There’s panic about a security hole in Facebook’s iOS and Android apps that surfaced today, but the threat of identity theft is being blown out of proportion. You only need to worry if your phone is actually stolen, and even then a hacker would need it to be jailbroken or they’d have to take the device apart. At that point you have a lot more than Facebook to worry about, as the thief could steal your contacts, cookies, and access all your apps if the phone was unlocked.
Really, this security hole highlights the new dangers of having your phone stolen. Owners should make sure they have a remote wipe solution ready to nuke all their data or else things could get ugly quick. → Read More
After debuting on the New York Stock Exchange last week with a huge pop in stock value, mobile ad network Millennial Media is now facing potential legal trouble from another mobile ad player. The company is facing a patent lawsuit by mobile marketing service, Augme Technologies. We’ve embedded the lawsuit below.
The lawsuit, which was filed in Delaware, says that the patents in question are all generally relating to “systems and methods for providing targeted content over the Internet.” From the patent lawsuit: “The ’721, the ’636, and the ’691 Patents are generally directed to the manner in which content provided in a Web page, such as advertisements, music, videos, and the like, is customized based on the end user’s computing environment, connectivity, bandwidth level, geographic location, gender, age, or other targeting criteria such as behavioral marketing data.”
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It’s been a while since I came to Google’s defense but I think it’s time to talk about what an absolute downer it is to dig through a lot of tech commentary these days. The most recent example came after the launch of Google’s Glass project, a HUD for future travelers that will let us connect to our world in a fairly non-obtrusive way. Arguably, the product is pretty pie-in-the-sky, but all things being equal, the potential device, even if it includes a small subset of the features we saw in the video, is pretty cool.
Instead of oohing and guffawing and going back to, you know, living his life, Old Man Gruber took some time out to dump three links to examples of the potential problems Glass faces. He noted, quite rightly, that only the worst companies created flashy videos of non-existant tech. → Read More
Google Maps, Bing Maps and a number of startups have been offering indoor maps for large venues like airports, malls and stadiums for quite a while. The problem with indoor mapping, though, is that it’s pretty hard for these companies to actually tell you exactly where you are on these maps. GPS obviously doesn’t work well in these spaces and WiFi and cell tower triangulation just isn’t very accurate. Now, however, Google has come up with a plan to improve indoor location accuracy for venues in Google Maps: venue owners who have uploaded their floor plans to Google’s mapping service can now use a new Android app to provides Google with feedback about how accurate its predictions are for their locations. All they need is an Android device (including tablets) that runs Android 2.3 or up. → Read More
Google has historically been paranoid about any numbers it publicly releases. For years, the management triumvirate including Larry Page had to personally approve any numbers the company issued in public, a policy I believe still stands.
So it’s worth pointing out all the figures the company has decided to share in a letter to investors that caps off Page’s first year at CEO: → Read More
It seems it’s a big news day for eBooks and eTextbooks. Google is winding down its eBook service for indie publishers, while Apple and top publishers are the subjects of domestic and European probes into eBook price-fixing.
On top of that, Boston-based educational startup Boundless Learning, which is trying to offer students an open alternative to textbooks (and even eTextbooks), is itself on the receiving end of litigation, thanks to three top textbook publishers. But a little litigation isn’t slowing down Boundless, as it today announced that it has closed an $8 million series A round, led by Venrock — the VC firm that began as the original venture arm of the Rockefeller family. The sizable chunk of pre-launch funding adds to the $1.7 million seed round Boundless raised last year from Nextview, Founder Collective, Kepha, and SV Angel. → Read More
Yes, that’s one of the more random headlines I’ve written, but look — I wasn’t the one who said it. Executives from Spotify and Turntable.fm really did compare themselves to popular musicians, and Pandora and TastemakerX took turns, too.
All four companies spoke at the closing panel at ad:tech conference in San Francisco yesterday, and they were all instructed by moderated Brad Berens to choose a single musician or band to represent their company. (The Beatles and Elvis were out, because they’re too obvious.) Here’s what they said: → Read More
In the world of online mapping, it feels like things aren’t quite going in Google’s direction these days: Apple switched away from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap when it launched iPhoto for iOS. Foursquare, too, announced a similar switch just a few weeks ago and today, Wikipedia switched to OpenStreetMap in the latest versions of its iOS and Android apps.
As our own Josh Constine wrote last month, Google’s plan to charge high-volume users for access to its Maps APIs could backfire and this most recent defection is yet another clear signal that we will probably see quite a few more of these moves in the near future. → Read More
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You know who the busiest man in the startup world is right now? Pinterest’s newly-minted CEO Ben Silbermann, who from what we’re hearing is so preoccupied with shipping product that he hasn’t been taking any investors’ calls.
And there are a lot of freakin’ calls (Fact: Silbermann’s voice mailbox is full). EVERYONE wants Pinterest to raise a C-round, and is trying every which way they can to get a precious slice of time with the modest Silbermann, who hasn’t taken a formal meeting with anybody yet according to a source, compounding the whole supply vs. demand problem. → Read More
Popping over to Facebook is always a crapshoot. Will it be a picture of a swaddled, newly born baby or your weird uncle spouting Jack Handey-esque aphorisms? You never know. That’s what LeFeed.com is for. It makes sense of your Facebook feed and brings up almost exactly the content you prefer.
LeFeed, launched on April 1, is clearly a work in progress and is, at best, a toy. However, the intelligence behind it is very compelling. Founder Serdar Yildirim says LeFeed has “two main goals: organizing users Facebook news feed and recommending new content to the user that don’t suck.” I also suspect his tertiary goal will be to not get sued by Facebook for using a similar logotype and color scheme, but that wasn’t in the FAQ.
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The American Booksellers Association sent a letter to its members today announcing that Google was putting an end to its reseller program, which allowed independent bookstores to operate an e-book storefront using Google as the wholesaler. The news was confirmed shortly afterwards by a post on the Inside Google Books blog, saying “it’s clear that the reseller program has not met the needs of many readers or booksellers.” → Read More
In a press event today held at the White House, President Obama just signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (which cleverly has the acronym of the JOBS Act) into law, sealing the deal on a bill that has been supported for months by a group of the technology industry’s most influential players.
Like most legislation, the JOBS Act has a lot of moving parts to it — it changes who can invest in private businesses, how companies proceed toward initial public offerings on the stock market, how many shareholders a company can have before it starts reporting finances to the SEC, and more. So we sat down with Ryan Caldbeck, the founder and CEO of equity investment marketplace CircleUp, to find out how this will impact the tech industry and the larger business ecosystem. Caldbeck’s current company is directly affected by the crowdfunding aspect of the JOBS Act, and he previously worked for years in the financial industry, so he is a good person to talk to about this issue. → Read More
“In the Studio” this week welcomes a serial entrepreneur who has previously founded four companies, three of which were acquired (two by public companies), quickly established himself as a thought-leader at the intersection of entrepreneurship and education, and now, after a brief stint as an EIR on Sand Hill Road, is back at it again founding his next venture focused on reinventing how companies identify and recruit talent.
Jon Bischke is a machine when it comes to education-related startups. After exploring some ideas as an EIR with Battery Ventures, he noticed that not only were founders troubled by the difficulty of finding and hiring technical talent, but that these activities posed one of the great scaling challenges facing startups today. In parallel, Bischke noticed changing norms around the power of credentialing from traditional bastions of higher education. Whereas in the past formal credentials in technical subjects may have provided the strongest signal to employers, new reputation systems — such as GitHub for developers — have emerged and now provide new, and in some cases, more relevant signals as they pertain to the world of software development. → Read More
Wow, AroundMe has really been flying under the radar. The location-aware mobile search app is announcing today that it’s now passed the 6 million mark for monthly unique visitors. To put that in perspective, Yelp’s mobile apps see 5.7 million+ monthly uniques these days. Not bad, then, considering AroundMe has a single founder, a team of four, and no outside funding.
The company is also now reporting having surpassed 1 million downloads per month, and has recently announced new partnerships with OpenTable, Booking.com for hotel reservations, and Telenav for web-based navigation. → Read More
In the U.S., 61% of all households currently have WiFi networks installed at home. According to data from Strategy Analytics, this means the U.S. is ahead of countries like Spain (57.1%), Mexico (31.5%) and India (2.5%). At the same time, though, this only puts the U.S. somewhere in the lower half of WiFi adoption among developed nations. In countries like South Korea (80.3%), the UK (73.3%) and Canada (67.8%), significantly more households currently have WiFi networks installed. → Read More
There’s a lot of exciting action in collaborative consumption, much of it being inspired by the early success of carsharing and ridesharing networks. After hitting 100 million miles served last year, Zimride is now one of the biggest online ridesharing companies in North America. Today, the startup is announcing the release of the mobile version of Zimride.com, a mobile-optimized version of its online service, which will, among other things, enable users to receive and send messages, view user profiles, search for, post and book new rides.
The mobile service’s launch coincides with this year’s Coachella Music Festival — which takes place April 13-15 in Indio, Calif. — as the startup has been named Coachella’s exclusive ridesharing partner. (It’s also the exclusive ridesharing partner for the Bonnaroo music festival.) → Read More
All our global institutions — from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization to the International Monetary Fund to the G20 to the G8 — are broken. That’s at least according to Don Tapscott, the best-selling author of Superwikinomics and a guy committed to “rebooting” the world. So when I sat down with Don last week at The Economist‘s Innovation event in Berkeley last week, I gave him 8 minutes to outline how we can rebuild these global institutions in the digital 21st century. → Read More
Project Glass sounds like a super-villain’s secret weapon, so Google may need to give its wearable augmented reality device a friendlier name. Luckily the search giant owns the domain GoogleEye.com, so the high-tech monocle may be called Google Eye when it eventually starts selling to the public. Google has the URL locked down through registrar MarkMonitor, which it also uses to handle google.com and gmail.com.
Google registered the URL in June 2003, so it may have been dreaming about being mounted on your face for a long time. → Read More
A startup called Althea Systems wants to reinvent the way we find videos online. Its app Shufflr is already available on desktops, the Web, iPhone, and Android, and today it’s launching on the iPad.
Shufflr co-founder Rajnish (he goes by a single name) isn’t shy about his larger ambition. In the same way that companies like Facebook are reorganizing the web around social identity and connections, Rajnish wants to build a new form of video discovery that’s organized around people — one that could eventually surpass television. Yes, it’s a crazy goal, and while I’m not sure Shufflr will go all the way, I was impressed by the product that Rajnish showed me earlier this week. → Read More
Change.org launched in 2007 as a social networking site for non-profits. Today, the site looks quite a bit different and has morphed into a petition platform that wants to empower activists around the world through what it calls “people-powered campaigns.” While the site only grew rather slowly in its early years, it’s on a tear now. According to Change.org’s own data, the site just passed 10 million users and is now growing by 2 million members per month. That’s quite a difference from last October, when the site was only growing by about 300,000 members per month. This makes Change.org the fastest-growing site of its kind. → Read More
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