All of us at GigaOM and our sister site paidContent are into the final planning stages for our big media show next week — paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads. As paidContent editor and conference chair Staci Kramer has described in her posts leading up to the conference, we’re going to be looking at a wide range of topics related to the disruption in the media industry, from newspapers to e-books, with a great lineup of speakers including Media News Group CEO Jim Paton and Vox Media founder Jim Bankoff. I’m looking forward to all of those sessions, but I’m also really looking forward to the two I’m moderating: an interview with Union Square Ventures partner and Twitter investor Fred Wilson and a panel with Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall and Vivian Schiller of NBC News.
More than perhaps anyone else, Fred Wilson has been ahead of the curve when it comes to the potential of social media such as Twitter as a disruptive force both for the web and for traditional media as a whole — a track record that arguably began many years ago with his investment in GeoCities, an early web community that was acquired by Yahoo in 1999 for $3.57 billion. Since then, Wilson and Union Square have invested in a number of other prominent social networking players, including Zynga, design community Etsy.com, Foursquare, MeetUp and of course Twitter.
While Wilson hasn’t invested in anything that is specifically focused on media, you could argue (and I have) that Twitter is getting awfully close to being a media entity, if it isn’t already. Although virtually all of its content is produced by users, Twitter still has media-like aspects, including the ability to censor tweets if necessary. More recently, the company has been adding “curation”-type features thanks in part to its acquisition of Summify, and also hiring editors to create editorial products with partners, such as the one Twitter just announced with Nascar.
The Union Square partner has also said that the world of technology and the world of media need to figure out how to help each other, and I’m looking forward to asking him more about what he means by that. In a blog post, he confessed to being a reluctant pirate when it comes to trying to watch certain sporting events that he couldn’t find legal access to — so I’d like to know how he would advise media companies to handle traditional functions like time-based “windowing” and geo-blocking in a digital era.
On the political front, we’ve seen over the past year or so how the real-time nature of the social web can play havoc with political campaigns and spin doctors. Not only can the candidates themselves post their thoughts on Twitter or Facebook — an example of what web veteran and blogging pioneer Dave Winer has called “the sources going direct” — but those comments can snowball to the point where they take over the entire political agenda, as Hilary Rosen’s remarks about Mitt Romney’s wife being a stay-at-home mother did just a few weeks ago.
Whether this is a positive thing or a negative thing for the broader political and social sphere is something I’m planning to ask Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Vivian Schiller, the head of digital for NBC News and the former CEO of National Public Radio. Are we just seeing a more high-speed version of the same spin cycle we’ve seen for years, or has social media changed the balance of power for the better? What is the impact of meme-trackers such as BuzzFeed, which has added a lot of political firepower with former Politico writer Ben Smith and others, or The Huffington Post (whose co-founder Jonah Peretti is also at paidContent 2012)?
One thing we know for sure is that the world has changed in some fundamental ways thanks to the power of the web and of social media like Twitter: since anyone can be a publisher or a journalist — even for a short time — with the push of a button, we now have an unprecedented ability to see and hear what is happening in places like Tahrir Square in Egypt or Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. Politicians like former deputy British prime minister Lord Prescott say Twitter gives them “a connection to millions” without having to go through the “distorted prism” of the traditional media.
What the future holds for media companies and for society as a whole remains to be seen, but there’s no question we are going through a time of almost unprecedented disruption. I’m looking forward to hearing what Fred Wilson, Josh Marshall and Vivian Schiller — and all of the other great speakers at paidContent 2012 — have to say about that future. Please join me at the Times Center in New York on Wednesday, May 23.
Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Nony Mata
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About an hour drive outside of the packed streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and into the sprawling Sorocaba region, GE has quietly been leading the way on clean water technology. There at GE’s Brazilian water filtration plant, the company develops mobile (containerized) water reverse osmosis machines, and also mixes chemicals in huge vats for water treatment applications, and cleans waste water in a large outdoor pit.
All of the above processes at the Sorocaba plant are used to clean water for industrial applications, not for human consumption. But similar principles could apply for cleaning drinking water. The type of industrial applications that GE commonly sells some of its clean water tech to include the sugar cane ethanol industry in Brazil, which uses processed water for cooling, pretreatment and for the ethanol mix itself.
GE’s Brazilian site manager Geraldo Menezes says that GE can assemble and ship the containerized mobile filter water device in days to industrial companies that have an urgent need to use clean water. GE’s customers rent the equipment on a weekly basis and GE has a handful of them ready to ship at all times to different parts of Latin America.
Reverse osmosis water cleaning works by pushing water through membranes at a high pressure, which captures all the contaminants, particles and salts from the water. The water that comes out of GE’s mobile unit is far too pure to drink, and would actually make you sick, says Menezes.
The one part of the tour I couldn’t take photos of was the chemical focused part of the plant, where the GE workers mix raw materials to make chemicals that can be used for water treatment. These types of chemicals could be used for ethanol production for cooling towers and the pretreatment process. Because the chemicals are flammable, cell phones and electronics are not allowed near them.
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Lawyers tried to ruin Mark Zuckerberg’s big day with a sprawling lawsuit that portrays the Facebook founder as a rogue hacker, and accuses the company of tracking users on their computers and iPhones. The lawyers want to collect $15 billion for you and me and nearly everyone else on Facebook.
Here’s a plain english Q&A of what’s going on:
What did Facebook do that was so wrong?
The company placed files on users’ computers called cookies that told the social network which websites they visited.
Is that so unusual? I thought lots of sites do that
The problem is that Facebook appears to have tracked you even after you logged-out. Under the company’s own policy, it promised not to do that and thus violated the limits of your consent when it did.
How exactly did Facebook track me?
Many websites like CNN or Justin Bieber Zone have a “Like” button that acts like an extension of Facebook. The company collects data about your visits to those sites — including, it seems, when you are logged out. The unauthorized tracking reportedly took place across smartphones and tablets too.
Well, maybe this was an honest mistake?
After blogger Nik Cubrilovic called out Facebook for stalking its users, the company awkwardly suggested that the tracking of logged-out users was a “bug” or a narrow technical measure. That claim hasn’t stood up well. Cubrilovic and German regulators soon called BS and suggested Facebook was doing this deliberately for more than a year. The lawsuit also points to a Facebook patent application for cookies that follow users after they log out.
So where did this lawsuit come from?
There are actually more than a dozen cases across the country. They were recently consolidated into one lawsuit in San Jose, California.
Why are the lawyers asking for $15 billion?
It’s a great way to grab headlines during a week the press is already in a Facebook frenzy. The $15 billion itself is loosely based on the Wiretap Act which lets people sue for $10,000 if someone records their conversation without permission. The lawsuit also cites studies that claim an individual’s web history is worth $52. There are also state law penalties. And so on. The lawyers had to pick some number so they chose $15 billion.
Will Facebook actually have to pay that $15 billion?
The short answer is no. The Wiretap Act was written with telephone conversations in mind so it’s no slam dunk that a court will decide the law should apply the same way to computer cookies (Google, HTC and Samsung are facing similar lawsuits under the same legal theory). At the same time, some judges have ruled that Facebook-style “privacy invasions” aren’t worth anything in dollar terms because no one has been harmed.
In this case, however, a judge would likely conclude that Facebook’s behavior (if the allegations are true) was egregious enough to find liability under at least one of the plaintiffs’ 11 claims. But if other tech related privacy suits are anything to go by, the case will settle long before a trial.
I’m on Facebook. Will I get some of that money?
Doubtful. While the class action aspires to cover everyone who was on Facebook from May 2010 to September 2011, a cash payout is unlikely. As noted above, judges have a hard time putting a dollar value on this type of privacy breach. When there has been a privacy settlement in other tech-related cases (like Google Buzz or Facebook Beacon), the money has been divided up between lawyers and non-profit groups that act as privacy activists.
What does Mark Zuckerberg have to do with all this?
The lawsuit paints the Facebook CEO as a creep who has a long history of using his hacking skills to steal people’s personal data. The complaint opens by reproducing this email exchange:
The lawsuit also lists a chronological history intended to show that Zuckerberg and his company have long displayed a systemic disregard for user privacy. This is, of course, just a legal tactic that doesn’t necessarily prove that Facebook is any better or worse than other tech companies on privacy issues. Facebook, which told Bloomberg the complaint is baseless, would likely add that this was an accident that shouldn’t detract from the fact it provides a popular free service to millions of people.
Are lawsuits the best way to solve the privacy problem?
Probably not. But since the government often has a hard time understanding (let alone regulating) the tech industry, the lawsuits can be an effective way of raising awareness and forcing companies to take care about how they handle consumer data.
Here’s the complaint itself:
Facebook Wiretap Act Complaint Copy
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Once protected by the hype bubble, Facebook is getting a hard lesson in the realities of the public markets. Despite the massive build-up to its IPO today, the market response has been more tepid than expected.
After a delayed start, Facebook started trading at $42, about 10.5 percent above its offer price of $38. But over the course of the day, it gradually traded down to close at $38.23, barely squeaking in above its starting price. In after hours trading, the price remained around $38.27. According to analysts and industry reports, whenever the stock threatened to fall below the opening price, Facebook’s underwriters stepped in to prop it up.
“We are seeing the stock hit reality like a brick wall,” said GreenCrest Capital senior managing analyst Anupam Palit. Facebook’s scale and engagement might have pushed its valuation to $100 billion, but, like every other public company it’s not immune to the larger economic trends.
Palit said he expected Facebook’s first day to be less dramatic than that of its public tech peers (like LinkedIn, Pandora and Groupon, which all saw a first-day pop of at least 30 percent), but added that today was “definitely more muted” than anticipated.
Still, he said that Facebook’s performance was generally positive considering that “the guys who have flown really high on their IPO have tumbled in subsequent weeks.”
Also, while first-day retail interest in other tech stocks had been essentially nonexistent, Palit said, retail buyers were much more interested in Facebook.
“It is a much more ‘tangible’ company because the average person uses it and knows what it is,” he said. “There are retail investors who want to say they took part in this because it is a big moment in market history.”
That played out today, he said, as retail buyers were willing to push the stock above $40, while institutional investors, who are more sensitive to valuation, wanted to keep the price lower. In the following weeks, Palit expects the price to continue to fall, eventually settling around $32.
On Friday, more than 577 million shares in Facebook changed hands, setting a new record for IPO trading volume.
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With Harry Potter fan site and e-bookstore Pottermore.com now using watermarking instead of heavyweight DRM on all the Harry Potter e-books, anti-DRM arguments are growing louder. Now the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the organization that oversees the EPUB e-book format, hopes to create an industry standard for “lightweight content protection” — something “occupying a middle ground between strong DRM and DRM-free.”
The IDPF is taking the first steps toward creating this standard by launching a discovery process — though it acknowledges the outcome of this process could be “that no feasible standardized solution would be sufficiently useful or accepted, or that no solution is forthcoming that will sufficiently address critical requirements.” Nevertheless, copyright expert Bill Rosenblatt writes, there’s “a growing recognition among publishers that DRM has aspects that work against their interests, including its lack of user-friendliness and eBook distributors’ use of the technology to ‘lock in’ consumers.”
The lightweight DRM Rosenblatt proposes would look something like this:
Overall, Rosenblatt writes, “a standard method of protecting eBook content that becomes broadly adopted would materially increase interoperability, ameliorate some of the ease-of-use limitations in current DRMs, and may promote broader adoption of digital reading.”
IDPF is taking comments through June 8.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock/Stacie Smith Photography.
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Facebook just had the biggest initial public offering in tech history. During the week leading up to it, we tapped into the GigaOM readership to see what they thought of the social network giant’s prospects for the next two to five years. What will Facebook become as it grows up? What are Facebook’s best opportunities and key challenges?
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The newly public Facebook says it is buying Karma, a mobile social gifting app. The news was released via Karma’s blog. As we first posted, Karma was founded by Lee Linden and Ben Lewis who in their past life were co-founders of Tapjoy, that was acquired by Offerpal Media after reaching more than $100 million in revenue. Investors in Karma include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, and Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s Obvious Corp.
In a blog post, Lee and Ben write:
Over the last year, we’ve built a new e-commerce platform from the ground up. We’ve been honored to partner with amazing brands to create a curated catalog of products. We made those products instantly giftable in a brand new way. And we harnessed the power of Facebook’s social network to ensure you never miss a chance to show someone you care. The phenomenal response and feedback we’ve heard from customers has more than exceeded our expectations. And we’re just getting started — today we take social gifting to the next level.
We’re thrilled to announce that Karma has been acquired by Facebook. The service that Karma provides will continue to operate in full force. By combining the incredible passion of our community with Facebook’s platform we can delight users in new and meaningful ways. As we say … only good things will follow.
The deal terms were not announced. Facebook plans to keep the service alive. A Facebook spokesperson said this is an acqusiton and not an acquhire.
“We’ve been really impressed with the Karma team and all they accomplished in such a short time. This acquisition combines Karma’s passion and innovative mobile app with Facebook’s platform to help people connect and share in new and meaningful ways.”
Facebook has gotten fairly aggressive in its acquisitions of mobile applications and acquired Instagram for close to a billion dollars. Karma is quite a stunning app and I have become quite a fan. In fact, I thought this could be the next Fab.com. When Karma launched we looked at the company and here is what we wrote:
What’s nice about the Karma app is that users can send gifts almost instantaneously, without having to enter their billing information before doing so. You also don’t need to have the address or contact info of the recipient — they enter that information when they choose to accept a gift.
It also allows users to send a personalized note to people they’re gifting, either by SMS, posted on their Facebook walls, or by email. Those receiving gifts can even choose between options or swap out something they’ve been given if they’re not thrilled with what was initially gifted to them.
One of the more interesting aspects about the Karma mobile experience isn’t just that it makes gifting by phone ultra-easy, but that it helps to highlight the news around friends and family that actually matters. There’s so much noise on Facebook that it’s difficult to tell now when a friend is having a birthday, or if someone got engaged or is having a baby. The Karma app, by contrast, uses semantic analysis to determine events that are worth gifting people for.
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Before you can get into the fun part of actually processing and analyzing big data with Hadoop, you have to configure, deploy and manage your cluster. It’s neither easy nor glamorous — data scientists get all the love — but it is necessary. Here are five tools (not from commercial distribution providers such as Cloudera or MapR) to help you do it.
Apache Ambari
Apache Ambari is an open source project for monitoring, administration and lifecycle management for Hadoop. It’s also the project that Hortonworks has chosen as the management component for the Hortonworks Data Platform. Ambari works with Hadoop MapReduce, HDFS, HBase, Pig, Hive, HCatalog and Zookeeper.
Apache Mesos
Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that lets users run multiple Hadoop jobs, or other high-performance applications, on the same cluster at the same time. According to Twitter Open Source Manager Chris Aniszczyk, Mesos “runs on hundreds of production machines and makes it easier to execute jobs that do everything from running services to handling our analytics workload.”
Platform MapReduce
Platform MapReduce is high-performance computing expert Platform Computing’s entre into the big data space. It’s a runtime environment that supports a variety of MapReduce applications and file systems, not just those directly associated with Hadoop, and is tuned for enterprise-class performance and reliability. Platform, now part of IBM, built a respectable business managing clusters for large financial services institutions.
StackIQ Rocks+ Big Data
StackIQ Rock+ Big Data is a commercial distribution of the Rocks cluster management software that the company has beefed up to also support Apache Hadoop. Rocks+ supports the Apache, Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR distributions, and handles the entire process from configuring bare metal servers to managing an operational Hadoop cluster.
Zettaset Orchestrator
Zettaset Orchestrator is an end-to-end Hadoop management product that supports multiple Hadoop distributions. Zettaset touts Orchestrator’s UI-based experience and its ability to handle what the company calls MAAPS — management, availability, automation, provisioning and security. At least one large company, Zions Bancorporation, is a Zettaset customer.
If there are more Hadoop management tools floating around, please let me know in the comments.
Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user .shock.
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Foursquare, as we reported recently, is getting its revenue story in order in hopes of making money through promoted check-in deals. Now, the company is recruiting some talent to lead the company’s big financial effort with the hiring of Steven Rosenblatt, the former director of advertising sales and strategy at Apple’s iAd. Rosenblatt will serve as Foursquare’s chief revenue officer, according to Ad Age.
Rosenblatt, who was Quattro Wireless’ SVP of advertising sales before it was bought by Apple, told Ad Age that the new paid product will appear mid-summer. He said there will be more ad products launched that will build off a newly redesigned app, set to appear in June.
“A special (offer) is one tactic that could be used by a merchant, but there’s lots of other ways to drive loyalty between merchants and consumers, and that’s what our goal is,” he told Ad Age.
The hiring shows that Foursquare is really working on figuring out the big monetization question that’s been hanging over the location-based service. Foursquare has eschewed traditional banner ads, but like a lot of social networks and publishers, it’s looking for non-obtrusive ways for brands and advertisers to reach out its 20 million users.
With the updated offers product, Foursquare will allow merchants to pay for special placement of personalized local offers. It will also use its Explore technology to better target the offers to users, who will check-ins to redeem them. Currently merchants can list special offers for their location for free, but the new ad product will ensure they can get better reach for their offers. Foursquare also recently announced it would charge merchants $10 to instantly verify their business instead of doing it through the mail. Ultimately, Foursquare is hoping that it can be a paid resource for merchants, helping them draw in new customers and keep them loyal.
Foursquare still has a lot to prove in showing how it can turn its network into a money maker. But with a team that’s well over 100 people now, Foursquare seems to have decided it need a few veterans to lead the charge.
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A security hole was found in the ZTE Score, a handset model sold on both by Metro PCS and Cricket in the U.S. On Friday, ZTE confirmed the issue exists, says Reuters, and is working to close what some are calling a “backdoor” method of access to the Google Android handset. The problem is one of bad timing for ZTE, which has been under scrutiny for some time by the U.S. government because the company is based in China.
I’ve said for more than a year that ZTE — and Huawei, for that matter — are two Chinese companies that are soon to be a household name in the U.S. Unfortunately, this type of security issue isn’t what I meant. ZTE is one of the largest network hardware manufacturers in the world and recently announced a strategy to challenge for the top smartphone spot as well. In the past year, according to Gartner, ZTE has moved from fifth to fourth in worldwide mobile phone sales and is now closing in on Apple.
What’s particularly concerning here is the type of security breach. If the hole is a “backdoor” by the traditional definition, it means that ZTE actively created the entry point, which can be accessed through a single password for control of the phone. It suggests that Android — which is no stranger to malware and security issues — isn’t the problem, but that ZTE itself manufactured it.
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And given the prior concerns that a Chinese company could be using phones and other consumer technology to gather information unbeknownst to a user, this issue may fan the fires of mistrust.
Perhaps this is much ado about nothing and simply an issue of poor timing and coincidence. But it could give consumers and carriers pause before buying or using a ZTE-built phone or tablet in the U.S. What do you think: Potential national security issue or something we really shouldn’t worry too much about? Have it in our poll!
Thumbnail image courtesy of TRDefence
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