Category: Tech news

Baltimore-based Apkudo is debuting its “Apkudo Approved” program this week, extending its existing work with making sure that Android apps and devices perform well for consumers. The company has positioned itself in a growth market, to act as a layer both between developers and devices, and between devices and carriers, to help both parties deal with the fractured and often maze-like landscape of the Android hardware market.

It’s normal for tier 1 carriers to run a gamut of tests on prospective devices before they bring them to market. Most recently, this was made quite public by BlackBerry, which has discussed the carrier testing process around its new BlackBerry 10 devices, but it happens for anything that hits a network. What Apkudo does is offer similar services for tier 2 and lower carriers, who might not necessarily have the engineering workforces or resources to devote to extensive testing.

Tests run by Apkudo include monitoring all types of performance while running around 25,000 apps from developer partners, using techniques like taking photos of screens with high framerate cameras to detect dropped frames, Apkudo CEO Josh Matthews explained in an interview. So far, they’ve tested and can provide results for over 1,700 devices, and while they’re not allowed to reveal the names of any specific OEMs they work with, Matthews says that if you can think of a modern smartphone, they’ve probably had it in their labs.

“There’s so much opportunity for the carriers given that an Android device can target budget and spec points on the full range of the spectrum, which is phenomenal,” Matthews explained. “The flip-side of that is that the variation in quality between devices in terms of performance under different app loads and in different circumstances is also phenomenal, and that can lead to very high return rates and customer dissatisfaction.”

Apkudo’s work can help carriers take some of the mystery out of the process by providing them with data on hardware before it gets released on their network. That has led to a variety of smaller carriers now insisting that devices are first “Apkudo Approved” before they’ll even consider them for sale. Which, obviously, is hugely beneficial to Apkudo. But the company also works closely with OEMs, and can provide them with crucial testing data that helps them upgrade their own devices, too.

Matthews says that his company is better-equipped to handle this task than most, simply because it’s their sole focus. And it does make sense that if the only thing you’re doing day in and day out is testing devices and software, you’d be in a better position than either a carrier or manufacturer to assess their strengths and weaknesses. Being a third party, with less personal stake in the products themselves, also helps.

So far, Apkudo is making around $5 million a year in revenue, but it has just signed on a number of strong customers, including Cricket, Cincinnati Bell and the Associated Carrier Group, which includes C Spire, Alltel and a number of other smaller regional carriers. Its developer product is free, since it uses that to help build the library it uses to help with its lucrative carrier partnerships, so if you’re an Android dev trying to test across a range of devices, it might work better than trying to amass your own collection of Android hardware.

Last week, a study by German antivirus testing company AV-Test claimed that Microsoft’s Bing delivered “five times as many websites containing malware as Google.” Unsurprisingly, Microsoft does not agree with these findings and today, the company released a full rebuttal of AV-Test’s study. The researchers, Bing argues, used its API to execute queries instead of performing its searches directly on Bing.com. However, this methodology, Microsoft claims, bypassed Bing’s malware warning system.

Microsoft’s senior program manager for Bing David Felstead notes in his response that Bing “actually does prevent customers from clicking on malware infected sites by disabling the link on the results page and showing the below message to stop people from going to the site.” Microsoft does not explicitly remove potentially malicious sites from its index, he writes, “because most are legitimate sites that normally don’t host malware but have been hacked.” Instead, it pops up a warning when users click on these links.

The reason for this, Felstead says, is that when users search for a site – even if it’s a known malware vector – they do expect the site to appear in Bing’s index and would think Bing’s directory is incomplete if it didn’t show up on the search results page.

Overall, Bing says it shows results with malware warnings for about 0.04 percent of searches. Felstead also claims that Bing’s warning system blocks “94% of clicks to malicious sites.”

Despite the fact that the competition between Google and Bing has been somewhat heated lately, Felstead does note that detecting malware on websites is a very complex problem and that “no engine will be perfect 100% of the time.” But he also argues that Microsoft does show these malware warnings on its site instead of removing the links from its index in order to protect users who may otherwise go to Google and “then click on it (because Google may not have detected it as malware) their machine could be put at risk.”

Here are the original results from AV-Test:

Everyone has their moments of insanity. The Internet has made that painfully obvious, as our moments of abstracted, often context-less, craziness are haphazardly posted and then, in some cases, amplified for all to see. Because of this dynamic, we’re also given endless opportunities to deconstruct the way in which someone else has come unhinged. To wit: The first thing we do in a national emergency and scandal? See if the suspect had a Twitter, Facebook or Myspace account — and then play comments-section psychologist. Or worse.

“We think of ourselves as sane and other people as crazy but really we are all a little crazy,” says BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, who will be giving the keynote speech at TechCrunch Disrupt. The talk will be about this exact topic, titled: “Everyone Is Literally Crazy,” like the headline of this post. After the last two weeks, I can confirm that someone somewhere needs to shed some light on why everyone seems more wacko online. I’m looking at you, Amanda Bynes.

***Buy tickets to Jonah’s talk here.***

“We think of ourselves as having consistent interests but really we are capricious and what we like depends on context more than our own convictions,” Jonah explains. “This all becomes clear on the web because we can measure human behavior so carefully.”

The examples of the Internet exposing and archiving humanity’s darker psychological side keep pouring in: Just yesterday, Gawker posted this email from a sorority girl at the University of Maryland. The article, which garnered over 1.6 million pageviews, featured a Delta Gamma board member lambasting her sorority sisters for “LITERALLY being so fucking AWKWARD.” Another great thing about the Internet is how often people misuse the word “literally.”

“If you just opened this like I told you to, tie yourself down to whatever chair you’re sitting in, because this email is going to be a rough fucking ride.

For those of you that have your heads stuck under rocks, which apparently is the majority of this chapter, we have been FUCKING UP in terms of night time events and general social interactions with Sigma Nu. I’ve been getting texts on texts about people LITERALLY being so fucking AWKWARD and so fucking BORING. If you’re reading this right now and saying to yourself “But oh em gee Rebecca, I’ve been having so much fun with my sisters this week!”, then punch yourself in the face right now so that I don’t have to fucking find you on campus to do it myself.?I do not give a flying fuck, and Sigma Nu does not give a flying fuck, about how much you fucking love to talk to your sisters. You have 361 days out of the fucking year to talk to sisters, and this week is NOT, I fucking repeat NOT ONE OF THEM. This week is about fostering relationships in the greek community, and that’s not fucking possible if you’re going to stand around and talk to each other and not our matchup. Newsflash you stupid cocks: FRATS DON’T LIKE BORING SORORITIES. Oh wait, DOUBLE FUCKING NEWSFLASH: SIGMA NU IS NOT GOING TO WANT TO HANG OUT WITH US IF WE FUCKING SUCK, which by the way in case you’re an idiot and need it spelled out for you, WE FUCKING SUCK SO FAR. This also applies to you little shits that have talked openly about post gaming at a different frat IN FRONT OF SIGMA NU BROTHERS. Are you people fucking retarded? That’s not a rhetorical question, I LITERALLY want you to email me back telling me if you’re mentally slow so I can make sure you don’t go to anymore night time events …”

(You can read the whole thing here. Nah, just kidding, that’s a link to the Disrupt Eventbrite page. Try here.)

My theory is that this email resonated with people not because it was super extreme, but because it reminded many of the more risky and out there stuff we’ve all done online when we think no one’s looking or even when, or because, people are. “Is it weird that I think this is a normal email?” joked TechCrunch writer Anthony Ha. Behind every joke is a little bit of truth.

Phone call in the middle of earnings calls: 'Hi Ryan, I just sent you an email about a half hour ago.' MURDER MURDER MURDER KILL KILL KILL—
Ryan Lawler (@ryanlawler) April 18, 2013

Because social communication platforms are so new, people have no clue what’s appropriate. Even, and maybe especially, the people we’ve hired specifically for that purpose. We’re just letting it all sloppily hang out in sort of a human communication avalanche.

Tomorrow is 4/20. I hope they catch suspect 2 today so by tomorrow he can be stoned! #boston #420—
Shawn Hikichi (@ShawnHikichi) April 19, 2013

“We have content to feed our obsessive compulsive selves, our narcissistic selves, and our ADD selves,” Jonah says. “We have content we like to search for on Google where nobody is looking but different content we like to share on Facebook where everyone we know is looking. We are strange creatures and our behavior on the web is a window into our contradictory souls.”

So come watch him speak about this at Disrupt New York next week. Plenty of other crazy people will be there, as well. Not the sorority girl, though. I wish.

Doug Renert told me yesterday that his firm Tandem, which backs early-stage mobile startups, is about to expand in a big way. The first step is bringing in more people, starting with two new partners that Tandem is announcing today — Rohit Bhagat, formerly chairman of Asia Pacific for investment firm BlackRock, and John Ellis, co-founder and executive vice president of product and technology at ad tech company Turn.

Tandem is currently investing in three startups a quarter, but Renert said he’s hoping to do much more. At the same time, he doesn’t want to change the firm’s hands-on approach. He describes it as an accelerator with “muscle capital.” Like other startup incubators, it mentors batches of startups and offers them office space. However, it makes a bigger investment than most — $200,000 to start, and follow-on investments if the company is successful.

Bhagat has experience scaling companies globally, Renert said, so he not only helps Tandem’s startups grow, but also does the same for the accelerator itself. Meanwhile, Ellis’ technical background means that he can help companies with product and infrastructure. Together, they effectively double the Tandem team, which until now consisted of Renert and Sunil Bhargava.

I asked Bhagat over email why he’s jumping from a giant firm to a (relatively) tiny one, and he responded:

I moved to Tandem because it is ideally positioned at the confluence of the rising tides of mobile, social media and cloud computing. Relative to large firms, I felt confident that Tandem’s model of “hands on” seed stage investing would spur more disruptive innovation, create stronger investment returns, and allow me to work more directly with smart people working on truly ground-breaking ideas.

There will be more expansion news in the near future, Renert said. And yes, that will probably include more funding (Tandem announced a $32 million fund last year), although he said it’s too early to talk about specifics.

As for the companies that he wants to invest in, Renert said Tandem’s strategy is to target startups before they would normally raise money — when they’ve built a product but don’t yet have traction. He said many of the current opportunities lie in emerging markets — not just copying successful American products, but figuring out what makes them work and how to transfer that to other geographies.

Renert actually wrote a guest post for us in February outlining the areas in mobile that he thinks have become too crowded (location-based social networking, photosharing, workplace collaboration), are still too nascent for successful companies (in-car apps and services, mobile wallets, integrated TV apps), and are just right for launching now (everyday apps, mobile developer platforms, rich messaging/SMS marketing).

“At the same time, we want to make sure that we’re not just trying to build companies around our ideas,” Renert said. “We’re very open to entrepreneurs’ ideas. We want to back their ideas.”

Tandem is also announcing the three latest startups that it’s backing:

Tile — Tandem’s first hardware company, which helps users find and track lost items

Swoopt — mobile fantasy sports tournaments

HomeTapper — real estate browsing for tablets

The deadline to apply for Tandem’s next class is May 1.

It's still early w unconfirmed scanner reports but if Redit was right with the Sunil Tripathi theory, it's changed the game 4ever

—
Luke Russert (@LukeRussert) April 19, 2013

.@LukeRussert No it hasn't.

—
Jon Lovett (@jonlovett) April 19, 2013

Reporters have a nasty addiction to a particularly potent drug: the attention that comes from getting a scoop. Last night, during the live manhunt of the Boston marathon bombing suspects, we saw a lot of respected writers completely tweaking out on it. For lack of evidence, speculation began to swirl from the least reliable of sources: Internet conspiracy theorists. In the morning, when it became completely obvious that amateur sleuths on Reddit had falsely identified a missing Brown University student as the marathon terrorist, many pointed fingers at Reddit as “vigilantes.”

Crowdsourcing detective work isn’t to blame; it’s the reporters and media outlets that gave unreliable sources a voice. The poor high school track student whose face was splashed on the front page of the New York Post is reportedly now holed up in his home, afraid to go outside. “It’s the worst feeling that I can possibly feel. . . . I’m only 17,” he told ABC.

The name of another “suspect,” a missing Brown University student, was haphazardly tossed around by the likes of NBC news reporter Luke Russert on Twitter. Even though Russert was explicitly skeptical, that doesn’t stop moderately informed citizens from misinterpreting the whole ordeal:

Who is Sunil Tripathi? What the eff is going on?

—
VIP (@VIPMag_HerbertH) April 19, 2013

The unexpected infamy has caused the family of the missing student untold grief. “A tremendous and painful amount of attention has been cast on our Beloved Sunil Tripathi in the past twelve hours,” wrote a family member on a Facebook page dedicated to searching for the missing boy.

Indeed, one of the top posts on Reddit yesterday was “Media Outlets, please stop making the images of potential suspects go viral, then blaming this small subreddit for it. And read the rules we’ve imposed before calling us ‘vigilantes’.” Continuing:

“Until the media got involved, none of the images were going anywhere but to the FBI.
Every single article on this subreddit so far reads like the writer took a glance at the front page then wrote an article about it, we explicitly have a list of rules to stop “witch hunts” …

Edit: News outlets have spread images on TV & in papers of two male ‘suspects’ that they say the FBI is looking for, these have now gone viral. That media, is what a witch hunt is.”

The FBI and Boston authorities made a nationwide plea to send tips, pictures and smartphone video into their hot line. It turned out to be a lucrative call: a bystander had discovered a high-resolution shot of the suspect that was serendipitously taken after the explosion, giving the authorities a (literally) much clearer picture than grainy security camera footage.

Online conservations can help bystanders become aware of latent content hidden in their phones. As the subreddit community hosting the conversation stated: “The harsh reality is that discussion requires looking at all possibilities. But to equate discussion with an unambiguous implication of guilt is presumptive and hyperbolic.” Adding, “We do not strive, nor pretend, to release journalist-quality content for the sake of informing the public.”

In other words, for the love of everything that is holy, these names are not for news stories, or even for social media updates, as viewers do not rightly distinguish between a story published on an official website or one tweeted out by a reporter’s account.

Overzealous redditors are conspiracy theorists — nothing more. One Reddit community had the good sense to apologize to Tripathi’s family. But, there will always be this kind of drivel on the web; it’s the cost of a free Internet.

However, we hold reporters to a higher standard, and they should start acting like they deserve it.

[Feature Image Credit: Flickr user Numinosity]

Hackathons are to developers what state championship games are to high school quarterbacks. The pressure is on, time is running out, and in the case of the Disrupt NY Hackathon, there’s never been a better audience of peers, judges, and media to impress.

That’s why we’re incredibly lucky to have some of the best platforms in the industry coming to New York to run workshops on how you can stand on the shoulders of their giant APIs and build something truly awesome.

More Hackathon spots are now available. Register here.

If you participate in the Hackathon (that is – you make a hack and present it on stage), you’re granted a general admission ticket to Disrupt. Yep, the same one that costs $2,995 and gives you access to all three days of Disrupt and the after parties.

We have a full roster of API sponsors and partners putting up a large number of prizes for the Disrupt NY Hackathon. They include: Microsoft BizSpark, Wrigley Energy Gum, Box, CrunchBase, Exadel Appery.io, GM, Microsoft SkyDrive, NewAer, Pearson, Samsung, Visa, Yammer and Volusion.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here [email protected].

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Amazon Web Services

Amazon developers will be on hand to demonstrate how to leverage and simplify using AWS. More info can be found here.

Box

Go beyond storing files with the Box API. Our API provides access to all of the file management, collaboration, and sharing features used and loved by over 92% of the Fortune 500.

Our workshop will introduce developers to the Box API and show them how to take advantage of several of our most popular endpoints, including social features such as commenting, collaborating, and liking as well as enterprise-level features like user event logging and user management. Attendees will get to see a live Box API application built from scratch. Beta access to several exciting, new APIs will also be provided to attendees of the workshop.

Evernote

Want to develop an app with the power to never forget? Join Karolyn from Evernote to get first hand advice, hints and tips on how to use the Evernote Cloud API. With the Cloud API, your application can create, search, read, update and delete notes, which of course are then synchronized across all devices the user has connected to Evernote. When you access the Local API, your application is interacting with a local Evernote client such as Evernote for Mac or Evernote for Android – awesome for pulling in someone’s digital brain and mashing it up with other services to create a personally relevant, rich and insightful app with ease.

Facebook

Facebook’s new mobile SDKs make it easier than ever for app developers to implement social features directly into their apps. To learn and get your tough questions answered, join Bear as he and Fred, Abhinav, and Sarah get hands-on and help you leverage the world’s most popular mobile app.

Foursquare

Join New York’s favorite startup, Foursquare, as they share insights on how to leverage their powerful API and deep data set to make your hack location aware. David from Foursquare will be joined by Akshay, Anna and Marcie to show you how to integrate with Foursquare’s API to access to all of the data used by the Foursquare mobile applications, and, in some cases, even more. Your users can check in, view their history, see where their friends are, create tips and lists, search for and learn more about venues, and access specials and recommendations.

The New York Times

Imagine having all the news that’s fit to print available at your fingertips! That’s what the recently released The New York Times’ APIs gives developers, providing easy access to the Time’s archives of high quality information. Join James from the New York Times Company and learn how easy it is to access, search and distribute Times content. Including articles back to 1981, over a dozen APIs provide rich access to content including Best Sellers, Movie Reviews, Real Estate and the Semantic API for Times tags and topics.

Love Home Swap, a U.K.-based startup that appeals to homeowners that want to trade their places, is getting into proper rentals.

The company, which launched about a year and a half ago, was operating on a member subscription model. People would pay to get access to a network of homeowners that were open to swapping residences across 150 different countries, plus a travel team, personal concierge and travel guides.

Now the company, which just raised $1.3 million from MMC Ventures, is offering rentals along with swaps. Swaps are, of course, free to members. With rentals, Love Home Swap will take a 12 percent service fee. If you’re a gold member, it’s 11 percent and for Platinum members, it’s 10 percent. On the hosting side, the company will take a 3 percent service fee, which drops to 2 percent for Gold members and 1 percent from Platinum members. Love Home Swap also pairs each transaction with an insurance policy from Hiscox to protect members against damages or theft.

Rentals are a natural move for the company, as nearly two-thirds of members said they would be interested in rentals. It adds a different revenue model to the subscription business. Normally, Love Home Swap charges anywhere from roughly $15 a month to $42 per month to belong to its club, depending on the tier of service you want. At the top level, they get a concierge service that helps with restaurant and flight bookings.

That business has helped Love Home Swap grow revenues by 37 percent and triple traffic since funding was closed in December of last year. The company just acquired 1stHomeExchange, to add 23,000 listings.

Love Home Swap doesn’t really consider itself a direct competitor to San Francisco’s Airbnb. It positions itself as a service that caters to higher-end customers that are a bit older, own property and have the ability to go on holiday more often. The company points to listings like a six-bedroom house in Koh Samui, Thailand or a five-bedroom chateau in Brittany.

The average age of their customer is 46 and they’re predominantly female. It’s split 50 percent between families while 21 percent are couples with no kids and 18 percent are empty nesters. The rest are independent travellers. About a third of the properties on the site are vacation homes, not primary residences.

Another competitor in an even higher tier of the market is Inspirato, which charges around $9,500 to join, plus $2,500 per year. They rent luxury properties that they let out for a few hundred dollars per day to a few thousands to members. OneFineStay is another higher-end competitor too.

The 12-person startup has raised $2.4 million to date.

Launched last June, Beachfront Media‘s Beachfront Builder platform was designed to allow video producers to quickly roll out apps across a number of devices. Those apps would have custom skins and could even serve ads, with videos streamed out either via the YouTube API or by connecting to creator’s own content management system. In the time since then, it’s gotten a few content producers on board, most notably YouTube network Big Frame.

The Beachfront platform basically enables creators to engage directly with their audiences through their own branded apps, without having their videos hidden within the broader YouTube experiences. And it helps them do so across a wide range of devices all at once. Rather than having to individually develop apps for iPhone, iPad, as well as a whole bunch of Android phones and tablets and phablets, and a bunch of connected TV devices as well.

Using Beachfront Builder not only speeds their time to market, but it also gives them the ability to test out different ways of displaying and distributing their videos. In addition to building apps for individual channels, they can highlight certain topics or characters, allowing them to see which videos and categories viewers engage with most. And, if popular, they can easily break those out into their own apps as well.

Those apps can be customized with branded skins and can also be monetized. Beachfront customers can add video ads, banners, and the ability to buy merch — all going beyond their traditional YouTube ad monetization.

That’s attracted interest from some big YouTube networks, most notably Big Frame, which is using Beachfront Builder to build video apps for a couple of its channels. By teaming with Beachfront, they’ve rolled out multiplatform experiences for urban lifestyle channel Forefront.tv, as well as its brainy female channel Wonderly. For both, they’re providing the ability to display channel videos on the web, mobile and tablet devices, and connected TV platforms. It’s also being used for multiplatform distribution of Maker Studios’ Epic Rap Battles of History, as well as getting Plum.tv onto like, connected TVs.

Beachfront Media is kind of the successor to video search and discovery platform MeFeedia. Launched in 2007, that company is now working to help video providers get onto more devices. Because everyone loves devices. And video.

Penguin has offered, and has confirmed to us that the European Commission has accepted, a settlement with the EC over the agency pricing model for e-books — a case the stretched back to last year and involved Penguin, along with Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, as well as Apple. The other four publishers and Apple settled with the EC in September 2012. The deal will mean that Penguin can proceed with its merger with Bertlesmann’s Random House, first announced in October 2012, and approved by Brussels earlier this month, so that the two publishers can better battle Amazon.

But in making the settlement, Penguin maintained “it has done nothing wrong,” and that that its position “remains unchanged…the company continues to believe that the agency pricing model operates in the best interests of consumers and authors.”

The full statement from Penguin:

“Penguin confirms that, subject to the market test currently underway, it has reached an agreement with the European Commission to settle its investigation into the establishment of agency pricing agreements for eBooks. Penguin’s position that it has done nothing wrong remains unchanged and the company continues to believe that the agency pricing model operates in the best interests of consumers and authors. While we disagree with some elements of the Commission’s analysis, we are settling as a procedural matter to clear the decks in anticipation of our proposed merger with Random House.”

This also means that the EC’s investigation into agency model pricing will now also close. The full run-down of that case, as it has been played out with the commissioners, is here.

In essence, the publishers and Apple were being investigated over agency agreements signed between them that the EC believed prevented others (namely Amazon, but also Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers) from inking wholesale agreements with the publishers. The publishers would have looked for deals with Apple that it considered more favorable to the publishers, in light of the fact that Amazon regularly prices books at wafer-thin margins — and often at a loss — in order to drive more business overall.

The agency model lets the publishers set the price for books and offer resellers a fixed cut of that price (30% is a typical cut). The wholesale model sees publishers selling their books to distributors, who then sell them at whatever price they want. The latter is the route Amazon has used to great effect to grow its business, sacrificing margin on cheaper books for scale.

Penguin’s concessions in the settlement reached today are essentially the same as those reached by the other four publishers. According to the EC document outlining the case, they are as follows:

1. To the extent that they have not yet been terminated, Penguin will terminate the relevant agency agreements for the sale of e-books in the EEA concluded with Apple.
2. Penguin will offer each retailer other than Apple the opportunity to terminate any agency agreements concluded for the sale of e-books that: (i) restrict, limit or impede the retailer’s ability to set, alter or reduce the retail price or to offer price discounts or promotions; or (ii) contain a price MFN clause as defined in Penguin’s commitments. In case a retailer decides not to make use of the oppor­tunity to terminate such an agreement, Penguin will terminate it in line with the conditions laid down therein.
3. For a period of two years from notification of the decision to Penguin, Penguin will not restrict, limit or impede the ability of e-book retailers to set, alter or reduce retail prices for e-books and/or to offer price discounts or promotions. However, as regards agency agreements, the aggregate value of the price discounts or promotions offered by any retailer shall not exceed the aggregate amount equal to the total commissions Penguin pays to that retailer over a period of at least one year in connection with the sale of its e-books to consumers.
4. For a period of five years from notification of the decision to Penguin, Penguin will not enter into any agreement relating to the sale of e-books within the EEA that contains a price MFN clause as defined in Penguin’s commitments.

The newly formed Penguin Random House will be 53% owned by Bertlesmann and 47% owned by Pearson, Penguin’s parent.

Reddit’s involvement – whether good or bad – in the hunt for leads in the Boston bombings case does not appear to be the reason for ongoing site outages. For those who can access the service today, a banner is informing visitors that “site availability continues to be impacted by a malicious DDoS attack.”

The company announced that it was experiencing a DDoS early this morning, later confirming that the attack was indeed malicious – meaning, not a result of an influx of organic traffic to the site from those who had come to peruse the many high-profile threads discussing the suspects in the Boston bombings case.

As morning drifts into the afternoon, the Reddit DDoS now continues, though the company reports that it has mitigated part of the DDoS at this time. However, certain site functions will be disabled until Reddit has fully recovered, the official Reddit Status account informs users.

Naturally, there are now several Reddit posts regarding the DDoS with more information. Reddit admin/moderator “alienth” (aka Reddit Systems Admin Jason Harvey) posts that the site has not seen attacks at this scale before, and that the traffic levels are much higher than what the heavily visited Boston thread generated. “Orders of magnitude more. Also very obviously fake URLs were being slammed,” he noted in a post, sharing this image (see below) of the DDoS on Reddit’s backend systems.

The graph represents the requests that made it to Reddit’s secondary load balancing server. “What we’re facing is orders of magnitude larger than what natural traffic looks like,” he explains in his post.

Harvey  also says that the site is being aided by Akamai, its CDN, in helping to mitigate the attack.

For those of you who don’t understand hacking and DDoS attacks, one Redditor in the thread posted a link to this. We think it helps explain:

More to come.

Facebook has given its main “f” logo icon a makeover, flattening the design by removing the pale blue bar along the bottom, which gave the icon a reflective sheen/slight 3D effect, as well as moving the position of the f so it now bleeds right off the bottom. The overall effect is a simplified, unfussy and clean looking design with the f more clearly leaping out. Facebook posted the new logo as a downloadable resource for journalists today.

The refresh was flagged to TechCrunch by designer Tom Waddington who notes in a blog about the change that it appears to be part of a wider icon spring clean at Facebook, with a whole host of other icons used on various official Facebook pages also getting made over in the same flattened and more visually striking style. These icons including a developers icon, privacy- and security-related icons and a mobile icon, among others. Updates seem to have occurred last week.

Here are some of the other icon redesigns — see Tom’s blog for all the examples he’s noticed:

Flat design has spread its levelling influence all over the tech industry and its interfaces in recent years — from Microsoft’s flat, tile-based Windows Phone UI, to Google’s penchant for streamrollering its product interfaces, to scores of other apps and websites. Standing out — or rather above — all this levelling is of course Apple, which continues to prefer a skeuomorphic style of icon and interface design that tries to recreate the look of real-world objects or shapes, by incorporating shading and/or texture.

Cupertino has been roundly mocked for sticking out while the rest of the digital world is shedding pixels and going flat (there’s a great dissection of both sides of the flat vs skeuo debate here) but from a usability point of view, flat design can create confusion about which portions of the website or interface are designed to be clicked on, for instance. However when it comes to something as visible as Facebook’s f logo there seems no reason to hold onto the pale blue bar. As a marketing message, the new icon is much louder and prouder, even though it’s flatter.

According to Facebook’s logos & trademarks guidelines page, the “f” logo can be used for:

1. Your Facebook Page
2. Your Facebook Group
3. An application you offer via Facebook Platform
4. Your implementation of Facebook Connect

It’s also clearly one of Facebook’s most visible bits of brand furniture — appearing on its favicon, for instance, and its mobile app icons. The new look logo is already  up and running on Facebook’s own Facebook page. While an inverted version of the logo (white square, blue f) appears on the Facebook search bar (if you have Graph search enabled). In his blog Waddington notes that the new f logo download is fully transparent, ie with the f fully cut out — which may explain the inverted search bar version.

The original f icon was designed by New York-based design house Cuban Council back in 2006 which told TechCrunch it has not worked with the logo or with Facebook since. ”Cuban Council produced the primary word mark for Sean and Mark in 2006,” Mike Buzzard wrote us in an email, “and have not worked with the logo or the company since.” His speculation is that the new icon system could be the the result of Facebook’s 2011 Sofa acquisition. Mike and some others from Cuban Council joined Google last year in an acqui-hire to work on Google+.

Facebook declined to comment when we asked about the icon redesign.

In addition to the general industry push towards flatter design, TechCrunch’s in-house Facebook stalker, Josh Constine, suggests the decluttered design could be a sign of internationalisation — i.e. to better communicate the Facebook brand to non-English language users who may have been confused by the horizontal line apparently connecting and extending the f symbol. He notes that the original design was conceived when Facebook was a domestic company targeting just U.S. users.

The newsreader business has undergone major shifts in recent months. Flipboard has emerged as the consumer’s preferred mobile magazine, Pulse was acquired by LinkedIn for $90 million, Google Reader is shutting down, and now another early entrant, Flud, has refocused on the enterprise market. The company began quietly testing the waters about six months ago after feedback from customers hinted at demand for a white-labeled option that could be used to read private, corporate content.

Today, Flud has signed up over 1,000 businesses on its new enterprise-friendly newsreading platform, which now integrates with other internal resources like Microsoft SharePoint and Yammer. The company’s website discloses some of the relationships Flud has built – Google, Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, Adobe, Intel, Nat Geo, Deloitte, Best Buy, Capcom, DHL, Hyatt, Oglivy, Kaplan, Disney, SAS, Zen Desk, Reuters, VMWare, and Bloomberg – but some of those companies are only trialing the product while others are paid customers.

Flud CEO Bobby Ghoshal says that contractually, he’s not permitted to disclose which is which, but notes that 10 percent of the company’s corporate user base has converted to a paid plan. And thanks to these customers, Ghoshal says he expects his startup to become cash-flow-positive within the next few months.

You may remember Flud as one of the early competitors in the consumer-focused newsreading space, where it struggled to find its niche against the likes of Flipboard, Zite, Pulse and others. Now, Pulse is off to power LinkedIn’s content platform, Flipboard is the top iPad magazine, and other competitors — including, notably, Google Reader — are shutting down. These are all indications that consumer-focused feed aggregators has been a tough market to crack for some.

But it’s not a market that’s dead, counters Ghoshal.

“Three years ago, when Flipboard, Pulse and Flud launched, we all basically did the same thing,” he says. “What’s happening now is that the top three or four platforms are trying to find their emphasis. It’s not that people are pivoting or selling because things are not working out. If anything, readership on the platforms has gone up.”

Flud, he notes, has a “few million users” today. But going forward, while the platform will remain free for consumer use, the company’s time and energy will be spent developing features that make sense in the corporate environment.

“The enterprise space doesn’t have anything like Flud,” Ghoshal notes. Flud takes three parts of big enterprise — corporate intelligence, corporate communications and enterprise portals (all current spend) — and consolidates them into one product. But big business already has investments in SharePoint technology, so Flud doesn’t have to replace that solution — it can instead work with it. SharePoint hosts internal RSS feeds which Flud aggregates, making it easier for employees to stay in touch with the goings-on in their company with a more consumer-friendly product that works on both web and mobile.

“Most large businesses have RSS in SharePoint — private RSS feeds — and they expect people to go out into these SharePoint portals and read the content. But no one does that,” says Ghoshal. “We are the millennial generation. And millennials don’t even know what a portal is.” So Flud becomes the front-end for that content.

The enterprise product offers a variety of features designed with the needs of both businesses and the end users in mind. Businesses get access to an admin dashboard where they can assign employees to groups, mandate that certain employees or groups have certain feeds in their own Flud readers, and it offers Active Directory integration for single sign-on. In the future, the plan is to integrate paywalled subscriptions, too, like the trade journals a company may subscribe to, for instance.

What’s New: Push Notifications From Company To Mobile Users, Flud “IQ” Score, Personal & Business Feeds All In One App

A unique feature is Flud’s “push notification” option that lets an admin, such as an exec or director, log in to their dashboard to send a push notification company-wide or to select users or groups. This appears like any other push notification would on employees’ mobile devices. (The Flud enterprise app is iPhone-only for now, with Android in the works).

Flud also provides the businesses’ with insight into their internal influencers by offering a “Flud IQ” score – something Ghoshal calls a “Klout for consumption behavior.” The Flud IQ, which is updated daily, measures the quality of sources a user reads, how much they read per day, how much they share, and how many people click through on your shares and then re-share your content.

“It’s an interesting cultural snapshot for these businesses,” says Ghoshal. “It’s a great way to hook people and get them to invest time into reading content.” He says that businesses ask him if employees will waste time in Flud because of all the content being pushed to them. Ghoshal responds to that question by informing them that employees are already wasting time.

“Most of these employees are already wasting time on Facebook or Twitter anyway,” he explains. “The difference is that the company can now use Flud to re-direct people to important information as opposed to random photos or videos on another social network.” Since employees can also add their own sources to Flud, that also entices them to use the app or website to stay current on news.

The company offers Flud as a freemium service. The consumer version will remain ad-free, Flud Plus is the free tier for businesses, Flud Pro is $125 for businesses and includes the dashboard, push notifications and more, and Flud Enterprise (pricing on demand.)

Last year, the company was planning to raise a Series A for its consumer product, but put those plans on hold to shift its focus, and also relocate from San Diego to New York. Now that it has six months of enterprise usage under its belt, with engagement levels among employees around 55 percent to 65 percent, over 1,000 customers (some paying as much as $25,000), the company is now revisiting those earlier plans.

Sony’s flagship handset for 2013 isn’t available in the U.S. yet, but it’s a great phone if you can stomach the high price for an unlocked, unsubsidized device.

Let’s face it, trying to find new, interesting, and ideally free apps on the iOS App Store is like trying to find a great restaurant by going to your local mall’s food court: You’ll definitely find something popular, you might even find something good, but you’re unlikely to find a hidden gem.

The Roku 3 is the official must-have device for cord-cutters. It’s the one set-top box you need if you’re getting your media from the internet.