Get the Lowdown on Cloud Computing at GigaOM’s Structure 08
Michael Arrington
1 comment »
Next month GigaOM
will hold Structure 08, a conference centered on the changing face of computing infrastructure. The event will discuss the wave of cloud computing technology that has been driving a revolution in web applications and has started to overthrow the notion of conventional servers.
Structure 08 will feature a workshop on Google App Engine, along with keynote presentations from Werner Vogels (Amazon), Greg Papadopoulos (Sun), and James Crowe (Level 3). You can see a full schedule here.
We’re giving away five tickets to the event, so leave a comment telling us why you’re too financially impaired to pay for a ticket and we’ll pick the best responses.
Structure 08 will be held on June 25th at San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center. TechCrunch readers who register by May 20 can get a 10% discount on registration here.
Poor Children Of The World No Longer Will Have To Struggle With Linux
Michael Arrington
22 comments »
One Laptop Per Child will ship a special version of Windows on their low cost laptops for poor children, the two companies announced this afternoon. Previously the laptops, which to date have been tested in a number of countries, ran only Linux. Trials of the Windows version of the machines will begin in June in “key emerging markets.” OLPC is also working with third parties to port its user interface, called Sugar, to Windows, and is hoping to have a machine with dual boot options to allow “users” to choose between operating systems.
There are no financial terms being disclosed, although it wouldn’t be dumb to assume that not only is the software being supplied for free, but Microsoft made a healthy donation to the organization as well. The last thing Microsoft wants is for anyone who’s computer literate to think that a world without Microsoft Windows is possible.
On the upside, though, the pain of having to deal with Windows crashes may make some of these kids excellent technical support people over time. They’d just get lazy with Linux being so stable all the time.
If it isn’t obvious from what I’ve written above, I’m not impressed. OLPC is in danger of becoming a celebrity cause rather than a real attempt to bridge the digital divide. My guess is Linux worked just fine as an operating system for these machines.
| Website: | www.laptop.org |
| Location: | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States |
| Founded: | January 1, 2005 |
With the tagline, “It’s not a laptop project. It’s an education project,” the One Laptop per Child initiative aims to revolutionize how we educate the world’s children. In January 2005, the MIT Media Lab launched the research initiative to develop a… Learn More
He Said, She Said In Google v. Facebook
Michael Arrington
18 comments »
More details on Facebook’s banning of Google Friend Connect from the Facebook API earlier today. I spoke with Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly and Google’s Director of Engineering David Glazer about the banning to get a fuller picture of the conflict.
Here’s an example of how Friend Connect (more details) works in practice. A third party site may want to add social elements to their service. They can integrate with Friend connect and allow users to sign in. Those users choose a social network where they keep their profile (Orkut, Hi5, GTalk and, until today, Facebook) and log in via the social network’s API. They then become “members” of the site, using Google’s terminology. If any of their friends from their social network also become members of that site, those friends are shown on the site and you can interact with them. To see it for yourself, click “log in” at the top of this sample site, IngridMichaelson.
Kelly says the issue comes down to the fact that Google Friend Connect users don’t have control over data pulled from Facebook. In particular, Facebook is concerned that they have no relationship to the end site where the data is presented (in the example above, IngridMichaelson). Instead, Google has inserted itself as a middleman in the process.
Also, Kelly says, once permission is granted to share data, the user has no way to revoke that permission from their Facebook account. Facebook has a privacy control panel that lets users set and change privacy setting over time, including the removal of applications. With Google in the middle, Facebook has no way to stop the flow of data to these third parties.
Google’s Glazer counters that they have a very effective method for unlinking to a site that a user has given permission to, so users will be just fine. In the screen shot below, Google gives an option to “Unlink” the specific social network from the site (on right) or change the data that’s shared from the social network (on left). Kelly is correct that you can’t trigger the unsubscribe from Facebook.com, but Glazer says that’s because Facebook’s API has no way of telling Facebook about the third party site the data has been passed off to.
Glazer says that they have been in “constant contact” with Facebook over the Friend Connect product, and are still trying to work with Facebook to get access to the API again. But Facebook has their own competing product to Friend Connect, called Facebook Connect. The longer the ban, made under the banner of protecting user privacy, remains in place, the stronger Facebook’s position will be competitively. My guess is they’re in no hurry to get through this conflict any time soon.
The fact is that Google is taking perfectly adequate steps to protect user privacy with their Friend Connect product, and it is a useful product for users. After talking with both sides, it seems to me that Facebook is relying on a very convenient catch-22 to stay out of Google’s network. They are the ones in control of their own API functionality, and they could add features that fix this problem. Until they do, there’s nothing Google can do to remedy the “problem,” and the walls around the Facebook garden get ever higher.
Spellr.us Launches: Check Your Site For Spelling Erors
Jason Kincaid
10 comments »
Last month we ran a brief post introducing Spellr.us, a service that monitors websites for spelling errors. Little was known about the site at the time - all we had to go by was a teaser splash page. The site has finally entered a private beta, and it shows a lot of potential. For those looking to try it out for themselves, you can grab one of 150 invites here.
Spellr.us monitors webpages by running site-wide spell checks at regular intervals. Results are presented as snapshots of pages, with errors highlighted in bright boxes (a mouse-over displays suggested corrections). Members can also choose to have errors sent to them in RSS feeds - a feature that will be especially handy for large sites that make frequent posts. Besides the visual snapshots, Spellr.us can list misspelled words according to their frequency across the site. This means that words like TechCrunch or Flickr, which are commonly used but aren’t in the dictionary (yet), can be quickly found and added to a custom dictionary.
I ran TechCrunch.com through a trial run, and the results were promising. Error flagging worked very well, with different colors to distinguish between possible errors and obvious typos. And the site’s main dashboard, which links to each error, made navigating across hundreds of pages surprisingly painless.
Unfortunately the site is still very much a beta, so we won’t be implementing the service any time soon. Custom dictionaries don’t work yet, and the system doesn’t offer any way to omit user comments from the search (we wound up with over 20,000 flagged errors because of this, though we made a few mistakes ourselves…). Spellr.us says that all of these features will be introduced by the general release. Grammar checking is also on the horizon, though a concrete date hasn’t been established.
Other players in this space include web tool supplier NetMechanic and TextTrust, which uses a combination of human and automated spellcheckers.
| Website: | spellr.us |
| Location: | Sydney, Australia |
Spellr.us is a high quality automated web site spell check tool.
The tool is used to run once off tests as well as monthly, weekly, daily, hourly monitoring of websites. Reports will include incorrectly spelt words as well as screenshots of… Learn More
The Mike Arrington Show
Michael Arrington
11 comments »
Yeah that’s right. I have a puppet parody now, too. This is pretty tame stuff compared to the hit job Loren did on Shel israel. Before you hit play, note that there is some offensive language in the video, referring to our recent dispute with Wired.
HubSpot Gets $12 Million To Drive Traffic to Your Site
Mark Hendrickson
15 comments »
Internet marketing is big money, and so is the $12 million recently raised by HubSpot, a consultancy and software provider for sites looking to improve their visibility online.
The Series B round led by Matrix Partners comes on top of the $5 million raised from General Catalyst Partners last September, bringing the company’s grand total to over $17 million.
In addition to providing paid SEO services, HubSpot offers a free search optimization tool called Website Grader that will automatically assess your website, score it on a 1-100 scale, and show you where to make changes that will get it in front of more eyeballs. The tool claims to have assessed over 300,000 sites, and your score on the 1-100 scale represents the percentage of those sites that your site tops (kind of like the SAT).
| Website: | www.hubspot.com |
| Location: | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States |
| Founded: | July 1, 2006 |
| Funding: | $17M |
HubSpot’s provides a marketing application and advice to small businesses enabling them to leverage the disruptive effects of the internet to “get found” by more prospects shopping in their niche and to convert a higher percentage of prospects into… Learn More
It’s Alive!: PopTok Combines Emoticons With Movie Quotes
Jason Kincaid
9 comments »
Israeli startup PopTok has done a brave thing. It’s created a plugin that combines emoticons and movie quotes (which, used in excess, are two of the most annoying things known to man). The plugin is currently Windows only, offering support for AIM and MSN Live Messenger with more protocols on the way.
The JVP Studio-funded startup wants to replace emoticons as we know them with short snippets of Hollywood movies, television, and music videos. After downloading the PopTok client, users can choose from hundreds of clips which have been culled from such quotable classics as “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” and “Austin Powers”. The site has formed partnerships with a number of studios, so all of this is done legally.
Unfortunately, PopTok is going to run into a number of problems. Only users that have installed the PopTok plugin can see clips immediately - everyone else just gets a link to a page that shows the movie. It’s unlikely that many people will take the time to open their browsers for a three second payoff, so the program is going to have a hard time gaining traction.
PopTok is fun at first, but I’m afraid it has the potential to be one of the more annoying plugins on the web (if any of my friends start to use it often, I’ll probably block them). That said, I’m probably not the program’s target audience. Instead, PopTok seems geared towards the tween and teen markets, which are far more likely to embrace this sort of thing. If the program can get a sizable user base in the youth market then it stands a chance at saying, “Show me the money!”, otherwise I’m afraid it’ll be “Hasta la vista, baby.”
| Website: | poptok.com |
| Location: | Tel-Aviv, Israel |
The PopTok application allows you to show celebrity video messages in your messenger chat. PopTok provide clips of scenes, gestures and great lines from your favorite movies, TV shows and music videos.
As of May 2008 PopTok works with AIM and MSN… Learn More
The Social Network Wars Begin In Earnest: Facebook Bans Google Friend Connect
Michael Arrington
75 comments »
Facebook is all about openness and data portability, as long as that doesn’t involve openness or portability of data, it seems.
Today they wrote a long 7 paragraph blog post to get a single point across: Facebook has banned Google’s Friend Connect access to the Facebook API:
Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.
This of course has nothing to do with the fact that Facebook launched their own nearly identically named product called Facebook Connect three days before Google’s Friend Connect.
It’s not clear exactly what features of Friend Connect justified the ban, since it is so similar to what Facebook announced on Friday. Both products allow the export of profile and friend list data to third party websites.
In the last paragraph of the blog post, Facebook says they want to work with everyone: “We think MySpace’s Data Availability, Google Friend Connect, and Facebook Connect can be part of a great movement in the industry to give users a better and safer experience online, while respecting user privacy. We look forward to working with our developer community and everyone else in the industry to help all of our users take their information, and their privacy, with them wherever they go.” If that’s the case, this sure is an interesting start to a healthy working relationship with Google. Next up on the block list: MySpace and their Data Availability malware product, no doubt.
Thanks for the tip, Jesse.
Update: Facebook PR is pointing out Sections 2B(4), 2B(5) and 2A9(vi) of the Developer Terms of Service:
4) You may not store any Facebook Properties in any Data Repository which enables any third party (other than the Applicable Facebook User for such Facebook Properties) to access or share the Facebook Properties without our prior written consent.
5) You may not sell, resell, lease, redistribute, license, sublicense or transfer all or any portion of the Facebook Properties, or use or store any Facebook Properties for any purpose other than as specifically authorized herein.
You will not use Facebook Platform or any of your Facebook Platform Applications, and your Facebook Platform Application will not be designed…(vi) to request, collect, solicit or otherwise obtain access to usernames, passwords or other authentication credentials from any Facebook Users, or to proxy authentication credentials for any Facebook Users for the purposes of automating logins to the Facebook Site.
| Website: | facebook.com |
| Location: | Palo Alto, California, United States |
| Founded: | February 1, 2004 |
| Funding: | $493M |
On February 4th, 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook, a social network that was at the time exclusively for Harvard students. It was a huge hit, in 2 weeks, half of the student body… Learn More
| Website: | google.com |
| Location: | Mountain View, California, United States |
| Founded: | January 1, 1998 |
| IPO: | August 19, 2004 |
Google primarily provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of tools and platforms including its more popular… Learn More
Why CBS Bought CNET, And Not The Other Way Around
Michael Arrington
57 comments »
- 1999: CNET is a $12 billion company
- January 2000: CNET Aquires MySimon for $700 million
- October 2000: CNET Acquires Ziff Davis (ZDNet) for $1.6 billion (after the March 2000 stock crash)
- July 2004: CNET Acquires Webshots for $70 million
- October 2007: CNET Sells Webshots for $40 million
- May 2008: CBS Acquires CNET For $1.8 billion
CNET announced its sale to CBS, a $16.5 billion company, today for $1.8 billion. In late 1999, though, CNET was a $12 billion company. They subsequently acquired MySimon for $700 million and ZDNet for $1.6 billion, and it’s been all downhill for CNET’s market cap since then.
So why didn’t CNET continue to grow and ultimately take over a media dinosaur like CBS, instead of the other way around? Perhaps it was because they did deals like buying Webshots for $70 million and then a couple of years later selling Webshots for $40 million. Or perhaps it was because they failed to realize the importance of blogs until 2007. Whatever the cause, or causes, CNET failed to disrupt the old guard, and will find itself to be a footnote in Internet history rather than the headline it should have been.
| Website: | www.cnetnetworks.com |
| Location: | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Acquired: | May 15, 2008 by CBS for $1.8B in Cash |
CNET Networks is a publicly held media company with a focus on technology. CNET Networks owns many popular websites, including CNET.com, News.com, ZDNet.com, MP3.com, and Download.com. CNET Networks also creates and distributes video content under… Learn More
| Location: | California, United States |
| Founded: | October 1, 2006 |
“CBS Corporation (NYSE: CBS.A and CBS) is a mass media company with constituent parts that reach back to the beginnings of the broadcast industry, as well as newer businesses that operate on the leading edge of the media industry. The Company,… Learn More
Metacafe Founder’s New Startup: Clear Applications
Mark Hendrickson
4 comments »
Israeli paper The Marker is reporting (in Hebrew) that one of the Metacafe founders who recently cashed out and left has turned his attention to business recruitment technology.
Arik Czerniak is now working on Clear Applications, a company that he co-founded seven months ago with two other Metacafe ex-employees, Oren Blatt and Gil Solomon. The startup is developing analytics tools that will help medium and large-sized businesses filter through thousands of job applications and identify those candidates with the best personal and cognitive skills.
Blatt, a former fighter pilot for the Israeli air force, holds the position of CEO. The company reportedly has six employees and is self-funded. No word yet on when they might launch their product, but it’s definitely not imminent; the Clear Applications website still points to a parked page.
Clever. Monospaced. Bold. Yellow. Those four words can describe this My Document laptop case as well as any others, which is good because our pocket dictionary just fell into the toilet. The design is from 25togo Design Studios, and as hard as we try (which is not that hard) we can't find a price tag or a way to purchase one. You can always email them and see if they'll sell you one manually, but they're in the country which has a country code of 886 (Taiwan), so be prepared to pay a little extra for shipping. [25togo via Like Cool via Slashgear] 
Bbq Magnetic BBQ Tool Light Brightens Up Your Beef
Did you know that May is national BBQ month? If you haven't celebrated yet, I suggest you make up for lost time by firing up that grill morning, noon and night. That's right, you can even cook in the dark thanks to this LED BBQ tool light. It isn't the first BBQ light out there, but it is the only one that can attach magnetically to your spatula so you can catch all of the action close up. It even has a bendable neck for added versatility. If you think about it, this sort of device could come in handy in all sorts of situations outside of the grill. Not bad for only $14.95. [Solutions via EB$29.99 via Techie Diva via DVICE]
XP on OLPC Windows XP on OLPC XO Laptop Now Official
Microsoft has officially announced that Windows XP is coming to the OLPC XO with trial runs beginning as early as June. This comes after months of discussion and speculation of when the move would happen. The operating system has been specially modified to run on the computer and support its ebook reading mode, writing pad and camera. And according to the press release, the plan is to have both Windows and Linux running on the machines, to let users decide what's best. More »Singapore Airlines Flights Get iPhone/iPod Docks and 15.4-inch LCDs
Singapore Airlines is installing iPod docks and 15.4-inch widescreen LCDs in their all-Business Class Airbus A340-500 flights between NY/LA and Singapore, ensuring that we're going to be flying with them if we ever have to travel to that part of the world. Each business customer can dock their iPhone or iPod and watch their own movies on the included noise-canceling headphones—which will be interrupting when the captain wants tell you to look off to your left so you can see a drunken Superman mooning your plane. Flights from Newark with this will start May 15 (today), and August for the LA ones. Maybe now business passengers won't engage in business time whilst in the air. First Spyshots of the Palm Treo 800w
Remember that rumored mockup of the Palm Skywriter we showed you last week? Yeah, this spyshot (courtesy of aliased citizen Shadowmite) of the finished Treo 800w shows the prototype was pretty spot on with the button layout of this WinMo phone. While unconfirmed, the 800w is expected to run WinMo 6.1 on a 400 MHz processor with 128 MB of RAM and have 256 MB of flash memory. It's also rumored to introduce a few firsts for the Palm brand — namely EVDO Rev.A, GPS, and Wi-Fi. More » 
7:51 PM on Thu May 15 2008
By Adrian Covert
807 views, 11 comments
Latest by pure241: How does this compare to the Palm Treo 500v? more »
Announcements Work For Gizmodo: Asia/Australia Editor Wanted
Hey you! Want to work for Gizmodo? We're still looking for an editor in Australia, Asia (Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, India, etc.) or somewhere in the general region to work for us. We're still going through applications from our first call for submissions, so even if we turn you down expect an email back telling you so. More »
Apple? John Mayer Cheats On Apple With Blackberry Bold
Jesús has been doing a rash of John Mayer / Apple stories lately, for I don't really know what reason, but you guys seem to care about it a lot more than I do. Here's another: a Blackberry Bold, which is an interesting sign in terms of taste making and trendsetting by the guy who usually chooses all things Apple. More »Question of the Day: What Do You Use To Record Your TV Shows?
The news that TiVo has brought back lifetime subscriptions got me thinking about how many people subscribe to TiVo versus going with a cable DVR or a PC-based method. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter as long as I don't have to sit through LOST with a commercial break popping up every 5 minutes. So, the question is, what do you use to record your favorite TV shows? More » 
Design The Slingshot Gets an Upgrade
Sometimes, you just want to take somebody's eye out and you don't have a BB gun on hand. In those cases, you've gotta turn to your trusty slingshot. This Ringshot concept by Shira Nahon, part of the H.I.T (Holon Institute of Technology) Industrial Design department's "Next Exit" Exhibition in Tel Aviv, Israel, puts a fresh spin on Dennis the Menace's weapon of choice. Just imagine, friends: what if we took all the guns away from all the world's armies? Just think about it. [Flickr via Notcot]iPod, Sony Ericsson Phones Appear in Metal Gear Solid 4; No Xbox 360s to be Found
This is… weird. Apparently, in the upcoming Metal Gear Solid 4 (never heard of it), you can have a fifth-gen iPod in your inventory for some reason. Also, there appears to be a girl using a Sony Ericsson W62S flip phone as well. I'm hoping you can kill guards by jamming the iPod into their throats, but I'm not holding out hope. Hit the jump for a couple more screenshots of the sweet, sweet product placement in action. More » 
Gadgets Pick Headphones Straight From the Tree: It's Even Weirder Than It Sounds
For artist Alex Metcalf, the inner workings of trees has been a lifelong obsession. So, after he graduated from design school he utilized his artistic skills to create the "Tree Listening Installation"—a project designed to educate the public about what happens inside a tree. The system he created allows visitors to listen to a live performance of a tree sucking up nutrients using either a simple metal cone that looks like an old-timey hearing aid, or a set of headphones linked to a specially designed solar powered sensor placed on the tree. More »
crowd sourcing Crowd-Source Design Site Kluster Launches Digg Competitor Called Knewsroom
What the hell does a product-design site like Kluster have in common with a community-filtered news service like Digg? They both use vibrant communities of enthusiastic—and perhaps overly opinionated—people to make decisions. Kluster, only in its infancy, decided to put its main design service on hold, and use its crowd power to publish a daily newspaper from its new service, Knewsroom. More »
Alltel Alltel Picks LTE for 4G Mobile Broadband
While Alltel isn't exactly the biggest fish in the carrier pond, its decision to use LTE for its upcoming 4G mobile broadband network further cements LTE's status as the dominant 4G tech. It's the third carrier in the US after Verizon and AT&T to go for LTE (Sprint is going the WiMax route, but we can assume T-Mobile will go LTE as well.) Like Verizon, Alltel's current network is CDMA, so it'll have to perform some behind-the-curtains magic to make everything flow smoothly once its post-2009 rollout begins, since LTE is a GSM technology. (If none of this made sense, here's a handy guide to mobile mumbo-jumbo.) [Electronista] 6:00 PM on Thu May 15 2008
By matt buchanan
429 views, 2 comments
Latest by Joseph: Sprint... the thugs of the mobile service industry. They just love to go against the grain. more »
Cash Dollaz Analyst Predicts $750 Million Worth of Kindle Sales by 2010
It looks like Amazon's foray into the world of gadget making is going to be a profitable one indeed: CitiGroup analyst Mark Mahaney claims that in less than two years, the e-book reader is going to pull in a whopping $750 million. For those of you keeping track at home, that's a shitload of money. More »
Comcast Comcast Blocks BitTorrent Traffic 24 Hours a Day
One of Comcast's main defenses of their BitTorrent blocking is to make sure the network isn't congested for other users during peak hours. This study done by the Max Planck Institute in Germany calls BS on that excuse by pointing out the fact that Comcast blocks torrents 24 hours a day, not just during peak hours. Not only that, they block every single day of the week as well, making sure that your uploads are minimal at best, killing your ratios on torrent sites. It's definitely not surgical blocking as they told us before. More »
summer tech Folding "Notebook" Grill (For Mobile Meat)
Even small BBQ grills can be awkward to lug to a tailgate, but this Notebook Portable Flat-Folding BBQ is just about as simple as carrying a meat-charring incinerator can be. Priced at around $40, the Notebook BBQ can fold up when not in use, leaving your friend who agreed to carry the charcoal SOL. Once we learned how long the grill needed to cool to a holdable temperature, we could bust this thing out on a whim to spite those damned vegetarian sunbathers. Then, once the testosterone wore off, we'd apologize for ruining their otherwise perfectly lovely afternoon. [Gadget Shop via Coolest Gadgets]
WiMax Sprint Says WiMax Is Officially Awesome, Ready for Service
So, Sprint's announcing that Sprint's WiMax network has officially passed Sprint's own tests for being ready for commercial service (and awesomeness). The criteria included overall and handoff performance, as well as handoff delay, with (semi) real-world testing going down in the Baltimore and DC-area networks. That's great, if it actually means the ball is finally rolling. But color us a believer when we can actually jump on to play with it. Witness WiMax's readiness in the press release below. More »
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