Ang Tsismis

Google’s CR-48 Chrome Laptop is a MacBook lookalike

2010-12-12T01:54:00.000-08:00

Apple and Google have a rather interesting competitive relationship as they battle it out in the mobile front with iOS and Android. When one comes up with a good idea, the other seems to quickly adopt it as well, although this flow of ideas seems to trickle from Apple to Google more often than the reverse; touchscreens, app stores, instant search, tablets, etc.

With this in mind, check out the pictures of the new Google CR-48 Chrome Notebook, it’s a dead-ringer for the older black MacBook. From the chiclet style keyboard, to the matte black finish, to the overall shape, the resemblance between the two is striking. Here they are side by side:

Check out the keyboards too, the MacBook is on the left and the Chrome CR-48 is on the right:

The black MacBook was a pretty good looking machine so I can’t really blame Google for taking some design cues here, and isn’t imitation the highest form of flattery?

While the hardwares appearance is very similar, the OS’s couldn’t be more different. I haven’t used one of these Google Chrome laptops yet, but Chrome OS looks intriguing in a minimalist sense. It’s basically the web, and that’s it. If you want to try out Google’s new OS, you can run Chrome OS on top of Mac OS X in a virtual machine, but it’s essentially like running the Chrome browser in a VM.

You can see more pictures of Google’s Chrome OS notebook at BGR.com and Engadget.

Oh, and if you want to test drive a Chrome notebook, you can apply to use one in Google’s pilot program. Why not try to get your hands on one?

http://osxdaily.com/2010/12/11/googles-cr-48-chrome-laptop-is-a-macbook-lookalike/

Microsoft Exec Confirms Facebook Acquisition Attempt

2010-12-12T01:41:00.000-08:00

Microsoft apparently tried to acquire Facebook for $15 billion--and Mark Zuckerberg told them no.

"We tried to acquire Facebook," Fritz Lanman, Microsoft's senior director of Corporate Strategy and Acquisitions, told an audience Dec. 9 at the Le Web '10 conference (as reported by TechCrunch). "Facebook had a lot of similarities to Microsoft back in the day."

According to David Kirkpatrick's "The Facebook Effect," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer visited Zuckerberg in Palo Alto, Calif., where he made the $15 billion offer. But Zuckerberg wanted to keep control of his project. And what's that compared to enough money to buy a medium-sized country?

Microsoft did invest in Facebook, however, to the tune of $240 million. That was good for a 1.6 percent stake in the social network, which has collaborated with Redmond on a number of initiatives over the past few months.

In October, Microsoft and Facebook announced a deeper partnership centered on a set of new social-search features accessible via Bing and Facebook's Web results. One feature, Liked Results, displays Websites and links "liked" by a Facebook user's friends. That's paired with Facebook Profile Search, which leverages a user's Facebook connections to deliver more relevant results.

"We think it's time for a real, robust, persistent social signal," Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Services Division, wrote in an Oct. 13 posting on the Bing Community blog. "Facebook has led a transformation of the Internet already. It has reached and passed 500 million members, and the amount of content created inside Facebook each day is staggering."

The following day, Microsoft announced updates to its Docs.com online applications platform, which allows Facebook users to create and share Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. The new features included .PDF support, full-text search, user-generated templates, and drag-and-drop Silverlight document uploading.

Such collaborations with Facebook, of course, give Microsoft access to a massive brand and a built-in audience, both of which are vital as it seeks to battle Google Docs and similar cloud-based productivity platforms. For Facebook, collaboration with Microsoft on a project like Docs.com allows the social network to expand its utility to users in new ways.

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/corporate/facebook_exec_confirms_facebook_acquisition_attempt.html

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is Donating Everything to Charity

2010-12-09T04:42:00.000-08:00

Joining up with Bill Gates, George Lucas, Warren Buffett, and 50 other billionaires, Zuckerberg has agreed to donate the majority of his wealth to charity, as part of the Giving Pledge movement Gates launched back in August.

It's the largest philanthropic work ever done, with over 50 billionaires pledging to give away most of their fortunes to various charities. They're not legally bound to do so, but if they renege then I imagine all hell would break loose. Just imagine having Gates' beady glare on you, wherever you go. *shudder*

15 other billionaires signed up recently, alongside Zuckerberg. AOL's co-founder Steve Case, and investor Carl Icahn are just some of the names you might recognize. The charities on the receiving end of the Giving Pledge's handout haven't been named yet, but considering Gates fascination with green issues, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw some funky eco-friendly initiatives start looking...well, greener. [WSJ]

http://gizmodo.com/5710013/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-is-donating-everything-to-charity

Facebook for Work

2010-12-09T03:10:00.000-08:00

IBM thinks social networking isn't just for fun—it can also make companies more efficient.

Social networks, to most, are about fun and games. To IBM, social networking has serious potential for the workplace.

The latest version of IBM's Lotus Connections 3.0, announced last month, is IBM's most earnest attempt yet to bring Facebook- and Twitter-style networking to large companies. Small firms can adopt other companies' tools, such as Yammer or Present.ly, to let employees tweet internally within the company, but Lotus Connections aims to serve companies with 10,000 or more employees.

A social network of this type lets workers in large, geographically spread out companies find one another—and one another's work—through serendipitous discovery, rather than through a deliberate search. "We had a customer with two teams, one in the U.S., and one in Australia," says Heidi Ambler, IBM's director of social software. "Neither knew that they were working on the same project, trying to solve the same problem." Ambler thinks a social networking tool like Lotus Connections could eliminate such redundancies.

In a recent IDC survey, 41 percent of respondents said they had already implemented a social software solution for internal use. IDC predicts enterprise social software will be a $2 billion annual business by 2014. "The existence and use of those networks helps to connect otherwise siloed business units, functions, and teams," says Gilbane Group analyst Larry Hawes. Faster problem resolution, he says, is a measurable benefit.

That's the case at Cemex, a premix cement manufacturer with 40,000 employees worldwide. Cemex uses Lotus Connections as part of an internal collaboration platform. With the help of the combined platform, "we were able to take a new product from idea to launch in four months," says Nelson Enriquez, technology innovation manager for Cemex. "That was unheard of before."

Lotus Connections, now in its fourth year as a product, has 500,000 active user profiles, according to Ambler. Members can choose to connect with people at other companies as well as their own. That's a puny one-thousandth the size of Facebook, but IBM's members have profile pages, blogs, and wikis focused on their work rather than their social lives.

Another proven benefit of the network is that if, say, a zealous sales engineer makes a training video for the product he supports, it can make its way virally around the company as coworkers share it. The previous sharing method would involve posting a file that other people would have to search for. Social-network sharing is closer to the older phenomenon of viral e-mail, in which an interesting message would be forwarded far beyond its original intended recipients.

The structure of social media makes it even more open to spreading than e-mail. "In e-mail, you had to figure out who to invite to a project, and then create a list to which everyone had to reply with every message," says Cemex innovation director Sergio Escobedo. "It's a very serial approach. Connections is more parallel. Everyone can receive information from all the nodes in the network at the same time."

Like Facebook, Lotus Connections doesn't just sit back and wait for workers to spread a meme. It actively suggests other users and topics based on shared interests: Who do you already know on the network? What do you look at? What do you comment on or tag? IBM's goal is to make these types of recommendations for coworkers within a big company, as well as across multiple companies that turn out to have common goals.

Companies can also use Lotus Connections to hire consultants from IBM's enormous Global Business Services unit—a worldwide organization of nearly 200,000 professionals. IBM integrates its enterprise products with one another, says Bradley Shimmin, an application infrastructure analyst for Current Analysis. "These [products] aren't just monolithic blocks of code," he says. "People within IBM move among the different teams looking for opportunities to use these tools together to find ways to increase revenues or identify problems customers ought to worry about."

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/26829/?a=f

Samsung's New Laptop Looks Like A MacBook Wannabe (But It's Still Awesome)

2010-12-08T23:35:00.001-08:00

We tested Samsung's new QX410 laptop that was just released this Fall and we're very impressed.

Despite the fact that it borrows heavily from Apple's MacBook design (even down to the clean white box it comes in), the QX410 packs the power of a high-end laptop into an incredibly affordable package.

Here's what we thought:

The 14" LED display is awesome. Streaming video and DVDs looked gorgeous and were incredibly bright.

It's speedy. Boot up and shut down were fast. Applications loaded quickly.

It has WiMAX built in so you can access Clear's 4G network. (You'll need an extra service plan from Clear).

It's light (only 5 pounds) and just over an inch thick, making it very portable and easy to use on your lap.

You can't beat what you get for the price ($799.99): Intel Core i5 processor, 4 GB RAM, a 640 GB hard drive, and 512 MB NVIDIA GeForce 310M graphics card.

The track pad was a pain to use. It's multi-touch and there are no mouse buttons (just like the MacBook), but it's too sensitive. There's definitely a learning curve: At first we kept accidentally clicking links and opening applications, but eventually got the hang of it.

The sound quality was above average for a laptop, but if you plan on watching a lot of movies, you should invest in a nice pair of headphones.

Overall, the QX410 is a great machine. And it's versatile. There's plenty of power under the hood for business users and it's light and perfectly priced for casual computing. If you're looking for one of the best PC laptop values available this holiday, this is the one to buy. You can order now from Best Buy.

Google Unveils Chrome OS, Moves Further Toward Cloud Computing

2010-12-08T07:26:00.000-08:00

Google unveiled the beta version of its new Chrome operating system this morning, as well as an early test version of its branded netbook. Chrome OS is an attempt by the search giant to help drive computing to the cloud — and to the popular web-based services that have become Google’s forté.

The company’s release of its netbook OS comes after a year of development and at a time when cloud computing — and the simpler machines that access applications on distant servers rather than running them on a hard drive — seems to have passed a sort of tipping point of respectability. Google’s chief competitors (Microsoft, Apple, etc.) have been touting their own respective cloud-based approaches for almost two years now.

Chrome OS relies entirely on web-based applications for basic productivity tasks like mail, document editing, photo sharing, social networking and reading news. Its inner workings are based on Google’s own Chrome browser, which has been available for nearly two years. The premise is that one no longer needs to install software programs on a general-purpose personal computer and instead use web apps running on top of a lightweight and fast OS.

After booting the OS and signing in with a Google account, one can go to a Web Store and install single-serving apps that are enhanced versions of those already available on the web. The download-and-install option provides a few more convenient features, like the ability to answer e-mail, work on your docs and play games without a web connection.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed up at Tuesday’s event to drive home his belief that the time is right to release Chrome OS. “We finally have a viable third choice for an operating system on the desktop,” said Schmidt.

http://walyou.com/google-chrome-operating-system/

Yahoo's Bartz Says Facebook Is Larger Competitor Than Google

2010-12-08T01:36:00.000-08:00

Yahoo! Inc. Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz said social networking leader Facebook Inc. has emerged as a bigger rival than Google Inc., owner of the biggest Web-search engine.

“Our greatest competitor probably is Facebook, more so than Google,” Bartz said at a presentation in New York yesterday. “They’re a hot site, but there’s room for more than one of anything.”

Bartz said her company once weighed buying privately held Facebook for about $1 billion and that her acquisition strategy is to focus on companies that bring users, content, engineers and advertising technology. Yahoo is adding features to keep from losing Web surfers to sites such as Facebook and Twitter Inc. that make it easier to interact with friends.

The second-year CEO has cut costs, pared extraneous products and focused Yahoo on news, sports and other content. She also struck a partnership that lets Microsoft Corp. handle the mechanics of Web search, while Yahoo oversees advertising sales. She’s been less successful reviving growth and keeping pace with newer, faster-growing Web companies.

As Facebook’s user base has surged past 500 million, its value has risen to more than $40 billion, according to private- share trading site SharesPost Inc. Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, has a market capitalization of $22.1 billion.

Asked for her thoughts on whether Yahoo should go private, Bartz said she has no plans to do so. She also said Yahoo will remain useful to users because of its ability to personalize and organize content from the Web’s 240 million sites.

“For the most part, people pretty much want this curated for them,” she said.

Yahoo rose 61 cents, or 3.7 percent, to $16.94 yesterday on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares are little changed this year before today.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net; Douglas MacMillan in San Francisco at dmacmillan3@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-08/yahoo-ceo-has-no-plans-to-go-private-sees-buying-content-users.html

How Google can thrive in the age of Facebook

2010-12-06T01:59:00.000-08:00

By some measures. we're hitting an Internet age that leaves Google behind. But here's a prescription to keep search relevant in the face of Facebook's social empire.

By Kevin Kelleher, contributor

Being king of the web is a short-lived gig. Only several years ago the web was navigated by search and Google was the clear king of innovation. Now, as the web takes on an increasingly social structure we seem to be heading into the Age of Facebook.

By some measures, it will be an age where Google isn't welcome. The company has long been seen as a one-trick pony, gifted at search and little else. It's stumbled again and again in social media with Orkut, Buzz and Wave – efforts that were at best mixed successes. Increasingly, executives and engineers in Silicon Valley openly declare that Google can't beat Facebook at its own game. Underscoring the pessimism, several key employees have bolted Google for Facebook in recent months.

Meanwhile, Facebook is expected to earn $3.2 billion in revenue next year, mostly from online ads – which is more than Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) makes on display ads alone. Time is running out for Google to find a way to keep its revenue and profit growing. Doing that will mean thriving in social media. While there's not a single strategy that Google can use to reach that goal, there are several approaches that can help. And early signs are that Google is busy taking those steps.

1. Don't copy Facebook.
Copying Google's search engine didn't work for Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), Ask.com or Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) – it only made clearer that they were laggards. Besides, Orkut was Google's attempt to copy Friendster and MySpace, and while Orkut was popular in India and Brazil, it never gained traction elsewhere.

Instead, Google would be smarter to study how people are behaving as the web evolves and then anticipating how the social web will operate in the future. Google hasn't offered too many details on what kind of social features it's building, but CEO Eric Schmidt has said it won't be a full-on social networking site but a social component built into existing Google products.

This approach has its risks as well. Google has a large installed base of users with, for example, Gmail. Google Buzz, a second-generation social network, failed in good part because of how Google handled the importing of Gmail contacts into Buzz connections.

Since Buzz, Google went back to its drawing board. Since then, one of the worst-kept secrets in Silicon Valley has been what a project called Google Me, an ambitious effort not to launch a new service like Buzz, but to incorporate a social element into all the services associated with a Google account – documents, calendars, photos on Picasa, videos on YouTube. Throw in the Google Music store it's long been planning as well as the ebooks for sale on the newly announced Google Editions and there starts to emerge a critical mass of services that a social layer could be built upon.

2. Focus on Facebook's weaknesses.
A few months ago, a 224-page Powerpoint presenation by a member of Google's user-experience team made the rounds. It thoughtfully made the case that our online identities aren't one-dimensional, that we all interact differently at work, with family, with friends, etc., and that social networks don't reflect that complexity. The presentation was seen as a vulnerability of Facebook that Google could attack.

Facebook responded quickly with Groups, which lets users share different content with various groups of friends. But Google had made its point: Facebook can't do everything, and there is room on the web for different approaches to social media. It made clear that Google would try to focus its strengths on Facebook's weaknesses.

It also explains why Schmidt takes every opportunity he can to swear that Google takes privacy seriously. He's not just regretting the privacy brouhaha that greeted the launch of Buzz, he's taking aim at the loudest and most consistent complaint about Facebook – its cavalier attitude toward privacy.

Facebook has pushed our comfort levels on privacy for a long time. Zuckerberg has argued that in time we'll all grow to accept that there is no privacy anymore on the web. But the reality is, as I've argued before, Facebook can't make its social ads pay without collecting and sharing as much personal data as it does.

3. Invest in a customer base.
So what does Google do if it builds a social component throughout its myriad products and nobody uses it? That was the problem with Wave, a well-designed tool for real-time collaboration that Google quietly killed this summer.
In fact, it's the Catch-22 that fells many social sites: Nobody wants to sign up unless their friends sign up, and their friends don't sign up because their own friends haven't signed up...

To start a fire under its social offerings, Google may become aggressive in buying startups with a strong social bent. It approached Yelp with little success, and is often mentioned as a suitor for Twitter. This week, Google is reportedly talking with Groupon, a deal-of-the-day site with a loyal customer base.

Viewed from one angle these deals don't make sense because many users of a site bought by Google are already Google users. But from another angle, that's the beauty of it. If Google owned Twitter, say, then users might start interacting with each other in Picasa, or documents. Google has the cash to keep buying other startups – a music site with social connections like Spotify or Mog, for example – until it can nurture a viable user base for its social layer.

It's too early to count Google out of the social web. Its failures in the field to date are ominous only if Google hasn't learned from them. It needs to do a lot of things right to succeed, but if it does, then we may not be calling this the Age of Facebook for very long.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/12/06/how-google-can-thrive-in-the-age-of-facebook/

Groupon Aims to Emulate Facebook, Not Yahoo, After Walking Away From Deal

2010-12-06T00:02:00.000-08:00

Groupon Inc., which rejected a Google Inc. takeover last week, is betting it can keep increasing its valuation after walking away from a deep-pocketed suitor, something Facebook Inc. pulled off and Yahoo! Inc. failed to do.

Groupon, the Chicago-based provider of online coupons, spurned an offer of as much as $6 billion that included performance incentives, a person familiar with the matter said last week. The startup will decide next year whether to go the route of an initial public offering instead, the person said.

Internet executives have had mixed results in refusing billion-dollar takeover offers. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang was head of the Web-portal company when Microsoft Corp. tried to buy it for $47.5 billion in 2008. After rejecting the deal, Yahoo saw its valuation cut in half and Yang was replaced as CEO. At Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo in 2006. Less than five years later, the social- networking service is valued at more than 40 times that.

“It is very common for all executives -- entrepreneurs or executives of public companies, to drink their own Kool-Aid and believe their own hype,” said Lou Kerner, a social-media analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc. in New York. “When everything is going up and to the right, it’s hard to have appreciation for the risks that are apparent in any business.”

Strategic Differences

Groupon Chief Executive Officer Andrew Mason, who started the company in 2008, had concerns about the strategic direction it would take under new management and what could happen to his employees if he sold to Google, according to a person familiar with the matter, who declined to be identified because the discussions were private.

Groupon has attracted 35 million users in more than 300 global markets by offering discounts of as much as 90 percent on everything from massages to ski tickets. The company makes money by keeping part of the revenue raised by the coupons. Groupon’s sales may top $500 million this year, two people familiar with the matter have said.

When Facebook declined Yahoo’s offer, Zuckerberg’s site had fewer than 12 million users. It now boasts more than 500 million. The Palo Alto, California-based company is worth more than $43 billion, according to SharesPost Inc., which tracks privately held businesses.

Yahoo, by contrast, has gone in the other direction. Even under a turnaround effort by Carol Bartz, the Sunnyvale, California-based company has struggled to revive growth and keep users from defecting to Google and social-networking sites. Its market value is now $21.3 billion.

Apple and Sun

Apple Inc., the world’s most valuable technology company, had its own near-miss takeover. The company held merger talks with Sun Microsystems Inc. in the 1990s, before CEO Steve Jobs returned to Apple and revamped its product line.

Twitter Inc., the microblogging site that lets users send messages of 140 characters, was in talks to be acquired by Google in 2009, the technology blog TechCrunch reported at the time. Twitter had recently raised funding valuing it at $250 million. The company is now considering a new investment round that would put its worth at more than $3 billion, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Other technology startups have opted not to sell in the past year, turning instead to outside investors. Small-business review site Yelp Inc. declined a $500 million offer from Google and took an investment of $100 million from private-equity firm Elevation Partners LP.

Foursquare Offer

Foursquare Labs Inc. turned down a $100 million bid from Yahoo, according to the All Things Digital blog. Instead, it raised $20 million in June from investors led by Andreessen Horowitz LLC.

In contrast, MySpace and Bebo, two of Facebook’s rivals in the social-networking market, both sold out to larger companies -- earning big paydays before their value declined.

News Corp. bought MySpace as part of its $580 million acquisition of Intermix in 2005. It later had to write down the value of the investment amid an exodus of users to Facebook. AOL Inc. bought Bebo for $850 million in 2008, and then sold it for less than $10 million this year.

“Life is all about timing and it’s hard to pick the perfect point to sell,” Kerner said. “Sometimes it’s better to sell too early than too late.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Ari Levy in San Francisco at alevy5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-06/groupon-aims-to-emulate-facebook-not-yahoo-after-walking-away-from-deal.html

Here's Facebook's New Profile Page

2010-12-05T21:13:00.000-08:00

Mark Zuckerberg will be unveiling a redesigned Facebook profile page on 60 minutes tonight. Here's a screencap from the episode's preview so you can get a head start on complaining about it. Hm, the poke button moved a little!

Update: Hey, look, you can get the new Facebook right now by going here. (Or you can wait for it to be rolled out to you.)

There are a bunch of changes, small and large which you can read about in great detail at TechCrunch.

Here are a few:

A stream of your recent tagged photos appears at the top of the screen, and there are more pictures of your friends on the page. This is because the main problem with Facebook is that there weren't enough opportunities to see pictures of people.
Now there's a field on your page called "philosophy," which folds in your religious, political views and favorite quote. Plus a brand new field: "People Who Inspire You." (If you put Mark Zuckerberg you should be able to get access to a special Super Facebook.)
All your vital stats are squished up under your name in a list now. It actually looks pretty good, like you're a character in a Role Playing Game or something!
There is also a field for sports, if you can somehow fit physical activity in between checking your Facebook profile
Tabs bring up different sections of your profile. Tabs: So hot right now.

Send an email to Adrian Chen, the author of this post, at adrian@gawker.com.

http://gawker.com/5706610/heres-facebooks-new-profile-page

A Growing Part Of Google's Revenues Now Depend On Facebook

2010-12-01T21:08:00.000-08:00

Google is about to buy Groupon for $6 billion – and that's great news for Facebook.

There are two main reasons.

One is that Groupon – already a huge Facebook advertiser – will now have Google's billions fueling a marketing budget that no longer needs to spend a dime on search ads.

The second reason is that while Groupon isn't as dependent on Facebook for customer-acquisition as Zynga is, it's closer than you might think. From sources familiar with Groupon's business, we understand that much of Groupon's rapid growth has been thanks to the way its subscribers will share coupons through Facebook. Remember, a Groupon discount doesn't go into effect until a threshold of buyers is met.

As Groupon grows, a growing part of Google's revenues will depend on Facebook remaining a very healthy platform. That's new.

Some other ways the Groupon-Google deal effects Facebook:

Groupon solves Google's social problem. It doesn't give Google a consumer-facing social product – but it does give Google huge exposure to group-buying, one of the two inherently social industries making hundreds of millions of dollars off of Facebook's success. (The other industry is social games, where Zynga is a leader.) After buying Groupon, Google will finally be making money in social. (This means it has less reason to dedicate resources to killing Facebook.)

Groupon–Google is great news for the developing SEM-for-Facebook industry. Thanks to Facebook's Ads API – only truly opened wide enough for businesses to depend on this year – marketing firms like Toronto's AdParlor can, with the ability to test thousands of ads at once, reduce the cost of customer-acquisition for Facebook advertisers by 20% to 50%. With Google pouring money in the Facebook ad ecosystem – and potentially driving up prices – that kind of efficiency becomes more important then ever. Expect a flowering in this industry.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/12/01/businessinsider-google-buying-groupon-is-great-news-for-facebook-2010-12.DTL

Groupon: More Anti-Facebook Armor for Google

2010-11-30T22:40:00.000-08:00

What if Google’s hunger to buy Groupon isn’t really about Groupon? Let’s think of the rumored deal as a $6 billion weapon for Google’s current and future war against Facebook.

Increasingly the two giants are fishing in the same ponds. Google recently started to offer local businesses an opportunity to pitch deals to users of Google search. Facebook this month launched an initiative it calls “Deals,” to offer discounts to Facebook users in the vicinity of local stores. (Sound familiar? Yup, these are just like Groupon.)

: Everett Collection; Google v. Facebook: Who will land the knockout punch?

Facebook just weeks ago launched a messaging service –- don’t call it email, Mark Zuckerberg says –- that competes with Google’s Gmail. Google is working on its own social-networking features and games that could rival how Facebook users spend their downtime. And increasingly, Facebook and Google are competing in the same talent pool. The New York Times reported in recent days that at least 142 Facebook employees (out of 1,700) are ex-Googlers.

The battle is over how people spend time on the Web – on Google sites such as YouTube, Gmail and Google News, or on Facebook? Google’s websites in October lured 181 million unique visitors, according to comScore, good for the No. 1 ranking in the country. Facebook was fourth at 151 million, behind Yahoo and Microsoft but closing quickly. While more people visit Google, people are spending more time on Facebook than on Google’s sites. Think of how much time you waste playing Scrabble or scouring your friends’ profiles for the latest baby photos.

With every click on Google or alternatively on Facebook, the companies get a chance to grab a bigger slice of the $26 billion annual pie for online advertising. Google for now is king of search ads, but Facebook is responsible for one out of every four graphical display ads across the Web. Google’s share is 2.7% in display ads.

Mobile advertising and the local arena are the next battle fronts. Research firm Borrell Associates estimates U.S. local businesses will spend $13.6 billion this year on online ads. Facebook encourages local businesses to set up Facebook pages and target ads – for example, wedding photographers can direct ads at young women who recently changed their relationship status on Facebook to “engaged.” Groupon and its ties with merchants may give Google a leg up with local businesses, at least until the next round of armaments.

“We believe that Google and Facebook will be battling for Web supremacy for years to come,” Wedbush said in a research note this week. “The purchase of Groupon would be another major piece of artillery for Google to use in this battle.”

The Google-Facebook war at its core isn’t about ad money, eyeballs or the rights to the King of Silicon Valley throne. It’s about bytes. The magic of Google’s $180 billion market value is its mastery of the reams of information about what people are looking for across the Web. The more clicks Google gets on its blue links, the smarter and more powerful the Google machine becomes. Facebook’s machine is grabbing at user data directly –- by inducing people to list their friends, hobbies, favorite movies and hometowns.

There’s even a precedent for Google using acquisitions as battle gear. Last year, Google announced a deal for AdMob, to help seed ads on cell phones and other mobile devices. That deal, of course, was a broadside against Google’s other BFFN (Best Friend Forever. Not): Apple.

http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2010/11/30/groupon-more-anti-facebook-armor-for-google/

How to Activate Find My iPhone for iOS 4

2010-11-29T22:15:00.000-08:00

Apple last week rolled out a major update for its mobile operating system iOS 4, and among the new features is a nifty free tool: Find My iPhone.

As its name suggests, Find My iPhone is a tracking feature to locate a missing iPhone 4, iPad or fourth-generation iPod Touch. (Only the latest models get the free feature.) If you’ve dropped your iDevice in a cab, or if someone’s stolen it, you can hop on a computer to follow the GPS coordinates of the iPhone on a Google map (see above).

Or, if you’re just absent-minded like me and you misplace your iPhone as often as you lose your keys, you can use your computer to trigger a beeping sound to help you find it. It should be loud enough to hear from under a couch cushion. (You’ll never have to bug a friend to call your phone again.)

If you do indeed think your iPhone is in the hands of a thief, you can use Find My iPhone to remotely lock the device or wipe the data. Do note, however, that if you wipe the device, you won’t be able to track it anymore (hap tip to @shacker for catching that). Also, a clever thief could just remove the SIM card, and you wouldn’t be able to track or wipe the phone.

Of the many new features in iOS 4.2.1, I found this one to be one of the sweetest bonuses. Find My iPhone originally was only available as part of a MobileMe subscription, which costs $100 per year. Making it free was a nice move on Apple’s part: An iPhone can potentially contain a treasure trove of personal information, so losing one is a big deal.

You need to activate Find My iPhone before you lose your phone, so do it now. Since the steps to turn this useful feature on aren’t immediately obvious, here’s how to do it:

1. Make sure you have the latest iOS update (iOS 4.2.1) installed. Plug in your iPhone and click “Check for updates” in iTunes to get the software.

2. With iOS 4.2.1 installed, tap the Settings app on your iPhone. Then tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” and “Add Account.” Then choose MobileMe.

3. In the MobileMe account menu, enter your iTunes or Apple ID and password (i.e., the login you use to buy iTunes media on the iPhone).

4. The “Find My iPhone” option should appear. Slide it to “ON” to activate it.”

And you’re done! From here on, you can hop on a computer and enter www.me.com in a web browser. Then enter the same login credentials you used to register for Find My iPhone, and you’ll immediately get a GPS reading of the phone, along with a simple menu of buttons allowing you to lock, wipe, or send a message or sound to the iPhone.

Update: Corrected an error that stated MobileMe costs $10 per month. In actuality, it costs $100 per year.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/11/find-my-iphone/

Google Delays Facebook-Killer Until Next Spring

2010-11-29T21:43:00.000-08:00

Google has delayed the launch of its "big social play" until next year -- perhaps March or April, Mashable's Ben Parr reports. Previously, Google was reported to be launching a social network, perhaps called "Google Me," this year.

If true, this delay is not a big deal. Whatever Google is going to do now isn't going to immediately destroy Facebook, so Google might as well take its time to do it right -- if it can do anything at all.

Google is notoriously bad at "social," and the company would be wasting its time if it came out with another lackluster product like Wave or Buzz.

Or is Google pushing it back until it has had time to buy and integrate Twitter?

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-delays-facebook-killer-until-next-spring-2010-11

No! You can't see who viewed you on FACEBOOK

2010-11-29T21:37:00.000-08:00

Let's put this matter to rest right now: Any Facebook application that offers to reveal who is viewing your profile is a scam. Period.

Security research firm Sophos posted a memo about a rogue app that was spread on Facebook recently with messages like "OMG ... I can't believe this actually works! Now you really can see who viewed your profile!"

The app is bogus. I've asked a Facebook representative about this before, and he told me that apps on the site do not have the ability to track who is viewing profiles.

In this particular case, clicking on the link provided in the message takes users to a Web page that encourages people to permit an application to access their Facebook profile.

"But do you really want complete strangers to be able to e-mail you, access your personal data, and even post messages to any Facebook pages you may administer?" the Sophos post asks.

Nearly 60,000 people have fallen for the latest scam, based on figures from Bitly using a search on one of the URLs used in this campaign, according to the post.

Facebook representatives did not return e-mails and phone calls seeking comment this morning.

Remember to be cautious when adding new applications on Facebook. Try to stick with reputable apps and pay attention to what permissions they seek.

If you have been duped by a scam, you should remove references to it from your News Feed, and revoke the right of the app to access your profile via Account, Privacy Settings, Applications, and Web sites.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20024026-245.html

Facebook Is Sniffing Around Twitter, Thinking Acquisition

2010-11-29T09:32:00.000-08:00

Facebook and Google are giving "serious look-sees" to Twitter as a potential acquisition, Liz Gannes at All Things D reports.

No term sheet has been extended, but both companies are apparently thinking about making a move. As we previously reported Google offered $2.5 billion - $4 billion for Twitter this year.

It would be out of character for Facebook to drop $4 billion on Twitter. It mostly buys smaller companies at lower price tags. It also offered $500 million in stock and cash for Twitter two years ago, which Twitter rejected.

Just last week Twitter cofounder Biz Stone said the company wouldn't sell, not even for $5 billion. That suggests the company would rather raise a fresh round.

Gannes reports DST is offering Twitter a $100 million investment at a $4 billion valuation. (We have heard from sources that DST is interested in Twitter, as well.) It is willing to make a huge investment to beat out Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz, which both want to invest in Twitter.

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-twitter-acquistion-2010-11

China's Tencent to offer Facebook-like services: report

2010-11-29T05:47:00.000-08:00

BEIJING — Chinese Internet firm Tencent plans to offer users links to third-party websites and access to externally developed applications, mirroring some features of Facebook, a report said Monday.

Tencent was testing about 10 third-party applications to run on QZone, its social network, and Tenpay, its online payment platform, company president Martin Lau told the Financial Times in an interview.

The firm, which runs the world?s largest instant messaging service QQ, was also testing several external websites that users could link to in the way Facebook members can link to other sites with the "like" function, the newspaper said.

The move would change the way the company makes money, it said.

The announcement comes as Tencent scrambles to repair the damage from a fight with Qihoo 360, a local antivirus software provider.

Last month, Tencent suspended services for those QQ users who also had 360 software on their computers.

Tencent said it was defending itself against a malicious software attack, but the move triggered accusations that it had too much power.

Up until now Tencent has focused on selling an ever-growing array of products such as online games and virtual goods to its more than 600 million QQ users.

Lau said Tencent would share the revenues generated by the third-party applications with their developers and expected the traffic to other websites to generate a new advertising business.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ghsFbifarz2wzHnvo2GalIO9Kapw?docId=CNG.f8f5c091d514ee6ae4d595e08ec57d7f.121

Dawn Treader to have Transformers 3 Announcement Trailer Attached?

2010-11-28T23:06:00.000-08:00

If you know me at all, you know that I’m a fan of many things, not just Narnia. One of those things is Transformers. I watched the original animated series when I was a kid (and with that I have just dated myself). Yes, I’m old enough.

This news is a little bit backward, in that usually we’re announcing what movie you can find a trailer for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader attached to. However, this time we’re going a bit backwards. When I saw a comment from Michael Bay that mentioned Narnia, I thought I’d weigh in.

Michael Bay’s Transformers films have their ups and downs, and they are far more adult oriented than they really should be. It makes news of this very strange, as the target audience seems very off. But, considering what they’re doing with that franchise, it seems like they’re targeting the two projected big guns of the Christmas season: Narnia and Tron: Legacy. Both films are releasing in 3D and Michael Bay shot Transformers: Dark of the Moon with 3D cameras.

Michael Bay commented: I will give full details of my process and why I liked 3D in the next week right before the Transformers announcement piece comes out on Tron and Narnia.

What does this mean for Narnia? Well, it seems that all of the marketing is finally beginning to pay-off. Especially now that the boy-wizard Harry Potter film has come and gone, and everyone that wanted to see it has likely seen it by now, people are turning to look at what’s coming next. Not just that, but the two biggest films coming this December. That they are placing a Transformers 3 announcement trailer (commonly called a teaser trailer online) onto both major 3D releases means they’re going for word of mouth and casting a wide net, hoping to catch the attention of people everywhere.

This also means that they’re hoping Narnia has a huge opening, so that they can have the largest reach possible. Plus, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has been tracking very well with test audiences and has excellent and positive word of mouth from those that have seen it.

Let’s band together and make The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader the stand-out film this Christmas

http://www.narniafans.com/archives/10451

Pirate Bay appeal falls on deaf ears

2010-11-27T23:27:00.000-08:00

In another blow to online file-sharing, a Swedish appeals court upheld on Friday the copyright convictions of three of the four founders of The Pirate Bay--perhaps the world's most well-known and notorious file-sharing Web site.

The court agreed with last year's ruling, which found Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstrom guilty of helping Pirate Bay users break Sweden's copyright law. However, it revised the ruling to decrease the defendants' jail sentences and increase the amount they must pay in damages.

The lower court had sentenced the men to a year in prison and set damages at about 30 million Swedish kronor ($4.2 million). The new ruling raises the damages another 16 million kronor and cuts Neij's sentence to 10 months, Sunde's to 8 months, and Lundstrom's to 4 months, based on each man's individual activities with The Pirate Bay.

A fourth Pirate Bay founder convicted by the lower court, Gottfrid Swartholm Warg, will get a separate ruling later, owing to the fact that illness prevented him from participating in the appeals trial.

Still up and running, The Pirate Bay is a BitTorrent search engine that helps online file sharers locate pirated copies of films, music, games, software, and other digital content. It's been celebrated by some as a heroic kick in the eye to corporate copyright owners who, these people believe, have priced content unfairly and whose policies have hampered the creative commons.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20023915-93.html

Facebook Plans to Trademark the Word 'Face'

2010-11-24T22:57:00.000-08:00

Hoping to finally launch thefaceslap.com? Sorry, Charlie, you're too late: Facebook may have just won the rights to the word "face."

The social-networking giant was just given a green light in its efforts to trademark the word "face." The company's efforts have moved Facebook's pursuit of face past the opposition period, according to the U.S Patent and Trademark Office, and a "Notice of Allowance" has been issued. And it looks like the application will be approved, Neil Friedman, a partner at law firm Baker and Reynolds who regularly practices trademark law, told FoxNews.com.

"At the end of the day, will they have protection in this space? Yes," Friedman said.

A trademark may help Facebook throw the book at the competition -- and Facebook faces a wealth of it. GoDaddy.com, the world's largest domain name registrar, told FoxNews.com that it has 53,000 domain names containing the word "face" in its databases. The company estimated that the Internet has 89,000 domain names containing the word "face" just in the .com world.

So put on a happy face, Facebook, that trademark may need to be put to use.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/11/24/facebook-plans-trademark-word-face/

iPad proving more useful than MacBook Air

2010-11-24T01:04:00.001-08:00

Apple's iPad can eclipse a laptop in usability and sheer number of hours used. And iOS 4.2 only makes this more probable.

As Apple adds more features to the iPad, the more it pulls me away from my MacBook Air.

(Credit: Apple)

Though I've just begun to dig around inside of iOS 4.2 on my iPad 3G, it's already obvious that this upgrade is only going to increase the amount of time I spend on the iPad. This will happen at the expense of my MacBook Air, the only other computer device I use regularly.

A recent trip (pre iOS 4.2) serves as a good backdrop to reasons--listed below--for the iPad's slow-but-steady encroachment on the laptop. During a two-day visit to Silicon Valley last week, I barely used the Air at all. It was iPad-all-the-time: airport, plane, hotel, and on the road locally. Though certainly not the equivalent of the Air in productivity, it always trumps the Air in one crucial area: grab-and-go.

In short, the iPad is a sticky commodity. It's always there, always accessible when you need it: instant on, instant access to the Internet, thanks to 3G. And this pushes me to do more productivity--i.e., writing--on the iPad, despite the relative inefficiency vis-a-vis the Air. It may sound illogical, nevertheless that's the way it has evolved for me.

How the iPad encroaches upon/eclipses the laptop:

Browsing: Coincident with upgrading to iOS 4.2, I have added the Atomic Web browser, which let's me do tabbed browsing. And 4.2's multitasking has made it a breeze to jump between Atomic Web and the host of other apps I use.
Productivity: Granted, this is challenging on the iPad. But it's getting easier for me as I master the touch interface sans physical keyboard. And it's more laptop-like with the enhanced multitasking on 4.2. I would submit that as people become more used to the tablet interface, productivity will increase in tandem with familiarity. That's my case, certainly.
Content consumption: No brainer (for me, at least). Because of its "grabability," the iPad becomes the device of choice here. And background streaming of Internet multimedia adds to the allure.
Multifunction: The iPad--and tablet design in general--screams out for front and back cameras a la Samsung Galaxy Tab. With this, I would have yet another reason not to put down the iPad.
Future iPad/tablets: Upcoming 11.6-inch and 12.1-inch tablets will be even more powerful and laptop-like. In an interview today with Binay Bajaj, a product marketing manager at Atmel, which makes touch-screen controller chips for the Samsung Galaxy Tab and HTC Evo 4G (among other devices), he spelled out how future tablets due next year will be much more powerful and very different from the relatively primitive tablets sold today.

And as a postscript, on Tuesday, Dell announced sales of the Inspiron Duo hybrid tablet-Netbook. This product is obviously a nod to the encroachment of the iPad on the laptop. And the Atmel marketing manager made a valid point today when he said consumers may eventually demand a touch interface on all sorts of products, as touch becomes the de rigueur interface.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20023770-64.html

Acer's phone that is sort of a tablet but with no name

2010-11-24T00:57:00.000-08:00

WITH NO NAME and not much more info to boot, Acer is refering to its new handset as the next generation smartphone but it certainly is a biggee with a whopping 4.8-inch 21:9 aspect ratio display.

Very much a competitor to HTC's HD2 and HD7 Windows Phone 7 phone the Acer next generation is somewhat late to the party. It only has a 1GHz Snapdragon processor with an unspecified Android OS but it does have Flash 10.1 and an 8MP camera with LED flash.

It also boasts a 2MP front camera for video conferencing, which users can have fun with, or not, with that huge display that has a resolution of 1024 x 480 and is LED backlit.

Sporting a full metal body, the handset that Acer describes as "100% Smartphone, 100% Tablet" has WiFi N and Bluetooth 3 and HSDPA along with a gyroscope and accelerometer, Dolby Mobile technology and DNLA.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1900148/acers-phone-sort-tablet

What to Expect From the Apple iPhone 5 (or 4G)

2010-11-23T03:05:00.000-08:00

Don't you sometimes feel that changes in technology are too sudden? People spend a bomb on cellphones today, which look passe in a couple of years (in some cases, even months), with phones with better features selling for a lower price.

Many phone manufacturers make a living putting a dizzying array of models on the shelves (Yes Nokia, especially you) with a wide price range that will appeal to the pauper, the rich man and everybody in between. Apple plays their game differently, they just rely on two versions of the iPhone; the current generation and the one before that.

For example: Since the iPhone 4 launched the iPhone 3GS is sold for a cheaper price, while the iPhone 3G has ceased to exist. Every year they keep updating the iPhone with newer hardware and/or iOS software releases. While having just two relatively expensive models does put off people, who don't want to/can't pay the premium for a phone, when you consider the iPhones flying off the shelves year after year, it seems that many don't mind the high price.

The iPhone 4 was a radical change from the 3GS. It added many features like the ultra-crisp Retina display, faster processor, front-facing video-call camera and a 5 megapixel sensor at the rear with 720p HD video recording. Yes, the feature list honestly doesn't sound out of this planet, as Android phones had all these things months before its launch. But for existing iPhone users, who've committed themselves to the Apple ecosystem, the iPhone 4 did give many reasons for them to upgrade.

And so we can only expect this yearly cycle of innovation to continue. June 2010 will bring the next iPhone and June 2011 will bring yet another new iPhone. I know it's a little too early to start speculating what the future versions of the iPhone will do, given that people have just settled down after the antenna design issue of the iPhone 4. I believe there are five things that ought to surface in the years to come.

http://www.techtree.com/India/Features/What_to_Expect_From_the_Apple_iPhone_5_or_4G/551-113472-899-1.html

Irish leader Cowen fights for survival over bail-out

2010-11-23T03:02:00.000-08:00

Calls are mounting for Irish leader Brian Cowen to quit over the country's 90bn-euro (£77bn, $124bn) bail-out by the EU and IMF.

Mr Cowen has phoned opposition leaders in what is seen as a bid to win support for delaying an election until a new budget is passed next month.

He announced on Monday that a general election would be held next year.

But the opposition is said to want a poll now and his own backbenchers are considering a no-confidence vote.

The government is due to publish a four-year economic recovery plan on Wednesday.

But the truth is the government is not expected to last another four months itself, the BBC's Mark Simpson reports from Dublin.

With the Dail (parliament) due to vote on the budget on 7 December, the coalition made up of Mr Cowen's Fianna Fail party and the Greens has just a three-seat majority, and faces a by-election on Thursday which it is expected to lose.

'There will be war'

Late on Monday, the taoiseach (prime minister) phoned Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny and Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11819060

Kinect is hacker-friendly, and that's a good thing, Microsoft says

2010-11-22T21:58:00.000-08:00

Kinect, the new motion-sensing peripheral, is easy prey for hackers. According to reports in several outlets, including the UK Telegraph, a range of "amateurs and professionals" have repurposed the device to run all sorts of cool programs, including "a Star Wars-style light sabre simulator" and "a shadow puppet that takes the movements of a user's arm and projects them as a bird." (More here.)

Sounds ominous, right? Well, not so fast. Responding to queries about the hacks, Microsoft has said that it intentionally made the Kinect open-source – and that it welcomes the additions to the Kinect universe.

"What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect by design, and reads the inputs from the sensor," Microsoft's Alex Kipman recently told NPR, according to Ars Technica. "The sensor ... has eyes and ears, and that's a whole bunch of, you know, noise that someone needs to take and turn into signal."

The Kinect, which sells for $150, has won solid marks from reviewers, who have praised the intuitiveness of the peripheral. The Kinect is a blast to play, Luke Westaway of CNET UK wrote recently, "so long as you don't mind sacrificing all of the dignity you've spent your whole life accruing. We've spent several days playing our way through the launch titles and concluded that it's impossible to maintain any sense of self-respect while playing."

Playing the Kinect is embarrassing, Westaway continued, "but that's a big part of the fun. Similarly, watching your friends flailing around like loonies is a treat not to be missed." Plenty of consumers seem to agree. As of last week, Microsoft had reportedly sold more than a million Kinect units worldwide – a strong showing for a fledging device.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2010/1122/Kinect-is-hacker-friendly-and-that-s-a-good-thing-Microsoft-says