Obama begins day with moment of solitude, then business January 21, 2009
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentWASHINGTON (CNN) — President Obama began his first full day in office with a moment of solitude in the Oval Office, reading a note from his predecessor, before making phone calls to Middle East leaders.
Obama arrived in the Oval Office at 8:35 a.m., according to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. The president spent 10 minutes alone, reading a note left for him in the desk by outgoing President George W. Bush. The note had been placed in an envelope with a note saying: “To: # 44, From: # 43.”
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel met with the president 10 minutes later to discuss the daily schedule, Gibbs said.
Obama called Middle East leaders, according to a senior administration official, including King Abdullah of Jordan, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
On Sunday, Israel and Palestinian militants declared a cease-fire after 22 days of fighting in Gaza.
First lady Michelle Obama joined her husband in the Oval Office at 9:10 a.m., shortly before the first couple departed for the National Prayer Service at the Washington National Cathedral.
READ THE REST—>Obama begins day with moment of solitude, then business
AppleApple CEO Steve Jobs takes leave until end of June; Jobs says health issues "more complex than I originally January 14, 2009
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentApple CEO Steve Jobs told employees in an e-mail Wednesday that he is taking a leave of absence due to health-related issues.
“Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well,” he wrote. “In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.
“In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.”
Steve Jobs taking medical leave from Apple | Technology | Los Angeles Times
Japanese Scientist creates intelligent "Fembot" ( make sure you keep your hands to yourself though …she doesn't appreciate being pawed at) December 12, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentEmbedded video from CNN Video
Even Google Gets Frugal in the Recession December 8, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentEven internet superstars fall to earth eventually. While recent reports of layoffs and other cost-cutting measures at Google have been greatly exaggerated, the search giant’s culture of unbridled spending is finally coming to a halt. And that’s probably a good thing. “Hard times have forced discipline on them,” says Sanford Bernstein’s Jeffrey Lindsay, who predicts, “They’ll come back really powerfully. They can emerge as a much leaner and more competitive player.”
Read The Rest—> Even Google Gets Frugal in the Recession
Dow futures tumble; trading limits imposed October 24, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentDow Jones industrial average futures fell 548 points this morning, leading to a freeze on their sales. Global markets were down, with Japan’s Nikkei index ending down 9.6 percent and European markets down almost as much. “Today might be the day where everybody throws in the towel,” Peter Cardillo, chief market economist for Avalon Partners, tells CNNMoney.
READ THE REST—–Dow futures tumble; trading limits imposed
News Corp.: Video ads to get premium pricing July 24, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentHALF MOON BAY, Calif. – Looking at big money-making opportunities online, News Corp. (NWS) President Peter Chernin pointed to video, mobile and overseas markets as good long-term bets.
In an interview with Fortune editor at large Richard Siklos at Brainstorm Tech on Tuesday, Chernin said advertisers still haven’t completely embraced the online opportunity, and that they continue to have a television mindset. He said an advertiser recently told a MySpace sales rep to come back when the social network has a “SuperBowl-level” event. What the advertiser failed to recognize, Chernin said, is that the MySpace homepage has as many viewers every day as the SuperBowl has once a year. (Of course, there’s a good argument that MySpace visitors aren’t quite as engaged with the content as SuperBowl viewers are.)
He also addressed the challenges News Corp. faces in getting a decent price for ads on MySpace. (The company partners with Google (GOOG) to monetize the site.) The answer, Chernin said, may be to look beyond banners and text ads. “What drives ad prices is scarcity,” he said. “The place that is most promising is probably in video. By definition there’s more scarcity in video, and there’s even more scarcity in premium video.”
READ THE REST OF THIS CNN/FORTUNE ARTICLE BY CLICKING HERE
Social networking applications pose risks May 14, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentCHICAGO, Illinois (AP) — Sarah Brown is unusually cautious when it comes to social networking.
Student Adrienne Felt created her own Facebook application to see what information companies could access.
The college sophomore doesn’t have a MySpace page and, while she’s on Facebook, she does everything she can to keep her page as private as she can.
“I don’t want to have to worry about all the different online scandals and problems,” says Brown, an education major at St. Joseph College in Connecticut. She’d like to control her personal information and keep it out of the hands of identity thieves or snooping future employers. “It’s just common sense.”
It sounds like her info is locked down and airtight. But is it?
Turns out, even the privacy-conscious Sarah Browns of the world freely hand over personal information to perfect strangers. They do so every time they download and install what’s known as an “application,” one of thousands of mini-programs on a growing number of social networking sites that are designed by third-party developers for anything from games and sports teams to trivia quizzes and virtual gifts.
Brown, for instance, has installed applications on her Facebook page for Boston Bruins fans and another that allows her to post “bumper stickers” on her own page and those of her friends. It’s a core way to communicate on social networking sites, which allow friends to create pages about themselves and post photos and details about their lives and interests.
People often think Facebook profiles and sometimes MySpace pages, if they’re set as private, are only available to friends or specific groups, such as a university, workplace, or even a city.
But that’s not true if they use applications. On Facebook, for instance, applications can only be downloaded if a user checks a box allowing its developers to “know who I am and access my information,” which means everything on a profile, except contact info. Given little thought, agreeing to the terms has become a matter of routine for the nearly 70 million Facebook users worldwide who use applications to spruce up their pages and to flirt, play and bond with friends online.
News Corp.’s MySpace, which has about 117 million unique visitors each month, recently added an applications platform, giving developers access to the profiles of anyone who downloads them. Unlike Facebook, though, MySpace users don’t have to include their names on their profiles.
So what do these third-parties do with the information? Sometimes, they use it to connect users with similar interests. Sometimes, they use it to target ads, based on demographics such as gender and age (something Facebook and MySpace also do).
Facebook and MySpace say they hold application developers to strict standards — and boot them if they don’t comply. They also point out that some information, such as e-mail addresses and phone numbers, aren’t made available.
But experts who track online security issues think there’s too much personal information flying around out there, with few guarantees that it’s safe. They also think social networkers have little understanding where their information goes and how it’s used — and as a result, have a false sense of security.
“I suspect that there’s a whole lot of clicking without a lot of thinking,” says Mary Madden, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project who studies privacy issues. “So much of this sharing happens in a way that users don’t see the consequences. It’s kind of a big, black hole.”
Part of the risk stems from Facebook applications being created by anyone, some of them tech-related companies and others individuals with know-how. And they could be anywhere in the world, as is Jayant Agarwalla, co-founder of Facebook’s popular Scrabulous application, a takeoff on the game Scrabble.
Reached by e-mail, he says Scrabulous does use demographic information to target ads that show up as a person plays the game. But Agarwalla, who’s based in India, stresses that that information is provided in “real time” and not stored. “In my humble opinion, users have nothing to worry about,” he says.
Some would argue that it’s much like trusting an online vendor with your credit card information.
Still, it’s an honor system, says Adrienne Felt, a computer science major at the University of Virginia. A Facebook user herself, she decided to research the site’s applications and even created her own so she could see how it worked.
Most of the developers Felt polled said they either didn’t need or use the information available to them and, if they did, accessed it only for advertising purposes.
But, in the end, Felt says there’s really nothing stopping them from matching profile information with public records. It also could be sold or stolen. And all of that could lead to serious matters such as identity theft.
“People seem to have this idea that, when you put something on the Internet, there should be some privacy model out there — that there’s somebody out there that’s enforcing good manners. But that’s not true,” Felt says.
Last year, Facebook users revolted when the company started using a tool called Beacon, which tracked its users’ purchases and actions at dozens of Web sites and then broadcast the data on the pages of the users’ friends.
Beacon has since been scaled back.
By comparison, the issue of personal information going to application developers, both on Facebook and now MySpace, has remained relatively quiet.
Jonathan Gaugler, a 26-year-old New Yorker, is one who finds targeted ads on his Facebook page a bit too invasive.
“Getting married? Do your registry here!” read one recent ad that showed up. Another on his fiancee’s page was advertising for egg donors for fertility clinics.
“Creepy,” Gaugler says.
He keeps his Facebook activity to a minimum as a result — and rarely downloads an application because he doesn’t want to be further targeted.
But many others are much less cautious, seeing the risk of social networking “as low and the reward as high,” says Patricia Sanchez Abril, an assistant professor at the University of Miami’s business school who studies privacy law.
“It is the chosen mode of communication of everyone they know. So if you’re not in it, you’re just not in the loop,” she says. “There’s a lot of peer pressure.”
What they don’t realize, she adds, is that there is little legal backup if their information is used in a way they didn’t intend.
“This is an area that’s completely unregulated. Yes, there are contracts. But if the receiving end doesn’t abide by the contract, you’re still out of luck,” Abril sa
ys.
And applications, she notes, are only one worry when it comes to online threats.
A social networker’s friends can, for instance, give access to personal information or photos in a profile. That happened to the call girl involved in the recent sex scandal with former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.
Researchers at Indiana University also published a study last year showing how they “scraped” information from students’ social network profiles. Posing as people’s friends, they then used the information to fool the students into providing their university ID and password on a bogus external Web site.
Whether the profile is private or not, users should limit the information they post, said Tom Jagatic, one of the researchers and now a senior information technology consultant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s good advice, says Jeremy Miller, a fraud investigator based in Nashville, Tennessee, but he wonders how many will heed it. He uses MySpace and sees people who routinely list everything from their income to phone numbers on their profiles — and don’t even bother to make their profiles private.
“It’s kind of a status symbol, so privacy takes a back seat,” says Miller, who works for Kroll Inc., a risk management consulting firm. “It’s much like people saying you shouldn’t carry your Social Security card around in your wallet.
“But a lot of people still do it.
MySpace wins $230 million in Internet spam case May 14, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentNEW YORK (AP) — The popular online hangout MySpace has won a $230 million judgment over junk messages sent to its members in what is believed to be the largest anti-spam award ever.
MySpace calls the award a “landmark,” but it’s doubtful the company will collect from the spammers.
A federal judge in Los Angeles, California, ruled against a notorious “Spam King,” Sanford Wallace, and his partner, Walter Rines, after the two failed to show up at a court hearing, MySpace told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Wallace earned the monikers “Spam King” and “Spamford” as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s. He left that company, Cyber Promotions, following lawsuits from leading Internet service providers such as Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, only to re-emerge in a spyware case that led to a $4 million federal judgment against him in 2006.
“MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site,” said MySpace’s chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam. “We remain committed to punishing those who violate the law and try to harm our members.”
Rines and Wallace created their own MySpace accounts or took over existing ones by stealing passwords through “phishing” scams, Nigam said.
They then e-mailed other MySpace members, he said, “asking them to check out a cool video or another cool site. When you [got] there, they were making money trying to sell you something or making money based on hits or trying to sell ring tones.”
MySpace said the pair sent more than 730,000 messages to MySpace members, many made to look like they were coming from trusted friends, giving them an air of legitimacy. Under the 2003 federal anti-spam law known as CAN-SPAM, each violation entitles MySpace to $100 in damages, tripled when conducted “willfully and knowingly.”
In court papers, MySpace said the activities resulted in bandwidth and delivery-related costs, along with complaints from hundreds of users. The company also said some of the outside Web sites contained adult material, potentially harming teens who use MySpace.
The judgment is a big victory for MySpace, although service providers often have a tough time collecting such awards. But even if the News Corp.-owned site never collects, it hopes the judgment deters other spammers.
“Anybody who’s been thinking about engaging in spam are going to say, ‘Wow, I better not go there,’ ” Nigam said. “Spammers don’t want to be prosecuted. They are there to make money. It’s our job to send a message to stop them.”
The Los Angeles-based company described the amount of the award as a “landmark.”
John Levine, a board member for the anti-spam advocacy group Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, said that past spam judgments he knows of have been in the tens of millions of dollars.
He said he would be surprised, though, if MySpace ever collected.
“The giant judgments are all defaults, which means they don’t necessarily even know how to find the spammer,” Levine said.
There was no telephone listing for Wallace in the Las Vegas, Nevada, area, where he moved to in 2004 to pursue night club promotion work. Service was disconnected for two listed numbers for Rines in Stratham, New Hampshire, his last known address; a third number in Stratham was unlisted.
U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins awarded the amounts sought by MySpace: $157.4 million jointly against Rines and Wallace and an additional $63.4 million against Rines under CAN-SPAM — plus $1.5 million more against the pair under California’s anti-phishing law and $4.7 million in attorneys fees. MySpace said it was entitled to another $3 million from Rines and Wallace under a different section of CAN-SPAM.
Collins also issued injunctions barring similar activities in the future.
MySpace has another anti-spam case pending against a high-profile defendant, Scott Richter, who it claims gained access to MySpace profiles using stolen passwords and then sent spam bulletins from those accounts.
MySpace said the junk messages from Wallace and Rines came after Richter’s.
Why you'll finally use LinkedIn December 14, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentThe buttoned-down social network has a new CEO, a growing membership, and an increasingly-useful set of features.
NEW YORK (Fortune) — For years, I’ve been befuddled by LinkedIn. I knew it was supposed to be the social network for work, but to me it was like war. “What is it good for?” I asked myself repeatedly, even as I occasionally poked around and accepted requests to link with people. I belonged to it, but I really didn’t know why.
The other day I had a chance to sit down with LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye, who’s been on the job since February. He told me about a few changes that Linkedin subsequently announced (VentureBeat has a good description of them.). And his PR person upgraded me to what would otherwise be a paid account. (It can be $20 to $200 per month.)
I have had a revelation. Linkedin isn’t bad. For all my well-known (and even ridiculed) enthusiasm for Facebook, Linkedin shows there will be plenty of room for other ways to connect with people on the Web.
Linkedin aims for a much more functional role in your life. While Facebook remains better designed and conceived, in my opinion, it is not likely any time soon to help you find a job, hire a contractor or consultant, or figure out who you should hire for a position.
That’s because of two things. First, despite all the criticism of its privacy policies, Facebook is fundamentally based on the notion of privacy. You cannot find out much about someone unless they have willingly elected to be your “friend,” or if they are in a partially-open network you also belong to – for your town or workplace or school. The other reason is that Facebook is intended to be a communications medium. Think of it as, in part, a way to broadcast information about yourself.
Linkedin, by contrast, is a sort of high-end consensual database of colleagues. In some ways it aims to turn the entire planet’s workforce into one big set of colleagues, who only come to know one another when one can solve a problem for the other. You can look for that job or find that consultant or employee, because Linkedin’s member data is essentially open for all to see, and because the site offers search tools to help you slice and dice it. (They are much more sophisticated and useful if you’re a paying member.)
In recent months Linkedin has reached a new critical mass. I know this in part because Nye told me the service now has 17 million members, up from only 8 million when he arrived. But I also know it personally because, for example, until very recently it contained hardly any of my classmates from college. While my class only included about 300, now about 40 of them are on Linkedin. (You generally tell the system what class you were in when you join.) And colleagues at Fortune and friends outside the tech industry (Linkedin’s initial user base) are joining quickly.
“We are focused on Linkedin as a productivity tool,” says Nye. “We don’t want to be compared to other sites that are just about pageviews and frequency of use. We want to give you the information you need to do your job better.” As for Facebook, he says “It makes sense to keep your personal and your professional lives separate.”
That last one I frankly doubt, in an era when the line between the two is so gray. Facebook will become more functional as it adds features that enable us to slice and dice our relationships to more accurately reflect the fact that one “friend” is a PR person who calls to pitch me a lot and the other is my brother. But Linkedin will remain useful, albeit not so often nor so enjoyably.
Nye said that if you were seeking a “product manager with an MBA trained in Six Sigma who lives in Cincinnati” you’d probably find six. I did that exact search, and actually found one.
Nye himself wanted to hire a former Procter & Gamble marketer who had been in Silicon Valley for a while. Using Linkedin, he claims he found eight names immediately and within half an hour was on the phone with one he had quickly vetted by e-mailing mutual friends (LinkedIn tracks those very well).
LinkedIn also enables you to ask questions either of specific members or the whole hoi polloi. You could, for example, ask an HR manager at a company similar to yours if your salary is fair.
A new interface design, still in beta, is an overdue and attractive visual upgrade. With the latest features, Linkedin aims to become more of a portal drawing users back daily. One, launched in partnership with Business Week, allows you to read a news item and examine names and companies mentioned through the lens of your own connectedness. (Nye recited the depressing figure that only 30 percent of LinkedIn’s members have read any business magazine in the last 30 days.)
Maybe that’s why people recently found credible a rumor that News Corp. was angling to buy the service, which Nye has said would not sell for less than $1 billion. But a very senior News Corp. executive I spoke with says there is “no way” the company would ever be interested in paying nearly that much.
But LinkedIn has established a key position in the business ecosystem. If it keeps developing its functionality, and especially if it reduces its fees, which are ridiculously high for anyone who is not either hiring or looking for work, I see a bright future. It will further speed the pace of commerce by helping us all better find the people we need to get work done.
Facebook's strategy: More than ads November 9, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentThe social networking site promises to turn advertising on its head by blending e-commerce with word-of-mouth marketing, writes Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick.
(Fortune) — Don’t compare Facebook’s new ad system to anything you’ve seen on Google, television, or any other advertising medium you can think of.
Compare it instead to Amazon.com (Charts, Fortune 500) or eBay (Charts, Fortune 500). That’s because, while advertising as we know it today may very well be a good profit engine for the social networking company, its new Facebook Ads program is also about e-commerce — that is, selling.
Take the user reviews on Amazon. They’re often useful when making a purchase, yet we don’t know much, if anything, about the people recommending a product. Facebook aims to fix this by adding what it calls its “social graph” on top of such a rating system. In effect, your friends — not strangers — will be giving you the thumbs up or down on products you might buy. (For an excellent description of the mechanics and details of what Facebook announced Tuesday, read my colleague Jessi Hempel’s report from the scene.)
Facebook’s strategy is based on a relatively new concept known as word-of-mouth marketing. In recent years, a sizable industry has grown up around the idea of getting people to talk to other people about products and services while hanging out together at neighborhood barbecues or late-night dance clubs. Consumers, the thinking goes, are far more likely to trust a pitch from friends than from a 30-second TV spot.
It makes sense. And now Facebook is automating that process — combining e-commerce with word-of-mouth marketing. When a Facebook user buys something, the seller will ask for permission to promote that fact to his or her social network (and, presumably, pay Facebook a fee if the user agrees). The contrast with conventional advertising is stark. It’s more akin to an Amazon seller who pays a per-sale commission than an advertiser who pays for a click on Google (Charts, Fortune 500).
It’s yet another sign of how power is shifting online into the hands of consumers. I wouldn’t be surprised if retailers offer discounts to Facebook users who agree to promote their shopping habits.
But the Facebook strategy is also about promoting brands. It allows people to stand up and say they believe in a certain product. For instance, this week I indicated I am a “fan” of The New York Times. Facebook will now broadcast that fact into the “Newsfeed” that my friends see as they log into the service — and The New York Times benefits.
To be sure, Facebook’s chief competitor, MySpace, has long allowed members to befriend bands or brands. The difference is that Facebook distinguishes between advertisers and users. On MySpace, you make friends with a brand much as you would with, say, a new coworker. Facebook makes a distinction between friendship with a person and “fanship” with a brand.
What makes Facebook different from MySpace and most other social networks is its social graph, which expresses real offline relationships in electronic form. To now attempt to inject commercial information into that social graph — and to do so without disturbing the human relationships that have allowed Facebook to thrive — is fascinating, ambitious, and highly risky.
The strategy isn’t fullproof. Skeptics argue that people have little interest in becoming public promoters of products they use. Facebook probably didn’t help its cause much when, in announcing the new ad platform, it cited Sprite as an example of a product users could promote to their pals. Will people really want to trumpet their association with unhealthy sugar water? Most likely not (unless, of course, they’re paid for it).
But what about that cool independent coffee shop around the corner? That sounds much more appealing. So it’s also possible that Facebook will expand the universe of companies that advertise online.
What’s more, Facebook could change the very nature of marketing, forcing marketers to work more closely with product developers. Instead of crafting compelling messages that will encourage consumers to want to spend, companies will have to think about how they can make the best possible product that people will want to buy — and tell their friends about. Cruddy goods won’t have many friends on Facebook.
Whether Facebook’s new ad play sizzles or fizzles, the site continues to make the boldest moves on the Internet. 
