free ads to small businesses? Do you think small companies will spend money on Facebook ads? Filed under: media, social        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Samsung ships 10M Galaxy S II phones, announces slick HD LTE variant Posted: 26 Sep 2011 08:20 AM PDT
The company also announced the Galaxy S II HD LTE today, its most powerful version of the phone yet, with a 4G LTE radio and killer high-resolution screen, according to Boy Genius Report. The Galaxy S II reached its 10 million shipment milestone just eight weeks after Samsung announced the phone hit 5 million shipped units. The numbers don’t reflect actual sales to consumers; they refer to devices Samsung has shipped to retailers. Still, the fact that shipments are moving quickly is a sign that sales are healthy. The phone originally launched in Korea in April, and it has begun to make its way to US carriers this month. For those looking for the absolute latest mobile hardware, the Galaxy S II LTE HD variant should satisfy. The phone sports a 4.65-inch Super AMOLED HD display with an astounding 1280 by 720 resolution. That means it will be able to run 720p high-definition video at full resolution, and it sports an even higher resolution and pixel density than the iPhone 4′s Retina Display. The phone’s LTE radio also makes it ready for Verizon and AT&T’s 4G networks. Samsung already announced an LTE variant of the Galaxy S II a few weeks ago, so it’ll likely be some time before we see this HD LTE model. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Tumblr grabs another $85M in fresh funding Posted: 26 Sep 2011 07:37 AM PDT
Tumblr has seen some impressive page view growth. But even with the growth, the company has struggled to generate revenues. Traffic for Tumblr’s blogs now attract more than 13 billion views per month compared to 2 million views at the beginning of the year. comScore stats indicate the service attracted 13.4 million unique visitors in the U.S. in July. Since the service was introduced, a sizable 30 million blogs have been created. And now those 30 million odd blogs generate more than 40 million blog posts per day. The company itself has been growing as well. In December, it had 16 employees and it now has around 50. News of the new funding has been floating around the web since late August, but has only been confirmed today. The round was led by Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners. Richard Branson, Sequoia Capital, Chernin Group, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures also participated. Tumblr last raised $30 million back in December 2010, with funding coming from Sequoia Capital, Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. The company has raised about $125 million total, including the new funding. Are you a fan of Tumblr and its blogs? Filed under: deals, social        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Zynga takes its most popular game, CityVille, to Google+ Posted: 26 Sep 2011 07:18 AM PDT
The move could be strategically important for both Google and Zynga, which need each other: Zynga needs Google+ to help it gain more independence from Facebook, and Google+ needs successful games like Zynga’s CityVille to lure users over to its fledgling social network. Meanwhile, the move is a blow for leading social network Facebook, which has had CityVille as an exclusive in Western markets. Zynga previously announced in July that it was taking CityVille to China through the Tencent social network. CityVille definitely needs a shot in the arm. Today, it has about 72 million monthly active users, down from its peak of more than 100 million users. Meanwhile, the No. 2 game on Facebook, The Sims Social from Electronic Arts, now has more than 60 million monthly active users. The addition of CityVille to Google+ should help the growth of games on Google’s platform. Previously, Zynga had launched a version of Zynga Poker on Google+. Under an agreement with Facebook, it wasn’t clear if Zynga would be allowed to move its games to other platforms. In exchange for supporting Facebook Credits and marketing support from Facebook, Zynga agreed to keep its games exclusive to Facebook. But the deal has a variety of conditions under which Zynga can move its games to other platforms, evidently. San Francisco-based Zynga said this is one more step in its mission to “connect the world through games and create play for everyone, everywhere — no matter which platform they play on.” Zynga is hoping that diversification will help it grow faster and produce more stable revenues. That, in turn, should help it go public through its planned initial public offering. Filed under: games, social, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Amazon Prime streaming video gets Fox titles, one step closer to Netflix Posted: 26 Sep 2011 07:13 AM PDT Hot on the heels of Netflix’s licensing deal with Dreamworks Animation, Amazon announced today that it has reached a licensing deal with Twentieth Century Fox to bring its movies and TV shows to Amazon’s Prime streaming video library. That brings Amazon’s total number of streaming video titles for Prime customers (who pay $79 a year for two-day shipping and other niceties) to over 11,000, edging quite close to Netflix’s roughly 12,500 titles (according to Instant Watcher, a service that makes it easy to find streaming Netflix titles). As part of the deal, Prime customers will have access to Fox movies like Office Space, Last of the Mohicans, and Speed. Currently, only some Fox films are available for streaming on Netflix (though Netflix has most Fox TV series). Amazon already has licensing deals from CBS, NBC Universal, Warner Brothers, and more. Given recent consumer frustration with Netflix due to rising subscription prices and the seemingly bone-headed way it spun off its DVD-by-mail business into a new service called Qwikster, now is the perfect time for competitors like Amazon to land more content deals and steal away subscribers. Similar to Netflix, Amazon also has both its on-demand and Prime video services available on connected TVs and set-top boxes, which makes it easy for consumers to get access to its videos in their living rooms. The Prime streaming video service shouldn’t be confused with Amazon’s on-demand video service, which currently has over 100,000 titles available for rental and purchase. Filed under: media, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Why music video games aren’t dead Posted: 26 Sep 2011 07:00 AM PDT
But despite critics' claims, the beat hasn't stopped for music games, which continue to enjoy chart-topping success in a multitude of forms and formats. As revealed in my new book Music Games Rock: Rhythm Gaming's Greatest Hits of All Time (downloadable free here), here's why it's premature to label them a one-hit wonder. Online, Mobile and Social Play As we speak, smartphones, tablet PCs, web browsers and social networks are introducing millions to gaming, and expanding its audience to include even those who don't consider themselves gamers per se. Moreover, billions of players are suddenly now walking around with ready-made jukeboxes in their pocket, or piped into free multiplayer (and therefore virtual-concert-ready) venues courtesy of services like Google+ and Facebook. Given the unique ability to serve as a common unifier across cultural, generational and socioeconomic divides, music – and, most importantly, music games – are spearheading the forefront of the revolution. Make no mistake: Mobile, social, digital and online connected play is the future of music games, and already leading the field forward into a brave new era. From iPhone and iPad outings including Tap Tap Glee, VidRhythm and Songify to digital downloads like Audiosurf and Facebook offerings like Nightclub City and Dirty Dancing, a new breed of title is quickly emerging. And between the rise of franchises like Tap Tap Revenge and gamification-powered group listening services like Turntable.FM, their impact is already being felt. Between free and value-priced titles which tap into your smartphone and tablet PC’s digital music library, or let you download new tunes on-demand, the category's fortunes are rapidly soaring. Simultaneously, new titles like Skillz also aim to provide experiences akin to those console-based competitors, i.e. DJ Hero, do at a fraction of the cost, minus the oversized controllers. Given music’s massive appeal, and growing on-demand availability and ubiquity through connected devices, today's mobile and social platforms offer endless brave new horizons for game makers to explore and conquer. Digital Distribution Sales of pricey plastic peripheral-based performance simulation games have been waning lately. But as can be seen from Rock Band, described by creator Harmonix as "a platform" and still drawing over one million people monthly to download new music online, it may be irrelevant. With said series having shifted over 100 million digital singles alone, it's becoming increasingly apparent that online music distribution, not retailing fake Stratocasters, may be the real viable long-term business here. Novel offerings with an attractive, attention-grabbing and instantly communicable hook, music games with fake drum sets and Stratocasters such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band may secretly have just been Trojan horses. Serving to capture the public's imagination and introduce the ability to physically interact with songs, each effectively sneaked the beginnings of a pipeline for high-tech direct-to-consumer record industry sales into millions of homes. Admittedly more unwieldy and tougher to dispense than an iTunes download, these sets nonetheless remain capable of delivering virtually distributed songs, which users can play with and enjoy in myriad ways, at high premiums and margins. For artists, record labels and game makers alike, the genre's large installed base and voracious appetite for new tracks could prove a healthy business going forward. User-Generated Content and Downloadable Content (DLC) Devices like the Nintendo 3DS already offer popular features for built-in sound recording and sharing. Ditto for past outings like Guitar Hero: World Tour, which offers a complete song creation studio. But newer titles like Everybody Dance, YooStar on MTV and SingStar Dance also include the ability to tape and share performances online or distribute content via Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Whether creating beatbox-style remixes with applications like Cambox, or simply popping and locking on camera, all are tailor-made for viral spread, and helping quickly expand the category's reach and audience. Though turning friends, family and shots of you accidentally two-stepping into the coffee table into embarrassing videos may seem innocuous, don't be fooled. By allowing users to effortlessly express themselves, edit creations and spread the word, all present a tremendous opportunity that game makers are rapidly capitalizing on to build new promotional and sales opportunities. Motion-Sensing and Active Games
Granted, titles like the upcoming Ubisoft game Rocksmith, played with a real guitar, will inevitably face an uphill battle going forward. Interested as people are in getting off the couch and shaking their moneymaker though, gesture-powered options like The Black Eyed Peas Experience still seem poised for success. Will motion-tracking dance and karaoke games rule going forward? That remains TBD. But given the seemingly rich and largely untapped vein active titles present by letting players literally get in the game, we wouldn’t bet against it. Video game and technology expert Scott Steinberg is the head of video game consulting firm TechSavvy Global. A business keynote speaker, analyst and industry consultant, he's a regular on-air correspondent for ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and CNN. The creator and host of popular online video shows Tech Industry Insider, Gear Up and GameTheory, he's a noted an entrepreneur and media analyst whose companies self-publish books, software, websites and more. His latest book is Music Games Rock: Rhythm Gaming's Greatest Hits of All Time (2011, Power Play Publishing) – 100% free to download at www.MusicGamesRock.com, also available on iBooks and Kindle ($2.99) and in paperback ($24.99) editions. Filed under: games        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Evri brings topic-based news discovery to the iPad Posted: 26 Sep 2011 05:00 AM PDT
Evri says its iPad app is the first to offer topic-based news discovery, while competitors like Pulse and Flipboard focus more on collecting stories from specific news sources or your social networks. Evri originally launched at the DEMO conference in 2009 with a semantic search engine aimed at publishers, but now the company is targeting users directly with mobile apps for discovering news. The iPad app makes finding interesting stories and trending topics easy, thanks to a technology that distills around 2.5 million topics from over 15,000 sources. It’s also easy to personalize, since the iPad app can connect to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. The Evri app will also recommend stories to you based on what you’ve read. Evri CEO Will Hunsinger tells VentureBeat that the company is now spending most of its energy on mobile apps, including EvriThing Gaming, EvriThing Tech, and SportsStream Football. After recently launching its football app, the company has seen tens of thousands of downloads. Overall, Evri is nearing half-a-million downloads for all of its mobile apps, Hunsinger says. Evri has offices in Seattle and San Francisco and it has received $8 million in funding ftom Vulcan Capital. Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Quantance raises $11M to create efficient power supply chips for mobile phones Posted: 26 Sep 2011 04:30 AM PDT
The chips, which took more than six years to develop, could play a huge role in making smartphones more powerful and have longer battery lives. “Most of these new phones operate at very high speeds and so they need a power supply that operates at high speeds also,” said Vikas Vinayak, chief executive of Quantance, in an interview. “But batteries and power supplies are too slow. They have not kept up with the consumer's voracious appetite for accessing mobile content and applications when and where they want them.” Most power supplies aren’t good enough to deal with the rapidly changing needs of a smartphone, which could be using a little bit of power one second and using a lot the next because the user answers a phone call or initiates an application. The benefit of Quantance’s better power supply chip (pictured right), which will cost 50 cents to $1, is that it enables faster data uplink speeds, improved performance, and better network reception for smartphones, tablets and data cards. The power supply’s job is to efficiently take power from a battery or a bus and deliver it to various circuits inside an electronics device such as a smartphone or tablet. It must deliver the power in the right amount and do so at a high speed. The problem is that some existing power supplies can generate voltage efficiently and others do it quickly. But none can be simultaneously quick and efficient. Most power supplies deliver more power than is needed, because if they deliver less than is needed, an application will fail and you’ll get the mobile equivalent of the Windows “blue screen of death,” Vinayak said. With such overkill, the designer can be certain that a call will never get dropped because of inadequate power moving to the radio. But delivering too much power is inefficient, and it means the device will run out of power too early. “We deliver the exact amount of power needed in the exact place, because our power supply is so much faster,” Vinayak said.
While waiting to get his Green Card, Vinayak happened to take an online Stanford University class on mathematical communication theory, via the Stanford Instructional Television Network. As he did so, he realized that the formula that most RF engineers use to calculate efficiency was incorrect. He worked out the correct formula, but he was shocked to find that the correct formula and the industry’s incorrect formula both gave the same number for efficiency — one reason it was never detected. Vinayak then tried to reconcile the different equations mathematically and managed to develop a new one. It turned out the equation could be true only if certain properties were true; and subsequent math simulations proved them to be so. “With this, I knew how to design the world’s fastest response power supply that was also highly efficient,” Vinayak said. “I loved analog circuits, and found I had to do something totally opposite of what was taught.” Vinayak formally founded the company, which is based in San Mateo, Calif., in 2006. To build its chips, the company has had to gather expertise in analog design, digital signal processing, and radio frequency design. All of that resulted in a tiny package that is just 1.5 millimeters square in size. Vinayak patented a technology that combines efficient analog computation with digital switching technology to respond to changes in power requirements about 100 times faster than other power supplies on the market. Conventional power supplies for 4G smartphones respond at 4 megahertz. But Quantance’s technology works at the equivalent of 400 megahertz, without drastically reducing efficiency. That allows uplink data speeds to be improved as much as three-fold, based on field trials, Vinayak said. Vinayak acknowledged it was “pretty hard” to convince investors to fund a chip company, since almost no chip companies are raising money these days. But his company jumped through a series of hurdles to earn its credibility. First, the company had to create prototype designs and then produce working chips. The potential customers then offered their feedback on the new features they wanted. “The technical part was very tough, and then we had to convince companies to take a risk on us,” Vinayak said. “We are lucky to have investors that understood what we wanted to do.” Quantance had to then go back and redesign its chip and produce more working samples. The whole process took more than six years. By 2012, Vinayak expects smartphones with Quantance chips to debut in the market. Most semiconductor companies have tried to create the same technology, but most have given up. Quantance is talking with many of them to be potential customers. A handful of related startups also failed, which was why it was so hard to raise money, Vinayak said. The investors include TD Fund, Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners, and DoCoMo Capital. Eric Zimits, managing director at Granite Ventures, said that Quantance is a leader in a market that could consume 10 billion devices over the next eight years. He expects Quantance’s technology to appear in many 4G devices. The funding will help the company launch chip production as well as design new chips. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the biggest contract chip manufacturer, will make the chip for Quantance. Quantance has 18 employees and it hopes to increase that by 50 percent this year. One unnamed manufacturer is designing Quantance’s solution into a power supply for a device that will begin prototype production later this year. A carrier will then put the mobile device through product trials. Volume production could begin in 2012. “Most of the companies are talking to us now, and I’m not aware of any company that is ready to ship a production device here,” Vinayak said. “We are the only ones doing this.” Filed under: deals, mobile        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Beating out HBO, Netflix cuts streaming movie deal with DreamWorks Posted: 26 Sep 2011 12:30 AM PDT
In scoring the deal, Netflix managed to beat out HBO, marking the first time Netflix’s web streaming has beat out a major pay-TV producer in securing a distribution deal with a major film maker. Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, told the New York Times that consumers no longer distinguish between web-based or TV-based content. “We are really starting to see a long-term road map of where the industry is headed,” Katzenberg said. “This is a game-changing deal.” Ted Sarandos, chief content officer at Netflix, said, “You're seeing power moving back into the hands of content creators. When a company like DreamWorks ends a long-running pay-TV deal — when a new buyer in the space steps up — that's a really interesting landscape shift.” Netflix isn’t exactly sitting pretty, though. It faces growing competition from Apple, Amazon, Vudu and Wal-Mart. And Dish Network announced a Blockuster-branded streaming and DVD-by-mail service on Friday, presenting yet more competition for Netflix. Meanwhile Netflix consumers are reeling from a hefty price hike that drove many of them to get rid of their long-term accounts for DVD-by-mail service. Netflix will also lose the rights to stream a lot of films in February, since it failed to renegotiate a deal with cable channel Starz. Netflix’s decision to spin off its DVD-by-mail service has also caused some backlash. This quarter, about 1 million of Netflix’s 25 million consumers have dropped the service because of the price hike. And the company lost half its market value, or $8 billion, in two months. Netflix will begin streaming DreamWorks movies in 2013. Filed under: deals, media        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Facebook tracks what you do online, even when you’re logged out Posted: 25 Sep 2011 11:39 AM PDT Updated 10pm Pacific with comments from Facebook. Entrepreneur and hacker Nik Cubrilovic reports that Facebook can track the web pages you visit even when you are logged out of Facebook. According to Cubrilovic’s tests, Facebook merely alters its tracking cookies when you log out, rather than deleting them. Your account information and other unique identifiable tokens are still present in these cookies, which means that any time you visit a web page with a Facebook button or widget, your browser is still sending personally identifiable information back to Facebook. “With my browser logged out of Facebook, whenever I visit any page with a Facebook like button, or share button, or any other widget, the information, including my account ID, is still being sent to Facebook,” Cubrilovic wrote. “They definitely have the information stored,” Cubrilovic told VentureBeat in an interview today. “As to what they do with it, you can only speculate.” Facebook engineer Arturo Bejar said (in the comments on this post) that Facebook uses the data from logged-out cookies only to prevent spamming, phishing and other security risks. “Also please know that also when you’re logged in (or out) we don’t use our cookies to track you on social plugins to target ads or sell your information to third parties,” Bejar said. Cubrilovic’s claims are based on his analysis of HTTP headers sent by browsers to Facebook.com. He says the tests are repeatable by anyone with a browser that has development tools installed. If correct, this could be a potentially serious violation of privacy. Some people are already alarmed that Facebook’s new “open graph” apps can report what you are reading or listening to in real time, adding the media you consume to your profile as an update without you clicking a “like” button. It’s not clear how Facebook’s 800 million reported users will react to this revelation. "Facebook trains you to undervalue your privacy,” said author and BoingBoing editor Cory Doctorow earlier this week at the Strata Summit in New York, and many of the site’s users have shown no hesitation at all in continuing to use the site despite its complicated and constantly-changing privacy settings. On the other hand, consumer reaction to Facebook’s Beacon feature several years ago forced the company to significantly revamp its approach. Beacon was similar to this year’s open graph in that it shared information about what you were doing online without you having to take explicit actions, like clicking on a button. Eventually, Facebook changed the way this worked, so nothing was shared without your explicit permission. To block Facebook from following you, you need to delete all Facebook-related cookies after logging out. You may also be able to use AdBlock Plus to block Facebook, with the following rules, as reported on Hacker News:
Note: we haven’t tested these rules for efficacy yet. Filed under: security, social, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Google about to make Google Docs into a virtual hard drive called Google Drive Posted: 25 Sep 2011 10:25 AM PDT Google appears to be close to rebranding its online document service, Google Docs, as a virtual hard drive in the cloud. A blurry screenshot (shown above) snapped by blogger and social media consultant Johannes Wigand appears to show a slightly modified version of Google Docs, called Drive. The screen appeared for a few seconds in “an event powered by Google,” Wigand reports. The screenshot looks almost identical to the “new look” for Google Docs that’s currently available as an option in some Google accounts, except that the word “Docs” in the upper left has been changed to “Drive.” The folder menu is labeled differently as well: It’s called “My Google Drive” instead of “My Collections.” TechCrunch’s MG Siegler elaborates on the screenshot, adding other clues that Google Drive is coming, such as a Google Docs dialog that mentions “Google Drive” and some code that recently appeared in the source code for Google’s open-source browser Chromium. TechCrunch also adds a detail not apparent from the screenshot: That Google Drive will be a full-fledged competitor to other online storage services like Dropbox and Box.net, with the ability to sync with local files. There’s no source for this last assertion, however. Google Docs already acts as a virtual hard drive in many ways, with the ability to store and share images, videos and PDF files in addition to document formats that are editable in Google, such as spreadsheets, presentations and word-processing documents. Google offers 1GB of storage for free, with the option to purchase 20GB for $5 per year. It supports uploading and downloading of entire folders, although without automatic syncing. Turning Docs into Drive would be a small change, but the name change might significantly change the way people think about and use the service. By comparison, Dropbox offers 2GB for free, or 50GB for $10 per month, and will automatically sync folders between the cloud and multiple computers. Box.net offers 5GB for free, or 50GB for $10 per month, with corporate options starting at $15 per user, and also offers automatic syncing and collaboration features. Other virtual drives have similar pricing. Filed under: cloud, VentureBeat        
   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
iPad users have yet another news magazine app option with the launch of 
| You are subscribed to email updates from VentureBeat To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |