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- Cyberwar Is With Us: Details Emerge About Use Of Stuxnet Worm In Iran
- Facebook Forced By Privacy Activist To Put Policy Changes Up For Worldwide Vote
- GirlsInTech Pick Their Top 100 Women In Tech In Europe
- Sick Of Daily Deal Emails? UnsubscribeDeals Is There For You
- Nokia & Microsoft Respond To Google’s Complaint Over Patent Trolling, Call It “Desperate” & “Wrong”
- With The Prepaid Barrier Broken, The iPhone Could Land On Boost Mobile In September
- 23snaps Tries Its Hand At Being The Facebook For Families
- Ikea Further Details Its Upcoming Uppleva HDTV Line
- Ecommerce Study Finds Mobile Safari To Be Fastest Growing Web Browser
- Sharethrough Launches A Video Portal To Show Off Ads That Don’t Suck
- ETSI Formalizes The 40% Smaller 4FF Nano-SIM Standard
- Zoopla Completes Findaproperty Merger To Take On RightMove
- MoneySupermarket To Acquire MoneySavingExpert For £87 million
- UK Daily Deals Aggregator Coupobox Sells Up To DealCollector In Another Sign Of Consolidation
- AdMob Founder’s Churn Labs To Shut Down, Team Lured Away By Their New Startups
- Big Data For Higher Ed: With $4.1M From First Round, Floodgate, Former Kaplan Exec Launches Civitas Learning
- Facebook Finally Cracks Down On Auto-Sharing Spam With “10-Second Rule”
- Now At 17M+ Users, Rebtel Brings Cheap VoIP Calls, Texts To The iPad
- Fred Wilson Talks NYC’s Tech Scene, The Effect Of Angel Investors, And More [TCTV]
- Is Facebook Down? Yes It Was For Some. Anonymous Laughs At Two-Hour Outage
| Cyberwar Is With Us: Details Emerge About Use Of Stuxnet Worm In Iran Posted: 01 Jun 2012 09:30 AM PDT  In an excellent piece by David Sanger, the NY Times has confirmed what we all suspected: that the US deployed the Stuxnet worm, a powerful worm that targets very specific machines within Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet. Some inkling to the source of the worm came in 2011 when Gary Samore, White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction, said “we’re glad they [the Iranians] are having trouble with their centrifuge machine and that we – the US and its allies – are doing everything we can to make sure that we complicate matters for them.” However, until now the worm, which jumped out of the Natanz facility and into the wild, was considered a rare and effective cyber attack by an unknown party. The worm took down “1000 of 5000″ of the centrifuges running n the facility. “It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country's infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives,” wrote Sanger. There are two interesting points in this mission, one that could be rightly termed a fiasco. First: cyberwar is real and it is happening now. If this worm can shut down a secure nuclear facility, even through the “air gap” between the Internet and the facility’s internal network, then we are all in danger. I’m not suggesting that we will see reactors explode and planes fall out of the sky. I could, however, see the day when it becomes harder to perform research unpopular to a certain regime. Politics aside, we are living in a world where one nation can perform no end of trickery on another in the name of national security. Second, this attack shows us that cyberwarfare can cause collateral damage. Because this worm jumped out of the facility and into the wild, it’s clear that even the best laid schemes aft gang agley. Anyone – be it in government, security, or development – who thinks this is a magic bullet akin to the neutron bomb. As we become dependent on the networks that support our lives – visibly or invisibly – a worm that has jumped the rails can (and dare I say will) come to effect all of us at some point. It’s just a matter of time. Cyberwar has grown up. I hope we learn to use it more wisely than we’ve used other technologies of destruction. [Image: Ludvig/Shutterstock]
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| Facebook Forced By Privacy Activist To Put Policy Changes Up For Worldwide Vote Posted: 01 Jun 2012 09:00 AM PDT  Max Schrems, the Austrian founder of Europe Vs. Facebook, successfully forced Facebook to put proposed policy changes up for a vote by all its users by mobilizing his privacy group to flood Facebook’s Site Governance page with many more than 7,00o comments on the proposal — the threshold for triggering a vote. Europe Vs. Facebook is demanding sweeping changes to Facebook’s product rather than the small policy changes found in the proposal Today the one-week voting period opens on a set of a relatively benign changes and Facebook will notify users by web and mobile. If over 30% of Facebook’s active users, or 230 million people, vote for the changes they’ll go into effect, and if they vote against they’ll be scrapped. Otherwise Facebook will take the changes “under advisory”. Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer for Policy Erin Egan told me yesterday the company will consider changing its site governance voting system to discourage votes being triggered by low-quality comments and adapt to the growing size of Facebook’s user base.
This is only the second site governance vote in the history of Facebook. It set up the voting system in 2009 when it had just 200 million users, so the 7,000 comment threshold and the 30% require to make a vote binding seemed more appropriate. Now Facebook will consider upping the comment threshold, or even possibly doing away with the voting procedure. Egan told me “Max is a user of ours and we appreciate his feedback, but we worry the voting threshold number may be incentivizing quantity over quality” in the policy comments Facebook receives. A new system would seek to get users actually reviewing the changes themselves and giving their own opinion, rather than being used as pawns by privacy activists. Users will have until June 8th to vote on the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Data Use Policy changes. Users will be directed to the voting page from ads in the sidebar of Facebook’s website, and a banner at the top of its mobile interfaces. The most significant changes users will be voting on are:
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| GirlsInTech Pick Their Top 100 Women In Tech In Europe Posted: 01 Jun 2012 08:40 AM PDT  While in the US the visibility of women in technology startups is pretty well established, in Europe it’s suffered a little from the more general problem of the fragmented nature of the European tech scene. Things have improved slightly in recent years (at least that’s my impression, although who knows about the stats on the ground?), but it remains the case that there are far more men than women. So lifting the visibility of women in technology is no bad thing, especially if it encourages other women to pursue careers in tech startups, which are typically more about meritocratic, flat management that the traditional “IT” roles. So it’s a welcome moment that the newly established Girls in Tech London group (@girlsintech_uk) has announced their pick of the Top 100 women in tech in Europe. The group elected women from 19 different European countries (including the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Spain, Greece, Israel and Turkey) based on their leadership either locally or internationally as well as their contribution to tech and innovation. The final list is unranked, so we’ve put it in alphabetical order (we’ll try to update with Twitter handles etc in due course): Agata Mazur, Applicake/FutureSimple The Judges included: Max Niederhofer (Accel Partners), Alex Farcet (Startupbootcamp), Patrick De Zeeuw (Startupbootcamp), Audrey Soussan (Ventech), Christian Thaler-Wolski (Wellington Partners), Paul Papadimitriou (Constellation Research), Marco Magnocavalo (Principia), Martin Kelly (IBM), Carl Sibersky (Poprigo), Cristobal Alonso (Bite Group), Oana Calugar (Neogen), Thibaud Elzière (Fotolia), Ciara Byrne (VentureBeat). Part of the international Girls in Tech network, the new London chapter is backed by Google, Criteo and Eventbrite. An event in London today featured various speakers including those from Microsoft, NBC, Wired, Eventbrite, Uber, Just-Eat, StylistPick, Decoded, Shopcade, Seedcamp and more.
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| Sick Of Daily Deal Emails? UnsubscribeDeals Is There For You Posted: 01 Jun 2012 08:31 AM PDT  Waxing for two at Take-It-Offs in Scranton? $100 worth of Polka lessons for 40 cents? An avant garde grilled cheese sandwich meal with metal shavings in it at Chez Naif for $60? You don’t want any of those daily deals, right? But they’re still coming. Two people (lovers, really), Edwin Hermawan and Lea Pische, wanted to fight back. And they did. With UnsubscribeDeals.com. “We stopped buying daily deals a long time ago, but the emails kept coming. We had to find a way to stop them,” said Hermawan. This site is a tactical nuke aimed straight at LivingSocial City, Gilt Groupville, and Amazon Localstan. You fire it up by connecting to your Gmail account and then you get a list of daily deals sites. One by one, like a sniper taking down stoats at a great distance, you turn off each daily deal. Bang. Dead. The deals, not the stoats. The site is completely bootstrapped and has seen about 2,000 users so far. Even the backstory is stirring: “I am a recovering attorney. She is a West Village waitress,” said Hermawan. “We started at a hackathon. At Pivitol Labs if you must know. We were trying to hijack one of their engineers and find our mythical technical co-founder. Unfortunately, all we got were awkward interactions and a random conversation about statistical-regression-mumbo-jumbo-database structure.” Hermawan is also co-founder of SignaturePages.com. But that’s not important right now. Pische is a “West Village waitress”. She “ordered too many things from Lifebooker that she never used.” She also has a startup, Runorder.com, that helps restaurants find distributors. But that, also, isn’t important. What’s important is that they’ve finally solved the daily deals inundation problem. Finally. And for good. Sure, Hermawan’s a little deluded. “We focus strictly on daily deals. We believe that’s where the bulk of the junk emails come from,” he said. “We knew it was time to go to sleep when Groupon emails start to come in.” Have you read junk email, dude? Have you? No matter. All I can say is thank you Edwin and Lea. Thank you. I’ve just unsubscribed from Gilt City (did I sign up for that? Is that for girls?) and whatever kgb deals is and I’m a happier man for it. Keep killing those stoats, friends, and stay gold.
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| Nokia & Microsoft Respond To Google’s Complaint Over Patent Trolling, Call It “Desperate” & “Wrong” Posted: 01 Jun 2012 08:10 AM PDT  Happy Friday, here’s some more patent trolling nonsense for you today: Google said on Thursday it had filed a complaint with the European Commission which claims cell phone maker Nokia is colluding with Microsoft to make money off their patents. The complaint states that the two companies are using proxy companies (read: patent trolls) to fight against Google Android. Nokia has since called the complaint both “frivolous” and “wrong,” while Microsoft said it was a “desperate tactic.” Specifically, Google cited Canada-based Mosaid Technologies as one of the proxies Microsoft and Nokia were using to enforce their patent rights. Mosaid acquired 1,200 Nokia patents in 2011, and has since been pursuing legal action over infringements. Google, however, had not yet been sued by Mosaid, saying the complaint was a preemptive measure. The concern on Google’s part is that if enough legal risk emerges for OEMs who want to build Android phones, they’ll simply turn to Windows Phone instead. Google also reminded Nokia of its prior promise to not enforce IP rights against the Linux Kernel (the core of Google’s Android OS). In a statement to the WSJ, a Google spokesperson said:
Microsoft has since responded with a statement of its own:
For its part, Nokia stated that it and Microsoft keep their IP separate, and decide independently of each other what their patent strategies are. Nokia also noted that it has “made regular patent divestments over the last five years. “In each case, any commitments made for standards-essential patents transfer to the acquirer and existing licences for the patents continue,” the company said. In addition, a Nokia spokesperson speaking to Reuters said, “though we have not yet seen the complaint, Google’s suggestion that Nokia and Microsoft are colluding on intellectual property rights is wrong.”
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| With The Prepaid Barrier Broken, The iPhone Could Land On Boost Mobile In September Posted: 01 Jun 2012 07:43 AM PDT  Cricket Communications made waves yesterday morning when they announced that they would be the first prepaid carrier in the country to offer Apple’s iPhone, and now it seems that other contract-averse carriers may soon do the same. TechnoBuffalo purports that Sprint-owned Boost Mobile will soon enter the fray by selling Apple’s little mobile juggernaut come “early September.” Like Cricket, the Sprint subsidiary is said to sell the iPhone 4 and 4S, though there’s currently no word on what kinds of plans will be available for it should this launch come to pass. Boost’s existing smartphone customers can pay either $55 or $60 per month for the company’s so-called “unlimited” plans — there’s a 2.5GB data cap in effect, and users are throttled once they tiptoe over the line — and much ado has been made about the company’s payment-reducing Shrinkage feature. But why Boost? For a long time now, whenever the notion of a prepaid iPhone came up, it was usually connected to Sprint’s other mobile subsidiary: Virgin Mobile. Considering that Virgin Mobile has always been a bit more up-to-date when it came to their hardware offerings, the connection made a bit more sense, but Sprint has begun to pump much more effort into revitalizing Boost’s product lineup. Once a bastion of bulky chirp devices, Boost now sports as many Android smartphones as its flashier cousin carrier, so the notion that they would score the iPhone isn’t quite as farfetched as it used to be. Regardless of whether or not this particular deal actually happens, one thing seems clear: the iPhone doesn’t live in an ivory tower any more. That may mean that the iPhone is no longer cool, especially given that the iPhone’s march onto other prepaid carriers will almost certainly happen, but in the end consumers won’t care. Instead of having to choose between a handful of largely similar Android devices, those contract-averse will be able to get a slightly discounted iPhone on their own terms. That’s not a knock against Android — I’m admittedly an Android fanboy myself — but the iPhone has become an iconic mobile brand almost in the way the original RAZR has. Whether that’s good or bad depends on your interpretation, but this whole prepaid situation makes the iPhone more accessible to markets Apple may not have been able to crack before and there’s likely no turning back at this point.
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| 23snaps Tries Its Hand At Being The Facebook For Families Posted: 01 Jun 2012 07:25 AM PDT  Another entry in the mobile-first, private social networking for families space (yes, apparently this is a thing now): 23snaps, a new iOS application that works like a mini-Facebook for posting status updates, photos and videos of your kids. The app isn’t anywhere near as dazzling as current private social network darling Path, but it’s a functional and easy-to-use alternative to the typical private sharing paradigm: the group SMS. After setting up your kids’ profiles in 23snaps and optionally adding your partner, as well as any other friends or family members you choose to share with, you can then begin to share content. There aren’t a ton of kid-specific features in terms of what you can post right now, save for an option to record height and weight measurements. The app borrows from the now-common design where the app’s home screen slides over to the right, revealing the menu – it’s the same one Facebook uses today, in fact. Also borrowed? The main stream of posts is called the “News Feed.” Despite being somewhat unoriginal, the design is also, in a way, comforting in its familiarity. It’s an easy transition for iOS Facebook users to make. And maybe that’s the idea. Plus, 23snaps encourages you to share, share, share your kids’ pics, videos and news, something which there’s still a bit of a stigma about on broader social networks like Facebook. And frankly, too much kid-pic posting makes you look decidedly uncool in hipster hotspots like Path and Instagram. Based in London, 23snaps was founded this January by Ivailo Jordanov and Yury Tereschenko. Jordanov was previously Head of Product at Espotting, a search service acquired by Findwhat in 2004. He also co-founded Zoomf.com, later acquired by UK newspaper Trinity Mirror. In 2009, he joined financial company Avans.bg in Bulgaria, where he still serves as advisor and board member. Tereschenko and Jordanov also both later co-founded the UK shopping company Styloko. Jordanov seems to rightly grasp the issues surrounding sharing photos of your children, saying, “I think that around each young child there is a group of approximately 5 to 10 people that can’t get enough of their updates, photos, videos etc., and outside of that group ‘over sharing’ is an irritation.’” (Exactly. I, too, remember the horror of seeing babies in my News Feed…until I and most of my best friends had one.) “I was looking for a product that has the right privacy settings by default and is simple enough for my mother and any generation to use,” explains Jordanov. “After being unable to find anything suitable and having various discussions with my team, all dads and dads-to-be, we decided to build an app that would offer private social networking,” he says. Hence, 23snaps. The app was in private beta for three weeks, and went live in the app store on May 19th. The company has not marketed the app or reached out to press until now. There are currently around 5,500 users (web and mobile), who have found the app via word-of-mouth. While that’s not a lot of data to go off of yet, the users are averaging 4 entries per day, and, each time a new entry is made, 90% of the people connected to the child log in within 5 minutes to see the update. Although 23snaps is somewhat basic right now, the company has a ton of features in the works. A future version of the app will offer more social sharing options, tighter Facebook integration, more child-related entry types (beyond height and weight), filters and photo frames, the ability to order prints, postcards and photo albums, new ways to navigate content (gallery views, by occasions, etc.), emoticons and moods, better geo integration, improved web support for feature phones, and more. An Android version is also about a month away. 23snaps is currently self and angel funding and is not currently raising. You can download the app from here.
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| Ikea Further Details Its Upcoming Uppleva HDTV Line Posted: 01 Jun 2012 07:24 AM PDT  Watch out, Best Buy and Samsung. Ikea is seemingly doing to home entertainment systems what Apple did to portable electronics. The company previously revealed its upcoming entrance into the home theater market. As the video above clearly shows, Ikea is injecting a full dose of their Swedish magic into the Uppleva line. Never mind about the thought that Apple might disrupt the TV market. Ikea is already doing it. Ikea gets it. Francis Cayouette, an Uppelva designer, said it best in the video, “People actually consider the TV as a piece of furniture but it is always something that looked very technical has a lot of cables, is complicated and it just doesn’t fit in the home environment.” As someone who sold TVs for a good chunk of my admittedly short adult life, I can attest that there is a lot of truth in this statement. The majority of buyers look at TVs as another piece of furniture rather than an electronic toy. Consumers often look at the style of the casing or stand before they consider the technical specs — if they consider them at all. The TV set most often sits within their house at a prime location, often being the centerpiece of a living room. By selling furniture system along with the screen Ikea is essentially reinventing TV shopping. But as this video shows, the HDTV itself isn’t a slouch either. As previously detailed, the screen is a top-of-the-line 1080p display with a 400Hz response time and built-in apps. This video sheds a bit of light on the remote, which uses a sliding mechanism to hide the number pad. The user interface seems simple enough with a grid of large icons. Ikea previously stated that it would sport popular apps like YouTube, Netflix and more. “The expression should come from the solution and not the electronic itself,” said Cayoutte. That mantra is very similar to the underlining thought in most Apple products. Instead of a smooth glass or aluminum exterior, Ikea is wrapping its electronic goods in laminated press wood. But the result as a simplified user experience is the same to the user. The Uppleva line is set to hit key European locations this summer with a more broad release set for next year. Complete systems including a Blu-ray player, 2.1 audio system and furniture are expected to retail for less than $1,000 — and of course some assembly is required.
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| Ecommerce Study Finds Mobile Safari To Be Fastest Growing Web Browser Posted: 01 Jun 2012 06:20 AM PDT  Much of the time when you talk about browser market share, it’s in the context of IE vs. Chrome vs. all the rest. But new data released from e-commerce technology company Monetate today has thrown the mobile version of Safari into the mix. The result? The firm found Mobile Safari to be the most rapidly growing web browser over the past year on its sites, going from 5.84% in Q1 2011 to 11.12% in Q1 2012. That’s not to say it’s the top browser – Internet Explorer still holds that crown – but its impact is being felt. First, a disclosure on the data. Like most of the outlets that provide browser tracking statistics (e.g. StatCounter, Net Applications, etc.), we’re being given one window into browser trends, not a complete picture. The market share data in this case is aggregated from 100+ top e-commerce sties, which are Monetate customers. While Monetate doesn’t disclose which exact sites it used in its analysis, its current customer lineup includes QVC, Urban Outfitters, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Best Buy and Brooks Brothers, to name a few. Monetate doesn’t use toolbars or consumer surveys, but pulls the data directly from the agent data passed to the web server from the brands’ websites themselves. In other words, while it may be a small section of the web, it’s one that makes sense to examine in terms of general consumer trends related to browser use. There are some big differences when you slice the data through a source like StatCounter or Monetate. And analyzing them doesn’t make for an apples to apples comparison. StatCounter doesn’t monitor mobile Safari at all, so the way it sees browser market share is different. Below, Monetate’s data is from January through March 2012 and StatCounter’s is for May 2012, but was collected before the month ended. For what it’s worth: StatCounter found IE’s global market share to be 32.42% and Monetate saw its usage on e-commerce sites at 42.35%. StatCounter found Chrome’s market share to be 32.28%, and on Monetate’s sites it was just 14.42%. Firefox had 25.39% market share on StatCounter, but just 15.46% on Monetate. And StatCounter found Safari’s market share to be 7.14%, but Monetate saw it higher at 16.33%. Finally, while StatCounter didn’t track mobile Safari usage, Monetate found it had reached 11.12%. The numbers from Monetate, while only a single source of data are even more striking when placed in context with the larger trends in this space, like those detailed by KPCB analyst Mary Meeker this week. A couple of slides from Meeker’s presentation are below.
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| Sharethrough Launches A Video Portal To Show Off Ads That Don’t Suck Posted: 01 Jun 2012 06:00 AM PDT  Ever want to re-watch one of those awesome and inspirational five-minute Nike ads, but didn’t know where to look? Video ad distributor Sharethrough has rolled out a new video portal that is designed to bring together all the most innovative branded ads all in one place. Sharethrough operates an ad platform and distribution network that specializes in taking high-quality video ads and making them spread like wildfire through various social channels. It does this by taking branded video content and seeding it out to a number of popular publishing partners, which then help those videos get seen, picked up, and shared by users through Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. With the launch of Sharethrough.tv, the startup hopes to aggregate the largest repository of branded videos on the web. By doing so, brands and agencies will be able to search through the most popular and most talked about ads produced over the last several years, all in one place. Users can search through the database to find specific ads, or they can browse through ads arranged by agency, brand, video type, or industry vertical. The new site was created to highlight awesome advertising, as brands seek to move beyond repurposing 30-second TV spots online. So instead, they’ve started hiring high-profile celebrities, making mini-documentaries, creating Michael Jackson-style epic music videos with silly storylines, stuff like that. Sharethrough CEO Dan Greenberg told me that’s his company is making a big bet on that paradigm shift: “In the past, the ads sucked because they interrupted you,” he said. But now, “brands are thinking of themselves as content producers and are actually producing good content.” They’re making content that people choose to watch, and share with friends, and watch again. That’s the whole idea behind the Sharethrough.tv portal, which now has about 1,500 videos from Sharethrough and launch partners such as 72andSunny, EVB, Mekanism, Pereira & O'Dell, and Seedwell. But the site is set up so that brands and agencies can upload their own videos to showcase them alongside their peers. Brands that are looking for a certain type of work can use Sharethrough.tv to find agencies who have done similar, impressive work in the past. Or, if agencies are feeling particularly awesome about their recent work, they can use it as a portfolio for prospective clients.
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| ETSI Formalizes The 40% Smaller 4FF Nano-SIM Standard Posted: 01 Jun 2012 05:31 AM PDT  The powers at the ETSI just released the specifications for a new SIM format. This card, the fourth form factor or the 4FF, is 40% smaller than the current micro-SIM card. It looks very similar to traditional SIM cards with a rectangle design and a notched corner. It’s just smaller at 12.3mm by 8.mm with the same thickness as the current cards. Even with the smaller size, these cards will be packaged in a way that will make them compatible with existing SIM hardware. Even though the ETSI didn’t come out and say it, as The Next Web points out, this card seems to match up with the design Apple proposed. If true, this flies in the face of other industry giants, Nokia and Motorola, who previously argued against Apple’s design, citing that several issues with the smaller SIM card including that it would not be friendly with mobile hardware. At this point it doesn’t matter. The ETSI has ruled and the 4FF will eventually be rolled out industry wide.
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| Zoopla Completes Findaproperty Merger To Take On RightMove Posted: 01 Jun 2012 02:35 AM PDT  Property startup Zoopla and the A&N Media (DMGT)-owned Digital Property Group (Findaproperty / Primelocation) have formally completed their merger following approval by the UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT). The transaction, which was agreed last October, had been pending subject to clearance from the OFT which was granted in April. The deal creates a property giant which now takes on Rightmove, currently the market leader in the UK. Zoopla’s data focused strategy is winning over users – try finding out house price trends on Rightmove, they just don’t have the data. It’s an approach used by Zillow in the U.S. which has seen it eat into traditional competitors. Zoopla has so far raised $10.7 million in funding from Atlas Ventures, Octopus Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. The newly company will be headed up by Alex Chesterman, Zoopla's Founder and CEO, who will continue in the role of CEO. David Dutton, former Chairman of Digital Property Group (which owned Findaproperty) becomes Chairman.
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| MoneySupermarket To Acquire MoneySavingExpert For £87 million Posted: 01 Jun 2012 01:24 AM PDT  MoneySupermarket, a UK-based price comparison site for financial services, is acquiring advice site MoneySavingExpert from founder Martin Lewis, for £87 million ($133 million). Lewis, a personal finance journalist, launched MoneySavingExpert in 2003. According to the site’s Google Analytics metrics it gets 39 million unique visitors and about 277 million page impressions a month. That makes it a powerful player and Lewis has parlayed this into books and TV shows in the UK. Although MoneySavingExpert looks like a throwback to a previous era of the Web (which it admittedly is), its bulletin boards regularly hum to the sound of the average Brit looking for a good deal and shooting the shit about stocks and shares. And of course a site with the phrase ‘money saving’ all over it is a natural in a recession. According to this post, Lewis has an earn-out period of about three years. He plans to retain MSE’s editorial independence from MoneySupermarket. In the year ended 31 October 2011, MoneySavingExpert reported revenues of £15.773 million (2010: £11.361 million) and EBITDA of £12.642 million (2010: £8.379 million). Here’s the announcement.
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| UK Daily Deals Aggregator Coupobox Sells Up To DealCollector In Another Sign Of Consolidation Posted: 31 May 2012 11:50 PM PDT  Today comes news of a small but indicative acquisition in the area of daily deals: the UK-based deals aggregator Coupobox has been bought by rival site DealCollector for a song: the price was in the “lower six figures,” according to Stavros Prodromou, the founder and former CEO of the company. The acquisition is a sign of how consolidation in the sector is hitting aggregators, too. Counting flash sales and private buying clubs with daily deals, there are an estimated 105 sites in the UK alone, with 1,400 across all of Europe, and there will likely be more companies bought or cast by the wayside going forward. ”From the consumer point of view we are currently too overloaded with daily deals,” says Prodromou. Prodromou, who in the past was general manager for Groupon in the UK and is now CEO of an industry organisation called the Global Daily Deal Association, says that part of the reason he has sold up is so that he can spend more time on the GDDA, campaigning for better standards and practices among other sites. In fact, the acquisition is the opposite of an aqui-hire: none of Coupobox’s founders or small staff went along with the sale. The deal will help DealCollector, which started in Germany as Tagesangebote, continue its expansion in the UK. This is part of a wider strategy for DealCollector, according to Prodromou. The company, he says, plans to make even further inroads across all of Europe and beyond, through the acquisition of local aggregators rather than grow organically. “Our acquisition of Coupobox will bolster the company's position in the daily deal sector and enhance our strategic partnerships; it's an exciting prospect for DealCollector,” said Mathias Jacobs, CEO of DealCollector, in a statement. The company does not disclose its total number of subscribers, but it was one of the very first aggregators to emerge in the wake of Groupon’s growth and the many cloning sites that followed. Coupobox was founded in 2010 by Prodromou with Tolga Oenal and Alex Petrov and was bootstrapped in funding. But despite its small user base — between 60,000 and 70,000 subscribers — it claims to be profitable. Partly, that was because of its proportion of repeat users — between 15 and 20 percent, he says. It also had a very small number of employees — only four, and developed its software in-house with no outsourcing. And the company had a robust data analytics and advisory service and provided consulting to the selection of deals sites that it aggregated, which included Groupon, Gumtree, Time Out and others. Extending beyond basic daily deals is probably the smart strategy for companies in this maturing area — it’s the same one being taken by Groupon, whose CEO Andrew Mason envisions the company as the “operating system for local commerce.”
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| AdMob Founder’s Churn Labs To Shut Down, Team Lured Away By Their New Startups Posted: 31 May 2012 09:07 PM PDT  The end is in sight for Churn Labs, the startup generator created by AdMob founder Omar Hamoui and AdMob’s first engineer Mike Rowehl. Two new companies will be spinning out in mid-July, Hamoui tells me, and they’ll be taking the Churn team with them. This doesn’t mean Churn Labs has failed, he says. In a way, Hamoui argues that it has succeeded. After all, the plan was never to create another Y Combinator, but instead to bring entrepreneurs together (the organization has offices in Irvine and San Mateo), have them churn through ideas, and then eventually spin those ideas out into startups that took the entrepreneurs with them. “We actually wanted to start companies,” Hamoui says. “We did, and now there’s nobody left.” His description is pretty consistent with the way he described Churn when it launched in March 2011. At the time, Hamoui suggested that he and Rowehl would be the only people who remained indefinitely — everyone else would be joining new companies. But it looks like the startup life (or at least the specific startups that were created at Churn) was too tempting. Rowehl decided to join the first spinoff, Metaresolver. And now Hamoui has been lured away by one of the startups that’s planning to launch this summer. (He says it’s too early to reveal any details about either of them.) Churn Labs was funded by Sequoia Capital and Hamoui himself. He says there’s still a little investment money left, and they’re still deciding what to do with it.
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| Posted: 31 May 2012 08:50 PM PDT  As colleges and universities strain their resources to accommodate an ever-growing, diverse student body, it becomes increasingly difficult to track the progress of individual students and figure out what’s working in their curricula, coursework, testing, and teaching styles. An appalling number of students in the U.S. are still dropping out before they earn a degree, and despite Mark Zuckerbergian exceptions, attrition means sunk costs for students, difficulties finding jobs, and loan defaults. To improve academic outcomes and keep students in school, teachers, learners and administrators need access to insight in realtime. Big data, predictive analytics, machine learning and recommendation engines are transforming the way we buy products, play games and watch movies, and Civitas Learning believes that the same should be true for education. Historically, higher education has been anything but data driven, so this week the Austin-based startup came out of stealth to launch a service that combines student demographic, behavioral and academic info with next-gen analysis, recommendation and data modeling tech to let institutions build and make sense of their big data. The startup is working with community colleges, four-year universities, and proprietary schools to build what it claims is already the largest cross-institutional data set in the industry, with over one million student records and more than seven million course records on file. To help the startup in its mission, Civitas has also announced that it has raised $4.1M in funding from Austin Ventures, First Round Capital, and Floodgate to help it bring big data insight to higher education. With capital in tow, Civitas is looking to provide colleges and universities not only with smart learning tools but also the ability to create their own learning apps based on its “Learning Community’s” application programming interfaces. By doing so, Civitas is providing an alternative path for scaling tools and solutions across institutions, through supporting publisher-created apps as well as those built by startups that otherwise could never invest in the integrations with campus systems or the sales cycles necessary to establish relationships with higher ed institutions. In turn, the startup’s participating institutions can identify trends across swaths of student learning data, including a realtime view of which students are at risk of dropping out (and why), the ability to identify specific courses and degree paths that are contributing to attrition, and, in turn, what specific resources and interventions are most successful and for what type of students. Civitas, which was founded by Charles Thornburgh, a former executive at educational giant, Kaplan, who spent nine years as an in-house entrepreneur and launched a handful of edtech businesses for both K-12 and higher ed, is currently working with more than a dozen institutions to optimize their data sets. Student populations are becoming more diverse and learning modalities are expanding to include online and blended tools and platforms, and faculty responsibilities are changing (and growing) as a result. But leaving them without actionable data, crappy interfaces, and clunky reports as they take on more advising and student interventions is dangerous. So, on the flip side, to help faculty channel the noise, Civitas allows them to flag which students are at risk based on realtime engagement data, providing informed intervention suggestions, examples of outreach resources that have helped similar students, and provide a glimpse into what techniques or curricular resources are working best. In turn, the service enables students to better choose degree and course selection, find better course combos, and recommend better ways to spend their time and get better grades. As to how it’s making money? The startup plans to generate revenue by charging subscription fees to its member institutions based on how many administrators, faculty members and students are receiving its personalized reports and recs. Of course, institutions aren’t exactly rolling in cash, so the startup sees an opportunity to give a little bit back as its community grows by offering rev sharing apps made available through its learning network. It’s a smart approach to yet another big problem in our educational system: Optimizing big data. As more schools join and its data set increases, its value to those institutions and their teachers and students will increase. Just as scores of startups and tech companies have done with their own data sets and technologies. Of course, its all about building that network of institutions and just how well its recommendations play among teachers and students. It took Netflix years to find the right concoction of algorithms, data, and intelligence to best optimize recommendations for movie recommendations and discovery, and hopefully Civitas has learned from Netflix and the many other examples. If it has, it stands to make the educational experience far more effective. For more, find Civitas Learning at home here.
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| Facebook Finally Cracks Down On Auto-Sharing Spam With “10-Second Rule” Posted: 31 May 2012 08:12 PM PDT  If you hate accidental auto-sharing, you’re in luck. Now you have to be watching or reading something for at least 10 seconds before Facebook apps can auto-share the activity to your Timeline. That should drastically reduce the amount of crappy click-bait articles and video clips you see in the news feed and ticker. Video apps must also now inform you that they auto-share and provide an option to opt out on the page where a video is watched. These rules could deflate the user counts of apps like Viddy and Socialcam. It also recently added more requirements to its comprehensive checklist auto-sharing apps must follow. The debate rages on about whether “frictionless sharing” is the future of discovery or the death of curation, but at least Facebook is taking decisive steps to keep the worst content from spreading friend to friend. Facebook launched its Frictionless sharing apps eight months ago, where users authorize an app once and it can then publish on their behalf when they take certain actions. But rather than firm requirements for privacy controls it has merely encouraged best practices that developers “should” follow. Unfortunately many developers only care about maximizing referral traffic and user counts, not the health of the Facebook experience. Back then I said Facebook might need to come up with a solution on its end rather than relying on the good hearts of developers. Now its is finally getting tough on spam, making the 10-second rule a firm requirement for news and video apps. Here’s the exact text, with my emphasis added in bold: “Built-in watch and read actions can only be published after someone engages with the content for 10 or more seconds. If a video is shorter than 10 seconds, the viewer must watch the entire video.” For contrast, Facebook’s policy on providing sharing controls for most apps only says “You should allow people to turn sharing on or off for the content in your app, and the setting a user selects should persist.” Thankfully, video apps are now more tightly controlled. That’s important because unlike utility apps or news readers where most content is professionally made or there’s little opportunity for deception, video apps like Viddy and Socialcam often feature user generated content that can be misleadingly titled. Spam and link-bait are in the eye of the beholder so some 15 year old might really want to share a “Sexy Girl’s Top Comes Off” video, even if others find that video of a girl putting down the top of her convertible to be misleading spam. For instance, I was pissed off when Socialcam auto-shared that I had watched “Lil Wayne Fights A Basketball Player” when it was really a video pulled from YouTube of the rapper celebrating a NBA team’s win by chest-bumping with one of the athletes. A lack of regulation and suspected favoring by Facebook’s EdgeRank news feed sorting algorithm led video apps to grow like weeds during April. In fact, they’re springing up and growing so fast they can’t moderate their user generated content in real-time, so Facebook minimizing the spread of low-quality content is critical. Now for video apps, “You must provide users with the ability to remove any video stories you publish to Facebook, and include this option on the same page where you host the video content” and “You must give the user clear, ongoing, and in-context messaging that their watch actions will be published on Facebook.” That means even if you get tricked into clicking, it will be obvious that your viewing activity will be shared and you can instantly nuke the story. If Viddy and Socialcam’s traffic have been propped up by accidental views under 10-seconds each, the new rule could be a huge blow to their growth potential, and make their big funding rounds and enormous valuations seem even more ridiculous. Beyond policy changes, Facebook has been tweaking how its displays auto-shared stories. It switched to a Trending Articles design that shows a blurb about a news article and not just link bait-prone headlines. Expect more product changes as Facebook adapts to emergent developer behavior. Frictionless sharing and the Open Graph platform are hugely ambitious moves for Facebook. They could provide the content and ad targeting necessary to grow its revenue such that it can justify its $104 billion IPO price, or at least its current $81 billion market cap. But they also push the limits of privacy and fundamentally change how we share from an explicit to an implicit action. Developers can’t be left to police themselves, or many will be as spammy as possible. If the average user is going to get comfortable with auto-sharing, they need to know an impulse or accidental click won’t instantly share something awful with all their friends. A 10-second grace period is a good start. [Image Credit: HackThePC]
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| Now At 17M+ Users, Rebtel Brings Cheap VoIP Calls, Texts To The iPad Posted: 31 May 2012 06:39 PM PDT  With Skype under Microsoft ownership, Rebtel now claims to be the largest independent mobile VoIP provider, with 17 million users in over 200 countries accessing its service over WiFi and 3G on iPhone, Android, and PCs. Rebtel has added two million users since February, and is seeing an average of 650K new users a month — many of whom have been attracted by its low-cost calling to landlines and mobile, along with the ability to switch between data and voice connections to avoid dropped calls and busy networks. Previously, Rebtel users have been able to download its iPhone app and use it on their iPads, but today the company is launching its first iPad app, with new navigation, graphics, and phonebook integration all optimized for Apple’s tablet. The app allows users to make calls to other Rebtellers for free over WiFi and 3G, or select a number in their address book and call outside lines for cheap — at rates which CEO Andreas Bernstrom says can be up to 60 percent less expensive than Skype. The app integrates with the iPad’s address book, enabling users to instantly see which contacts are available to call for free (are using Rebtel) and which they can call for cheap. The app also boasts low-cost international SMS at rates it claims are up to 60 percent lower than the average carrier, and allows users to let their friends reply to text messages for free by selecting “Collect Reply” and including a link to the message that lets them reply via mobile web page, while you pick up the tab. And because long calls over data networks can be unreliable, the company added its “KeepTalking” feature to let users talk over voice networks instead. With Rebtel expecting to hit $85 million in revenues this year — with what the Rebtel CEO adds is an average revenue per user that’s three times higher than Skype — it believes its timing on the release of its new iPad app is looking good. The iPad reached 11.8 million in sales during the last quarter, with Apple selling 3 million of its new iPads in the first three days it was on the market, giving Apple a 68 percent share of the tablet market. To this point, Bernstrom added:
That being said, Rebtel plans to release an Android tablet app over the course of the next months, with a Windows Phone app due by the end of the summer. With Forrester research predicting that there will be 760 million tablets in use globally by 2016, the need for quality, tablet-optimized apps is becoming essential, and, offering cheap, flexible VoIP calling across tablet platforms will put Rebtel in a good position to continue its current growth. For more, check out the free Rebtel iPad app here.
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| Fred Wilson Talks NYC’s Tech Scene, The Effect Of Angel Investors, And More [TCTV] Posted: 31 May 2012 06:00 PM PDT  So, TechCrunch TV was glad to have the chance to sit down with Wilson last week after he came offstage from his fireside chat with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington at the Disrupt NYC conference. Watch the video above to hear his thoughts on the rise of angel and seed investing, how the Facebook IPO is impacting the larger ecosystem, the importance of geography when it comes to building a tech business, and more.
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| Is Facebook Down? Yes It Was For Some. Anonymous Laughs At Two-Hour Outage Posted: 31 May 2012 05:28 PM PDT  “Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we don’t crash EVER!” – ‘Mark Zuckerberg’, The Social Network. Not quite. Facebook has been offline or slow to load for some users around the world for over two hours. Reports started flooding in to Twitter at roughly 4:26pm PST on 5/31/2012 with many users quipping that “Facebook is down. Just like its stock price.” Despite some who lost service regaining it temporarily, two hours in DownForEveryoneOrJustMe confirms the outage continued for portions of Facebook’s 900 million users, though others had no trouble logging on. Update 8am PST 6/1/2012: Facebook refused to cite a cause. However, the shadowy group Anonymous known for taking down websites tweeted, “Looks like good old FaceBook is having packet problems… Similar to Facebook’s IPO, which was largely chronicled with tweets rather than the social network itself, Facebook users are turning to Twitter to vent their frustration with the downtime. The site so rarely encounters loading problems that the outage has come as quite a shock to some, whereas Twitter’s short but frequent hiccups have come to be expected. Today’s outage could be do to a coordinated hacking attempt, or just some Facebook-caused technical glitch
80 minutes after the outage began we heard reports that users in the United States, Brazil and Tunisia and likely other locations lost service, but the site seemed to be coming back to life for others, including me. 95 minutes after the site started to sputter it looks like most of those users who lost service have now regained it, though there are still reports of outages. But then 2 hours into the disruption it looks like things weren’t fixed as some users in the US and around the world were still experiencing outages, including those who regained service around 6:00pm. By 8pm, 3.5 hours after the outages began, Facebook appeared to be stable Despite the jokes, Facebook was actually up $1.41 / 5 points today to close at $29.60, but is still 22% below its IPO price. We’ll have to see how the outage impacts its share price in the morning. [Update 8am PST 6/1: The outage may have hurt Facebook's share price, as it's down $1.76 / 5.95% to $27.94 today. Facebook tells me "Earlier today, some users briefly experienced issues loading the site. The issues have since been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologize for any inconvenience." While Anonymous did not clearly claim responsibility, in a tweet it used the term "tango down", a CIA expression indicating an important target had been killed. It's previously used the term to gloat about successful Anonymous attacks. It therefore could have coordinated an assault that briefly brought the social network offline for some, or the attack may have been independently carried out by some of its members. Sources familiar with the group tell us it wasn't the source of the outage, though.]
As Jesse Eisenberg fumed during his fictional portrayal of ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ in Aaron Sorkin’s dramatized history of Facebook, ‘The Social Network’:
Honestly, Facebook has been remarkably reliable over the last few years, even as its user base swells. But hopefully the site’s engineering team doesn’t mine sipping on a Caribbean piña colada while they sort things out. [Image Credit: TwitterWhale]
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