Category: Tech news

Mobile devices may rule our lives in many ways, but a fully capable PC is still an absolute necessity.

Today The Guardian reported that the GCHQ, Britain’s NSA equivalent, worked with several foreign governments to help them tap Internet traffic and phone communications. The Swedish, French, Spanish, and German governments are said to be involved.

It has been known for some time that the United States and British governments, through a number of programs such as the UK’s Tempora effort, directly tap the fiber-optic cables that are the backbone of the Internet, collecting data in massive quantity.

That four other countries do the same is, therefore, not surprising, but it is dispiriting. It will be far harder than we initially perhaps hoped to end this sort of mass surveillance. That the GCHQ was willing to provide what is described as “a leading role in advising its European counterparts” in how to get around legal restrictions is simply depressing.

The NSA acts in a similar fashion. After it was banned from collecting data sent in between data centers of private companies on the country’s soil, it started doing so overseas. Problem? Solved. Presumably the GCHQ, close cousin and partner in crime to the NSA, is teaching similar methods.

Previously, James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, joked that furor over news of NSA’s spying on the phone of the German Chancellor was asinine: “Some of this reminds me a lot of the classic movie ‘Casablanca’: ‘My God, there’s gambling going on here!’” Clapper is correct, it appears.

The losers here are the regular folks who are having their Internet traffic and telephony data absorbed by more than just their own governments, but by apparently a cadre of nations working in concert to ensure that digital privacy is kaput. The GCHQ is zealous in its will to help allies get around their own law. The Guardian’s quote about Holland is downright depressing:

“The Dutch have some legislative issues that they need to work through before their legal environment would allow them to operate in the way that GCHQ does. We are providing legal advice on how we have tackled some of these issues to Dutch lawyers.”

Frankly, I think that at this point it is reasonable to state that wholesale monitoring of the raw data that flows through the trunk cables of the web will not stop. The only solution is some sort of new encryption technique that is unhackable – though the NSA is working on ending that protection as well.

It is an incredible shame that it has come to this, and that nations find it impossible to keep their hands to themselves.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

The furor over Google’s mystery barges in San Francisco and Portland has reached a fever pitch over the past week. According to our sources the various reports about the barges being showcases for Google’s Glass retail efforts are correct.

Today, a report by The Los Angeles Times’ Chris O’Brien notes that most of the reporters going after this barge story have been looking at the wrong San Francisco lease. O’Brien notes that the correct lease’s purpose is the “fabrication of a special event structure and art exhibit only and for no other purpose.”

The sources we spoke to were still uncertain about the exact uses that all of the barges would be put to in the end, but aiding Google in showcasing Glass for its eventual retail run is the likeliest fate of the units docked behind San Francisco’s Treasure Island.

A story from CBS KPIX yesterday, which we mentioned earlier today, outlined a luxury showroom with a ‘party deck’ up top and spaces below for retail stores that could showcase Glass and other Google products. This report was said to be ‘pretty accurate’ by our sources.

The barges are composed of shipping containers stacked together, with cutouts that have had large bay windows put in place and then covered up. The shipping container is already a favored construction block of Google, which has used them for years to house data centers that can be easily expanded. The rationale behind using containers in this instance is that the barges likely won’t be a permanent home for the showcases, which could theoretically be disassembled and moved wherever Google needs them to be, on land or sea.

Lack of retail stores in which to demonstrate Glass effectively and publicly has always been a concern with regards to making the head-mounted computers available widely at retail. In my time with Glass, it became incredibly evident that people had no idea what they really did, how to use them or what the value proposition was. Poor demo conditions in many places that I showed them to other people limited them to what amounted to a head-mounted video camera. A proper mis-en-scène for Glass will be all-important for having people ‘get’ the thing, and apparently Google is working to provide just that.

News of the barges, which are being built by a shell company called ‘Buy and Large Llc‘ (an apparent Wall-E reference) was broken widely by Cnet last week, which speculated that they could be water-borne data centers. But, O’Brien notes, this report is actually chasing the wrong lease, one that was signed on August 1st, while work on the Google barge began last year.

A report from The Verge this week noted that the Treasure Island barge will likely be towed across to Fort Mason for display once it’s completed. The Portland Press Herald, which published the image above, snuck out to get some close-up shots of the one at Rickers Wharf this week.

If Apple decided to make updates to its OS X operating system free in part to drive more rapid consumer uptake, it was a great decision: Market adoption of its new OS X Mavericks operating system has beaten adoption of the preceding Mountain Lion version by a large margin.

According to NetMarketShare, OS X Mavericks is now installed on 0.84 percent of the global PC install base, or 10.8 percent of the total OS X install base of 7.73 percent. Mavericks accomplished that in 10 days. By comparison, according to Chikita, it took Mountain Lion a month to reach that level.

It’s worth noting that Chikita reported Mavericks passing the 10 percent mark sooner than NetMarketShare – data of this sort is somewhat imprecise. However, we can tell, by weighing both data sources, that Mavericks has enjoyed far more rapid adoption than preceding editions of OS X.

In real, or perhaps gross, terms, Mavericks has market share equivalent to essentially half of Windows 8.1 (an operating system that also launched in October), which reached 1.72 percent in the same month-period. Only Windows 8 users could update to Windows 8.1, giving the latter a market-share pool of roughly 8 percent. Mavericks, by contrast, could only draw from part of OS X’s aggregate 7.73 percent market share, meaning there were fewer total machines that were able to move to Apple’s new operating system. That explains why Windows 8.1 has grown its share more quickly, though the faster sales rate of Windows-based machines has certainly helped, as well.

However, from a different perspective, Mavericks is spanking Windows 8.1:

Apple’s decision to make Mavericks free to anyone with a compatible Mac should certainly help its adoption. Available for just a few weeks, already one in ten Mac users is on 10.9; only one in 50 Windows users is in 8.1. Indeed, only one in ten Windows users is on Windows 8.x. Apple has done in a couple of weeks what Microsoft has only managed in a year.

Both companies can take heart in the numbers to a certain extent. What will be interesting to watch at the end of November will be the total converted percentage for both Mavericks and Windows 8.1, and whether there is anything that we can glean from that information.

Top Image Credit: Apple

Microsoft today announced that it has renewed its partnership with Twitter, giving Bing access to all of the public content Twitter’s users create. The terse three-sentence announcement is short on details, but a Microsoft spokesperson told us it extends, for an unspecified amount of time, the deal the two companies made four years ago.

“The past four years partnering with Twitter have been great, and we’re excited to continue that relationship in order to help deliver the best possible search experience,” the spokesperson told us.

Unlike Google, Bing has made social search a cornerstone of its strategy. Its close relationship with Facebook has long given it the ability to highlight posts from the popular social network, as well as from Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Foursquare, Klout and other services in its social sidebar. With Bing’s latest redesign, which dropped the number of columns on its search results pages from three to two, the social sidebar now features even more prominently on the site.

Twitter itself started giving access to its public firehose feed to partners in 2010, and it continues to keep a very tight grip on who gets access to this information. It’s providing a full feed to large partners like Microsoft, Google and others, though a small number of select resellers like Gnip and DataSift can provide anybody with the right resources (both financial and technical) with access to this data.

With the latest Retina display MacBook Pro, Apple makes a number of thoughtful refinements to what was already a stellar notebook. The result is one of the best laptops on the market right now.

The mayor of Seattle has alleged that Comcast donated significant sums to his rival ahead of the November 5 election. The money could have been donated, perhaps, in hopes of scuttling the planned public-private broadband initiative in the city that could introduce new inexpensive, and fast competitive service.

In response to a question during a Reddit AMA asking what would happen to the effort – which will likely be executed with a private firm by the name of Gigabit Squared – Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn said, ”I don’t know, but I do know Comcast gave [rival candidate] Murray a big pile of money.”

That’s a stark implication. The Washington Post reported on the situation, intimating as well that Comcast could be taking a financial interest in the outcome of the election, and therefore is donating to prevent its competitive landscape from becoming steeper.

Let’s be frank: Comcast wants less competition not more, as do all corporations. It also makes political donations, as do nearly all public companies. It also donates to specific candidates, over time, because it finds the views of those candidates more palatable to its interests and perhaps in hopes of swaying them slightly during their time in elected office.

That is simple politics. If any of that surprises you, you are a bit behind.

Comcast has donated to McGinn’s rival Ed Murray in the past through his tenure as a State Senator. So, the relationship is extant. This election cycle, Comcast has made a direct $700 donation to his campaign, and a Comcast executive named Janet Turpen also donated $500.

That sort of company-executive donation is not abnormal. For example, Yahoo and one of its executives have also donated to Murray’s mayoral electoral bid this cycle. No one is accusing Yahoo of attempting to buy a vote. Now, the Post goes on to list the following larger and less public donations by Comcast to groups that have put money behind Murray:

The Broadband Communications Association of Washington PAC, which received 94 percent of its 2013 contributions from Comcast, donated $5,000 to the group People for Ed Murray less than a month after Gigabit Squared’s pricing announcement. That was the PAC’s largest single donation. Unsurprisingly, People for Ed Murray has made significant expenditures supporting Murray’s candidacy. The Web site of the Broadband Communications Association of Washington also lists Janet Turpen as president-elect.

Comcast also donated $5,000 to the PAC called the “Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy,” or CASE, whose largest expenditures were donations to People for Ed Murray, to the tune of $52,500 – over half of the money spent by the group according to the most recent disclosures online. Their second largest expenditures was $10,000 to People for a New Seattle Mayor, a group opposing McGinn’s reelection.

So, $10,000. That’s hardly big money. Perhaps $10,000 speaks more loudly than what is normal in a mayoral election, but the sums here are not out of hand.

Comcast, in a statement provided to the Post, denied that it is trying to buy the election or unduly influence it. Which is what you would expect the company to say, of course. As a firm it is spending to have an impact. You don’t spend money for no reason, of course. Comcast is supporting Murray because it favors him over McGinn. And given that McGinn has worked on creating a competitor to Comcast, that is hardly surprising.

Still, what we lack in all of this a simple answer: Does Murray favor scrapping the public-private broadband pilot, and later the full project? That is not clear. The Post says this:

The [Murray] spokesman also committed that, if elected, Murray would honor the current agreements between Gigabit Squared and the city, “but he will also makes sure that the City monitors the company’s performance to ensure that they are delivering the promised results as the project moves forward.” In other words, the limited pilot project would likely go forward in a Murray administration, but there’s more of a question about whether the rest of Seattle would be offered gigabit service via a private-public partnership.

That strikes me as a bit weak. Could it be that Murray is less enthusiastic about the broadband initiative than McGinn? Sure. It’s not his project after all. But the intimation that Comcast is trying to shift the election perhaps to dodge this specific bit of competition feels like perhaps sensible speculation, but speculation all the same.

Murray can lay this all to rest by simply stating that he is committed to the project – if he is, of course. Simple speech is the best response to innuendo.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

The Nexus 5 is here! The Nexus 5 is here!

After months of hype and more questionably “accidental” leaks than any device in recent memory, Google announced their new flagship Android handset this morning.

I’ve only had the device in my hands for a few hours, so it’ll be a few days before I’m ready to give my final yay or nay on this thing. With that said, I recognize that I’m amongst a very lucky few to have access to this thing before they start leaving the warehouse en masse later this week, so I figured I’d share some early impressions.

Thoughts so far:

• It’s quite nice looking, though not in a particularly unique way. Look at it from more than a few feet away, and most folks probably wouldn’t have any idea what phone they were looking at. It’s a big glass screen with a matte black back; I’m… not sure how you could get any more standard.
• The soft touch backside gets fingerprint-tastic, and fast. I had to wipe it almost constantly for our hands on photos. For reference, I’m using the black device and don’t have particularly oily hands.
• As you’d expect of a device with a nearly 5-inch (4.95 inches, to be specific) screen, it’s big. Real big. Any bigger, in fact, and I’d say it’s too big. And yet, Google and LG managed to keep it just within the realm of sanity. It’s not a strictly two-hand device, but unless you’ve got hulk hands, expect to need a second hand more often than not.
• With Android 4.4, Google Search is now integrated into every single page of your homescreen launcher, and can be triggered by voice through an “Okay, Google” hot keyword. Having search on every page is so nice that I wonder why Google didn’t do it before (instead letting the user pick which one, if any, of their homescreens had a Google Search widget on it). Search is always just there.
• Google Now is now always the left-most screen on your homescreen, which is a smart move on Google’s part. Google Now is incredibly neat (if slightly terrifying) – but, previously stuffed behind a swipe from the very bottom of the screen, it was far too easy to forget it was there. You can still reach it with a swipe up from the bottom, need be.
• It’s smooth. Really smooth. Every transition, every fade in – it’s like butter. If it stays this smooth after a few weeks of use, it’s by far the smoothest Android experience I’ve had; alas, that rarely seems to be the case with Android.
• The camera seems above average, but not mind blowing. I’ll save the example shots until I’ve had a chance to pit it head-to-head with a few comparable devices. The camera is also a bit crashy, though that might be my specific unit; three times now, the camera has just stayed at a black screen when I tried to open it
• Android 4.4 overhauls the dialer, with the main feature being a knowledge of nearby businesses. Just type a business name into the same field where you’d normally type the first few letters of your friends name, and it pulls up the details for nearby locations. In my early tests, this feature works very well. Typing “Starbucks” pulled up 8+ locations near me (hey, it’s San Francisco), broken down by their location, each offering their phone number at a click. It works in reverse, too; I had one of those Starbucks locations call me, and the phone identified the caller as such. Google says all this data is piped in from Google Maps
• In Google’s HDR+ mode (which takes photos in rapid succession and combines the best parts of each into one photo), the camera can be slow. Twice I moved the camera before it was done (but after the shutter sound went off), ending up with a photo of the ground.
• While Android 4.4 is largely focused on optimizations that allows it to run on lower-end devices, there are a number of lil’ subtle changes that really spruce up the place. The top bar and bottom nav bar are both translucent now, allowing the homescreen background to go fullbleed across the screen . The widgets drawer has been moved out from the pop-up app drawer (which always seemed like a weird location), and back to being behind a long press on the home screen (like it was in Android of yesteryear).

The Nexus 5 comes in two colors: one black, and one white. $349 gets you a 16GB model, while $399 gets you 32GB. Both of those devices are unlocked and off-contract, mind you – for the price, the hardware stuffed into this phone is rather amazing.

Alas, it might be tough to get one for a while. The Nexus 5 just went on sale this morning, and almost immediately sold out. If you’re one of the people who got their order in: don’t worry, so far I’d say you’ve made a solid choice.

While my notes above may seem neutral (or even neutral-negative), I’m actually pretty darn pleased with the device so far. It feels like they took the Nexus 4, the Moto X, and the HTC One – all three devices of which were devices I really liked – and mashed them together, pulling in many of the best parts of each. If you’re already an Android fan or a Nexus 4 owner, you’ll like what you see here. If you’re an iPhone user, this one really could be the one to convince you to make the switch. I know I’m tempted.

Check back in just a few days for our full review.

The Rockstar consortium is an organization backed by Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Ericsson and Sony. It purchased patents off of the defunct telecommunications company Nortel in 2011, in a bidding war with Google.

Now, the consortium has filed suit against Google, ASUSTek, HTC, Huawei, LG, Pantech and ZTE over those patents. The suit was filed in a U.S. District Court of Eastern Texas today.

“Google placed an initial bid of $900,000,000 for the patents-in-suit and the rest of the Nortel portfolio. Google subsequently increased its bid multiple times, ultimately bidding as high as $4.4 billion,” the filing states. “That price was insufficient to win the auction, as a group led by the current shareholders of Rockstar purchased the portfolio for $4.5 billion. Despite losing in its attempt to acquire the patents-in-suit at auction, Google has infringed and continues to infringe the patents-in-suit.”

Google famously bid some not-so-random numbers before the end, including ‘pi’. The suit also involves a licensee of the ‘Associative Search Engine’  6,098,065 patent, NetStar, Inc.

The other patents are US 7,236,969, 7,469,245, 7,672,970, 7,895,178, 7,895,183 and 7,933,883. They’re mostly fairly dry stuff related to database searches, relevance in advertising presentation and data sorting, but exactly the kind of stuff that makes Google’s special sauce work. We can’t speak to the strength of the patents, but they certainly appear to be relevant.

Google lost out in a heated bidding war against Rockstar and went on to acquire Motorola, a move that many attributed to a patent grab, but that was also about hardware  in a lot of ways.

Notably, HTC has a cross-licensing agreement with Apple on some patents, but apparently not these. News of the suit was first reported by Reuters today.

Today, Bloomberg’s Sarah Frier and Serena Saitto report that Twitter’s highly anticipated initial public offering is oversubscribed, indicating booming interest for its shares as the firm looks to become a public company. Notably, Twitter had priced the shares well below expectations, all but guaranteeing an oversubscribed IPO.

The report says that the IPO had enough interest to be oversubscribed before bank involvement.

When Twitter filed its documents to go public, it was criticized by some for its extensive, and widening losses. And currently, all signs are pointing to Twitter’s revenue in calendar 2013 has expanded quickly as well. The company will raise around $1 billion in the IPO, valuing the firm at around $11 billion. Twitter plans to offer 70 million shares at $17-$20 per share. Early indications are that Twitter would price on November 6th and begin trading the day after.

At this point, Twitter now has options available to it including floating more shares or hitting above the higher end of the range when it prices next week. Losses aside, Twitter will be the hottest IPO of the year. Strap in.

Music-focused social network SoundTracking released a new version of its smartphone app today, one that co-founder and CEO Steve Jang said will make the app useful beyond “hardcore music lovers.”

We’re also hearing that SoundTracking has reached an agreement with Sprint, with SoundTracking being preloaded or featured on certain Sprint Android phones starting next spring. However, Jang declined to comment on any potential partnership, so hopefully we’ll know more about that soon.

Anyway, back to the updated app. There’s a new design with features like larger photos and brighter colors, but the most interesting addition is probably a Discover section, which is basically a new take on finding music through Soundtracking.

Previously, people discover music based on what was shared by the users they followed. With the new section, you can find music in a way that’s not subject to the randomness of who you follow and when you checked your newsfeed. There’s a song of the day chosen by the SoundTracking team (something the company was already experimenting with via email, and which got a positive response), hashtag-based search, and charts of general trending music and music nearby.

Jang said he plans to go further in this direction with more charts focusing on different types of music.

The obvious comparison seems to be Twitter #Music, an app that recommends music based on what people are tweeting. Jang suggested that social networks in general have moved toward personalized recommendations that less reliant on timelines and on who you follow. On the other hand, a recent report suggested that usage of the #Music app has declined and that Twitter may shut it down. The problem in that case, Jang suggested, is that people wanted that experience in Twitter itself, not in a separate app.

Jang added that 14 million tweets, Facebook status updates, Instagram pictures, Foursquare check ins, emails, and SMS messages are sent each day from SoundTracking. Users have created a total of 40 million music moments, which have been shared more than 6 billion times and viewed 530 million times within the company’s mobile and web apps.

“The stats reflect that we continue to create a product that’s’ really great for expression, sharing, and outbound messaging,” he said. “I think our work on the Discover section and charts and personalized is really going to address the other side. … Now we need to help people who love music that are little bit more passive, more of viewing and listening type.”

” So we can expect more “lean back” type experiences to come in the future.

In this week’s special episode of Ask A VC from Disrupt Europe in Berlin, Germany, AngelPad founder and former Googler Thomas Korte talked to TechCrunch about his incubator’s strategy, expansion and more.

Korte, who launched AngelPad in 2010 with six other ex-Google employees, explained why he’s kept the incubator small, with only around 10-12 startups per session (with two sessions per year). Korte also told us that AngelPad is heading east for its next session, debuting a new session in New York City (interested founders can apply here, and the deadline is Sunday).

While AngelPad was bootstrapped for the past three years with the backing of its founders, Korte also revealed that AngelPad just raised $7 million in outside investment from undisclosed LPs.

As of January of this year, AngelPad had seen 62 companies participate in five sessions. In 2012 alone, AngelPad’s 62 total companies raised $56 million, which is on top of the $25 million they had raised in 2011. The incubator has also seen some impressive exits from portfolio startups, including Twitter’s recent $350 million acquisition of MoPub.

Tune in above for more!

Google Cloud SQL now supports native MySQL connections, a move that is intended to make it easier to integrate third-party applications. With the support, native MySQL apps can be plugged into Cloud SQL, allowing the customer to leave system administration and management for Google.

Through MySQL Wire Protocol, the standard connection protocol for MySQL databases, Google maintains that CloudSQL allows for low latency connections from applications running on Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine. Customers can use popular tools such as MySQL Workbench, Toad and the MySQL command-line tool to manage Cloud SQL instances. It also supports standard drivers, such as Connector/J, Connector/ODBC, and Connector/NET.

The native connectivity also means that data can be replicated with control over managing and deploying cloud databases. For example, Google notes in its post that data can be replicated between Cloud SQL and on-premise databases – including Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2.

The support demonstrates how connectors like MySQL Wire Protocol will help create transparency between cloud services and any on-premise application. It’s a service that should attract those looking for the level of managed services that Google provides.

Google is starting to offer features that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has had for a few years. While Google launched the core of its CloudSQL service in June, AWS launched its MySQL service in 2009 and in 2012 began offering support for Oracle Database.

Then there is the pricing. According to the InfoQ blog, AWS RDS is “cheaper than corresponding Google Cloud SQL pay-per-hour options, but one needs to consider other costs such as data storage and transfer fees, etc.”

Workers from tech giants Google, Red Hat, and Oracle and other companies have reportedly joined with the government to help fix the notoriously broken Healthcare.gov website that is a key portion of the Affordable Care Act.

According to a tweet from CNBC, “experts” from the firms have been dispatched. It is not clear yet in what quantity or what their role will be. The government needs the help, and it is good to see the technology community step up. After all, this is our domain.

In a piece by Alex Wayne on BusinessWeek, Google is parting with Michael Dickerson, a “site reliability engineer.” Also according to Wayne, Greg Gershman of mobile company Mobomo is said to be taking part as well.

When the Affordable Care Act went live recently, its website, which was supposed to provide a central exchange, failed: It lagged, dropped users, and fed wrong information to insurance companies. It was a tectonically embarrassing moment for the government and the president. Later, a “tech surge” was called for. It appears that this is part of that effort.

The government has promised that the website will be functional by the end of November. That gives the Silicon Valley cavalry just a single month to get the beast back in the pen. Also unclear at the moment is why these three firms have stepped up and not others. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, and Twitter are other firms that could spare an engineer or two.

Private tech employees helping the public government untangle a website built in part by Canadian contractors? The leaks from this saga are going to be amazing.

This is a developing story, and this post will be updated as new information becomes available.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

How old is social media? Maybe we can date it from the birth of Facebook in February 2004. Or perhaps we can go back to 2002, to when Friendster was founded. Or even way, way, way back to digital antiquity – back to 1997, when Reid Hoffman founded the first social media website, SocialNet.

No, social media is actually older, 2,000 years older, than Facebook, Friendster or SocialNet. That’s the view at least of Tom Standage, the digital editor of the Economist, whose new book Writing In The Wall: Social Media – The First 2,000 Years makes the intriguing argument that social media has actually been around since the Romans. It’s the industrial top-down media of the last 150 years, Standage told me, that is the historical anomaly. Social media, he explains, “scratches a prehistorical itch” for personalized news, opinion and gossip. So rather than a waste of time or a distraction, he insists, Facebook and Twitter are actually something that satisfies us as human-beings.

Standage is too good a historian to argue that nothing about social media is new. He acknowledges, for example, that the globalized, instantaneous and searchable nature of social networks are truly new. Yet Standage’s comparisons of contemporary social media with Roman papyrus letters or hand-printed tracts of the Reformation really do suggest that social media goes a lot further back than 1997. “The only surprising things about social media,” Standage dryly concludes, “is that we are surprised by it.”