After Facebook

[a_majoor]

Since so much of our lives is becoming digitized (despite the obvious benefits clay tablets  ), it is well worth thinking about how to harden our digital assets. This service offers one way (local backups, UPS systems to allow your home PC a graceful shut down, Internet anonymizers and using a "clean" computer dedicated to tasks like banking and used for no other purpose are others). Interesting concept:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/08/backupify_yes_you_should_back_up_your_gmail_facebook_and_twitter_accounts_here_s_how_to_do_it_.single.html

You Should Back Up Your Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter Accounts
Here’s how.
By Farhad Manjoo|Posted Friday, Aug. 17, 2012, at 6:08 PM ET

Even though companies such as Google and Twitter save your data on multiple machines, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s backed up.

When I first heard of Backupify a few years ago, I thought the service sounded unnecessary at best. The company promises to back up the data you’ve stored on various online services, scooping up all your mail and contacts from Gmail, your calendar entries from Google Calendar, plus everything you’ve got on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, and LinkedIn.

I have long been an advocate of frequent backups, but that term is usually reserved for stuff you’ve got stored on your own computer. A backup creates an extra copy, either on an external drive or online, so that when your machine bites the dust, you won’t be hosed. But Gmail isn’t stored on your own computer (you might have downloaded your mail to your desktop, but unless you’ve explicitly deleted your messages from Google’s servers, they’re still online). And Google is very good at backing things up. Like other firms that store data in the cloud, Google keeps many copies of your stuff on thousands of computers across the world. This redundancy is one of the cloud’s biggest selling points. Even if you keep your photos on three different hard drives in your house, they’re still vulnerable. (What if you’re burglarized?) But if one of Google’s data centers gets hit by a meteorite, your data will always be secure in some other center somewhere else.

That’s why Backupify sounded fishy—it seems to do what cloud services already do. It doesn’t help that the firm wants you to pay for the service, too. The company offers a free plan with 1 GB of storage, but if you want to back up even more of your cloud data, Backupify asks for $5 a month for 10 GB of storage or $20 for 50 GB. Remember that the services you’re backing up—Gmail and the rest—are free. So Backupify is asking you to open up your wallet to back up an already backed up free thing. Do they think you were born yesterday?

But in the last few weeks, I’ve seen the light. I now consider Backupify an essential part of keeping my digital life secure. In fact, signing up for its free plan is as important as choosing strong passwords and regularly backing up your local data. And, for my own data, I’m going to go even further. I’ve decided to pay for Backupify’s monthly plan to get enough space to secure all of the stuff I have in the cloud.

Why did I suddenly change my mind about Backupify? After a string of high-profile cloud mishaps, I now realize something important about how Google and other companies store people’s data. Even though the search company saves my email on multiple machines, that doesn’t really mean it’s backed up. Google’s redundancy does protect my stuff from natural disasters or mechanical failure, but it doesn’t do anything to secure my data from its worst enemy—me and other devious human beings pretending to be me.

Backupify, on the other hand, is your savior in the event of human error. If you subscribe to the service, your stuff isn’t really ever gone for good—not when you lose your data because you’ve been hacked, not when you forget your password, not because the cloud service kicked you out, and not because you just accidentally pressed delete.

Rob May, Backupify’s co-founder and CEO, says that he got the plan for the firm in 2008 when he was talking to friends about startup ideas. Someone told him, “Hey, you should build a Flickr backup tool.” May says his first reaction was like mine: “I thought it was a dumb idea.” But the more he thought about the idea, the more sensible it became. Lots of friends told him they were losing data in the cloud, either accidentally or through some attack. And once the data was gone, it was gone.

This gets to the fundamental paradox of the cloud: The advantage of storing your data online is that it’s available everywhere, all the time, to you or anyone with proper credentials. The problem with storing your data in the cloud is that it’s available everywhere, all the time, to you or anyone with proper credentials. In the Atlantic last year, James Fallows described the devastation his wife, Deb, suffered after someone got into her Gmail account and deleted everything:

Six years’ worth of correspondence and everything that went with it were gone. All the notes, interviews, recollections, and attached photos from our years of traveling through China. All the correspondence with and about her father in the last years of his life. The planning for our sons’ weddings; the exchanges she’d had with subjects, editors, and readers of her recent book; the accounting information for her projects; the travel arrangements and appointments she had for tomorrow and next week and next month; much of the incidental-expense data for the income-tax return I was about to file—all of this had been erased.

A few weeks ago, tech journalist Mat Honan suffered a similar attack. And those are just the ones you hear about—a Google representative told Fallows that there are thousands of attacks against Google accounts every day.

But you don’t need to be a victim of a hacker to lose stuff in the cloud. In fact, according to a 2007 study by a trade organization called the IT Policy Compliance Group, malicious attacks cause only a fraction of online data losses. By far the largest cause is human error—you accidentally delete an important document in Google Docs, say. It doesn’t even have to be your error: Earlier this month, in a widely circulated Gizmodo piece that carried the headline “Why the Cloud Sucks,” Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak wrote that after he upgraded to the latest version of the Mac OS, he noticed that one of his primary Google calendars suddenly disappeared. At first, he had no idea how it had happened—his other data was intact, so it didn’t look like a hack. Then, he got a notice from the makers of BusyCal, a popular calendar app for the Mac, telling him about an incompatibility with the new version of the Mac OS. The message had come too late: BusyCal, which Wozniak had set up to sync with Google, had deleted one of his calendars.

Backupify solves all these problems with a simple, brilliant innovation: It has no delete function. After you sign up to the service and authorize it to connect to your cloud accounts, Backupify regularly downloads and saves every item you have online—your messages, calendar appointments, contacts, and on and on. But if you delete something from your cloud account, Backupify does not mirror that action on its own servers. So if you, a hacker, or a third-party app trashes your account, it will remain intact at Backupify. Indeed, even if a hacker somehow gets into your Backupify account, he still wouldn’t be able to delete your data. The company’s Web interface has no delete button. The only way to delete your data from Backupify is to call up the company and send its staff a copy of your driver’s license and other credentials to prove that you are who you say you are.

And that gets to why cloud services can’t protect your data the way Backupify does. For privacy reasons, Google and Facebook have to offer customers a delete button that actually deletes your data. (In fact, Facebook has struggled to make delete actually work; in the past, some Facebook photos could still be accessed years after they’d supposedly been deleted. This week Facebook announced that when you delete a photo, it gets permanently removed from Facebook’s servers within 30 days.) Backupify can make deletion difficult only because it’s a third-party service dedicated to backup.

Backupify is about four years old, and in that time it has managed to gain thousands of paying customers, most of them businesses that are looking to protect their Google data. But the firm only has about 200,000 nonbusiness users, which sounds like too few to me. May says that on average, Backupify users restore—that is, undelete—about 3.38 items every year. In practice, that means that a lot of people aren’t restoring anything, and some people are restoring their entire accounts. (You can restore your stuff to your original cloud account, or you can download your data to your hard drive.)

May says that the number of undeletes proves how useful Backupify can be. “It shows you that this is a real problem,” he says. “It happens more than people think. It’s just not publicized very often.” Well, here you go: Let me publicize the heck out of it. You’re keeping all your precious data in the cloud, and it’s all just one accidental or malicious deletion away from oblivion. Signing up for Backupify is free, and it takes about two minutes to do so. What are you waiting for?

 

[a_majoor]

I love the Oatmeal. The "what happens when Microsoft buys SKYPE and Facebook integrates it" cost me a keyboard....

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/state_web_summer

 

[Stevenhh]

Porn Machine?
I cracked up at that one.

 

[bridges]

I love the Oatmeal. The "what happens when Microsoft buys SKYPE and Facebook integrates it" cost me a keyboard....

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/state_web_summer

Some good stuff there!  I could have done without the idea of the "best" of Pauly Shore, though. 

Re. Backupify, I can't decide if it's a brilliant idea, or laughable illustration of how our society has gone nuts evolved.  Maybe both.  Sounds worth checking into, either way. 

As an aside, I wish it didn't look like it rhymes with "stupify". 

 

[a_majoor]

Financially, mac and cheese outdoes Facebook. Not sure if this heralds the end of time or not....

http://www.wired.com/business/2012/09/annies-mac-n-cheese-facebook/

Why Mac ‘n’ Cheese Is a Smarter Investment Than Facebook

    By Marcus Wohlsen
    Email Author
    09.18.12 6:30 AM

In the hype tsunami prior to Facebook’s May IPO, I doubt anyone wrote these words: “Instead of social media, you should invest in macaroni and cheese.” As it turns out, that’s exactly what you should have done.

The day Facebook (FB) went public, its shares closed at $38.23, just pennies above the initial asking price of $38. That same day, shares of organic mac ‘n’ cheese maker Annie’s (BNNY) closed at just a little less than that at $36.39. If you’d bought Annie’s that day, your shares would be up by nearly one-third right now. Facebook shares, meanwhile, are down more than 40 percent.

You’d be even better off if you’d gotten in on the ground floor of the Annie’s IPO in March, when shares were priced at $19. You would have nearly doubled your money on that first day of trading alone. In what kind of world does a company that makes bunny-shaped pasta go public and get a dotcom-style pop, while a social media juggernaut that has fundamentally changed the way humans communicate turns into one of the great stock market stinkers?

The success of the Annie’s IPO, and the failure to date of Facebook’s, could be just a flukey coincidence. After all, one sells eyeballs, the other kids’ food. But the story of Annie’s’ rise to success doesn’t read that differently than that of an internet startup.

Annie’s is named after Annie Withey, who started the company with her then-husband Andrew Martin in a fit of what you’d now call serial entrepreneurship. In the mid-’80s, Martin had helped invent a new kind of resealable bag for snack food. The bag needed a product to show it off, so Annie started experimenting in her kitchen and came up with Smartfood, the now ubiquitous white cheddar-flavored popcorn in the black bag. The resealable bag didn’t take off, but the popcorn did: Frito-Lay bought Smartfood from the pair for a reported $15 million. Fishing around for something to do next, the two stuck to what they knew: packaging and white cheddar. Annie’s Shells and White Cheddar, the mac ‘n’ cheese in the purple box with the bunny, came out in 1989 and helped pioneer a product niche that more than two decades later has become a big business: healthy convenience food.

Like most scrappy internet startups, the pair did nearly all the work themselves, from writing the homey box copy to delivering cases to regional grocery stores in and around Boston. (Health-food store habitués may be surprised to know that they’ve never had Annie’s all to themselves; mainstream grocery stores have sold their products since the beginning.) Unlike most internet startups, however, they started small and stayed small for a long time.

When current Annie’s CEO John Foraker joined the company in 1999 at the peak of the dot-com boom, he says the company had six or seven employees and about $7 million in annual revenue. Sales had doubled by 2002, when private equity firm Solera Capital stepped in with a reported $81 million investment that made it the majority shareholder.

With big money behind Annie’s, Foraker says the company developed a “performance-oriented culture” focused on meeting quarterly and annual goals. That could have killed the personality that Annie had instilled in her namesake company, but Foraker says Solera understood that shooting for financial goals didn’t mean sacrificing what he saw as the company’s vision or its heritage. “It wasn’t just a pasta company,” he says. “I viewed it as a brand that stood for a lot of important things.”

Solera didn’t seek a quick exit, which in the packaged foods industry almost always means selling to one of the big players, the way Withey sold Smartfood to Frito-Lay. As a result, Annie’s had time to grow organically (pun intended). And just as the company began adding more organic products to its lineup, the mainstreaming of the organic movement was gaining momentum.

With 125 products, from organic BBQ sauce and gluten-free mac ‘n’ cheese to uncured pepperoni frozen pizza and vegan pretzel bunnies, Annie’s went public just as it was hitting what Foraker describes as the sweet spot of its growth curve. The market for convenience foods with ingredients that sound like they originated in nature and not a lab, was moving far beyond the boundaries of Boston and Berkeley, California where the company is now based, along a trajectory from co-op to Whole Foods to Walmart. But Foraker says the majority of grocery stores that carry Annie’s products still shelve them off to the side in a “natural foods” section. Foraker’s job now is to convince the rest of those retailers that Annie’s can go head to head with Kraft, that its products aren’t just riding a fad but represent a basic shift in attitude toward eating. “It’s really hard to see the broad trend of people wanting to eat healthier changing,” Foraker says.

Wall Street mostly agrees. Analysts polled by Thomson/First Call advise to either hold on to Annie’s shares or buy more. William Blair and Co. analyst Jon Andersen says the U.S. natural and organic food market is growing by 8 percent annually, much faster than conventional packaged food, and should hit $52 billion by next year.

Andersen says in a note to investors that Annie’s is not only a top seller in that market but “has proven crossover appeal” that should grow considerably with its recent launch of frozen pizzas. “We believe that Annie’s has a compelling long-term growth opportunity,” he says.

Not that Annie’s is without its detractors. Some investors worry that Annie’s’ highly visible post-IPO success will spur other companies to slap “organic” on a box of mac ‘n’ cheese and take a big bite out of Annie’s’ market. If that happens, it will be interesting to see how well Annie’s can keep its commitment to its core values while under pressure from shareholders — a dilemma Facebook knows well.

For now, Annie’s seems to be perfectly balancing its responsibilities to Wall Street, while upholding all the things you might expect of a company with an enormous bunny emblazoned on the side of its Berkeley headquarters. An earnest vibe radiates throughout the low-slung building, which houses most of the company’s 100 employees. The walls are adorned with slogans like “Create a garden of goodness” and “Share the sunshine,” while conference rooms are decorated with murals of hippie goddesses and flowers. And, of course, bunnies. Even the low-flow toilets advertise how much water they save compared to the conventional variety. Frankly, it’s exactly the kind of business you’d expect to find in Berkeley.

But that could in a way be a key to Annie’s success in the market. Berkeley is a town where people are genuinely committed to their causes, but also aren’t afraid to make money (as in the ritzier parts of Silicon Valley, the bursting of the real estate bubble was barely felt in Berkeley). Compared to Facebook, Annie’s’ value proposition is plain and simple, just like what it sells, but the company also apparently knows how to sell it. Facebook may be a more ambitious and more valuable company at the moment, but like many internet companies, its shares rise and fall based on how confident investors feel it really has anything to sell. Annie’s makes a thing you hold in your hand and put in your belly. As fears of another tech bubble persist, mac ‘n’ cheese makes for some real stock market comfort food.

 

[GnyHwy]

I'm no investor, but it seems pretty simplistic to me that the original shareholders will not open shares to the public until it has plateaued and there is no more significant profits to be gained.  Once that happens they sell in order to share the risk, which they were clearly smart in doing.

I guess the next plan for insider traders is to let them drop, buy them back for significantly cheaper than they sold them, introduce the next great thing, and watch them climb to the next plateau, only to be sold again to the next bunch of suckers.

 

[a_majoor]

But the investors will just eat the Mac'n'cheese.... ;D ;D ;D

 

[a_majoor]

Version 2.0 of this will have your laptop or tablet deliver an electric shock when you log into these sites. Army.ca is productive time, however....

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/9616910/Man-slapped-when-he-looks-at-Facebook-to-increase-productivity.html

Man slapped when he looks at Facebook 'to increase productivity'
A computer programmer claims he increased his productivity at work by hiring a woman to slap him every time she catches him looking at Facebook.

Man slapped when he looks at Facebook 'to increase productivity' Photo: Alamy
By Stewart Maclean 10:02AM BST 18 Oct 20129 Comments
Maneesh Sethi placed an advert on the classified website Craigslist to recruit someone willing to monitor what he was looking at on his laptop.

The computer expert and writer, from San Francisco, now pays a female employee $8 (£5) an hour to strike him in the face if she spots him wasting time on social media.

Mr Seethi claims the unusual motivational system has helped him boost his productivity from just 35 per cent to around 98 per cent during the working day.

Writing on his blog, he said he felt embarrassed after calculating he wasted around 19 hours every week looking at Facebook or other social media websites.

He wrote: "Humans are social animals – we aren't designed to live and work alone."

"Having worked mostly alone, on my computer, I found that the majority of my time is spent unproductively."
He added: "Nothing makes me more embarrassed than seeing the amount of hours I spend wasted on Reddit and Facebook chat.
"I figured 'This is stupid, why am I wasting this time doing nothing? When I have a boss, or someone of authority watching me, I always get my work done. How can I simulate the authority figure?'

"Naturally, I believe that an authority figure should have real authority.

"So I went on Craigslist, put up an advertisement, and waited to see if anyone would bite."

Mr Seethi published details on his blog of his Craigslist advert, which was entitled '(Domestic gigs) Slap me if I get off task'.
In it he wrote: "I'm looking for someone who can work next to me at a defined location (my house or a café) and will make sure to watch what is happening on my screen.

"When I am wasting time, you'll have to yell at me or if need be, slap me.
"You can do your own work at the same time. Looking for help asap.
"Compensation: $8 / hour, and you can do your own work from your computer at the same time."

Mr Seethi said he was inundated with offers from potential slappers and quickly hired a volunteer he names only as Kara.

He wrote: "Within minutes, my in-box began blowing up.

"I received 20 emails in less than an hour from people who loved the idea. I read through them, found one that stood out, and hired her to meet me at a café the day after.

"The next day, at 9am, I found Kara sitting and waiting for me.

"Pulling up a seat, I gave her the basic instructions – she would monitor me for the next few hours, and make sure that I was staying on task.

"I gave her a list of action items that I needed to accomplish, and made her promise to force me to stay on task."

A video on YouTube shows Mr Seethi working in a café alongside his new employee.
Kara can be seen slapping him firming around the head when she spots him wasting time online.
The computer programmer claimed the ever-present threat of a physical assault helped him to radically boost his output by staying focused on his work.

He wrote: "The Slap Challenge added a playful, silly element to working.

"It gave me a non-conventional reminder of what I was supposed to be doing – and it ended up being something I didn't want to happen again."

 

[a_majoor]

A web developer in Canada is working on Web 3.0. Not sure I am clear on the benefits of this (but then again, most of what I actually do on computers or the Internet could be handled by mid 90's vintage machines anyway). Something to keep an eye on:

http://business.financialpost.com/2013/01/13/prince-of-pop-up-picks-canada-to-build-the-next-web/

Prince of Pop-up picks Canada to build the next Web

Rick Spence | Jan 13, 2013 7:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Jan 11, 2013 2:35 PM ET
More from Rick Spence | @rickspence

He’s been called a Web pioneer, the Prince of Pop-ups, and “the most hated man on the Internet.” In the 1990s, Brian Shuster developed such innovations as sub-domains, pop-up ads and click-tracking. Love him or hate him, Shuster helped create the Web we know today — and now he’s building the next Web.

Born in Montreal, Shuster’s family moved to Fresno, Calif., when he was seven years old. After studying business and communications at UCLA, he got in on the ground floor of the Internet, hiring software talent from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop Web-hosting and online advertising systems that became industry standards. He was a brilliant, but polarizing figure who sought patents for many innovations and then tried to claim a piece of the action from major companies using sub-domains or pop-up ads. Shuster was ahead of his time; when he sought venture capital, he says Silicon Valley VCs turned him down, because they thought the Web was a fad that wouldn’t last.

Related

    Rick Spence’s 10 best lessons in business from 2012
    Canadian CEO shares his time-management expertise
    From Skid Row to High Street: CEO uses past experiences to become business success, help others

    Silicon Valley VCs turned him down, because they thought the Web was a fad that wouldn’t last

Wonder why you’ve never heard of Shuster? He says it’s his “invisibility cloak” — media tend to steer clear from covering business people who have been involved in porn. When he couldn’t finance his activities through intellectual property or venture capital, Shuster and a partner created one of the Web’s first pornography networks, Xpics Publishing, which later boasted two million paying members and revenue of $10-million a month. Shuster avoided the tech meltdown by selling his hosting company, WebJump, for $12-million in 1999. But his porn empire expired in 2000 after conflicts with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and credit-card companies over Xpics’ practice of charging clients before their month-long free trials were up.

Hero or villain? History will judge Shuster on the success of Utherverse, the immersive new platform he’s been developing since before moving to Canada in 2006. Between Utherverse and his IP holding company, Ideaflood, he employs 60 people in Vancouver and will soon receive his 90th patent.

If you are dreaming of moving to Silicon Valley, Shuster says Canada, and particularly Vancouver, is the place to change the world. He cites four reasons why:

    Silicon Valley knowledge workers use companies as transitional stepping stones. To recruit someone from another firm, you have to give them a better job title, he says. As soon as they get that title, he says, they update their resumés and start looking for another employer.
 
The customer experience is better in Canada. Shuster says he has found a higher service ethic in his Vancouver workforce than in the U.S. “Here, people want to help,” he says. “It seems to be a natural Canadian trait.”
 
High-tech talent is just as strong in British Columbia as in California, if not stronger. When it comes to 3D gaming, Shuster says, “the talent pool is the best in North America, and maybe the best in the world.”
   
Finally, he says, the Valley’s get-rich-quick mentality impedes longer-term success. High-tech workers in California want to develop an app for a year and then sell out, he says; Canadians are more willing to tackle bigger projects. “If you want to change the world, you have to commit to it for a decade.”

Courtesy of UtherverseWith VWW, Shuster says, the boundaries between gaming, education, shopping and social media will fade.

That’s what Shuster is doing: Working on the future architecture of the Web. Today’s “flat web,” he says, is fine for search or e-commerce. His VWW (Virtual World Web) is immersive and interactive, with users moving through game-like virtual environments rather than reading static Web pages. With VWW, he says, the boundaries between gaming, education, shopping and social media will fade. Imagine online conventions with trade-show booths, panels, networking breaks and gift bags. Looking for a new home? There’ll be no more 360-degree photo collages of the kitchen; you’ll be a character in a 3D-style rendering, “walking” between rooms to experience the flow of the house.

Shuster says Utherverse is business-friendly. More than 100,000 companies already have virtual presences on the VWW, and developers will find it easy to create 3-D games and applications. His current offerings include Virtual Vancouver, an immersive re-creation of the city for users to explore, as well as Red Light Center (RLC), a not-safe-for-work adult pleasure park based on Amsterdam’s red-light district. In RLC, your customized character can chat, flirt, drink and dance with other people’s avatars, or just head to a private room. Shuster says RLC has more than a million members, along with 10 paying “franchisees” that run RLC sites for other countries or cultures.

In February, Utherverse will release its third-generation VWW platform. Clients intending to leverage the technology already include a university, a major California real estate company, and a big online dating service. As the technology becomes more mainstream, Shuster says conventional browsers will be obsolete by 2015: “It’s inevitable that we will move toward a holodeck, like on Star Trek.”

While he doesn’t know if his platform will become the industry standard (other firms such as IBM and Google have worked on 3-D environments) he is confident Utherverse will become a big player in the new Web. Then maybe Shuster — and Canada — will get more respect.

Rick Spence is a writer, consultant and speaker specializing in entrepreneurship. His column appears weekly in the Financial Post. He can be reached at rick@rickspence.ca

 

[a_majoor]

Google is up to something, although what exactly is not clear at this time. If they are experimenting with alternatives to conventional cellular service (especially in conjunction with the Android OS and their own suite of services), then what may be under wraps is a much more powerful version of a smartphone or tablet. IF it is a useful screen size like some of the Galaxy phones, that will be very good for people like me who find an iPhone screen hard to read:

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/510341/googles-private-cell-phone-network/

Google’s Private Cell Phone Network

A small cell network over the company’s HQ could herald new competition for established carriers.

Filings made with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission reveal that Google wants to start operating its own, very small cell phone network on its Mountain View campus. It’s the latest in a series of hints in recent years that Google is unsatisfied with the way that mobile networks control the mobile Internet.

Google tells the FCC it wants to install up to 50 mobile base stations in buildings on the Western edge of Google’s Mountain View campus, just a block or so away from its main Android building. Up to 200 mobile devices will be used on that “experimental” network and the area covered will be small, with indoor base stations reaching only up to 200 meters, and any outdoors ones reaching no further than a kilometer. The WSJ reports that the frequencies used belong to ClearWire, and aren’t compatible with any U.S. mobile device. They are in use in China, Brazil, and India, though.

Google might just be experimenting with devices for those parts of the world. Or it might be trying something more radical. The search and ad giant has been rumored to be exploring the idea of working with TV provider Dish to launch a wireless Internet service, has already got into the business of providing broadband (see “Google’s Internet Service Might Bring the U.S. Up to Speed”), and has a history of showing interest in ideas that would loosen the grip of cellular providers on mobile devices and what people can do with them.

Google lobbied U.S. regulators to encourage them to open up unused TV spectrum into so-called “white spaces,” as they did in 2009, allowing that portion of the airwaves to be used by any company or device rather than being  licensed exclusively to one company (see “Super Wi-Fi”). In 2008, the company filed a patent for an idea that would appall mobile networks—having mobile devices automatically hop to the cheapest cell network in an area rather than being locked to just one provider at all times.

Google’s biggest strike against the way wireless networks work today came in 2010 and was something of a flop. The company tried to break the U.S. convention of new mobile phones being tied to carrier contracts, only offering the flagship Nexus One smartphone online and unlocked. That experiment lasted only about six months, after Google struggled to cope with customer service requests and learned that U.S. consumers are apparently happier paying a significant markup for a device over two years than a smaller sum upfront.

Google has since played more nicely with cellular networks. Yet the relationships are still fraught, with fallings out over Google’s contactless payments system (blocked on Verizon handsets) and Android’s tethering function (also blocked by some carriers). It’s too early to know whether Google’s private cell phone network in Mountain View will add to that drama, but mobile networks are surely watching closely.

 

[a_majoor]

OOPs. I'm sure there are furious investor calls happening right about now.....

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/this-is-how-much-facebook-made-per-user-last-month-2-pennies/272708/

This Is How Much Facebook Made Per User Last Month: 2 Pennies
By Alexis C. Madrigal

Jan 30 2013, 5:12 PM ET6

For all its ubiquity and $1.59 billion in revenue, the company's net income was $64 million in its last quarter.

Every month, a billion people offer their two cents to Facebook, literally. That's roughly how much income the company generated per user per month over its last quarter.

Add it all up and the company made just $64 million on revenue of $1.59 billion. That means the company is generating about half a buck a month of revenue per user, and just $0.02 a month in income. Facebook says that a run-up in R&D hurt their profitability for the quarter.

Nonetheless, compared with the other tech giants (save Amazon, which has its own profitability problems), Facebook is not much of a money machine. It isn't even within an order of magnitude of old-school companies like Microsoft or Oracle, let alone Apple.

But hey, it's young. And detailed data on all of our lives has got to be worth something, right? Right? And the good news is that for the full year 2012, Facebook generated $13.58 in revenue per user in its most developed markets, the US and Canada. That's up more than $2 over 2011 and $4 over 2010.

Update: Facebook would also probably like me to note that if you don't follow the GAAP method and use Facebook's own accounting, they made $426 million for the quarter, which is considerably more money than $64 million. Then again, there's a reason they're called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

 

[cupper]

Half of Facebook parents joined to spy on kids?
You think half those adults on Facebook are there because they love Facebook? No, no. These are merely parents engaged in covert operations.


http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57569806-71/half-of-facebook-parents-joined-to-spy-on-kids/

I had always imagined that adults entered the world of Facebook because they wanted to re-enact their teenage years, find a new lover, or "connect" with long-lost relatives whom they never really liked.

Yet a new piece of research has proved mind-altering.

My failure to regularly read the Education Database Online has been mitigated by Mashable and has led me to a new appreciation of the adult world.

For these vital statistics reveal that American parents aren't trying to imitate children so much as spy on them.

It's perfectly well-known that children can be trusted about as much as news stories in Pravda during the Brezhnev era.

So parents feel forced to take the radical step of joining them so that they can beat them. In a psychological sense, you understand.

Indeed, this study suggests that half of all parents sign up with Facebook at least partly in order to see what drugs their kids are taking, who they are consorting with and what they really think about, well, their parents.

An excitable 43 percent of parents admit that they check their kids' Facebook pages every day.

Some 92 percent of them make it so easy for themselves by openly becoming Facebook friends with their kids.

Some might reach the inevitable conclusion that American parents aren't very bright.

If they are making it so obvious they are snooping on their kids by friending them, might they not imagine that the kids, in turn, will not express themselves fully on Facebook, instead choosing to go to Tumblr, Instagram, or some other relatively recondite place?

Might that be one reason why several recent studies suggested that kids think Facebook is old?

The Education Database Online figures offer that a third of kids would defriend their parents "if they could."

I, though, am left fascinated as to how much adults are exposing themselves.

Surely the kids -- just, you know, for fits and giggles -- trawl around their parents' Facebook pages and speculate as to which of their Facebook friends are former (or even current) lovers.

Surely the kids take a look at these people's profile pictures and pray that they never, ever end up as wizened and alcohol-sodden as some of them appear.

Given that the kids are far, far more tech savvy than their parents will ever be, might they be far better spies than their parents?

While the adults think they're being clever in following the kids, I suspect it's the kids who get more information out of this social-networking exchange -- information that they'll choose to use just when they need it.

Blackmail never goes out of style.

 

[a_majoor]

Why indeed? Facebook and social media in general meet the ultimate disintermediation:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517356/if-facebook-can-profit-from-your-data-why-cant-you/

If Facebook Can Profit from Your Data, Why Can’t You?
Reputation.com says it’s ready to unveil a place where people can offer personal information to marketers in return for discounts and other perks.

By Tom Simonite on July 30, 2013
WHY IT MATTERS

People have little idea how much personal data they have provided, how it is used, and what it is worth.


It has become the Internet’s defining business model: free online services make their money by feeding on all the personal data generated by their users. Think Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, and how they serve targeted ads based on your preferences and interests, or make deals to share collected data with other companies (see “What Facebook Knows”).

Before the end of this year, Web users should be able to take a more active role in monetizing their personal data. Michael Fertik, cofounder and CEO of startup Reputation.com, says his company will launch a feature that lets users share certain personal information with other companies in return for discounts or other perks. Allowing airlines access to information about your income, for example, might lead to offers of loyalty points or an upgrade on your next flight.

The idea that individuals might personally take charge of extracting value from their own data has been discussed for years, with Fertik a leading voice, but it hasn’t yet been put to the test. Proponents say it makes sense to empower users this way because details of what information is collected, how it is used, and what it is worth are unjustly murky, even if the general terms of the relationship with data-supported companies such as Facebook is clear.

“The basic business model of the Internet today is that we’re going to take your data without your knowledge and permission and give it to people that you can’t identify for purposes you’ll never know,” says Fertik.

Fertik says he has spoken with a range of large companies and their marketers who are interested in his impending “consumer data vault,” as the new feature is called. He won’t yet give specifics about what data people will be able to trade, or what for, but he did tell MIT Technology Review that major airlines like the idea. “All of the airlines we talked to would like to be able to extend provisional platinum status to certain types of fliers to get some kind of loyalty,” he says. “It’s very hard for airlines to gain a sense of who is worth [it] today.”

Reputation.com was founded in 2006 and has received $67 million in investment funding. It currently offers products that help individuals and companies find information about themselves on the Internet and in various proprietary databases. For a fee, the company will also try to remove records or information, a service enabled in part by deals that Fertik has struck with some data-holding companies.

Fertik says those existing products, which have around one million users, mean that many people already have data in Reputation.com’s service that they could trade with other companies in return for special offers. That data can include home and family addresses, buying habits, professional histories, and salary and income information.

Reputation.com has far fewer users than Facebook, of course, but Fertik says the data people have given his company can be more valuable to marketers than clicks on a like button. Reputation.com has also filed patents on data-mining techniques intended to identify valuable insights in people’s data vaults.

Peter Fader, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, who specializes in the use of data analysis to help marketing, is skeptical that Reputation.com’s approach offers enough to tempt either consumers or companies.

“Despite the ways that companies delude themselves, demographics and other personal descriptors are rarely useful,” he says. Data that captures customer behavior is much more important, says Fader, and many companies already have plenty of that flowing in from the various ways they interact with customers.

As for consumers, Fader predicts that, even as companies like Facebook expand how they share and leverage information gathered from users, relatively few will be motivated to actively manage and trade a portfolio of their own data. “The effort required to manage your personal data will be seen as greater than the benefits that arise from doing so,” he says.

Shane Green, CEO and cofounder of startup Personal, which provides a website and apps for people to store personal data, disagrees. His company currently has less than a million users, and he says the growing prominence of privacy issues in the media shows that many people do care about what happens to their data.

Green once spoke of launching a service similar to the one planned by Reputation.com (see “A Dollar for Your Data”) but now has different plans. Still, he says that Fertik’s vision makes sense. “I think there will actually be a lot of those marketplaces,” he says. “Marketing will shift toward more permission-based opportunities.”

Green cites the date that a person’s car lease expires as an example of a piece of personal data with an established value that people control themselves. “There’ll only be one car company that knows that,” he says. “But companies will pay hundreds of dollars, if you are seriously going to buy a car, to incent you to do that.”

Personal, based in Washington, D.C., and founded in 2009, has raised $15.7 million in investments and debt financing. The site currently focuses on helping people collate and reuse data—for example, for completing applications for college and loans.

Green says that he intends to develop infrastructure so people can selectively share data with another company, perhaps in return for discounts or other benefits. Similar to how a person might use a Facebook or Google account to log into a website, he might use a Personal account to connect with a company. He could then control exactly what data that company could access, and for how long. An early iteration of this idea can be seen on the website Car and Driver, where its already possible to log in with a Personal account. Doing so leads to a permissions screen where the site requests access to details including the make, model, and year of a person’s vehicle. “[Data] marketplaces are going to be incredibly valuable, but we’re focused on portability,” says Green.

 

[Cbbmtt]

I have family across the world and honestly it's the best method to keep up to date with my family. Some of the games on there are fun, I won't deny that it's fun beating your friends at bejeweled to pass some time in the morning with your morning coffee.

There are more negatives than I can count, but I'm going to list a few that I find;

1. People wanting to be your friend because you went to school with them. You didn't talk to them in the 5 years of high school, why the F#$% would I want you to see pictures of my life?
2. People that use their phones in public while hanging out with other people to check their facecrack.
3. People posting pictures on their facebook of me at a party getting hammered????????? That's just stupid.
4. People not getting jobs because of facebook profiles.
5. People having fights with each other over message boards.
6. My mother spending money on fake play chips for a gambling game where you can't win money playing poker on a facebook app.........

 

[Duckman54]

Way back in the day, when this whole Facebook thing was pretty new, I created an account... What the heck, right?  After about 6-8 weeks of, as Cbbmtt said, seeing people I hadn't spoken to or even thought about for the past 10 years, the novelty wore off in a big way.

"Delete Account"
Are you sure?

Where's the "Hell-Yeah!!" button?!?

... That was about 5 years ago, and I've never looked back.

'Greg.

(B'sides, already got my Milnet account history dogging my brand-new Air Force career! Lol)

 

[a_majoor]

I have family across the world and honestly it's the best method to keep up to date with my family. Some of the games on there are fun, I won't deny that it's fun beating your friends at bejeweled to pass some time in the morning with your morning coffee.

There are more negatives than I can count, but I'm going to list a few that I find;

1. People wanting to be your friend because you went to school with them. You didn't talk to them in the 5 years of high school, why the F#$% would I want you to see pictures of my life?
2. People that use their phones in public while hanging out with other people to check their facecrack.
3. People posting pictures on their facebook of me at a party getting hammered????????? That's just stupid.
4. People not getting jobs because of facebook profiles.
5. People having fights with each other over message boards.
6. My mother spending money on fake play chips for a gambling game where you can't win money playing poker on a facebook app.........

And that just other users being abusive. Now consider the masses of personal data FaceBook has collected on you, and are manipulating, selling and sharing without your knowledge or consent. Knowing the NSA (and dufusus like Edward Snowdon) have access to all you data makes you feel safer, right?

 

[a_majoor]

The future is just creepy. I think the best defense might be a personal EMP weapon for women to zap creeps like this and fry their iPhones and Google Glasses. Now to write the business plan.....

http://www.dailydot.com/technology/infinity-augmented-reality-glasses-creep/

Pick-up artistry in the age of Google Glass

By Audra Schroeder on December 19, 2013 Email
If Google Glass weren’t already annoying people before even being released, there are several competitors on the horizon. Back in August, the ominously-named NYC-based company Infinity Augmented Reality released a “concept” video that explained why their product would run circles around ol’ Google Glass:

“By using Infinity AR's software platform it will enable the use of such applications as facial, voice, and mood recognition. This futuristic phenomenon actually knows what you are doing, what you want, and when you want it based on information received from the connection to your smartphone or other mobile device.”



In the video, a man pads around his loft before getting dressed and unlocking his Porsche with his mind-cam, then driving to a pool hall to challenge a villain from a Bond movie to a game.

The only time a woman is featured in this future hellscape is when the bro-bot approaches the bartender and scans her face to reveal her Facebook info, before ordering a drink. His faceputer also knows her astrological sign, and he uses that info to shift into pickup artist mode. A voice analyzer picks up that she’s “intrigued,” and later, he invites her over to his apartment, where he offers her a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. He already knows it’s her favorite, because of his creep specs, so basically all the hard work of meeting women and having a genuine conversation is gone. Well, if you have enough money.

This isn’t another sequel to American Psycho, but it should be. Augmented reality glasses and wearable tech will be big in 2014, with Google Glass, Infinity AR, and the California company Meta all launching products. The latter is fine-tuning a pair of $3,000 3-D glasses that aim to replace laptops and tablets. We’re already living in a world where anyone with $35,000 can buy an Iron Man suit.

Update: Oh yeah, and Glass now lets you wink to take photos.

 

[a_majoor]

Well, more on the behaviour of Facebook vis a vi their users. Isn't it nice to know you exist to be someone else's cash cow?

http://www.wired.com/business/2007/12/zuckerberg-cave/

Zuckerberg Caves In, Lets Facebook Users Turn Off Beacon
BY BETSY SCHIFFMAN12.05.0712:26 PM

After weeks of hand wrangling, Facebook has finally granted users the option of turning off Beacon, a controversial new advertising platform that notifies Facebook users’ friends of purchases they may have made on various external sites.

Beacon was immediately lambasted by critics for invading users privacy — the problem was that notifications were sent out about purchases made on third-party sites before users even had a chance to approve them.

In a meekly titled blog post, "Thoughts On Beacon," Zuckerberg apologizes profusely for taking so long to make the requested changes to the system.

The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better . . .

Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we’re releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here.

If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

But today’s step hasn’t quieted Facebook critics. Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, is still worried about the amount of data Beacon will collect on Facebook users, even if they opt out of the system.

"Mr. Zuckerberg isn’t truly candid with Facebook users. Beacon is just one aspect of a massive data collection and targeting system put in place by Facebook," Chester said in a prepared statement.

Photo: Flickr/goldberg

 

[a_majoor]

While not Facebook itself, it is very similar to what these companies are doing in the background. The idea that my personal information is available to total strangers is creepy enough, the reaction of people when it happens to them up close and personal rather than through something like targeted advertising on your Gmail page should be interesting. Spearing a person to the ground and screaming"What else do you know?" sounds like a perfectly justifiable and logical response to me....

http://arstechnica.com/staff/2014/04/when-the-restaurant-you-googled-googles-you-back/

When the restaurant you Googled Googles you back
It's not the thought that counts; unexpected in-person customization feels icky.

by Casey Johnston - Apr 13 2014, 5:11pm EDT
PRIVACY WEB CULTURE

A restaurant with three Michelin stars is now trying to up its customer service game by Googling its customers before they arrive. According to a report from Grub Street, an Eleven Madison Park maitre d' performs Internet recon on every guest in the interest of customizing their experiences.

The maitre d' in question, Justin Roller, says he tries to ascertain things like whether a couple is coming to the restaurant for an anniversary, and if so, which anniversary that is. If it's a birthday, for instance, he wants to wish them "Happy Birthday" when they arrive. He'll scan for photos of the guests in chef's whites or posed with wine glasses, which suggest they might be chefs or sommeliers themselves.

It goes deeper: if a particular guest appears to hail from Montana, Roller will try to pair up the table with a server who is from Montana. "Same goes for guests who own jazz clubs, who can be paired with a sommelier that happens to be into jazz," writes Grub Street.

Obviously, the restaurant is just trying to be better in tune with the people sitting around eating its food and drinking its wine. But it seems like a reasonable assumption to believe people posting their birthday dates online aren't doing so in the hopes that someone they've never met before will know, as if by telepathy, to wish them the best on their special day.

The case speaks to what seems to be the root cause of privacy transgressions—most people aren't too hesitant to give up their personal information, but when it's used for stuff they aren't expecting, it feels like a violation. Customer service enterprises seem only too excited to "know" the "answers" to what a customer "wants" before they are told, but this feels like something that needs a little more consideration of what is comfortable and what is creepy.

We often write about privacy oversteps that have real-world consequences, like marketers creating complete profiles of would-be customers that end up controlling, for instance, what products they see or predatory loans they get. But a restaurant Googling its customers doesn't need to have consequences or even involve obvious big data correlations to feel a little wrong.

The pairing of servers with interests is another matter entirely—one that's more subtle, more insidious. Per the article, Roller secondarily tries to figure out whether customers will be receptive to him knowing this Google-able stuff or if they would rather to personally, for example, let him know it's their birthday. Speaking personally, this would fail. Roller could absolutely scrounge up plenty of information on me, and being an editor of a technology publication, one might think I'd love the novelty of this new application of the Internet. But on the contrary, I would be more likely to spear him into the ground and demand to know who told him it was my birthday. What else do you know?

I can't be the only person who feels this way, but are there others who would be delighted for their maitre d' to light up when they walked into dinner and start talking to them about their personal lives?

 

[a_majoor]

While entirely predictable, it is also unsettling that they attempted to do large scale manipulations like this. Imagine if they were to try this in the context of an election? (and of course shutting off people's ability to receive messages, news feeds etc. based on an arbitrary whim or set of criterion has a name already: Censorship. One can imagine other scenarios where Facebook or other social media site manipulates the data the user sees IOT create some sort of desired outcome (but possibly not one desired by you):

http://boingboing.net/2014/06/30/facebooks-massive-psychology.html

Facebook's massive psychology experiment likely illegal
Cory Doctorow at 6:18 am Mon, Jun 30, 2014

Please read our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Community Guidelines. Except where indicated, Boing Boing is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution

Researchers from Facebook, Cornell and UCSF published a paper describing a mass-scale experiment in which Facebook users' pages were manipulated to see if this could induce and spread certain emotional states. They say it was legal to do this without consent, because Facebook's terms of service require you to give consent for, basically, anything.

But as legal scholar James Grimmellmann points out, there's a federal law that prohibits universities from conducting this kind of experiment without explicit, separate consent (none of this burying-consent-in-the-fine-print bullshit). Two of the three researchers who worked on this were working for federally funded universities with institutional review boards, and the project received federal funds.

Facebook says that it manipulates feeds all the time, and this was no different, but Facebook is acting as a private company when it does this, not working on a federally funded project, in concert with federally funded researchers. Besides, Grimmelmann further points out that there was real potential for harm in the protocol of the study.

As Grimmelmann says: This is bad, even for Facebook.

Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks [Adam D. I. Kramera, Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock/Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]

As Flies to Wanton Boys [James Grimmelmann/Labmatorium]