Category: Tech news

Today after the closing bell Salesforce reported its fiscal third quarter 2014 financial performance, with revenue of $1.08 billion and earnings per share of $0.09. Investors had expected the firm to earn $0.09 on revenue of $1.06 billion.

The company fell more than 3% in regular trading. In after hours, Salesforce is up almost 1%. The company is richly valued – the Wall Street Journal calculates that it is currently trading at around 118 times its forward 12 months earnings per share.

The company’s GAAP diluted earnings per share totalled a negative $0.21 for the quarter. Salesforce has just over $1 billion in cash and equivalents.

To be fair, the company did manage to beat expectations today, but by such a thin margin, I can’t call the above anything more than a meets expectations. That said, the company is raising its fiscal 2014 revenue outlook, which will help its stock price. For its fiscal 2014, Salesforce now expects revenue between $4.050 and $4.055 billion. For its fiscal 2015, Salesforce expects to grow its top line by just over $1 billion, with revenue of $5.15 to $5.20 billion for that period.

Its fiscal third quarter (2014) revenue of $1.08 billion represents growth of 36% year-over-year. Operating cash flow for the period was $138 million, up a slightly more modest 30% year-over-year. All told, a solid quarter for the quickly growing company, but nothing that will change market perception of the company, and allow it to carry a higher valuation.

After-hours trading of Salesforce is somewhat confused, with the company managing to be both up and down one to two points in five-minute intervals. Investors appear conflicted about the quarter.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

Apple’s new iPad mini for 2013 introduces by far the most oft-requested feature that was missing from the original version: a high resolution Retina display for ultra-sharp rendering of text and images. Apple has added that screen without introducing trade-offs in terms of battery life, size (substantial ones anyway) and portability, too. This is the iPad mini everyone wanted to begin with, and now it’s here, and it’s the best tablet money can buy.

Video Review

Basics

• 2048 x 1536 7.9-inch Retina display
• 16GB, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB
• A7 processor
• 802.11n dual-channel Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0
• 10 hours general use on Wi-Fi, 9 hours on cellular
• Starts at $399

Pros

• Super high resolution screen in a thin, light and portable package
• All the processing power of A7

Cons

• Slight changes in dimensions means first generation accessories might not fit
• Price increase versus first generation device

Design

The Retina iPad mini retains essentially the same design as its predecessor, with some slight changes to account for generational differences. The most noteworthy changes from an exterior standpoint are the addition of the space grey finish, which replaces the black version, and the addition of a tiny bit of size and weight to the original case specifications.

Before anyone gets too worried about that size and weight gain, however, rest assured that this is nothing like the additional girth added to the 9.7-inch iPad between generation one and two. Apple packed on the pounds in that generation, in order to make room for the extra battery needed to power the iPad 3′s Retina display. This time, it has also had to change the dimensions slightly, but the difference in negligible: it adds just 0.3mm of thickness, and 29 grams of weight to the svelte proportions of the original.

In practice, this makes literally no difference to how you’ll perceive the mini. It still feels the same in the hand, and is just as comfortable to use one-handed as its predecessor. The original iPad mini set the bar for tablet design as far as I’m concerned, and the new version maintains that. There are also some small but crucial tweaks to the exterior design in terms of function: a second microphone input helps detect and compensate for background noise, making FaceTime calls and Siri more effective.

Display

The iPad mini with Retina display is all about that last bit – “with Retina display” – so the screen is the real star of the show in many ways. And it delivers an outstanding performance. On our review model, photos were just outstanding. Comparing them to photos viewed on the first generation iPad mini’s display reveals levels of fine detail not previously visible. And just glanced at casually, there’s such an improvement in sharpness original device owners might feel as though they’ve needed glasses all this past year and just never knew it.

The display on our review unit worked perfectly in testing, and didn’t display any of the image retention uses that seem to be affecting a small portion of users. The most amazing part of the screen is how it can achieve those results using a case design that’s otherwise similar: packing twice the pixels into the same amount of screen space as was found on the original is no mean feat, and Apple has essentially pulled off a show-stopping magic trick in doing so.

The original iPad mini quickly replaced my iPad 3 as my tablet of choice in most, if not all situations. But the lack of a Retina display was a tough pill to swallow, and every time I’d go back to using a Retina screen on a Mac, iPhone or 9.7-inch iPhone, I felt the lack of the same tech on the mini. Apple has now delivered on the only thing holding the ur-mini back, and it’s hard to understate the value of that.

Features

This Retina iPad mini offers up that excellent sound isolation tech I mentioned before thanks to the positioning of its mics, and that pays big dividends for FaceTime calls, according to my testing. It also packs new MIMO capabilities for the Wi-Fi antenna, which ensures that your iPad should have more reliable Wi-Fi connections, available at longer ranges than before (so long as you’ve got a wireless router that’s MIMO capable, which you should if you’ve bought one in the last few years). It’s hard to test this with much accuracy, but I definitely found the Mini’s Wi-Fi connection to be solid throughout testing on various networks.

The version I tested was the iPad mini with cellular connectivity, and the LTE radio also worked very well throughout testing. I was only able to test it on Canadian networks, but the Retina iPad gets the same multiband LTE radio that’s available in the iPad Air, which means it can easily tackle 4G networks around the world. In testing the Air, I found that it worked flawlessly between the U.S., UK and Canada, and I expect the iPad mini with Retina will be no exception.

Performance

The iPad mini with Retina has a brand new, gorgeous display, but it also has an A7 processor and M7 coprocessor that are every bit as powerful as the ones within the iPad Air. That means one thing: this device gets a huge boost over its predecessor when it comes to performance, and can handle every type of creative task you might think to throw at it.

This device gets a huge boost over its predecessor when it comes to performance.

Apple putting an M7 activity tracking chip in the iPad mini seems an odd choice, since it’s a device that’s far less likely to be in your pocket with you at all times than the iPhone 5s, but it actually has some neat tricks up its sleeve. It can tell Day One what type of activity you were doing while you logged something in that digital journal, for instance, offering up more context. It’s easy to see how gathering that contextual data about what’s going on while you’re using your iPad could be put to other uses, too.

The A7′s power is truly awesome, though. When you run an app like iMovie, and can near instantly compose clips with inset video and then have them render and playback with virtually no wait time, it’s apparent this is no mere evolutionary step in computing. It’s faster than when I use Final Cut Pro X on my primary video editing Mac, and it can be done by anyone, anywhere. Plus, the camera on the iPad mini, while only 5 megapixels, still beats those in most flagship smartphones out there. The rear shooter gets a boost thanks to Apple auto-improving multi-frame recombination tech, and the front-facing one gets an upgrade too, which is better able to deal with low-light situations thanks to bigger pixels.

Battery

Apple has managed to increase the capacity of the battery considerably, while not drastically increasing the size. But it paid off: The Retina iPad mini gets the same long-lasting battery life on a full charge as its predecessor. On mixed use, I was getting an average of about 8-10 hours out of a full charge during my testing.

Battery continues to be the iPad’s strong suit, and a big advantage it has over competitors. The iPad mini easily beats its closes rival, the Nexus 7 on this score for instance, and its ability to hand both the outstanding increased processing power of the A7 while still maintaining the same usage time as the iPad mini is really remarkable.

Cases

As with the iPad Air, Apple offers two different case options for the iPad mini with Retina display, including a Smart Cover and a Smart Case. The Cover protects the screen and is remarkably light and made of polyurethane, while the Smart Case protects the back as well as the display but also adds a bit more thickness. Of the two, I prefer the Smart Case with the iPad mini, since the leather shell feels great in the hand, and it offers peace of mind while still managing not to compromise the iPad mini’s portability.

Bottom Line

The iPad mini with Retina display is the iPad mini I’ve been waiting for since the concept was even floated many years ago. You’ll pay a premium price to get it, but that nets you not only the gorgeous screen, but also the power of the A7 processor within. Since that offers 64-bit processing and power that developers have only begun to explore, this is also, maybe more than any other device that came before it, a future-looking iPad that’s nearly perfect as-is but sure to get better with age.

Earlier today, the New York Post reported that the newly launched Al Jazeera American cable news channel has very low ratings. For its first few months, the channel has averaged around 13,000 viewers.

That’s low, but not zero. The kicker is that the predecessor to what people now call AJAM, Current TV, had a larger average audience of, wait for it, 31,000. That number was so low the channel sold itself to the Qatar based Al Jazeera, committing suicide by corporate takeover.

The channel, according to the Post, is available in more than 40 million homes in the United States, which is mostly good news with a tinge of negative: It has the reach to grow to any size possible, but it’s also correct that even with that potential reach, it has failed to attract much more than tumbleweed.

Its rivals are a full order of magnitude larger. What I am surprised at is the surprise that AJAM is tiny. Of course it is. What else would it be? Current TV’s ratings were a running joke. Who honestly expected the channel to be born with an audience in its grip?

Also, as Peter Kafka points out, the total audience size for cable news is small to begin with. Summing all the large channels’ audiences together barely breaks the three million mark. So AJAM is fighting for a scarce number of eyeballs.

The TechCrunch crew, while chewing over the ratings news, posited partially that perhaps there is no market for serious news journalism on television, or at least that the niche is satiated by current offerings. I hope that isn’t the case.

Our own Greg Ferenstein correctly pointed out that CNN’s ratings fell during its period of heavy coverage of the rollout debacle of the Affordable Care Act. The other side to that fact is this, via the New York Times:

Did [CNN’s ratings fall] mean people didn’t want to hear wall-to-wall coverage of the failure of the site? Maybe not, if they were viewers already committed to the one of the partisan corners: Both Fox News and MSNBC did far better last week, with heavy coverage of issues related to the health care law.

I don’t doubt that taking a more partisan view to the news is an effective way to firewall yourself an audience segment. But I also think that we can agree as a body that CNN is hardly great television. It’s gamification of healthcare news was dull, and its regular quality is hardly well regarded.

There are some signs of life in other corners. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is seeing his ratings start to recover from their firm slump that kicked into gear when he took over his primetime spot. Hayes is noted for his wonkish take on the news, with better discussion, commentary, and smarter guests:

Nielsen returns have All In With Chris Hayes posting its best averages yet among total viewers and adults 25-54 – excluding the breaking news boost from the Boston Marathon bombings (April 15). For the week of Aug. 26, and compared to the week prior, Hayes was up 71 percent to 224,000 viewers in the cable news network’s targeted demographic and up 47 percent among total viewers with a nightly average of 772,000.

Hayes of course came into his new time slot after a successful weekend show drew attention to his method of handling the news.

If AJAM wants to bet that a serious news channel has a shot in a market that includes endless helpings of the asinine and petty, I hope that it succeeds. But let’s give it enough time to find its legs before we write it off. There’s a Newsroom joke here that I’m missing. Feel free to submit it in the comments.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

Good morning, super troopers. Out fresh this week is a neat little app from Microsoft Research that turns your Windows Phone into a remote to control Office documents on your PC.

Dubbed Office Remote (natch), the app lets you run presentations on screen, or on a projector, say, from your smartphone, so that you can wander around a conference room, bedazzling the audience with your ability to not misspell large words bolded in your title sections.

The app works with all forms of Office 2013, except for Office 2013 RT, so if you are rocking the new Surface 2, buzz off. It’s a neat little app that could make your grey corporate life slightly more lively.

Via the lovely crew at The Next Web, here’s what the Windows Phone client looks like:

You can snag the app here, if you are so inclined.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

Deeplink.me, an open initiative which encourages app developers to embrace deep linking – that is, linking directly to content inside an application from anywhere on the web or mobile – is today rolling out support for Twitter Cards. This means app developers who don’t currently have a web presence are now able to take advantage of Twitter’s ability to point users to a specific page inside a mobile application from a tweeted link.

Twitter Cards are used by thousands of developers to post richer content to Twitter’s network, including article summaries, photos, videos, songs and more. And in April, the company added support for mobile app deep-linking, too, as a tool for app discovery and user engagement. With Twitter Cards, developers could tweet links pointing existing users to a page within the app on their phone, or if they didn’t have the app installed, they could be pointed to the app store to download the app in question instead.

However, the problem with the Twitter Cards implementation when it came to mobile app deep linking is that it required developers to also maintain a web presence in order to host the metatags Twitter required. For many mobile-only developers, especially game developers, this meant they weren’t able to take advantage of the Twitter Card feature.

“We realized that this is a quite an issue for a lot of app developers,” explains Cellogic CEO Itamar Weisbrod, whose company launched the mobile app deep linking service, Deeplink.me, earlier this summer. The service has now grown to support thousands of developers, too.

“We’re actually hosting all the metatags and the markup for [developers using Deeplink.me],” he says.

Today, developers interested in using the Deeplink.me service simply set up a URL scheme, define some translation rules, then route incoming URLs through Deeplink.me.

The service is free to use, and easy enough to set up which has encouraged its adoption, Weisbrod notes. Going forward, those developers who want to have the added benefit of using Twitter Cards won’t have to take any additional steps beyond signing up and creating their Deeplink.me links – Twitter Card support is built-in.

“The links hit us first and then because we’re handling which platform it’s on and passing the data along, it’s already hitting our servers,” says Weisbrod of the new Twitter Card support. “For each link, we’re dynamically inserting all the metadata that Twitter needs for this specific app on the fly.”

In other words, instead of having to establish a web presence for their app to use Twitter Cards, developers can just use Deeplink.me. When they then tweet a Deeplink.me link (which can also be masked behind a URL shortener if they choose), the tweet will display richer content, including the “open the app” button to point users to the app itself or the app store, if they’re not a user.

Many developers are already using Deeplink.me URLs, but Weisbrod doesn’t yet have permission to share these companies by name, only saying that the lineup includes several “large mobile gaming companies” and “mobile commerce companies.”

In the weeks ahead, the Deeplink.me service will be upgraded to support a few other options specific to Twitter Cards, like the ability to control the icon that displays and more. But in the meantime, interested developers can get started here.

Deeplink.me competes with things like URX and TapCommerce and more directly with Quixey’s AppURL initiative, which has a smaller list of supporters at present. Plus, Google also recently announced its intentions to surface Android app deep links in search, starting with Android KitKat (Android 4.4) – something that will force developers to start taking mobile app deep linking more seriously.

“We shifted into this mobile world without a proper link standard…and you need to be able to link to specific things in order to monetize properly, discover things, use things properly,” says Weisbrod. “Having to make your app linkable is like having to make your website linkable,” he adds.

[App Image: Deeplink.me]

Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency on everyone’s mind, is booming in value. Currently trading around $645 per coin, it has never been worth more, or generated more headlines that I can recall. The two are likely connected.

If you can remember April, Bitcoin enjoyed a firm rally, spiking to around $275 per coin on the Mt.Gox market. It then fell to the $60s. That was the second Bitcoin rally. The first was quite a while ago, in June of 2011 according to the same dataset, with Bitcoin spiking to a then sky-high $30 or so. It later fell to the single digits.

And so, in the first two Bitcoin rallies, we saw short-term spikes followed by sharp declines and price troughs. The gap between Bitcoin Rally 1 and Bitcoin Rally 2 was far longer than the distance between Rally 2 (April) and Rally 3 (now), but the pattern appears to be about the same.

And oh, darling is Bitcoin putting on a show. For perspective, here’s a weekly Bitcoin chart, starting around July in 2010, to today:

Kaboom, essentially.

The current rally is being fueled by the usual combination of presumed scarcity, an overzealous investor class, and truckloads of optimism. So, things will calm down in a bit, with a decent price correction. History teaches us that much. Also, can I sell you this tulip bulb.

Bitcoin was given a boost of sorts recently from the words of Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, speaking to Congress in epistolary format:

[T]hese types of innovations [such as Bitcoin] may pose risks related to law enforcement and supervisory matters, there are also areas in which they may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system.

So that didn’t hurt. There is fear in the market that regulation of Bitcoin by the government could make it less anonymous, stripping it of one of its most important tenets. For now, however, on goes Bitcoin.

Buy another monitor, toss a chart on it. This is going to get fun.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

The Supreme Court has rejected a call to challenge the National Security Agency’s secret telephone record surveillance program.

Without explanation, the high court refused to entertain a suit from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, seeking to stop the intelligence organization’s bulk data collection program. Now that hope is lost that the courts could strike down the controversial spy programs, all eyes turn to the most unproductive Congress in history.

Several members of congress have proposed reforms. Security hawks, led by California Senator Diane Feinstein, have advanced a bill to only limit the number of officials who can query the already-collected data. Privacy advocates, such as Senators Ron Wyden and Rand Paul, want to end bulk collection entirely, provide more transparency to congress, and allow citizens to sue the NSA.

All of this, however, will have to wait until President Obama’s NSA task force releases its recommendations. Then, next year, in between budget negotiations, immigration reform, and healthcare, a congress that hasn’t passed any major bills will have to tackle surveillance reform.

This is going to take a while.

[Image Credit: Flickr User Mark Fischer]

If you’re in the business of gift-giving, they say it’s the thought that counts. That’s all well and good unless of course you can’t think of anything to buy. Launching officialy today, UK startup ThePresent.co promises to numb that pain-point.

Using its own recommendation engine and algorithms, linked to its database of gifts – ranging in price from £8 to £80,000 – the smart personal shopper asks you to link the service to your Facebook account so it can glean demographic and interest-graph data from your intended recipient. Alternatively, you can fill out a simple survey on who they are and their interests.

Using this data, the web app will suggest suitable gift ideas within the target price you enter, let you go on to purchase the gift from the merchants it works with, wrap the gift and dispatch it for delivery. In theory, it’s a company after my own heart.

Yet, when I took the app for a brief spin, I was faced with further indecision: should I link ThePresent.co to my Facebook account and send it off to mine (albeit, publicly available) data on my intended recipient. I hate handing any app the keys to my social media profiles at the best of times, but when it’s for the purpose of interrogating data on my friends without their explicit permission, my uneasiness increases. Opting out of Facebook and filling out a survey also feels a little intrusive, not least because the first thing that ThePresent.co asks for is the name of your intended recipient.

More broadly it opens up a whole can of worms around who not only owns your data, but how that data can be used by the friends you’ve connected with on various services, even if that data is publicly scrape-able anyway.

However, in the case of ThePresent.co, I likely have nothing to worry about. “We are really against spam and the misuse of data in general, it’s for that reason that we never store any data after a search,” says CEO and co-founder David Yalland.

“On your question around storing data, we absolutely allow people to bypass Facebook. Whether you are nervous around using Facebook Connect or simply that the person you are buying for may not be connected to you (i.e. your Grandmother), then you can just use the dynamic hints filters (i.e. style / interests) to allow our technology to still recommend a relevant selection of gifts for the recipient.”

(I’d humbly suggest that the site makes its no data storage policy clearer from the outset.)

And certainly, for a time limited shopper (read: lazy) like me, a service like ThePresent.co does make a lot of sense, although it will be dependent on the reliability and quality of its recommendation engine and inventory of gifts.

Its founding team looks decent, too. Alongside CEO Yalland, it comprises Rupert Hambro (former Chairman of Hambros Bank, currently Chairman of JO Hambro), COO Charlotte-Anne Swerling (former Balderton VC), and Chairman Dominic Perks (serial entrepreneur and active investor).

Meanwhile, ThePresent.co is backed to the tune of £1.5m from various London-based investors, including a Goldman Sachs syndicate.

Sling Media is trying to make place-shifted content available in more places and on more devices, now launching a Roku channel that will allow customers to stream live content to another TV and control that experience with their mobile phones. The company is also releasing a new iPad app that will allow them to take TV with them wherever they go.

SlingPlayer 3.0 is the newest client for iPad, providing a new interface for discovering and viewing place-shifted TV on the tablet. The app provides a new split-screen navigation feature that allows viewers to browse through other shows, get more information about what they’re watching, and engage with other viewers through an integrated Twitter channel. Along with the built-in social media conversations, the app also allows viewers to discover content based on what they’ve liked on other networks.

Since so much of Sling’s viewing is live, and focused on sports, the company has built some features to support that. The new version does away with viewers having to search a grid-like interface for the game that matters to them. Also, once they’ve selected a game, they’ll get scores and live stats alongside the video.

The Sling app can also be used either as its own viewing device for when a viewer is on the road, or it can be used as a second-screen remote control within the home.

In addition to the iPad app, Sling is introducing a new Roku channel for users to watch live or recorded TV in another room in the house, or while they’re on the go. The channel is controlled by the SlingPlayer mobile app, which matches up with Roku boxes that are connected on the same WiFi network to stream content from the iPhone or Android device.

The Sling Roku channel will be available on Roku 3, Roku 2 XS, and Roku 2 XD boxes, as well as the Roku Streaming Stick. Support for later models will come in the next week.

Finally, Sling is working on a Windows 8.1 app, which is expected to be released next month. The app will deliver the same place-shifting experience on Surface tablets, as well as desktops, laptops, and hybrid/convertible devices.

Photo Credit: vonlohmann via Compfight cc

It’s not Snapchat, but Facebook is looking to step up its game in messaging by adding more features to the product it already has. The social network is currently testing a new messaging feature that lets you know not just which friends are online at the same time as you are, but whether they are using the mobile or desktop version of Facebook.

Previously, you were online on the web or mobile, had messenger installed but were offline, or were offline completely. The new feature being tested will mean Facebook will let you see friends who are currently online on “web” or “mobile.”

The additional details were first reported to us by Deepanker Verma, founder of the Techlomedia blog in India, who said his friend had spotted them first. He’s also pointed out that it appears to be a bit buggy.

We reached out to Facebook who confirmed that this is something it is testing out. “We are testing a feature that gives you a better understanding of where your friend will receive your message,” a spokesperson said, who said she would keep us posted on when and if it rolls out more broadly.

So why might Facebook be testing out new features?

The idea of giving users information about what kind of devices their friends are using is, in a way, a throwback to the earlier days of messaging services that were built out for enterprises, when IT companies talked about “unified communications” and creating ways of letting people seamlessly integrate their mobile messaging and desktop messaging applications and services – partly so people stayed connected all the time, and partly so that they knew where their messages were ending up.

While this kind of requirement isn’t as essential in the days of connected services that are almost always already available on both, or are strong enough on mobile that desktop access is unnecessary, you can see how some of the logic of knowing this information remains.

Although our smartphones are becoming increasingly more computer-like in their functionality (and for many have replaced computers altogether), there is still a gap between how users interact with each other when they are on desktop versus when they are on mobile devices. Users who are mobile may give shorter replies, or they may be less likely to reply instantly if they are on the move. Those who are on desktop are more likely to be sitting down, and therefore have more time to read longer messages with links and media and reply to them.

Facebook already provides some of this detail but in a different way: today if a user is sending a message from a mobile device, the recipient can see that detail on the message – information that some would prefer not to share. Putting “mobile” or “desktop” into the status window would pre-empt that information coming across in the message after the fact. That’s something that may lead to people using the platform to send more messages, since people are more inclined to send a message if they think they’ll get a quick response. These presence indicators make more it clearer someone is ready to reply.

It could also be that Facebook is thinking more generally about ways that it might develop its messaging app going forward, to keep the product evolving.

While services like Snapchat, Whatsapp and Line may still be far behind Facebook when it comes to monthly active users, Facebook is somewhat scrambling today in another race: the mindshare race.

As the NY Times pointed out yesterday, the reports circulating that Snapchat spurned Facebook’s acquisition offer point to how Facebook may lack a bit of the cachet that it may have once had in the past, and that some founders, and maybe investors, believe that we could be facing an inflection point where the platform might get supplanted by another as the go-to social network for people to communicate with each other. (Other indications: Facebook usage among teens is declining; the ongoing rise of other networks like Twitter and Pinterest.)

In that context, the rush to remain dynamic and full of new but simple features, which may catch the eye of users and get them to use the service a bit more, is not to be underestimated.

Additional reporting Josh Constine.

Yahoo has announced this morning that it will make all traffic flowing between its data centers encrypted by Q1 of 2014. This follows moves by other companies like Google to do so after recent revelations about the NSA’s data gathering sparked concern and outrage.

Yahoo’s announcement, made by CEO Marissa Mayer, outlines a plan to encrypt all of the data that moves between its data centers internally. Yahoo recently announced plans for 2048-bit key SSL encryption in Yahoo Mail by January 8th, 2014. Other encryption plans for the company include offering encryption for all data traveling between Yahoo and its customers by the end of Q1 ’14 as well. Yahoo says that it will work with all of its co-branded international Mail partners to ensure that at least the basic HTTPS protocol is enabled.

“As you know, there have been a number of reports over the last six months about the U.S. government secretly accessing user data without the knowledge of tech companies, including Yahoo,” says Mayer. “I want to reiterate what we have said in the past: Yahoo has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency. Ever.”

The announcement today comes in the wake of Google making similar moves (which began last year). Google began encrypting the traffic between its data centers after the exposure of a joint NSA-GCHQ program known as MUSCULAR, which outlined a system in which it spliced itself into communications between the company’s servers to gather data on surveillance subjects. The MUSCULAR project also targeted Yahoo directly, as shown in government documents obtained by Edward Snowden and exposed by The Washington Post.

The plan outlined a procedure which could intercept SSL communications between server groups at Yahoo or Google (or other large tech firms with lots of user data) to gather information on hundreds of millions of user accounts, both foreign and domestic. The WaPo report stated that millions of records a day were intercepted from Yahoo and Google networks:

According to a top-secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, the NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records – including “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video.

Earlier this month, Google engineer Brandon Downey posted a personal (not company) statement about the WaPo story, putting it bluntly:

Fuck these guys.

I’ve spent the last ten years of my life trying to keep Google’s users safe and secure from the many diverse threats Google faces.

I’ve seen armies of machines DOS-ing Google. I’ve seen worms DOS’ing Google to find vulnerabilities in other people’s software. I’ve seen criminal gangs figure out malware. I’ve seen spyware masquerading as toolbars so thick it breaks computers because it interferes with the other spyware.

I’ve even seen oppressive governments use state sponsored hacking to target dissidents.

But even though we suspected this was happening, it still makes me terribly sad. It makes me sad because I believe in America.

Google announced that its  efforts to encrypt all of its internal communications were approved last year, but ‘accelerated’ in June after Snowden’s revelations prompted fears of data tapping.

After being queried by the Register about its encryption practices, fellow data-heavy giant Microsoft said that it did not encrypt server-to-server traffic and that “recent disclosures make it clear we need to invest in protecting customers’ information from a wide range of threats, which, if the allegations are true, include governments. We are evaluating additional changes that may be beneficial to further protect our customers’ data.”

Encrypting server-to-server traffic seems like a no-brainer, but Yahoo is not alone in scrambling to put it into effect. The saddest aspect is that the lack of action here was largely due to the expectation of privacy from our own government, not lack of fear of outside ‘malicious actors’.

You post “Goal!!!!11!!” but who scored? Facebook’s on a drive to host more sports talk and get its trends shown on the news, so today it’s partnering with SportStream to structure, enhance, and make sense of its messy real-time data.

SportStream will offer broadcasters and sports teams a search interface for Facebook’s Keyword Insights and Public Feed APIs that leverages its “SportsBase” of metadata on teams, players, leagues, and games to surface who’s saying what about the biggest moments in athletics.

Facebook knows chatter about real-time, global events like sports is a huge opportunity for engagement, but many people are bringing this talk to Twitter. By getting TV, print, and web news outlets plus the sports teams themselves sharing Facebook sports chatter trends, Facebook hopes users will make it their water cooler for the big game.

The problem is jumbled data. When you write “RG3 touchdown” you mean Robert Griffin the third scored a touchdown for the Washington Redskins NFL football team. Facebook can’t parse that, but SportStream can.

Launched last June, SportStream monitors every major game, organization, and player plus all their social media accounts to understand what’s going on in games. It would break this content down into feeds about specific games or rivalries that news outlets could reference or sports teams could embed on their sites. At first the company was making consumer apps, but has shifted its focus towards being a data provider.

Until now SportStream was predominantly looking at public Facebook Pages, Instagrams, and Twitter accounts, but its new partnership with Facebook gives it access to the Keyword Insights API that anonymously aggregates trends of what Facebook users are privately posting about, and the Public Feed API that’s a firehouse of what users are specifically sharing in public posts.

It’s now releasing a search interface for these APIs that makes it easy to construct queries like “What part of the country talks about football the most?”, “Do young people chat more about Kobe Bryant or LeBron James”, and “Which home city is talking more about the big Boston Red Sox vs New York Yankees game?” SportStream then visualizes that data with graphs and maps as clips for TV news or embeds for news websites.

The ability to license access to its platform filled with this Facebook data could be a huge boon to SportStream, which has raised $3.5 million, has 10 employees, and serves about 50 teams and media outlets already.

By making its sports data easier to understand, Facebook might get more outlets and teams to use it. Facebook hopes the perception that it’s a home for real-time event chatter will trickle down to users.

But it’s not built for this kind of talk. The News Feed is algorithmically sorted for relevance, rather than reverse chronologically sorted for up-to-the-minute information. Facebook has been testing a solution to this problem that would show updates in the proper time sequence if it recognizes that you’re posting about a real-time event, but this formatting modification isn’t ready yet.

As much as Facebook wants to be a place for public talk about world events, it was built for sharing updates about your own life with friends. Facebook lets you be your offline self online, but now the service is encountering growing pains as it seeks to define its own identity.

Formerly the realm of the deep-pocketed kitchen nerd, sous vide cooking — where food is sealed in an airtight bag, then heated at a low and steady temperature — has become more accessible with the arrival of some lower-priced cookers.

The assets of mobile messaging startup Just.me are up for sale. Yet when founder Keith Teare called me to discuss the news, he argued that it’s not a failure.

“I feel like Just.me is not successful, but it is not a failure,” Teare said. “I don’t feel defeated – I feel like we’re in the middle of a process.”

In fact, Teare said that Just.me has attracted 458,000 unique users on iOS, Android, and the web since it launched in April, making it the biggest startup to emerge from his incubator Archimedes Labs, as well as “the best startup I’ve ever done.” (Teare’s past includes founding or co-founding the EasyNet Group and RealNames Corporation, as well as TechCrunch.)

Despite all that, Teare said there are two big issues that are causing the sale. First, he said that Just.me’s initial funding included $1.5 million in debt from Hercules Technology Growth Capital. The debt, combined with the fact that having hundreds of thousands of users means but Just.me is still “pre-traction measured by the meaning of the word ‘traction’ in the current mobile landscape,” made it impossible for the company to raise more money. As a result, it has now run out of cash and can’t pay its debts or cover its costs.

Hence the sale. Teare said Just.me is selling off its assets in five “buckets” – a non-exclusive license to the source code, the product and the infrastructure, a patent application for an advertising system that connects brands and consumers via direct messages, the Just.me domain, and the company’s physical assets. They’re being sold separately, Teare said, in the hopes of maximizing the money raised – unless that amount exceeds $1.3 million, it will all go to Hercules.

And here’s one more twist: Teare told me, “I fully intend to be the winning bidder for everything.” In other words, he’s hoping to raise money for a new company unencumbered by the debt, which would then buy the assets and continue running the Just.me service without interruption. But in the meantime, he needs to hold a real sale to show that he’s not just giving himself a sweetheart deal, and also in case he doesn’t succeed in raising that money.

Just.me’s situation is unusual because of the debt raised early on (Teare said that the money seemed necessary at the time, but he added, “Would I advise early stage companies against taking debt? One hundred percent yes.”). Nonetheless, he argued the situation speaks to a broader trend of startups struggling to raise money after their additional funding. The idea of a “Series A Crunch” (or a Series B, depending on what kind of round you raised first) isn’t new, and indeed it’s something that Teare has been giving talks about.

“I escaped London in 1997 because it was hard to raise capital,” Teare said. “It’s like Silicon Valley is become Europeanized. Now you’ve got to bootstrap very effectively or you’ve got to get huge growth.” And that’s a problem if you have a big idea: “It’s very hard to cheaply build anything significant in a multi-platform, mobile world.”

You can read more details about the sale and bid here.

After a year and a half of keeping a flat fare on all its rides, on-demand transportation startup Lyft is set to begin a test of dynamic pricing based on demand. It’s testing out the new pricing model, which it calls “Prime Time Tips,” in Los Angeles beginning today, as a way to make more drivers available during peak demand.

Lyft historically has shied away from demand-based pricing, partly as a way to differentiate itself from competitor Uber. But as its popularity has increased, the company also faces periods in which demand outstrips supply. While the company says that it has made many backend improvements to increase ride availability, Lyft is hoping that providing higher tips during periods of high demand will encourage more drivers to take passengers.

With that in mind, the Prime Time Tips will be automatically triggered when rides outnumber drivers. Passengers will be alerted with a notification screen, a la Uber, before they choose to request a ride at the higher fare.

That said, Lyft’s initial test of “Prime Time Tips” varies a little bit from the way Uber currently does it. For one thing, Lyft is capping increases at 25 percent, compared to the 2x or more that Uber’s surge prices can hit.

Another way that Lyft is trying to differentiate – it says that 100 percent of any price increase during high demand will be passed on directly to drivers, with Lyft taking only its usual base fare. That contrasts from Uber in that the latter company has a fixed commission split which remains the same in periods of surge and non-surge pricing.

Lyft believes that by structuring its pricing that way, it can still incentivize drivers to keep picking up passengers, while providing a fair price to passengers.

For now, Lyft is testing the pricing scheme in Los Angeles, which is one of its oldest markets. Lyft co-founder and president John Zimmer said that one of the reasons it’s testing out “Primetime Tips” there is it can be too hard to find a ride there during peak demand. It’s unclear if that test will extend to its other 17 markets, but in the meantime, Lyft probably wants to see what the reaction is like in L.A. and what effect it might have in curbing demand and increasing supply there.

Kind of related: Earlier today, competitor SideCar sent an email to passengers saying that it would move from donations to a flat fare structure in California, where the Public Utilities Commission has given its approval for new ride-sharing services. That means its passengers will be able to know how much a ride will cost once they’ve entered in their starting point and destination. Zimmer told me this afternoon that Lyft, too, would be moving away from donations to a fare structure in California as well. Stay tuned!