Google reaches $125 million settlement with authors

Google will be paying authors and publishers $125 million as part of a settlement agreement that resolves a suit against its Google Book Search initiative, the Authors Guild and a group of publishers announced Tuesday.

The settlement enables authors and publishers to receive compensation for online access to their works.

Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, called the settlement "the biggest book deal in U.S. publishing history."


Google is digitizing the works from many major libraries, including the New York Public Library and the libraries at Stanford and Harvard universities, and is making those texts searchable on pages with advertisements. The Authors Guild, which represents more than 8,000 authors, sued Google in September 2005, alleging that the company's digitizing initiative amounted to "massive" copyright infringement. Five large publishers filed a separate lawsuit as representatives of the Association of American Publishers.

Under the terms of the settlement, Google has agreed to pay the authors and publishers $125 million. It will also be responsible for selling access to copyrighted works in its repository. Most of the revenues from such access would go to the authors and publishers.

Currently, users of Google Book Search are able to view snippets of books online. The settlement agreement allows Google to make whole pages of copyright works available to online searchers. Users will be able to preview up to 20 percent of a book and purchase the book if they choose to, said David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer for Google.

All public libraries in the United States will be offered a free online portal to Google's digitized collection, said Aiken, and patrons will be able to print an unlimited number of pages for a per page fee. Google will also be offering institutional subscriptions to colleges and universities. Google Book Search services available outside the United States will remain the same, Drummond said.

Article source: CNET

Finally getting with the program: Microsoft to offer Office online

Microsoft announced at the Professional Developers Conference Tuesday that it is finally putting Office apps Word, Excel, and PowerPoint online, but not killing the traditional versions. It's about time Microsoft got with the program here. Online apps offer several advantages over software apps, which Google has been leveraging in its Google Docs suite. Primarily, documents that are created in an online app can be opened up for sharing and collaboration very simply.

If Microsoft Office were not a nearly ubiquitous piece of software, chances are the company would have added an online version earlier, due to another bit benefit of the platform: Your user base grows virally. All it takes is for a user to share a document and the app comes along with it, for free. With paid and installed software, obviously, there's a big barrier to adoption.

All is not peaches and cream with online apps, though. As a rule, they have less robust feature sets and interfaces than installable apps. Although many see that as a benefit, it's an easy thing to market against. People new to a word processor may adopt and stick with a product like Google Docs, but anyone with a few years of usage history in Office is going to find it harder to make the move.

Even among online suite users, there is often a split in usage behavior: People will use an app like Word to compose most or some of their documents, and then import them into Google Docs if they need to share them. Or they'll use Google Docs for some types of composing (documents destined for the Web) but not others (mail merge letters or documents being created for print). And this is where Microsoft has the upper hand. If (big if) the company manages to build online versions of its Office apps that complement its installed apps, it can obviate the problems with the split-use model, gracefully letting users float between versions of the apps as they want or need. In a demo at the PDC, Microsoft showed, among other things, two users working on a single OneNote 14 notebook. One was on a desktop app, the other on a browser. The changes on one were syncing over to the other. This is how apps should work: users should not care if they are online or off.

Microsoft, though, does not have a track record of building strong online/offline apps. The Web version of Outlook, Outlook Web Access, is a pale and poor cousin of the desktop app. And Microsoft has already said that the new online apps will not have all the features of the desktop apps.

As far as pricing, Microsoft will be competing with Google's free Google Docs as well as Zoho's suite. Microsoft cannot afford to give away its core productivity app completely. The company has not revealed its entire pricing strategy, although representatives note that the current Office Live has both free, ad-supported options as well as subscription services.

Although Microsoft will be late to the game in offering an online app suite when Office Online beta shows up in 2009, I do not believe it is too late. Google and Zoho have softened up the market for online apps but there are still plenty of people locked into Microsoft Office. This new direction brings Microsoft into an emerging market, which will then see a very big uptick in competition. This is going to be very cool to watch, and beneficial for users.

Article source: CNET

Taste Kid offers dead simple content recommendations via search

Recommendation tools are a dime a dozen these days. That's not necessarily a bad thing though--the more exposure you get to new content, the greater your chances of finding a new favorite. To aid in that search is newcomer Taste Kid, a search tool that provides simple recommendations for music, books, TV shows, and movies.

The tool uses previous user searches to figure out how terms are related, which means as time goes by the results are honed, and hopefully more accurate. While each of these results is missing links to purchasing pages and audio samples, each one has a YouTube video that you can view right from the results.

What makes the site particularly useful are the unrelated items that get stuck on the bottom of each exploration page. The site tacks on the most recently added and popular bands, books, TV shows, and movies, which turns each result into its own browsing experience. In just a few minutes you can peruse about a dozen videos to find something you like--and if not, a simple click on something you do like takes you to another recommendation page to start the process over again.

Where the tool loses some of its luster is the lack of a breadcrumb trail to get you back to your original search, or any sense that it's getting to know you better. Mufin, a music recommendation tool I took a look at a few weeks back does this, and it makes it a far more engaging experience. Ideally future iterations of the tool will keep track of this with a cookie.

Article source: CNET

Blogger And Podcaster Media Network Looks To Turn Long Tail Blogging Into A Full-Time Job

For all of the millions of blogs on the web, only an incredibly small fraction generate enough revenue to serve as full time jobs. Most people are happy enough with just sharing their thoughts with the public, even if they only see a few hundred hits a months with the very occasional comment. But what if there was a way for even these small-timers to generate enough money to put food on the table?

Larry Genkin, the founder and editor of Blogger and Podcaster Magazine, is looking to help the long tail of bloggers turn their hobby into a lucrative job. He has started the Blogger and Podcaster Media Network, a consortium of bloggers and related companies looking to help bloggers of all sizes effectively monetize their sites without having to worry about having a relatively small audience. The site is currently open for signups, but won’t go live until early next year.

At launch the BPMN is a rollup of companies including Genkin’s magazine, Fuel My Blog (A bloggers’ social network based in the UK), Podcast Pickle (a podcasters’ social network), and SocialRank, a company similar to Sphere that monitors blogs for related and popular content.

Each of these companies will help promote the new network, and will also offer technology to help bloggers build out their site (for example, they’ll be able to use SocialRank’s technology). The BPMN will also try to partner with large media companies to help give blogs more exposure. To help each blog get started, the company has partnered with PR NewsWire, which will offer each blogger a promotion package Genkin says is worth $2000.

The BPMN will also have a dedicated sales team for advertising. Genkin says that large ad networks like Federated Media cater to large blogs, leaving most of the long tail bloggers to fend for themselves. Because BPMN will be representing a large number of blogs at once, Genkin says it will be able to secure more favorable deals. The network will have a rev-share agreement with bloggers, giving 70% of ad revenues to members.

Beyond advertising, The BPMN is also employing an affiliate scheme to help bloggers generate revenue. Genkin says that for every blogger a member brings into the network, they’ll earn around $500-1000 a year. It sounds like this is the primary way the BPMN expects to help small time bloggers earn full-time salaries (just recruit 50 bloggers and you’re set!), but recruiting bloggers is more difficult than it sounds, which is where I think the BPMN might fall short. To further entice bloggers, The BPMN is offering a (presumably small) equity stake in the company to early adopters on the network who sign up by the end of the year. And the last selling point: bloggers will have healthcare coverage, though the details for this have yet to be worked out.

The Blogger and Podcast Media Network is going to have a long struggle ahead. Even if advertisers are enticed by the ability to make large ad buys across the network that are more favorable than AdSense, most individual bloggers still won’t be seeing much income from their ads. And the affiliate scheme sounds too good to be true - I doubt many people will be able to recruit enough bloggers to earn a sizable income. If Genkin can pull off some partnerships with large media corporations (his magazine already scored a deal with USA Today), these bloggers may be able to increase their traffic and generate some revenue, but I have a hard time picturing small time bloggers earning full time wages.

Article source: Techcrunch

Think Firefox 3 is fast? Try Firefox Minefield

A colleague today showed me a cool, new browser that he's been using to browse the web at blisteringly fast speeds. The browser? Minefield. The author of the code?

Mozilla.

Yes, that same Mozilla that makes the Firefox browser. Minefield is, in fact, a way to glimpse into the future of Firefox, as it's a pre-release/alpha version of the Firefox browser.

After spending some time with Minefield, one thing is clear: the future of Firefox is fast. Lightning fast.

How fast? Some claim that it has the fastest javascript engine on the planet, which means it leaves Google's Chrome browser in the dust. In my own unscientific tests, I'd say that this assertion is correct. Ars Technica pegs Minefield as 10 percent faster than Chrome.

You can download the latest nightly build for Mac OS X, Linux, or Windows, but be warned: it's alpha code. While a quick scan of the Web shows few complaints as to stability, Minefield may not be for you. It doesn't support some of my favorite Firefox extensions (like Adblock Plus), but it actually has surprisingly good support for extensions, given that it's a fast-moving project.

Feeling brave? Or simply feeling like your browser is too slow? Give Minefield a try. It's a separate install so it won't affect an existing Firefox install. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

Article source: CNET

Study: When it comes to influence, bloggers beat friend lists

Facebook likes to trumpet the value of "trusted referrals"--recommendations and ads with the endorsements of members of your friends list. But a new study from Jupiter Research, commissioned by analytics company BuzzLogic, says that consumer purchases are more likely to be influenced by what they read on a blog versus what their social-networking rosters recommend.

Half of all those surveyed who identify as "blog readers" (people who read more than one blog per month, a fifth of total survey respondents) say that blogs are important to them when it comes to making purchasing decisions. But they don't necessarily find them to be all that reliable: only 15 percent of blog readers, and five percent of all those surveyed said that in the past year they had trusted a blog to help them make a purchase decision.

That's still higher than the number of people who said they used social-network recommendations, though: ten percent of "blog readers," and four percent of all those surveyed.

Results of the survey are similar when it comes to advertising: a quarter of "blog readers" say they trust ads on blogs that they read (versus 43 percent on "familiar" or mainstream media sites), but a slightly lower 19 percent say they trust the ads on social networks.

So what does all this mean? Well, it's good news for BuzzLogic, which tracks blogger influence for clients and has seen blog advertising pushed aside a bit on Madison Avenue in favor of "appvertising" and social ads. Aside from that, the real take-away point is that the results seem to indicate most blogs are less mainstream than you might think: Only a fifth of respondents say they read a blog at least once a month.

That's actually really surprising--or maybe blogs have become so ingrained on the Web that people don't even know they're reading them.

Article source: CNET

ReadWriteWeb is reporting that Aviary, a much-hyped and long awaited suite of online image editing tools, is about to leave private beta. Aviary was developed by the people behind the popular Photoshop contest site Worth1000 using Adobe’s Flex, and is easily one of the most impressive pieces of graphic design software delivered as a web application.

Aviary’s current stable of products includes Photoshop-replacement Phoenix, a multi-layer image editor, visual effects editor Peacock, and Toucan, a color picking tool. Currently in alpha is Raven, a vector image editor, and Talon, a Firefox plugin for creating screen captures.

Aviary has an ambitious product roadmap, with 15 visual, artistic, and creative design applications currently planned or under development, including a 3D modeler, an audio editor, a desktop publishing app, a video editor, and even a word processing application. Based strictly on volume of applications, it is easy to think of Aviary as the creative professional counterpart to Zoho.

Starting November 3, Aviary will begin offering pricing plans. A free, ad supported version will mark all images created on the software with a watermark. Paid plans will remove the watermark and advertising, as well as allow access to collaboration tools and tutorials. Paying customers also get early peaks at alpha versions of software before free customers.

The graphic below illustrates the paid plans coming next week. Anyone who signs up by Sunday gets $50 off the most expensive plan.

Aviary stores all files to it’s internal cloud storage service (called Rookery — notice a theme?), and backs up data to Amazon S3. A DVD backup service is in the works, and all files can be exported to flattened image formats, like JPEG and GIF. Fully layered file exports are something that the company is still working on. Also in the works: AIR versions of the applications for bringing the Aviary suite to the desktop.

In addition to the software, Aviary also hosts a Flickr-like image sharing site for artists to share their creations with one another. For artists that allow it, graphics can be shared with others fully layered, so anyone can open an image directly from the gallery in one of the Aviary tools and remix it.

Have you used Aviary? Let us know what you think. While it clearly isn’t a Photoshop replacement, we think it is a very impressive online image editing suite that many people will find more any adequate.

Article source: Sitepoint

Amazon’s WindowShop Offers A Sleek Interface For The Online Megastore

Today Amazon has launched a new storefront called WindowShop, which presents some of the store’s newest and most popular movies, books, and video games in a way that makes browsing the online megastore actually fun. Each product is displayed as a tile on a large grid, which users can pan across until they find something they’re interested in.

The site seems geared towards shoppers who are just looking for ideas, as there isn’t a search feature. Users can scroll through the site using their arrow keys, zooming in on individual products by hitting the spacebar. Each product includes a demo video (in the case of movies, songs, and video games) or an excerpt (from books).

The site seems to be an answer to more attractive online interfaces like iTunes, which encourage users to simply browse even when they don’t have something in mind. Amazon may sell just about everything under the sun, but the store’s massive inventory is also detriment as it can be overwhelming - unlike iTunes, I’ve never visited the store just to “look around”.

WindowShop is fun to play with, but the site should include some kind of navigation (for example, I should be able to look at just books). I realize that part of the fun comes from stumbling across random products, but at this point the site is more of a novelty than something I’d visit regularly.

Article source: TEchcrunch

New Yahoo Developer Tools Coming Tomorrow

Last week Yahoo invited a group of reporters to its Brickhouse offices in San Francisco to discuss its open strategy in general and to announce that a set of new developer tools were coming in the following week.

Well, it’s that following week and we just received word that these tools go live tomorrow morning. Yahoo will provide details at that point in a blog post, but from what we learned last week, we can expect a sandbox for developers to start building social applications (based on the Open Social spec) that can later be placed across Yahoo’s properties.

These properties include My Yahoo, profile pages, and the Yahoo homepage itself, among other locations. There will also be a “data updates” system that pushes social notifications around from website to website (much like Facebook Beacon, except more extensive), as well as an API that lets developers pull Yahoo profile data onto 3rd party sites (much like Facebook Connect).

Article source: Techcrunch

AVG Detects ZoneAlarm as Trojan

People that use the AVG anti-virus, along with the ZoneAlarm firewall, had an unpleasant surprise when AVG suddenly started to block and quarantine Check Point's popular firewall solution. The false positive was caused by a bogus malware definition file update and AVG eventually addressed the issue.

This problem affected all versions of ZoneAlarm and AVG, both free and commercial; thus, the users assaulted the ZoneAlarm support forum with reports that AVG started to detect ZoneAlarm as a Trojan by the name of Agent_r.CX. Several ZoneAlarm components were being blocked and quarantined and attempts at reinstalling the firewall software failed. At the same time, similar reports popped up on the AVG forums.

“AVG updated on reboot around 8:30 p.m., 10/13/2008. Then AVG Resident Shield blocked Zone Alarm Pro vsmon.exe from loading after identifying five (5) ZA files in Windows/System32/ZoneLabs/lib as infected with Trojan Horse Agent_r.CX: ConfigWizard.zip.dll, licenseui.zip.dll, zlsvc.zip.dll, zpy.zip.dll, zui.zip.dll. Files have been there for 3 months,” a user described the technical details.

According to Laura Yecies, General Manager at Check Point, the company that develops ZoneAlarm, AVG was immediately notified and issued a definitions fix in a matter of hours. During the few hours of uncertainty, the users devised a workaround that consisted in adding the ZoneAlarm folder to the exceptions list of the anti-virus.

The Register reports that an AVG spokeswoman confirmed a time of seven hours and a half since the first faulty update until the fix was issued. "We did accidentally tag Check Point’s Zone Alarm as a trojan. The detection was out for approximately 7.5 hours. As soon as we were notified of the issue, it was resolved and added to our whitelist. We were made aware of it around 3 am and the issue was addressed and resolved within a few hours," the spokeswoman noted.

This incident comes after last month bogus definitions released by anti-virus vendor Trend Micro tagged several system files as malware and caused computers to crash. Symantec pulled a similar stunt that resulted in thousands of unbootable computers. Cases where bogus definition updates tag Windows system files as malware occur more often and generally affect more users. However, since both AVG and ZoneAlarm products have free versions that are quite popular, it’s safe to assume that a considerable number of users were affected in this incident, too.

Article source: Softpedia

A New Interface For Historical Content At WorldHistory

History buffs and students are going to like WorldHistory, a new product from Utah-based Family Link.

The product is still in private beta, but you can get a good sense for what they’ll offer from the demo videos here. Use the map to find a location you are interested in and see historical events that occurred there visually. Set a date range and see just the events during those years.

You’ll also be able to add your own ancestors and genealogy information to the site, such as adding an ancestor that fought in a historical battle or other event.

If anything, it looks to be a cool way to access Wikipedia data, where much of the content seems to come from.

The company also says they are developing an iPhone application that will show you interesting historical events near where you are at any given time. That’s definitely a winner.

Is Your Username Taken? Usernamecheck Will Tell You.

Most people tend to register the same username when signing up for services, for obvious reasons. Your username is your personal identity and most people don’t need more than one. It’s also easier to remember. But one thing that is becoming increasingly difficult to remember, with so many new Web services sprouting up ever day, is which services you have signed up for exactly.

A recently launched application called Usernamecheck gives you a great overview at which Web 2.0 services your ‘default’ username has already been registered.

In just a couple of minutes, you’ll know just how hung up you have been on trying out every new service on the block, and which one you’ve once signed up for but have long forgotten about. Or, alternately, where your username has already been taken by somebody else.

Update: the service returned correct results when I tested it, but several commenters are pointing out inaccuracies.

Usernamecheck currently pings 68 services for the username you want to look up, and lets you know instantly if it is still available or not. According to the counter at the bottom of the homepage, over 110,000 user names have already been checked with the service.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some holes to fill.

Article source: Techcrunch

Rackspace Ups the Ante in Assault on Amazon

Web hosting provider Rackspace announced today that it has acquired two startups in a move to bolster its cloud hosting service in a bid to take on Amazon’s Web Services stack. Rackspace, which is based in San Antonio, Texas, paid approximately $11.5 million in cash and stock (with the potential for up to $16.5 million in additional payouts of cash and stock) to acquire two companies: VPS provider Slicehost and Jungle Disk, an online storage app that uses Amazon’s S3.

Rackspace’s cloud hosting division, Mosso, is also announcing the rebranding of its flagship products. The Hosting Cloud, which is a scalable web hosting environment, will now be called Cloud Sites, CloudFS, which is a file storage offering that competes with Amazon’s S3, will be renamed Cloud Files. Rackspace plans to offer CDN services via its Cloud Files services as part of a partnership with Limelight Networks later this year.

Further, Rackspace announced Cloud Servers, an on-demand server service that will use Slicehost’s provisioning technology, which uses Xen virtualization software.

Both acquired companies will continue to operate independently, and Jungle Disk will continue to offer Amazon S3 as a storage option to customers. The Jungle Disk acquisition seems a bit odd, since it is a consumer play that doesn’t seem to fit with Rackspace’s core business, except as a show piece for their Mosso services. Slicehost, on the other hand, makes a lot of sense.

Slicehost has grown into one of the major players in on-demand, virtualized servers, and claims more than 15,000 “slices” online today. They’ve become very popular with web app developers, especially those using the Ruby on Rails framework (three out of the four founders of my site Rails Forum have their own slice, for example). That’s just the sort of early adopter, web application developer crowd that Rackspace wants to attract away from Amazon.

Both Slicehost and Jungle Disk have FAQs up about the acquisitions.

Article source: Sitepoint

Study: Email Beats the Pants Off of Social Networks for Marketing

From the “Research that Makes Spammers Giddy” department, Jordan McCollum over at Marketing Pilgrim points to an interesting new study from Ball State University’s Center for Media Design and ExactTarget. The study, Messaging Behaviors, Preferences, and Personas looked at how different groups of people interact with media and which sales channels work best to reach them.

The researchers found that almost universally, direct mail and email marketing were far more persuasive at getting people to make purchases than any sort of social network advertising.

“One of the key findings in this research is that 18- to 34-year-olds claim they are more likely to be influenced to make purchases based on email marketing messages and direct mail than marketing messages on social networks,” Mike Bloxham, the director of insight and research at Ball State University’s Center for Media Design, said in a press release. “It is too easy to assume that the media consumers choose for their own news, information and entertainment are, by default, the best media to use for marketing messages. This is a dangerous assumption to make in a time when consumers are becoming increasingly aware of their level of control over their media experiences.”

That’s terrible news for social networks. They’re the preferred hangouts for those in many of the market segments that the study looked at, including teens, college students, and “young homemakers,” but sales messages on social sites just don’t resonate with consumers. In some cases, advertising on social networks is actually offensive to users, who feel that it is a violation of what they look at as private sales channels. It’s also bad news for our inboxes, as this sort of study validates spam as a effective tool for unscrupulous marketers.


Some key findings from the study below about their six persona types:
Wired Consumers - 20% have subscribed for marketing communications via SMS, which is a higher rate than any other group. However, they only want to be bothered with urgent customer service issues, not sales pitches.
Young Homemakers - More than 50% use social networks and SMS, but respond better to direct mail and email marketing.
Retired Consumers - 81% have purchased online and 94% have been influenced by some form of direct marketing to make a purchase. Read: the target market for sleazy spammers.
College Students - The study found that college students are very spam-savvy and thus think that private communication channels such as SMS and social networks should be off limits for marketers. This is perhaps the most valuable demographic, but good luck reaching them where they live.
Teens - Use social networking more than any other group but surprisingly, they’re more likely to make a purchase from direct mail, followed by email, SMS and then social network sites.
Established Professionals - Among the members of this group, women are more likely than men to use new digital media channels such as IM, SMS and social networking, but both genders are heavy online shoppers, with 92% having made an Internet purchase.

Where do you fall among those groupings? Are you more likely to respond to a direct sales pitch, email marketing, or marketing that comes via social channels like IM or social networks? Should social networks be off limits for marketers? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Article source: Sitepoint

29% of Internet Users Buy from Spam

Recent Marshal poll results show that 29% of Internet users buy products of whose existence they find out via spam. The percentage is incredibly large if we don't take into account the fact that the Marshall survey included only 622 respondents, a sample that can hardly be held as sufficient. Moreover, the question that stood at the base of the poll was "What purchases have you made from spam?", which implies that those who answer it are very likely to have actually bought something using the method.

29% of the respondents confirmed that they had bought at least one product advertised through spam. Usually, people who buy once will buy the second time as well, as proven by the Marshal poll, which concluded that "spam shoppers" become fond of this type of making purchases. The most common products that Internet users acquire through websites advertised by illegal means are items to spice up one's love life and counterfeit luxury goods, like clothing, watches and jewelry.

"Spam has become a mainstream means of advertising for restricted or counterfeit goods due to strong demand from Internet users. Many of us don't consider spam to be a legitimate marketing practice, but the products that people are buying aren't legitimate. There is a huge market for cheap goods that are otherwise expensive or hard difficult to come by via legitimate means," explains Marshal Vice-President of Products, Bradley Anstis, almost as if condoning the illicit advertising method.

The results of the Marshal study may not be valid, given the small number of users who disclosed their online shopping behavior, but the security company offers another example to prove that spam purchases are not that uncommon as believed. Citing a Forester Research survey from 2004, which reckoned 6,000 answers, 20% of Internet users admitted to have bought something from spam. "The poll highlights an inconvenient truth," adds Anstis. "Many of us often question ourselves, why is there so much spam? The answer is, enough people are purchasing products from spam to make it a worthwhile and profitable endeavor for spammers."

Article source: Softpedia

The World's Biggest Spam Network Shut Down

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has obtained a court order to shut down a number of companies serving a vast spam network. All the assets and accounts have been frozen and the two individuals behind the whole operation have received restraining orders.

Lance Atkinson from New Zealand and Jody Smith from Texas are accused of running the spam network and, according to the FTC, they are responsible for sending billions of spam messages. The Spamhaus project considers the enterprise run by the two, also known as the HerbalKing gang, “the #1 worst spam gang on the Internet for much of 2007 and 2008” and, as they revealed, it has been running since 2005.

The Register reports that Richard Cox, Spamhaus CIO, noted that Atkinson and Smith "are probably the most prolific spammers at the moment". The two used several companies in U.S. and abroad to sell fake prescription drugs that were not FDA approved as well as male-enhancement and weight loss pills. The drugs were being shipped from countries like India and did not conform to the FDA standards. In addition, when the FTC covertly obtained samples of the drugs and had them tested, the results revealed that the drugs posed health risks.

The two men also set up an affiliate program called Affking through which they recruited other spammers. This service is believed to have been responsible for one third of the entire spam activity in the world. The money resulting from the scams was laundered through multiple merchant accounts set up by Smith in countries like Cyprus or Georgia to make it harder for the U.S. authorities to track it. To put things into perspective, one of Smith's U.S.-based companies, Tango Pay, received around $3.3 million from September 2007 to May 2008 from bank accounts in Cyprus.

“Their enterprise included participants in Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Russia, Canada, and the United States,” is noted in the FTC press release. Therefore, the Commission coordinated their efforts with the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs and the Australian Communications and Media Authority in order to hit the network infrastructure at the same time hoping to put a halt to the operations. Spamhaus' Richard Cox pointed out that "this is probably the first time that an action by law enforcement will affect the level of spam in people's inboxes" throughout the world.

Article source: Softpedia

Muxlim plans Muslim world’s first virtual world

Muslim social network Muxlim.com, live since late 2006, is planning to launch a Muslim-oriented virtual world not unlike Second Life. The idea is that something tailored to the Muslim world would be allowed through the IP-blocks of countries like United Arab Emirates which currently stops access to virtual worlds and online games considered unsuitable or offensive to Muslim culture. The virtual world is said to launch in 4-6 weeks and will “allow the opportunity to wear a hijab, and go to prayer rooms.” Muxlim itself is your standard social network offering community features, blogs and video sharing. The revenue model will be VIP accounts, virtual gifts, virtual furniture/clothes, themes/styles, profile applications, advertising, branded communities and physical merchandise like t-shirts.

Although there are well over one billion people who identify themselves as Muslim, I see this site as appealing primarily to slightly more ‘westernised’ Muslim world. In the UK alone there are over three million Muslims with an estimated £21 billion annual spending power (with a fair proportion of this oil-related money).

Ashar Saeed, vice-president of Muxlim.com reckons that by setting up a Muslim virtual world they’ll be able to attract sponsorship from the likes of brands like Coca-Cola, which already advertise in other online worlds. Launched in December 2006 in Finland, the site 1.5m unique monthly visitors and is backed by Finnish and Swedish money, sepcifically Swedish VC Rite Internet Ventures (also backer of Nebula, the largest Finnish hosting provider and Nyheter24.se, the Swedish online tabloid).

Article source: Techcrunch

Is The Economic Crisis Affecting European Startups At All?

A lot has already been said and written about the current economic crisis, and how the financial meltdown is and will keep on affecting startups in the US. VC’s and angel investors are telling their portfolio companies to say goodbye to the good times and batten down the hatches, and at the same time raising the bar for new financing rounds, while startup CEO’s are executing substantial lay-offs and some company founders are even jumping ship altogether.

Little noise seems to be coming from Europe though, as if the downturn isn’t having an impact on the industry here at all (or at least not yet). Not that we’re rooting for that to happen, of course, but it’s a trend worth noticing. It’s hard to say if it’s merely a matter of perception, considering there’s not really a culture about being open and transparant on dealing with internal challenges here. Or could it be that European startups simply haven’t been hit by the tidal wave yet, while previously considered rock-solid banks and insurance companies all over the continent are fighting for their lives, governments are nationalizing like crazy, and even entire nations are facing bankrupcy? I think it’s safe to say they will feel the sting of the recession soon enough.

But unless I missed them, I haven’t noticed any public (or should I say “leaked”) statements from European VC’s advising their investments to prepare for tough times, nor have I seen many announcements from European startups doing lay-offs or shutting down altogether. The exception proving the rule in this case: Fleck, whose founders put the service up for sale last week, although this decision wasn’t driven solely by the economic crisis as far as I can tell.

I also took note of Martin Varsarvsky subtly criticizing Sequoia, which owns 1% of his company Fon, for not raising any caution flags a year ago when the first signs of a pending recession were already quite visible. He’s also one of the few who publicly states that there have been “painful cost reductions” at Fon, even if they have apparently been dealt with six months ago.

Other than that? Nothing but deafening silence about the challenges ahead and how startups in Europe plan to meet them.

And yet, Max Niederhofer from Atlas Venture recently wrote that he’s seeing “first, quiet shutdowns” - quiet seems to be the keyword here - and that “companies looking for follow-on financing likely won’t get it in the current environment.” Inevitably, the number of first rounds of VC funding and the valuations that come with them will go down in Europe, too. My guess is that the effects for fledgling startups will be less visible in Europe and remain under the radar for some part, but I’m quite sure they will cut just as deep as in the rest of the world.

Article source: Techcrunch

Poll: What Do You Think of Apple’s New Attack Ads?

The increasingly hostile climate around the US presidential election seems to have seeped into the blossoming Apple vs. Microsoft ad war. The latest salvo comes from Apple, with a pair of new ads in their successful “Get a Mac” campaign that casts the Daily Show’s John Hodgman as the nerdy, out of touch PC and actor Justin Long as the hip, young Mac.

The problem with the new ads is that rather than pointing out problems with Windows or talking up what’s great about OS X, they instead take aim at Microsoft’s new $300 million advertising campaign — and not on merit, but on, er, price tag? The problem is that they might be just a bit too much inside baseball for the general public, they’re hypocritical, and they’re, well, mean-spirited rather than informative.

The first new ad pokes fun at Microsoft for trying to fix the image problems around Vista through marketing, accusing Microsoft of spending $300 million on a new ad campaign rather than putting that money toward Vista.

It’s kind of hypocritical, though, given how pervasive Apple advertising has been over the past few years. It’s hard to turn on a TV these days without seeing either a “Get a Mac,” iPod or iPhone advertisement, which also show up on high profile web sites and in many magazines. In fact, Apple spent $467 million advertising in 2007, while Microsoft spent $1.3 billion — about three times as much, but the company has a wider product line and makes a lot more money. Microsoft’s ad spending actually dropped slightly this year.

Microsoft also spent more on R&D — a lot more — $7.1 billion to Apple’s $782 million last year. As a percentage of revenue, Microsoft ponies up 14% on research and development, Apple spends about 3% of its net sales income on R&D. Again, though, Microsoft has a wider product line and Apple could argue that Microsoft has more to fix.

Facts and figures aside, the point is that Apple’s new ads feel like inside jokes that don’t really do much to sell me on the Mac and just seem sort of mean. They’re definitely both funny, but they paint Apple as an elitist bully that’s out of touch with what consumers care about rather than the lovable underdog, in my opinion. Is that really what they’re going for now? Or perhaps these ads meant to just play to the Apple base? (To borrow some phraseology from the political sphere.

Article source: Sitepoint

He was accused of defaming his former company

An autistic Australian working at the Foster's Yatala brewery was fired because of some YouTube videos in which he was "defaming" his workplace. Karl Tilcock, reports Australian IT, has been an employee of the company for over 12 years when he received a written notice regarding his dismissal. The man, whose online nickname is AusDingo, admitted that he had posted on YouTube a few videos in which he made fun of the company and even of his own boss.

The brewery claims that representatives sent, time and again, letters in which they asked the man to stop defaming the company, but that he wouldn't listen. Tilcock comes with another story – he says that he has quit posting offensive videos as soon as he got the first letter.

The man, who lost his job but who still has to provide for his wife and their two children, also autistic, says that he believes the reason that led to him getting fired was his condition, and not the videos. "I've had to fight a lot more (because of the autism) and take time off to care for my family and the company didn't like it" he told the same source. "I did my job."

At the opposite pole, the brewery staff says that the man not only discredited them, but actually filmed some of the compromising videos while at work. "We re-explained the rules to him after the initial warning," a spokeswoman for the company said. "He was making disparaging remarks and defaming the company."

Apparently, the authorities are on the former employee's side. Union state secretary Gary Bullock is quoted to have said that the conduct of the company in handling the case of Tilcock has been "un-Australian." Wherever the truth lies, it is obvious for everyone that finding a job is a lot more difficult for someone who’s autistic, so people tend to be on Tilcock's side.

Scaling The Data Warehouse

LGR Telecommunications has a 310-TB Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL) data warehouse that's used daily by 2,500 people at one of its telecom carrier clients. The warehouse powers an LGR service, called CDRlive, that gives its carrier customers access to call data records. It's updated round the clock, in near-real time, and is available for query 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

"There are no batch jobs," says Hannes van Rooyen, chief architect at LGR, which supplies data warehouse software and services to the telecom industry. "Instead, as many as 13 billion records a day are added, and an equal number are dropped in an online update process that runs concurrently with user queries."

The data warehouse keeps more than a petabyte of disks spinning and has grown by a factor of 10 during the last four years. It's expected to at least double in the coming year.

Most companies still don't hold hundreds of terabytes of data, but they're up against the same data warehouse problems that face LGR--soaring data volume, more users, complicated queries, and fast-changing information. Throw in a growing number of vendor options and it's time for companies to re-evaluate their data warehouse strategies.

The new generation of data warehouses looks a lot like LGR's: growing at an extraordinary pace, in multiple dimensions, and supporting critical business processes that must react quickly to events around the company. Whether your company has 250 GB or 250 TB of data, you're likely facing the same questions: Do we have the right architecture? Is it on the right platform? Is the warehouse about to run out of headroom? What will it take to service new users? How do we move from batch loading to continuous update? And with technology changing so rapidly, how do we know we're on the right system?

All the answers loop back to managing scalability. Getting control of scalability might mean embracing the highly parallel processing and scale-out architectures long offered by Teradata and IBM and elements of which are now emerging in new products from Oracle and Microsoft (see story, "Microsoft And Oracle Are Scaling Out"). Or it might just require more effective management of existing data warehouse practices, including quantifying requirements, measuring alternative solutions, and acting earlier on potential problems.

Article source: Informationweek.com

Adobe Releases Flash 10 Player

Adobe today officially released the tenth version of its ubiquitous Flash player on the world. Flash 10, which was previously known under the code name “Astro,” adds a large number of new features to the Flash player, but the most flashy (forgive the terrible pun) are certainly the 3D support, the new text engine, and the Pixel Bender image processor, which was formerly known as Hydra.

I talked to Tom Barclay, a senior product marketing manager at Adobe, and Justin Everett-Church, a senior product manager at Adobe, who gave me an overview of each of those features.

What will quite possibly be the most talked about new feature in Flash 10 is the native support for 3D. Developers will now have the ability to very easily take 2D objects and transform and animate them in three dimensions — for example, rotating a set of 2D images in a circle in 3D space. Access to 3D effects in Flash comes via simple APIs and new tooling in Flash CS4. Previously developers would have had to use ActionScript or rely on third party tools to achieve similar 3D effects. “This is really 3D for the rest of us,” said Barclay.

Because the native 3D transformations and animations take advantage of GPU hardware acceleration, third party 3D animation tools will get a speed bump as well in Flash 10.

The new version of Flash will also sport an all new new text rendering engine that will allow developers to create their own text layout components. The new text rendering engine will debut on Adobe Labs later this year. When it does, developers will be able to support more advanced text layouts in their Flash-based applications, such as multicolumn flowable text, inline images, bi-directional text, and the ability to chain together multiple custom text components. That will make supporting non-Latin alphabets more easy.

The new Flash text rendering engine was developed in partnership with the Adobe InDesign team.

Perhaps the most compelling new feature in Flash 10, though, is the integration of the new Pixel Bender image processing technology, which is based on the tech that powers visual effects in Adobe’s After Effect CS4 video post production software. Pixel Bender lets developers create custom filters and effects that can be applied at runtime to video, images, and bitmaps. Adobe set up a Pixel Bender Exchange last May when Flash 10 went into beta, so you can get an idea of what sort of effects we’re talking about.

Because Pixel Bender supports multicore CPUs (whereas ActionScript does not), and because it is asynchronous and runs processes in their own thread, it won’t slow down your application while you’re computing massive calculations, according to Everett-Church. Basically, Pixel Bender is an engine that does math calculations very fast.

What makes it so cool, is that its just-in-time compiler can be used for more than just graphics. Everett-Church and Barclay told me, for example, about a customer who is been using Pixel Bender to render multichannel, omni-directional audio in real time (more on that in a later post).

Flash Player 10 is available at www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer. It is available immediately on Windows, Mac, and Linux, with a Solaris version to follow. Adobe tells me that Flash 10’s features should make their way into the next release of AIR, on track for the end of this year.


Article source: Sitepoint

Stores in UK Targeted by Credit Card Fraudsters

According to a BBC investigation, stolen US credit card details are shared on the underground carding market for use in the UK. A gang that stole thousands of credit card details from ATMs across the US are contacting UK carders, and have them manufacture fake card clones to buy goods, or withdraw cash from self-service store chains like Asda and Tesco.

The British fraudsters are also looking on carding forums for mules, people that handle the physical aspect of the fraud for a share of the illegal profits. The most likely approach will be to buy high-value goods like electronics or expensive liquor, and then resell the items. Using the cards to get cash back payments is also theoretically possible, but Tesco officials have stated that the self-service terminals in their stores do not allow for such transactions.

The carders that specialize in cloning cards are looking for mules because, with scams of this nature, there is a high risk of exposure. Andrew Goodwill, director at The 3rd Man Ltd., a company that specializes in card fraud prevention, pointed out that "this is risky because fraudsters risk being captured by CCTV on checkouts. Carders typically like to remain faceless."

He also explained why this kind of scam was possible even though UK and most EU countries have implemented the “Chip and PIN” system, which adds an additional chip-level layer of protection to credit cards. "This approach wouldn't work on UK-issued cards but would work on foreign issued cards where there is a fall back to using data from the magnetic stripe in cases where the cards don't support Chip and PIN," he said. Unfortunately, this system is not yet available in the US, which puts companies like Tesco at risk regarding fraud, even though their terminals have the “chip and pin” system implemented.

Hitting self-service checkouts is preferred by criminals, since it reduces the chances of fake cards being detected. It also simplifies the card cloning manufacturing process, because the fake cards just need to be plain plastic sheets with a magnetic strip attached, as opposed to carefully crafted and branded clones that would be required to trick store personnel. Jacques Erasmus, from the Prevx security company, estimated that the fraudsters could make between $9,000 and $14,000 per day with this scam.

Tesco and Asda officials have noted that the systems block payments if the accounts have been reported as compromised. However, until the US and other countries implement the chip and pin system, this kind of scams that involves stealing credit card information in one country and cashing the money in another will still be possible because of the necessity of backward compatibility of the verification systems. This means that chip protected cards will still work in countries that did not implement the chip and pin system, while cards from such countries will also work on bank terminals that are chip-reading capable.

Article source: Newspedia

FBI Concludes Carding Forum Sting Operation

Earlier this week a German radio unmasked an FBI undercover operation on a popular underground forum used by cybercriminals to sell stolen banking information and equipment used for credit card fraud. The FBI confirmed the operation in a press release, outlining the results so far and their future plans.
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As we previously reported the Südwestrundfunk German radio got hold of some leaked documents from the German national police, according to which the FBI had infiltrated and administered the DarkMarket underground carding forum since 2006. The same documents poined to one of the forum administrators, going by the nickname Master Splynter, as being the FBI Senior Agent J. Keith Mularski from the Cyber Initiative and Resource Fusion Unit at the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance (NCFTA) in Pittsburgh.

The website, which the FBI claims had as much as 2,500 registered members from around the globe, was eventually shut down earlier this month. There's no clear information as to why the FBI decided to close it down, but Master Splynter posted on the board before it happened that “It is apparent that this forum … is attracting too much attention from a lot of the world services (agents of FBI, SS, and Interpol). I guess it was only time before this would happen. It is very unfortunate that we have come to this situation, because ... we have established DM as the premier English speaking forum for conducting business. Such is life. When you are on top, people try to bring you down."

The FBI does not provide any specific information regarding the identity of its infiltrated agents or how the whole thing played out, but it does confirm the existence of the undercover operation. “A primary objective of this operation was to infiltrate the forum, develop intelligence on its leading members, and in coordination with our U.S. and international law enforcement partners, systematically identify, locate, and arrest them over a sustained period,” is specified in the FBI press release.

As a result of the intel gathered from the forum, a total number of 56 arrests were made across the globe during the last two-years. The FBI also estimates that, due to the operation, a total of $70 million have been saved from being stolen, by quickly closing the compromised banking accounts that were being disclosed or sold on the forum.

The Register reports that five people were arrested this week in the U.K. in connection with the DarkMarket operation. This is confirmed by the FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director Shawn Henry. “The arrests this week in the U.K. are a good demonstration of the coordination taking place today between the FBI, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), and other law enforcement agencies around the globe,” commented Mr. Henry.

In addition, the information gathered in this operation is likely to prompt other arrests worldwide. “Separate from these successes, this operation created new leads and more investigative information to pursue. These efforts are being followed up by the FBI and international law enforcement partners,” informs the press release.

It is notable that rumors about the FBI running the DarkMarket forum existed almost since the operation began. In 2006, soon after Master Splynter joined the DarkMaster administration board, a hacker by the name of Max Ray Butler got unauthorized access to the server's database and disclosed the IP the new admin used to log in. The IP was registered to the NCFTA in Pittsburgh, but the hacker's findings were pretty much dismissed by the forum members at that time. The FBI eventually arrested Butler in 2007 on credit card fraud charges.

Article source: Newspedia

Second Life Dropouts Return To Real World

About 15 million people have tried Second Life in its five-year history, but only a half-million people are active users. That means a lot of people are Second Life dropouts. They try the service for a few minutes or months or a couple of years, and then give it up. Early abandoners cite difficulty learning to use the service and finding things to do as problems.

People who drop out after a longer period say they get tired of wrestling with Second Life technology problems, or difficulties doing business with Linden Lab. Or they just plain get bored.

Among the ranks of ex-Second Lifers is Mike Gunderloy of Newburgh, Ind., a work-at-home programmer/consultant, husband, and father of four who used Second Life under the name MikeG1 Schumann. He was a dedicated Second Life user for months in 2007 -- going so far as to lease three servers, known as "sims," from Linden Lab, at a cost of US$1,675 each plus $250 per month maintenance. He then built a business on subletting space on the sims to other users, known in Second Life jargon as "residents." (I rented a Second Life home from Gunderloy for several months.)

But Gunderloy got frustrated, and walked away from the service.

"I seem to have flipped a switch on Second Life," he said. "It was an endless succession of bad client builds, sims down, screw-ups with every piece of Linden Lab technology, and their continued attempts to prove that they're going to be more user hostile thanMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT)."

The last straw for him was when Linden Lab slashed the price of sims to $1,000 each, soon after he bought land at a much steeper price. "That was an asset that, at one stroke of the Linden pen, was massively devalued," he said. He decided to sell. Fortunately, he was able to find buyers who were willing to pay a premium to buy land fast. "I only took a couple hundred dollar per sim loss," he said. He sold two sims, retaining the third only because he doesn't want to abandon his tenants. He logs in infrequently now.

"Maybe the new guy [Kingdon] can turn things around. I don't know," Gunderloy said. "I'd still like to see Second Life succeed, but at some point someone is going to come along and eat their lunch."

Another disaffected Second Life user is Michael Durwin, creative director of the Boston ad agency Rize Yongho. The agency has land and an office in Second Life, and did some campaigns for clients in Second Life two years ago. Second Life campaign performance lagged YouTube and MySpace. Durwin sees several problems with Second Life as an advertising or marketing platform.

Among the problems: Graphics are poor. "Even the cheesiest video game has better graphics and works smoother. Even Monkey Ball [a game] on my iPhone has better graphics," Durwin said. Second Life requires a download, which puts off most users. "If Linden Lab figures out how to get Second Life into a browser, things will change," he said. The audience is small and cliquish; residents form tight communities and don't interact outside their communities.

However, Durwin said he hopes to try Second Life marketing again, with the right company and the right technique. Second Life marketing can be successful if it's used to engage with an existing real-life community, Durwin said. The TV show The L Word has a thriving fan community in Second Life, as does Gossip Girl, both sponsored by the shows' creators. Other TV shows have their own, unofficial fan communities in SL, including Battlestar: Galactica, and Lost. (On the other hand, the Gilligan's Island area of Second Life seems to have nothing to do with the show other than the name.)

Article source: Informationweek.com

Microsoft Launches Open Source Web App Installer

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft released their Web Platform Installer (Web PI), a free downloadable application that installs and configures their entire web platform stack. The application installs the latest versions of the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, IIS7.0 and Extensions, IIS FastCGI, Visual Web Developer 2008, SQL Server 2008 Express, SQL Server Management Studio, ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight Tools. The idea is that the Web PI makes it easier for for developers to install the entire Microsoft web stack and then stay up-to-date with the latest releases.

But what good is a web platform without applications? So this week Microsoft launched the Web Application Installer, a companion tool that automatically installs and configures a number of widely used open source and community web applications. The app initially will install Graffiti, DotNetNuke, WordPress, Drupal, OSCommerce, and phpBB. It downloads the latest version of the application direct from the vendor.

According to David Lowe of the Windows server team, more applications will be added to the Web AI app in the future.

In some respects, Web AI reminds me of the cPanel installer Fantastico. Microsoft has taken the heavy lifting out of installing and configuring applications to work on their web platform stack, and makes doing things like installing phpBB or setting up Wordpress, for example, a matter of a single click.

As Matt Asay points out, Web AI doesn’t make Microsoft a distributor of these open source apps, since they’re being downloaded from public source code repositories, but it is pretty close. And that’s a departure from Microsoft’s stance on open source software in the past.

MapQuest taps Yelp info for local push

MapQuest will begin showing business reviews from start-up Yelp on Thursday, part of a plan to expand from just a mapping site into a go-to hub of local information.

Through the deal with Yelp, MapQuest will get better locally specific content, and Yelp will get more Web site traffic from beyond tech-savvy places such as Silicon Valley that currently are familiar with the site, said Christian Dwyer, MapQuest's senior vice president and general manager.

In addition, the AOL site will add sports information to its MapQuest local site, said Mark Law, MapQuest's vice president of product development. The expansion fleshes out MapQuest's vision to reproduce what people can find in their Sunday newspaper, but in a dynamic online format.

MapQuest also is seeking to plug into the booming mobile mapping business. It's released BlackBerry-specific applications so far, and a version of its site tuned for the Safari Web browser on Apple's iPhone is due to be launched "in the next few days," Dwyer said.

The efforts come as AOL seeks to improve its financial condition so Time Warner will get a better deal selling the asset--perhaps to Yahoo. Dwyer wouldn't comment on MapQuest's financial performance other than to say, "We're a healthy, growing, going concern."

The new local site, initially launched a month ago, is growing in significance for the AOL division, too. It's got about 3.3 million visitors a month, compared to 48 million for the entire site, Law said.

Another change coming is a shift in ad formats. The older MapQuest site uses a somewhat antiquated large banner ad across the top--"Secrets of the ultra wealthy revealed!" said one ad I saw Wednesday. The new site uses a more modern, squarish ad on the right, and MapQuest is moving away from the banners, Dwyer said.

Article source: CNET

Photobucket gets photo organizer, album themes

On Thursday, Photobucket introduced two new features: a way to skin albums and an overhauled organizational tool that lets users drag and drop photos into various folders.

Of the two, the organizer is the biggest enhancement. Users are taken to a dark gray editing environment that lets them make changes without the entire page having to refresh. Everything is drag and drop, which is useful for ferrying photos and videos between albums, and reordering album arrangement. There's also support for batch operations, so you can quickly move, reorder, and rename multiple photos at once.

Compared with Adobe Photoshop Express and Flickr's Organizr, this new organizer isn't nearly as technical. Missing are things like group tagging, and control of the metadata. Considering you can add and edit tags from the individual photo pages this seems like an oversight.

The other big feature is the skinning of album pages. This is just another level of personalization you can give an album short of reordering the images. There are a few hundred themes to choose from, and like a blog theme on Wordpress.com, you can preview what it looks like before applying it. Each theme changes the colors of various page elements, with the centerpiece being the background. I found most of the themes with background images to be too distracting, but there are some simpler ones that dramatically improve the somewhat barren white look the service had before.

In addition to the grouping of Photobucket-built themes, users can design their own with a simple editor that lets them pick the color scheme, background image, and border colors. You can preview all of the changes in real-time, then push it out to one or more of your albums. There's also a publishing feature that lets you share it with other Photobucket users.

One thing I'd still like to see with both of these features is more cohesion among other parts of the service. For instance, if you want to edit a photo from the organizer, it kicks you out to the special partnered FotoFlexer editor. Likewise, if you're in an album and want to rearrange the shots it feels like you're going to a completely different site. I'm not saying Flickr's done a better job at this, however on Photobucket the experience feels far more disjointed.

Article source: CNET

The week in tech layoffs

With financial troubles taking their toll on every sector of the economy, an increasing number of companies are laying off employees to stay afloat. And the technology industry is no different.

The long and growing list of tech companies planning staff cuts ranges from Pandora to Tesla Motors, leaving a slew of highly trained workers looking for new opportunities:

Appcelerator, an open-source software company that develops products and services for rapid rich Internet application development, was forced to close its Atlanta office Wednesday and lay off its remaining six employees working in the city.
Pandora, the online music streaming service, announced Thursday that it was forced to lay off 20 employees because, as its founder pointed out, it's simply "not immune to the challenges presented by the current economic turmoil."
Hi5, the third-largest social network, confirmed Thursday that it laid off "10 to 15 percent" of its staff in a restructuring plan that will see some go, but others hired in different areas of the company. Like other companies in the market, Hi5 wants to be prepared for any economic troubles it may face.
Business social-software maker Jive Software reportedly laid off one-third of its workforce Tuesday to, you guessed it, stay ahead of what it perceives will be a tumultuous economic environment in coming months.
Sirius XM announced Thursday that it laid off 50 on-air and off-air employees in its Washington, D.C., office. The layoffs were the result of a companywide belt tightening on the part of Sirius XM to help it eventually turn a profit and grow its free cash flow.
Redfin, an online brokerage for residential real estate, laid off 20 percent of its employees earlier this week in a move that it claims had more to do with the current economic conditions than its business model. There are 75 to 80 employees remaining at the company.
Tesla Motors announced Wednesday that it will lay off its entire Detroit office staff to adapt to the changing economic conditions. The company claims the layoffs will help it achieve its goal of becoming cash-flow-positive within the next six to nine months.
AdBrite, the "Web's online ad marketplace," announced that it laid off 40 percent of its staff. The company's CEO, Iggy Fanlo, claims the move has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with his desire to make AdBrite profitable immediately.
Zivity, the start-up that specializes in letting people vote on the best adult pictures on its service, has laid off one-third of its staff over concern about future economic troubles.
Last Friday, Seesmic, a video microblog, announced that it laid off one-third of its workforce due to uncertainty and the company's desire to be prepared if the economy gets worse.
Although each company has its own rationale for the layoffs, they all seem concerned about staying competitive and maintaining a sound financial structure to weather tough times.

We'll be updating this list. Perhaps it will help bridge those companies looking to hire experienced employees with those seeking new opportunities.

Article source: CNET

Firefox for Mobile: What you need to know

How would you like to be among the first to get touchy-feely with the next mobile browser everyone's talking about? Mozilla's release of the Firefox for Mobile alpha code, code-named Fennec, grants that wish to users of the Nokia N810 and N800 Internet tablet (installation details here).

For the rest of us, the anxiety-filled wait continues.

Even though most of us can't play with Firefox Mobile firsthand, here's what we can expect when the release does become more broadly available on other platforms: a full-screen display with navigation set to the side. A version of the Firefox 3 Awesome Bar that combines history, bookmarks, and search. Plenty of capability for add-ons.

Let's look at these features in more detail.

Navigation: Fennec has a full-screen mode that relinquishes the entirety of the screen for your browsing pleasure. This is consistent with one of the early designs, and with some functionality of the Opera Mobile 9.5 beta browser for touch-screen phones. As long as it won't slow you down while going backward and forward, this is a smart idea for mobile phones--after all, what good is it to clutter your small screen with buttons you use only half the time?

Awesome Bar: Don't expect a complete replica of Firefox 3's Awesome Bar to show up on your mobile phone, but do expect something close enough to save you typing time. An official demo video reveals a bookmarking button to the right of the URL that lets you quickly grab favorites from a drop-down list. Roughly the same event transpires when you tap the URL bar; your links display below before you type a thing.

I'm less convinced, however, by the search bar along the bottom edge of the screen. It seems convenient enough to type in your term, than to click the engine you prefer to search with--either Google, Yahoo, Amazon, or Answers.com. However, wouldn't it be more efficient to bundle search into the URL? That feature may be one of the more contested once more users see Fennec before them. Stay tuned.

Tabs and controls will receive a new mobile-specific treatment as well. Instead of hovering above in buttons, you'll find that controls live in the righthand margin of the Web page and tabs, really preview windows, are way over to the left. It will be very interesting to see how this setup handles during sustained surfing and whether it ends up slowing down browsing, or if it succeeds in keeping the focus trained on the content in the center.

Add-ons and others: One of Fennec's goals is to carry over as much functionality from Firefox 3 as possible. Already, this early version contains a password manager that offers to save and autofill your logins. Anyone who has spent more time than necessary pressing Alt or some other key to switch among letters, symbols, and characters on your smartphone (all features of a strong password) will appreciate the time-saving qualities of having a secure password manager onboard. No matter how you shine it, a mobile keyboard (virtual or otherwise) is less than ideal for inputting text.

Fennec's alpha build also debuts with pop-up blocking and the familiar logo to the left of the search bar that serves up the identity of the Web site owner.

Most importantly, Fennec supports add-ons. A few have already been created, but this build is going out now in part to engage the thousands of independent add-on developers in the conversation of building, porting, and deploying mobile extensions.

One difference here will be exactly where in the interface your add-ons will sit. This wouldn't be much of an issue if most users employed one or two extensions, but the average could be in the range of a dozen or more. Since a phone's screen is much tinier, icons will likely inhabit a context menu or pop-up control bar.

Firefox add-ons bring the uber-popular browser its character. It seems obvious that making the mobile version of Firefox extensible and customizable will likewise herald its instant popularity, and will threaten the dominance of Opera Mini and Opera Mobile.

What about Flash video?

Mozilla's team knows that most people want to stream video from their mobile phones, and that having Flash is therefore a must. The official answer on this one is that Fennec will support a plugin API, which means that as long as Adobe and others give the green light, you'll eventually be able to play YouTube videos via Firefox's mobile browser.

Fennec on Windows Mobile phones. There's been a lot of Internet chatter about when Mozilla will release the next alpha version of Fennec. According to Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's Mobile director, that won't be for a few more months; not a few weeks, as some sources suggest. Fennec must first undergo some changes to be readied for that introduction. First, it must be able to run on standard non-touch-screen phones as well as touch-screen formats. Second, it must be stable in portrait mode as well as in landscape mode. Third, there may be necessary tweaks to make it legible on a smaller screen.

Keep in mind that both Nokia Internet tablets with which Fennec is compatible have much larger screens than most smartphones and are in landscape mode. These are both traits that give Fennec plenty of room to run. While the Nokia tablets (which are not phones) will showcase Fennec well, there may still need to be engineering work before the alpha mobile browser can comfortably transition to a consumer phone.

When that happens, I'll be here with a full review.

Article source: CNET

Opera: Just 4.13% of Web’s Code is Valid

A new study from Opera finds that the overwhelming majority of web sites don’t adequately support web standards. The good news is that compared to previous studies, more web sites are valid today than they were in previous years. The bad news is that just 4.13% of the URLs included in the studies sample size — which was over 3.5 million web pages — passed the W3C validator.

The results came from Opera’s “Metadata Analysis and Mining Application” (MAMA), a search engine that “indexes the markup, style, scripting and the technology used while creating Web pages.” Opera engineers and data miners can then ask the search engine questions like, “how many sites use CSS?” (the answer is 80.4%) or, “how many markup errors does the average site have?” (it’s 47).

Opera is vague about what they’ll do with this tool, other than continue to analyze the data and post additional finding, but a press release hints at the possibility of making it publicly available to web developers.

“MAMA will help Web developers find examples of usage of features and functions, look at trends and gather data to justify technology to their clients or managers,” wrote Opera. “This will also encourage standards bodies to take into account developers’ suggestions about what is happening on the Web in reality and will eventually raise the quality and interoperability of specifications, the Web and browsers.”

Ars Technica, which posted an analysis of the findings today, also seems to think that the search tool Opera writes about will be made public.

The MAMA study findings released today, also revealed that ~50% of pages sporting “W3C Valid” buttons aren’t actually valid. The reason, surmises Opera, is that keeping pages valid is not easy for many developers, and for many keeping up with evolving standards is difficult. The key takeaway, says Opera, “is that people are BAD at this ‘HTML thing.’ Improper tag nesting is rampant, and misspelled or misplaced element and attribute names happen all the time. It is very easy to make silly, casual mistakes — we all make them.”

One problem, though, is that the tools people are using to create web pages also turn out ugly, invalid code. MAMA also looked at validation as it related to web page editors and content management systems, and found that with the exception of Apple’s iWeb — for which an impressive 81.91% of URLs pass validation — the results were generally dismal. Just 0.55% of pages made with Microsoft Frontpage are valid, according to MAMA, just 3.44% for Adobe Dreamweaver.

For content management systems, the results weren’t much better. Wordpress pages were valid just 9.0% of the time, just 12.74% for Typo, and 6.45% for Joomla. Google’s Blogger fared the worst, with only a paltry 0.30% of URLs passing validation.

There is a lot of interesting information to dig through in the full results and Opera is promising to release more results as part of a planned “long, multi-part saga.”

article source: Sitepoint

Silverlight 2.0 Expands .NET Support, Adds Controls

Adobe Flash 10 wasn’t the only major web runtime to have a milestone release this week. Microsoft’s Flash competitor, Silverlight, officially hit version 2.0 yesterday.

Silverlight 2 comes after a very good summer for the Microsoft cross-browser rich media and RIA plugin, one which saw adoption rise rapidly following some successful public deployments. According to Microsoft, Silverlight market penetration in some countries is already approaching 50%, in large part due to their rapidly growing developer ecosystem. The NBCOlympics.com deployment of Silverlight for this summer’s online Olympic video coverage — perhaps the largest to date — saw 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams and 600 million minutes of video watched, and increased Silverlight penetration in the United States by 30%, says Microsoft.

Silverlight also handled the video for this year’s Democratic National Convention, which due to the high profile nature of the presidential race in the United States, was one of the most watched in history. And, Microsoft says, CBS College Sports Network is streaming more than 20,000 hours of live content each year using Silverlight.

Microsoft has signed an impressive list of corporate development partners for their plugin, with forthcoming applications from Blockbuster, Hard Rock Cafe, CBS, AOL, Yahoo! Japan, and Toyota.
What’s New in Silverlight 2?

Silverlight, which is essentially Microsoft’s answer to Flash: a cross-platform browser plugin that enables the delivery of rich media content and the development of .NET-based rich Internet applications, adds a number of compelling new features for version 2.

* Text Rendering - Text rendering has been improved in Silverlight 2. According to Tim Heuer, program manager for Silverlight at Microsoft, text is an area that they will continue to focus on and improve.
* Silverlight Control Pack - Silverlight 2 adds a bunch of built-in controls that help developers rapidly build new applications. Via Scott Guthrie: “The Silverlight 2 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc).” The plan is to continue releasing new controls over the next few months and eventually have more than 100 in the pack.
* Networking Support - “Out-of-the-box support allows calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS and standard HTTP services, enabling users to create applications that easily integrate with existing back-end systems,” says Microsoft’s press release.
* Expanded .NET Framework Support - RIAs can now be coded for Silverlight using any .NET language, including C#, JavaScript, VB, IronRuby and IronPython.
* Deep Zoom - Microsoft is really hyping the new “Deep Zoom” feature in Silverlight, which is essentially a control that allows smooth zooming and panning of ultra high resolution images without much load time. It’s pretty cool, but it seems like it would have only a limited, niche appeal and makes me wonder why it is included on such a low level in the plugin.

“We wanted to build a cutting-edge, rich Internet application that enables our customers to search our vast database of content and metadata so they can access movie reviews, watch high-quality movie trailers, and either rent or buy movies from our new MovieLink application,” said Keith Morrow, chief information officer at Blockbuster in a press release. “Because Silverlight 2 now includes several new rich controls such as data grids and advanced skinning capabilities, as well as support for the .NET Framework, allowing us to access our existing Web services, we were able to easily maintain the high standards of the Blockbuster brand and bring the application to market in record time.”

Microsoft is also touting their commitment to “openness and interoperability” around Silverlight 2. They’ll be funding a project to add Silverlight development capabilities to the open source Eclipse IDE, will release the Silverlight Control Pack under an open source license, and plan to publish the Silverlight XAML vocabulary specification.

As we reported last month Microsoft is already working on Silverlight 3, which will feature support for h.264 and AAC audio.

Article source: Sitepoint