Category: Tech news

People assume the worst. So when it comes to counting government “requests” for private data, disclosing a number, even a high number, is far better than the fear of infinity. That’s why tech giants are fighting to show they aren’t open books surrendered to the NSA. They want to prove only the suspicious are being spied upon.

“Direct access” were the words that drummed up the fear. The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency had attained direct access to the data of nine of the world’s largest tech companies. Many of those companies aggressively denied this, saying they only provide specifically requested data when legally obligated to. Unfortunately they were heavily muzzled regarding the specifics of what they could say. The vagueness combined with their initial inaccurate reports of direct access left the public shaken. Many innocent citizens got the sinking feeling they were being spied on.

Desperate To Disclose

Over the last week, the companies have been fighting for more freedom to disclose exactly how many government requests for data they’ve been receiving from the NSA. The hope was that that would quell the speculation.

Yesterday Facebook and Microsoft both cut deals to disclose numbers. Not hard numbers,  but at least a narrow range of numbers of requests they’ve recieved from the government for private user data on criminal as well as potential terrorist threats over the last six months. For Facebook, that range was nine to ten thousand requests on between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts. For Microsoft, it was six to seven thousand requests affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 users.

Previously, all companies were completely gagged when it came to requests from the National Security Agency, legally required to keep the number of requests for data on potential terrorist threats a secret. The deals let them disclose numbers…but only in aggregate with local, state, and federal criminal data requests, and only in bands of one thousand to obscure the specifics.

Numbers, Even Obscured Numbers, Fight Fear

Why Facebook and Microsoft wanted this was that these numbers establish a worst case scenario. Rather than allow conspiracy theorists and panicked journalists (which I was guilty of being) to speculate that hundreds of thousands, millions, or everyone was under the watchful eye of the NSA big brother, it capped the number of people possibly monitored at 19,000 for Facebook and 32,000 for Microsoft. That is a lot more reassuring than people being scared the surveillance extended to all users.

Facebook needed a number to point to more than anyone. It’s business model lives and dies by private data. When users feel comfortable, they volunteer the fuel for Facebook’s content relevance and ad targeting engines. If they feel paranoid, they’re not going to deactivate their accounts, as Facebook has become too crucial a utility for most. But they will be subtly weary of sharing their more personal information and content. That hurts Facebook.

But Google and Twitter immediately criticized the social network. Why? Because they cut a bargain rather than hold out for exact numbers of NSA requests and the volume of people affected. Facebook settled for giving the public something rather than nothing, even if the data on the NSA is obscured by being combined with non-NSA requests for more traditional criminal cases. That could make it harder for other companies to get the NSA to loosen up even further.

Facebook didn’t want to keep the public in the pitch dark, and couldn’t risk not getting to disclose anything. If the government does what’s right, this disclosure will just be a stepping stone to the data Google and Twitter want to provide. True transparency. That’s what the public deserves. But regardless of the criticism, what Facebook and Microsoft won for the public yesterday will go a long way to reassuring us that these companies aren’t knowingly spilling the beans on everyone, and the government might not be as powerful as we suspected.

[Image Credit]

Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and several-times entrepreneur. His latest book is “Choose Yourself!” came out this past June 3 (foreword by Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter).

I know you do it. We all act like we don’t do it, like we’re all pristine human beings who WOULD NEVER do perverse things like that. But I know you do it. And you do it a lot.

You respond to trolls.

It starts like this: You post something intelligent on the “World Wide Web.” Triple-dub to those in the biz. You expect that the entire world is going to praise you for coming up with the one thing that’s never been said before in the history of mankind.

Then HE shows up. Someone who says something to provoke you. Most of the time you say “troll” to yourself, and you get back to living your larger-than-life existence. But every now and then, the troll takes the place of your father. Or your mother. Or your ex-spouse. Or your ex-something. Some button is pressed. Right there in the center of your head.

And you have to respond. Because…because…because…if you don’t respond then EVERYONE will think maybe this guy is right and you HAVE to set the record straight.

One weekend I had an article right here on TechCrunch. A little over a year ago. The article came out at 8 a.m. on a Saturday. Around 9 p.m. the next day, 37 hours later, my wife came up to me and said, “you know you’ve been glued to that message board all weekend. You NEED TO SHOWER NOW!”

I published a book last week. “Choose Yourself!”  It was No. 1 for all non-fiction for a couple of days, even beating out Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In.”

I was very happy. The book is about how we can choose ourselves for success instead of rely on the masters who would love to keep us on a leash. It’s about breaking the shackles so we could have financial freedom. It’s what every TechCrunch reader wants to do.

In the book, among other things, I threw out a challenge. I asked any Internet troll, someone who prides himself on driving people crazy, someone who spends 10 hours a day or more responding to message board comments, to please contact me and describe the mentality.

We all get advice on trolls all the time. I get 100 hate comments a week across various message boards. I’ve even gotten death threats.

But sometimes…sometimes….there’s just those buttons. It’s daddy or mommy and they know how to press them.

Then, in response to the challenge in my book, GVOK wrote me. 

You may know GVOK.

You may know him if you spend thousands of hours on http://www.startrek.com arguing about politics. Or, after he was banned from startrek.com, if you spent another several thousand hours on sistertrek.com. Or if you spend thousands of hours on YouTube arguing whether or not Jesus is real.

GVOK is no teenage, pimply idiot typing out screeds from his high school computer lab.

He wrote: “After graduating law school I worked for a law firm, bored out of my mind and miserable for eight years and was laid off in 2009. I had also bought a large, beautiful house that I am now renting out because I could no longer afford the mortgage.

“Your message that these types of middle jobs will eventually become temp jobs definitely speaks to me.  I never enjoyed working these kinds of jobs anyway. They’re boring, coworkers are gossipy and I always felt underutilized and looked down upon.  Your daily practice you mention inspires me and I can definitely see breaking out on my own.”

But every now and then, the troll takes the place of your father. Or your mother. Or your ex-spouse. Or your ex-something.

So GVOK, while he was at his former job as a high-priced lawyer, started spending hours every day on message boards. His only goal: to drive other people completely insane. All of the bold lettering below is mine. He wrote:

“I’ve had three experiences trolling. Two message boards on Star Trek and one comment section of a Youtube video on whether Jesus was real. Trolls rarely admit they are wrong and I’m no exception. I was converted from being an upstanding board member into a troll by a board bully named Admiralbill.

Now Admiralbill was a staunch Republican, a real ditto head, ex-navy guy from Texas.  He vehemently attacked anyone who remotely espoused a liberal viewpoint.  After it was determined that there were no WMDs in Iraq and the whole basis on the invasion was based upon a false premise I began to have my doubts about conservativism.  This brought me into the cross hairs of Admiralbill.  After a few times being attacked by him and observing him attack others I decided to attack back.  All this is to show that I thought my motives were pure.  

The following is a list of methods I employed:

1. I would post a news article that tended to put the Republican / Conservatives in a bad light. This was obviously intended to push Admiralbill’s buttons but I could always argue that I thought the article was interesting and might stimulate discussion.  It had the effect of putting him on the defense because he felt compelled to respond to it.

2. I would then keep him tired and on the defensive.  I did this by responding quickly and concisely.  When I did post commentary I would keep it short and only address one particular point.  I always found it funny when another poster would get so worked up over something and take the time to write a long drawn out post responding to every single point in the previous post.  I would just choose one point to refute or agree with.  This had the effect negating all the work the previous post made.  I conserved my energy with small posts that took me ten minutes to craft they exhausted themselves with long ones that took an hour.  The longer they take to respond, the more rest I have and the more agitation they feel to get a response out.

3. I usually asked questions in my responses.  This also put him on the defensive because he felt compelled to respond to a direct question.  Thus he never set the tone because he was always responding to the tone I set.  Questions (for some reason) also had the effect of pissing him off.  I naturally asked questions to begin with not thinking this was strategy but once I realized he didn’t like it I did it more.

4. I specifically stated at times that I did not want Admiralbill to respond in specific threads to avoid conflict.  Of course this had the intended opposite effect.

I spent quite a bit of time baiting Admiralbill.  I think it was more than five years before I was banned from the website.  By the time that happened I wanted to be banned.  I needed to end the endless cycle.  It drained my energy.  I was constantly thinking of new ways to piss Admiralbill off.  To this day part of me still hates how mean and self righteous he was.  James, I know you don’t vote but it’s enough motivation for me to vote Democrat knowing that in some small way it gets back at him.

There’s definitely an addictive cycle when it comes to trolling.  The exhilaration is the drug that for a moment takes away the pain I feel during the 90% of the rest of the cycle.

I can only speak for myself but I suspect most trolls (and people who engage in e-debates in general) probably share a common personality type.  They probably work jobs or live lives that are in someway unsatisfying.  They want to feel special and crave attention and respect.  They are highly dependent on the opinions of other people.

And this is really at the heart of the matter, a message board troll feels intense shame.  It is shame that motivates him to shame others.  Where this shame comes from is a whole other discussion but part of it definitely had to do with working a job I hated for so long.

As you mention in your book it is basically pointless to try to change another person’s mind but I suppose at some level I was also operating under the delusion that if I said the right thing he would admit he was wrong.”

I asked GVOK three questions in response:

1. Did you ever feel like it was a waste of time? Like, maybe you could’ve been finding a better job or relationship or whatever?
2. Did you ever get really really angry?
3. Would you get mad if someone didn’t respond to you?

His response.

“Oh wow.  You responding just made my day – sitting here auditing legal bills in the basement of my parents’ house on a rainy day.

 There is an interesting connection between trolling and working these boring corporate / cubicle jobs that became clear to me after reading your book. You feel intense shame, you are bored, you have access to the internet – of course you will end up trolling!”

And he ended his discourse with:

“Thanks”.

GVOK, you’re welcome.

It’s been a good week for old media. The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal have all done a superb job of reporting on the NSA/PRISM revelations. Unfortunately it has also been a terrible decade for them. Newspaper advertising revenue has fallen by more than half since 2007, and paywalls aren’t even coming close to covering that loss.

Worse yet, nimbler competitors are doing their breakneck best to steal the audience…and they seem to be doing it well. I recently got curious about how frequently various news sources are shared on social media, and since I couldn’t find any tool that measured quite what I wanted, I built one myself. (And I’ve spent like a hundred dollars on App Engine server costs amassing all of its data, so I hope you appreciate this.) The results were eye-opening.

My handy-dandy tool, called Scanvine, tracks stories from a panoply of online sources, measures how often they’re shared, and compares and ranks them all. Guess what its leaderboard says as of this writing? None of the above are ranked in the top three. Nor the NYT, or the WSJ, or the New Yorker. Instead, third place goes to The Onion, with an average of 2000 shares per story; number two is Cracked, with 2700; and number one, at over 3000…is much-loathed BuzzFeed.

But wait, it gets worse. The numbers for most of the sources Scanvine tracks have been pretty consistent since the start of the year, which is how far back its data collection goes. Here’s a handy-dandy chart of the New York Times since then:

and here’s the BBC World News:

and here’s TechCrunch. (Which, incidentally, does very well indeed among tech sources.) (modest cough.)

All three are basically still where they were in the second week of January. But here’s BuzzFeed –

and here, I’m sorry to say, is the Mail Online. (As a former UK resident I have good reason to despise the Daily Mail, and while the Mail Online is not quite the same thing–basically it’s the UK’s TMZ–it’s guilty by association.)

Can you see the difference?

Now, it’s possible that some methodological tweak has somehow caused Scanvine to overstate the recent rapid increase in the share counts for BuzzFeed and Mail Online — and indeed I kind of hope so — but you’d be hard-pressed to deny that quick-hit low-journalism sites, as personified by those two, have had a much, much better half-decade than the gray old-media titans of yore, and there’s no sign of this trend turning around anytime soon.

Please note: I said low journalism, not bad journalism. There’s a huge difference. High journalism, eg the investigative Snowden/NSA reporting, is like protein; low journalism is more like chocolate. And there’s definitely a place in this world for good chocolate, à la The Onion and Cracked, whose stories usually manage to be about something while still being hilarious. But BuzzFeed? Not so much.

Historically, high journalism has largely been subsidized by low journalism. Nowadays, though, the two are increasingly decoupled, largely because we can get the latter online in unlimited quantities. BuzzFeed is the poster child of this movement, partly because of its undeniable success, partly because it is to low journalism what high-fructose corn syrup is to chocolate, as satirized by, er, The Onion. BuzzFeed is little more than a superbly engineered machine for turning animals, animated GIFs, and repackaged Reddit threads into pageviews. It’s almost pure sugar water.

To be clear, I’ve been amused by many a BuzzFeed post myself; and to their credit, they’re trying to do more. They’re not just expanding further into video, they’re looking to broaden their remit into high journalism as well. Under Ben Smith, they’ve expanded into political reporting, and they’ve just hired The Guardian‘s Moscow correspondent as their first foreign and national security editor:

The idea for the expansion, says BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, took shape after the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings… “It was a real eye-opening moment,” Peretti says. “They don’t have a legacy news brand, and they were turning to BuzzFeed, a site they visit every day, to figure out what was happening. … Our top five stories were all hard news content.”

Well, maybe. But I built Scanvine to tabulate the available data myself, and according to it, here are BuzzFeed’s 40 most-shared stories for the week following the Boston bombing. You do find “29 Reasons To Love Boston,” “Comfort Dogs Come To Boston”, “Boston Marathon Met With Unbelievable Acts Of Kindness,” “Dunkin’ Donuts In Boston Stayed Open During Lockdown,” and “16 Eerie Images Of Boston On Lockdown,” but only three stories there could remotely be considered hard news — and they’re way, way down the list from “27 Signs You Were Raised By Asian Immigrant Parents,” “20 Reasons Why Going To The Gym Is A Huge Waste Of Time,” and “27 Dogs That Will Do Anything For Kids.”

I challenge you to find political or hard news high on the BuzzFeed Top 40 list for any other week this year, either. If their audience really is into hard news and politics, then they sure seem to be going out of their way to keep it hidden from one another.

Who knows? BuzzFeed may yet become, well, the BuzzFeed of hard news. And I genuinely admire their attempt to do so. But if they do succeed, it will be one of the great media pivots of our time. I doubt it will happen. I think that instead the world of news will continue to bifurcate into the high/hard and the low/soft, and that BuzzFeed will remain the lowest and softest of the latter category.

All of which means that for pretty much the first time in the history of newspapers (unless you count The Economist, which continues to defy all trends) we’ll all have to find out whether or not hard news and investigative journalism can survive and thrive all on their own. Let’s hope so. Because as this week shows, we still need those grizzled old-media watchdogs to keep their eyes and teeth sharp. Maybe now more than ever.

Calling all startups from Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We want you. For the very first time, the full TechCrunch Disrupt conference (complete with the main TechCrunch Editors and Writers) is coming to Europe and we’re looking for the very best startups to launch on our Disrupt stage as part of the world-famous Startup Battlefield. The winner gets a shiny Disrupt Cup, $50,000 cash, and a huge amount of attention from the world of tech.

The Startup Battlefield is the heart and soul of our conferences. Companies like Yammer, Dropbox, FitBit, Swype and hundreds more have launched from the Disrupt stage. We’ve always had an international contingent, but come October, it will be Europe’s time to shine.

Last month, at Disrupt NY 2013, Enigma bested a very impressive batch of startups including HAN:DLE, SupplyShift, and Zenefits. The very best startups show up at Disrupt.

Are you ready to launch your company on the biggest startup launch stage and get the highest profile possible? Tell us about it.

For the first two days, 30 companies will present their product to a panel of judges — a group of experts that include partners from major VC firms and CEOs and other execs from major tech companies who take you through your paces. Then comes a shortlist and if you make it to that you pitch again.

But first you have to apply. Click here for the application and full list of rules.

More details about Disrupt Europe:Berlin 2013 will be announced in the coming weeks. ‘Early bird’ tickets are currently on sale at a significant discount. We are preparing a stellar line up of speakers and panels, the cream of Silicon Valley and Europe combined. Disrupt Europe: Berlin will also play host to some awesome parties and receptions. We hope you’ll join us.

But we need your help. Apply for Startup Battlefield and help us make the first Disrupt in Europe one they’ll talk about for years to come.

Applications are reviewed by TechCrunch writers and on a rolling basis — and the last two Disrupts had record numbers of applicants — so it’s to your advantage to submit as soon as you are ready. Due to strong demand, we are unable to review applications more than once, so please do not submit a draft application before you are ready for final consideration. Just submit the one good one.

PowerPoint slides and video demos are optional but highly encouraged. We reserve the right not to review applications without video demos based on application volume. We look forward to reviewing your application.

All submissions are confidential unless otherwise permitted by applicants on the application form.

And of course, our sponsors help make events happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team at [email protected].

Google X, the secretive lab behind projects like Google Glass and Google’s self-driving cars, announced its latest project today: balloon-powered Internet access for those areas of the earth where regular terrestrial Internet isn’t a good option. Earlier this week, Google started testing these balloons, which are meant to provide Internet access comparable to 3G networks while sailing the stratospheric winds, in New Zealand.

We had previously heard rumors about this, but just like most of Google X’s projects, this idea sounded like a long shot. Using free-flying balloons, after all, sounds like a recipe for disaster – or at least for run-away balloons.

Because the whole idea sounds a bit crazy, Google says, it’s calling this initiative “Project Loon.” Google, however, believes that it has found a way to let these balloons “sail freely on the winds” and steer them by moving them up or down to catch the right winds. This still means the team has to manage a fleet of these balloons – and the idea here is to one day have these fly these around the world. Google says it’s solving this problem “with some complex algorithms and lots of computing power.” Google uses wind data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to predict the balloons’ flight paths.

Currently, Google says it is using 30 balloons in this pilot project and about 50 testers in New Zealand are using the service on the ground. These testers have special antennas that can connect to the balloons when they are within a 20km radius.

Google, and its chairman Eric Schmidt in particular, have long been talking about the importance of getting those two-thirds of the earth’s population who don’t currently have Internet access online. Project Loon is meant to help solve this problem, Google notes. Not only could it bring Internet access to areas where today’s technologies don’t work well (jungles, archipelagos, mountains), but it seems Google also hopes that this balloon-powered network can help bring down the price of Internet access in many countries where it’s currently unaffordable for many people.

Editor’s note: Michael Wellman is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. 

At 1:07 p.m. on April 23, a hijacked AP Twitter account falsely reported an attack on the White House. Seconds later, major US stock indexes started to fall. They were down 1 percent by the time the tweet was publicly identified as bogus three minutes later. And in another three minutes, the markets had recovered to pre-tweet levels.

The quick plunge appears to have been triggered or exacerbated by computer algorithms that automatically trade based on monitoring and analyzing social media streams. Indeed, a growing number of firms and startups claim they can tease emotion, meaning and context out of social media chatter and identify financially relevant information. Augify, SNTMNT, and Lucky Sort (acquired just last month by Twitter) are a few examples. Although we don’t know how any particular product handled the fake AP tweet, the incident illustrates a potential pitfall of automated trading on news feeds in real time.

But perhaps more worrisome are other types of trading algorithms that work even faster. Those meriting the label “high-frequency trading,” for example, can act on data in milliseconds or less. That’s a great deal faster than humans can process even simple bits of information.

The actual focus of high-frequency trading algorithms is on rapid response to detailed events in the internal behavior of financial trading networks rather than on anything that is happening in the economy or world affairs. While some algorithms may be hanging out and listening to social media, a lot more spend their effort gleaning specific information about trade order activity and its transmission throughout the complex network of brokers and exchanges.

The catch is that the public ticker is always just a little bit out of date.

Typical retail investors may be surprised to learn what happens when they enter a trade to buy some stock at their favorite online brokerage. There are dozens of exchanges authorized to execute trades in U.S. equities. It is generally up to the broker to determine how to route a client’s order. Before an exchange can execute a trade against an order on its books, it must check whether a better offer is available at some other exchange, as reflected on the “public ticker.” This public price is compiled from information continually provided by the exchanges, and it is what the investor sees when looking up the current bid-ask prices for a security. Presumably, investors do not care where their orders go, as long as they get the best available prices.

The catch is that the public ticker is always just a little bit out of date. There’s an unavoidable lag, or latency. It takes time for the exchanges to communicate updated price information and continually merge and publish these revisions. The delay may be fairly short—measured in milliseconds. But any disparity in time opens the door for somebody with faster connections and computers to figure it out before it becomes public.

Trading on price disparities across markets is called arbitrage, and if the latency edge of a high-frequency trader is large enough, the trader can in some cases obtain a risk-free profit. Other high-frequency trading strategies exploit latency advantages using statistical predictions rather than strict arbitrage. Whether the gains are sure or not, such profit opportunities have naturally set off a latency arms race. Trading firms routinely invest in high-speed hardware, dedicated computer lines, proximity to exchange servers, and any other measure that could shave mere microseconds from their latency and gain advantage over other traders.

These practices can affect regular investors and market performance overall. This is a large and controversial topic, and the extent of the effects depends on what trading strategies are involved.

In a recent study, University of Michigan doctoral student Elaine Wah and I developed a simple model of latency arbitrage across two exchanges with a delayed public ticker. We found that the presence of high-frequency trading in this model takes profits away from regular investors and, moreover, reduces the overall profit of the system. This doesn’t even count all the direct costs of the latency arms race — all the resources dedicated to trimming microseconds. Our model can’t estimate the extent of the damage, but it does show that it degrades market performance.

Here’s why: High-frequency trading aggressively clears trades across exchanges, whereas the market sometimes performs better by letting orders accumulate for a while to better judge which ones should trade.

It might be in the nation’s best economic interest to eliminate this latency arms race. One way to do this would be to move to a system where all trades happen at discrete points in time — say once per second — rather than continuously. The interval is short enough so that markets can accurately track real-world events, but long enough so that shaving off tiny fractions of a second provides no significant advantage.

Our study showed that this market organization performs better by far than continuous trading. By placing a lower limit on time differences that matter for trading, we could create markets that can effectively keep up with even the fastest-moving world events, but no longer drive us to trade faster than reality itself.

[Image via Shutterstock]

Updated. As the PRISM scandal shows no signs of dying down in the public consciousness, Facebook has just released the fullest account to date of the requests it has received from United States law enforcement and governmental authorities for the data surrounding its users.

To borrow a phrase from local news sizzle reels, the numbers may surprise you.

In a report issued today on Facebook’s company blog, general counsel Ted Ullyot wrote:

“For the six months ending December 31, 2012, the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S. (including local, state, and federal, and including criminal and national security-related requests) – was between 9,000 and 10,000. These requests run the gamut – from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat. The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts.

With more than 1.1 billion monthly active users worldwide, this means that a tiny fraction of one percent of our user accounts were the subject of any kind of U.S. state, local, or federal U.S. government request (including criminal and national security-related requests) in the past six months. We hope this helps put into perspective the numbers involved, and lays to rest some of the hyperbolic and false assertions in some recent press accounts about the frequency and scope of the data requests that we receive.”

More information can be found here, and we’re updating the story as it develops.

UPDATE: Microsoft has followed suit, releasing its own figures on official U.S. data requests including FISA orders in its own blog post shortly following Facebook’s disclosures, writing:

“For the six months ended December 31, 2012, Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from U.S. governmental entities (including local, state and federal).”

But at first blush, those numbers may not seem as scary as the initial reports on governmental surveillance of web activity would imply. Though the government under FISA does have the right to request as much information as it would like in the name of national security, it seems that those requests have affected a relatively tiny fraction of Facebook users.

For a bit of background: Facebook this week joined several other technology giants including Microsoft and Google in publicly asking the government to change the restrictions prohibiting them from being fully transparent about the extent of their cooperation in the U.S. government’s surveillance activities.

Thus far, requests that Facebook has received from the National Security Agency (NSA) have been kept secret because they are by definition confidential orders executed under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — the secrecy is mandated in the name of keeping American citizens safe from equally secretive terrorist organizations. In short, anything under FISA is just like Fight Club — the first and most important rule is that it isn’t discussed.

Facebook has said recently that one reason it has refrained from issuing public statements about its involvement with governmental authorities (such as Google does with its Transparency Report) is because the existence of FISA would make such statements incomplete. In many ways, these companies’ hands have been tied if they want to keep complying with the law.

Now, many of us would love to see whistleblowers within these tech firms flout the law and talk about what exactly is going on, as Edward Snowden has — FISA be damned. Michael Arrington, who I personally think has been nailing exactly how the tech industry should be viewing this issue from day one on his Uncrunched blog, has issued a some compelling calls for industry folks to do just that — but up until now, we’ve only had tech companies asking for a bit more leeway and permission to talk.

While staying within the confines of the law, Facebook today has made a significant stride toward really opening up the way that the government handles its information gathering and disclosures — it will be interesting to see how other companies follow suit.

Elastic Path has raised an $8 million debt round to fuel the development of its “commerce everywhere,” API — a hypermedia platform that abstracts backend complexity for the front-end developer and business person.  Wellington Financial out of Toronto provided the financing.

Elastic Path has traditionally served as an e-commerce company. But over the past few years, it has focused on  building an API platform that extends the capability for businesses to take commerce beyond a website.

Vice President of Marketing Matt Dione said the company will use the funding to invest in its API platform.

In particular, Elastic Path will invest in its Cortex API, a touch point broker that is designed to embed e-commerce capabilities where the experience takes place. That might be a website, a mobile platform, or through a car. The API brokers the capabilities on the backend.

The company will also use the investment to integrate with content management companies such as OpenText, with which it announced a partnership this past week.

Elastic Path is betting its future on the concept of the API Economy — this idea that the world is connecting deeper through APIs, which is in turn creating a new form of commerce that is built on a deep distribution network.

In April, Google announced a couple of new features that were meant to speed up mobile browsing. Among them was “Quick view,” an experimental feature that added a badge to Wikipedia results on Google’s mobile search results pages that, when you clicked it, loaded the Wikipedia result in around 100 milliseconds. Now, however, it looks like these Quick view badges were indeed just experimental and have quietly disappeared from Google’s mobile search results pages.

We asked Google about this change, but the company did not provide us with an on-the-record statement. It’s common for Google to quietly run various experiments on its search results pages and then remove them later. Once the company officially announces a feature, however, it tends to keep it around for a while.

When Google launched Quick view, it said that it was working on bringing more sites on board and even offered a sign-up page for webmasters who were interested in making their sites available through this feature. The sign-up page is still available.

It’s surprising to see Google, which loves anything that can help speed up the web, remove this feature from mobile search. Maybe users didn’t actually use Quick view or didn’t fully understand it, but its odd to see it go. It was actually a very useful feature and worked exactly as advertised.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that this version of Quick view was different from the one Google also once featured for quickly opening up PDF files, Word documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Maybe anything called “quick view” doesn’t have a long life expectancy at Google.

In this week’s Ask A VC epsiode, we had Canaan Partners’ Maha Ibrahim in the studio to chat about her perspective on social gaming and more.

Ibrahim, who has worked at Canaan since 2000, invests in cloud, social gaming and digital media companies for the firm. We raised an interesting question to Ibrahim: Why aren’t there more female VCs in the industry? According to a recent report, of the 25 most active VC firms in 2011, only 8 percent of their investment professionals were women. Many of these firms don’t have female investment professionals at all.

Considering Ibrahim’s investment in Kabam and the struggles Zynga has faced, we also asked her whether there is still an opportunity in social gaming.

Check out her answers to these questions above!

Bloomberg, Lee and Jack Dorsey. vine.co/v/bl3dmAdeLTB—
Chris O'Brien (@obrien) June 14, 2013

Square CEO Jack Dorsey and the Mayors of New York City and San Francisco announced today that they will be collaborating on a digital technology summit, to be hosted on September 30th in the Big Apple. At a press conference at Square this afternoon, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee gave a few details about the upcoming summit, which will bring together industry stakeholders for a big-think meeting of how to solve social issues.

NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who is in town to give the Stanford commencement speech, stole the press event with a few jokes about Dorsey’s “plans” to run for his job. Talking about Dorsey’s hypothetical campaign, Bloomberg said he could have “140 character campaign speeches; six-second campaign videos, and your pledge that everyone can pay their taxes using Square.”

For good measure, in response to Mayor Lee prodding New York City about snow problems, Bloomberg joked, “Climate change has taken away the snow so we really haven’t had much.”

I asked Mayor Bloomberg about New York’s legal warfare against sharing economy apps, such as Uber and Airbnb, and he responded that, “regulation becomes a crutch… It’s the old entrenched industries, under the shield of regulation,” that prevent meaningful competition. No word on how exactly he’ll support them, other than wanting to “F***ing destroy” the taxi industry.

We’ll see if actions follow words. Or conferences.

Vine via @Obrien.

Ebay is generally credited with being the first company to bring auctions — a system that, for nearly 2,500 years, had exclusively taken place live in noisy, public (and offline) forums — into the Digital Era. But, today, in spite of the fact that eCommerce has become a thriving global industry, with online marketplaces collectively topping $1 trillion in sales last year, one market in particular has managed to resist the disruptive influence of technology and online commerce: The grand old world of fine art.

Not to be deterred, a handful of startups have emerged in recent years behind a shared goal of leveraging eBay’s online auction model to bring some automation and democratization to the staunchly brick-and-mortar industry. The efforts of three young companies in particular, the New York-based Paddle8, Berlin’s Auctionata and India’s Saffronart have begun to find some support, both from insiders and investors.

To wit: Last week, a number of well-known names in the fashion and art worlds put their through their support behind Paddle8, an online auction house founded in the summer of 2011 that aims to connect buyers and sellers of art through both monthly themed auctions and benefit auctions, which allow non-profits and foundations to hold events online.

Damien Hirst, the controversial, English pop artist, Alexander von Furstenberg, the son of prominent fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, along with members of the Mellon family were among those to contribute to the startup’s latest investment. The $6 million round follows on the heels of a $4 million Series A last year, both of which were led by Founder Collective and Mousse Partners.

Part of the interest in Paddle8 is its mission to become the online destination for beginners and wily veterans alike. It wants to walk the line between stuffy and accessible, allowing the public to access and buy legit, curated works and find insider opinions from the influential figures who participate as guest curators for its auctions.

There’s also the fact that, as Semil Shah wrote when he interviewed co-founder Aditya Julka earlier this year, it’s not easy to build a viable online marketplace in a complex and opaque industry like the one that has grown up around fine art over the decades. Artists, gallery owners and collectors are very particular about the process by which pieces of art move between each party involved in the transaction (understandably, given the amount of money that may be exchanging hands) and what kind of re-sale options are involved.

As Semil points out, a virtual auction house, if done right, can solve problems which have traditionally deterred some art holders from working with offline auction houses. For example, if an owner ends up selling art back to the gallery after buying it at an auction, they’re likely going to take a significant hit in doing so. Not to mention the fact that many auction houses (online and off) typically price out a big chunk of the market, limiting auctions to items over $100K.

Paddle8 aims to deal with these industry-specific issues by catering to the “lower, higher end” of the market, offering auctions on items up to $100K and setting durations at a fairly lengthy two weeks. In saying “lower, higher end,” we mean that it’s not quite the affordable, accessible-to-everyone end of the market startups like Zazzle and Art.com cater to; however, it still opens it up to a larger audience than those upstream, while maintaining an air of “legitimacy” for serious buyers and sellers.

For galleries and gallery owners, the startup offers a set of services which allow them to run their back-ends via its platform, including a dashboard for inventory and transactional management and the ability to ship, install and insure artworks without placing limits on time and geography, as we wrote last year.

The key to building a successful marketplace and business in a niche industry like this (and really any other, for that matter) is that you have to know, and respect, your audience. Even if they’re a little bit eccentric — or snobby. Paddle8 also gives galleries, art fairs and museums a POS transaction platform and, going forward, it wants to offer them private, virtual rooms to display artworks to potential buyers — rather than having to attach a .JPEG to an email, which is the way things usually work — along with the ability to auction works outside of their exhibition. The company also attempts to appeal to art sellers by taking a 6 percent commission from sellers, while charging buyers 12 percent.

The startup also keeps all records and prices involved in auctions private, meaning that it doesn’t disclose details of whether or not a piece of art sold, didn’t sell, or sold for less than the asking price. For artists or owners, this can be a fairly attractive policy in an industry that’s all about your reputation and show — taking a hit or failing to sell might have insiders turning up their nose at you the next time around.

Of course, Paddle8 isn’t the only one that sees opportunity in a digital marketplace for fine art. Founded last year, Auctionata shares a somewhat similar vision in that it wants to peel back some of the frumpy layers of the art world by making the international art market more accessible to the general public. In a slightly different approach than Paddle8, however, the Berlin-based startup is going directly after the big names in the old world of auctions, like Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

It’s doing this by attempting to re-define the familiar, live format by hosting auctions every Friday from its own TV studio. Basically, it’s going for the 100-percent-online, streaming media version of Sotheby’s. Auctionata also offers evaluation, appraisal, authentication and marketing services — along with some of the logistical tools in Paddle8′s arsenal. However, unlike Paddle8, where the average artwork sells for about $10K, Auctionata is going after the high-end. In April, it auctioned off a painting that a had a starting price of $1.5 million, for example.

Having grown to 110 employees over the last 12 months and looking to expand further to go full bore after this market, Auctionata recently raised some of its own outside capital. In April, the startup landed $20 million from Earlybird Venture Capital, Bright Capital and Kite Ventures, among others, bringing its total investment to $23 million.

With its new capital, Auctionata wants to continue hiring and build a bigger, 5,000-foot studio in New York, and expects to hit $20 million in revenue this year, according to Crain’s.

Meanwhile, with Paddle8 busy attacking the fine art market in the U.S. and Auctionata moving across Europe, a company called Saffronart has been busy applying the eBay-for-fine-art model to its home market in India. In fact, the company, which has been around in various incarnations for over a decade and has raised over $12 million from Sequoia and others, now claims to be the “largest fine-art auction house in India, online or otherwise, and one of the largest online fine art auction platforms in the world.”

For most of that time, Saffronart was almost exclusively focused on the Indian market (and Indian art) and while it’s sticking with what’s working, it, too, has been looking to expand its scope and started selling Western art for the first time last year.

Whether or not this world seems too niche to get overly excited about, these startups are finding an eager audience, especially toward the lower-end of the market. The musty air of the fine art market is in sore need of some fresh tools that can make its goods and services more accessible, and whether or not we find it all a little high-falutin’, for these three companies (among others), the approach seems to be (quietly) paying off.

The upcoming death of Google Reader  and the addition of hashtags signal Facebook will likely launch a new way to discover and read news at the June 20th press event it’s just sent out mysterious invites to. It could be a sort of “trending articles on Facebook” feature, or a more full-blown RSS reader-style product.

Either could take advantage of Facebook’s massive treasure trove of aggregate data on what people share to surface popular and personally recommended news articles.

The event invite, first spotted by Joanna Stern of ABC News, says “A small team has been working on a big idea. Join us for coffee and learn about a new product.” The conspicuously analog invite was sent out via paper snail mail instead of by email like Facebook usually does. There’s also a coffee stain on the invite. You know where else you find coffee stains? On the newspaper, while you’re reading it, over coffee.

Nobody knows what Facebook knows. Since most users share semi-privately, it can’t be scraped for trending topics. But Facebook’s algorithms see all. Similar to how it offers ad targeting data in anonymous aggregate, Facebook could surface what articles are being shared most frequently across its user base without violating privacy.

The product could potentially ket people follow outside sources of news through a format like RSS, but we can’t confirm that. The product is likely to take advantage of hashtags that Facebook users can now add to posts to help its algorithms understand what topics different news articles are about.

When I asked Facebook about what more it could do with its data on what people share, it initially offered to put me on the phone with someone, but ended up just referring me to the hashtag announcement from earlier this week. That blog post notes ”Hashtags are just the first step to help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations. We’ll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months.”

A better way to surface news could be that next step. In fact, I’m pretty much positive it is, though I couldn’t get anyone at Facebook to confirm on the record.

Whether the new product includes formal RSS reading capabilities that take advantage of the long-running content syndication standard remains to be seen. Asking users to choose different sources and subscribe to feeds of them could be a lot of work and seem somewhat redundant for the average Facebook user. Still, that kind of functionality could find an audience amongst hardcore Internet users.

As our Ingrid Lunden wrote yesterday, “Lines of code referring to “rssfeeds” have recently started to appear in Facebook’s Graph API code (as spotted by developer and Facebook sleuth Tom Waddington). Linking the RSS feed to a user’s Facebook ID, the code schema also covers such aspects as title, URL and update time. Each RSS feed subsequently has entries and subscribers.” This code could be part of the new product, but it also may be unrelated, having to do with a user’s own posts being an RSS feed, rather than a user reading feeds produced by others.

A Facebook news reader with RSS would come at a perfect time, just two weeks before Google shuts down Google Reader for good. The June 20th launch date might give Facebook just enough time to help people migrate onto its version.

Alternatively, Facebook’s new product could more resemble Reddit or a list trending articles based on what’s being shared the most on the social network. That would make it instantly and easily valuable to people.

Whatever it’s exact design, I hope it won’t just be a clone, but something that combines the unique social signals Facebook has access to with tried-and-true news consumption mediums.

A reader of any form would certainly qualify as a “big idea”, as Facebook is all about connecting you to people, things, and information you care about, and news is by definition what people care about. A successful launch could drastically increase time spent on Facebook, fill it with useful data about what topics people are interested in, offer new advertising opportunities around current events, and most importantly, make us all better informed citizens of Earth.

You know what’s worse than waiting all day for an app (an app!) to get back to you? The fact that an article called “Father’s Day: What’s your ROI?” exists.

Finally, someone likens parenting to marketing. Tech newsmedia brethren, have you given up?

I know, I know, some of our guest posts are also atrocious, and our world does have bigger fish to fry, but weren’t Fridays supposed to be the days that you did journalism, VentureBeat?

Did “Journalism Fridays” not work out? Were you all like “Fuck it, SEO”?

I mean, check this out. All mistakes actually exist in the original post.

To all the fathers out there who think they could be doing better, you are not alone. Recently released data from the federal’s government’s finds that 46 percent of you feel the same way …

And …

Fathers only wait for someone to bring them their slippers and a martini in the movies. In the real world, you have to engage. You have to reach out with the same fearlessness and determination as you would with a new business prospect. Or, to take a page from the Sheryl Sandberg playbook, you must “lean in.”

And …

You didn’t give up when your company didn’t get funding. You didn’t give up when your code crashed your machine. By the same token, don’t give up when your attempts to use technology to model some good old-fashioned positive male behavior fails.

Brave new world with such pieces of content in it.

Will they blend? Why yes, they will. They’ll also perform many of the same duties as full-size blenders, but for less money, with less mess, and while requiring less storage.