Category: Tech news

There goes another one — RIM announced today that Chief Legal Officer Karima Bawa will soon be leaving the company. This is RIM’s second major departure in as many weeks, with RIM sales head Patrick Spence leaving the ailing smartphone maker last Wednesday.

At the time, sources pointed to audio electronics company Sonos as his likely landing spot, though neither Spence nor Sonos have officially commented on the situation.

Unlike Spence, who reportedly jumped ship after being passed over for the company’s vacant COO spot (Sony Mobile EVP Kristian Tear eventually got the job), Bawa’s situation seems much less contentious. After spending nearly twelve years with the company (two of which were in her current spot), she’s finally looking to retire.

According to Reuters, Bawa’s departure was no surprise — she apparently revealed her desire to leave months in advance, and will be sticking around long enough to get her successor up to speed.

Still, a loss is a loss, and if recent reports are to be believed there are plenty more to come. Rumblings of a new round of layoffs have making the rounds lately, with the Financial Post reporting yesterday that nearly 6,000 employees are said to be on the proverbial chopping block.

RIM laid off 2,000 employees as part of a drastic cost cutting measure in July 2011 which acccounted for 11% of the company’s total workforce at the time. If these latest layoffs indeed come to pass, RIM will (for better or worse) be smaller than it has been in years. The Waterloo-based company needs to put as much of their effort as possible into crafting their forthcoming BlackBerry 10, and it remains to be seen whether or not this new, lean RIM is up to the task. Their early focus on luring developers to the platform with developer-friendly hardware and tools was a smart one, but market share shrinking and a launch window that could put it up against stiff competition, RIM can’t really afford for it to be anything other than a homerun.

Your Powerpoint pitchdeck is so boring. So. Freaking. Boring. Although tech bloggers aren’t sent startup’s actual pitchdecks as often as investors are (thankfully), we’re still walked through them on dreadful, “let me read to you from my Powerpoint” phone calls more often than should be socially acceptable. That’s why when image aggregator Piccsy, which is simultaneously a competitor to Pinterest as well as a top 20 content source for the site,  pinged us to take a look at its pitch deck, we were pleasantly surprised. A pitchdeck that’s actually fun to read? Can such a thing exist?

Piccsy.com/investors hosts the company’s public pitchdeck, and it’s a striking, visual representation of the data that would be typically found in bullet-pointed slideshows. The format leads you to wander through content and explore, much like Piccsy itself does. CEO Daniel Eckler admits that he doesn’t even know how to use Powerpoint. “I’ve only ever opened the program once or twice in my life,” he says. But it wasn’t just lack of know-how that led the company to ditch the idea of the traditional deck. As outsiders from Toronto, they wanted to stand out, Eckler says.

“We began with a problem (how to get investors to see our deck) and came up with a solution (create something unique, beautiful, informative, and easy to share), as opposed to going with the status quo,” Eckler explains. “This is conceivably the first thing investors are going to relate to when they see a company. Lots of companies that are innovative in other areas are sticking to an old model with their deck, even though they have the resources (dev/design) to do something special.”

Plus, he adds, a generic, Powerpoint-style deck wouldn’t be right for a site that’s all about discovering beautiful imagery.

For what it’s worth, the novel deck has been working. 50,000 pageviews and 15 inbound investor requests came in over the weekend, and the site got linked on Hacker News (where discussion delved into criticisms over content, however, but not the style.) Said one commenter, “it’s a beautiful presentation. I’m jealous….I’d absolutely pay to get a site like that.”

Say, Piccsy – if that whole image aggregation thing doesn’t work out…

The screenshot above is just a snippet. The full site is here.

(And yes, this is probably just a nifty trick to get an investor link posted to TechCrunch, but a tip of my hat to you then. Well played, Piccsy, well played.)

We’re currently used to more drama-oriented stories coming out of Yahoo!, but that doesn’t mean business hasn’t entirely halted there.

Yamli is a service which offers a smart Arabic keyboard that allows users who type in Latin characters to find -in real-time – the most accurate equivalent Arabic term. It debuted in 2007 but has become an important part of a market which serves hundreds of millions of users worldwide. The platform also offers services to help navigating the ‘Arabic web’.

Today Yahoo has acquired a license to use Yamli for its Arabic service, Yahoo! Maktoob, which will see it integrate Yamli’s existing technologies into a new product, “3arrebni,” or “Arabize me” in other words. This will be featured on Maktoob’s homepage will be integrated into Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail in Arabic, Yahoo! Search, and Yahoo! Maktoob Forums as well as in the comments section of media products such as Yahoo! Maktoob News.

The move marks a pivot for Yamli away from consumer services into B2b. It’s a nice deal for Yamli and a way to scale in the Arab world for the ailing Yahoo but a far cry form the acquisition we predicted might happen in 2010. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Since about 60% of Arabic-speaking Internet users dislike using an Arabic keyboard, many users have to use a Latin keyboard for their jobs or school, which makes the keyboards impractical. That means they have adopted a phonetic web language that spells out Arabic words with Latin letters. So Yamli lets users enter words phonetically into a special text box that displays a list of matching words that are written in Arabic. This allows them to keep using their Latin keyboard, without having the resulting text look like rubbish. And although there are around 22 dialects in the Arab world, Yamli can deal with multiple different phonetic spellings.

Yamli claims to have 5 million words pushed though its platform a day day, mostly from Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, and Jordan.

Co-founder Habib Haddad, now CEO of Wamda, says its a nice continuation of Yahoo!’s reputation amongst startups in the region which is established when it acquired Maktoob.

The company launched an Arabic frontend to Google in November 2007, and released an API in March 2008.

Face.com’s CEO has shrugged off rumors that it is being acquired by Facebook for up to $100 million when we asked. But the addition of its facial recognition tech to Facebook’s mobile apps could make sure friend tagging continues as the social network’s user base shifts away from desktops.

In fact, about 45% of users of Face.com’s app KLIK end up sharing their photos on Facebook, which shows how popular mobile facial recognition could be.

For the record, Face.com people are keeping their cards close to their chest. Face.com’s CEO Gil Hirsch flatly tells TechCrunch: “We have nothing new to announce or share at this time.”

But even while Facebook has been pushing a lot of fancy new enhancements to its mobile offerings (its Camera mobile app being the most recent) there are still a surprising number of features that have yet to be covered by the company.

So, perhaps because nature abhors a vacuum, we’re now getting a full whack of reports of what the company might buy or launch to make up for that, including today’s Face.com news that Facebook is looking to buy mobile/PC browser company Opera and hiring ex-Apple hardware engineers to work on its own phone. (Btw Opera is also giving a similarly no-news line: “Everything I’ve read has been news to me,” one Opera person told me.)

We may just, quite possibly, be in the middle of a Facebook news bubble and that half of what we are reading about Facebook and mobile may never come to pass — or could take ages to come to fruition: Buffy the Android slayer is reportedly still six to 12 months away going by the timing in the AllThingsD post from November. And this is not the first time we’ve heard that Face.com is in the Facebook acquisition line.

But, if you swallow that large grain of salt, there is a huge amount of sense in the social network looking at beefing up its mobile arsenal with companies like these, which offer features that Facebook currently does not, and therefore offer the promise of getting mobile users to spend more time on the social network — something that is a concern for the company.

At the moment, Facebook’s popular photo tag suggestion feature does not work from mobile, only on web uploads on PCs; on mobile, users can tag by starting to type a name for tagging options to appear, a spokesperson notes to us.

Face.com meanwhile offers facial-recognition software both for PC-based and mobile usage, with the key being that it covers mobile.

Face.com has its own iPhone mobile app, KLIK, beta-launched in January, and then rolled out as a 1.0 version in the app store earlier this month, which shows off the full range of its features.

These include facial recognition, facial-friendly photo filters and a location-based photo network — all services you could see sitting naturally in Facebook’s existing services.

Face.com tells us that Klik had over 100,000 downloads of the app in the first three days — signs of stickiness and popularity.

Equally interesting, Face.com also offers an API to integrate its technology into other apps. (One company suggested for an integration: Path.)

The API functionality could come in handy as Facebook looks at more ways of extending its functionality and touchpoints outside of its walled garden, especially since an Android version is likely to come soon from Face.com.

Opera, last week’s acquisition rumor, offers a similar promise of covering new ground for Facebook.

In its case it’s about a web browser — which, as others have reported, would be an essential feature if Facebook were to launch its own mobile platform.

That would be to compete against the likes of Android from Google and iOS from Apple in smartphones. But having web browsing capabilities could also help Facebook make more of a push in the lower-end feature phone space — an area where it has already made advances with services like Facebook Zero and its acquisition of Snaptu to improve the feature phone experience to target users in developing markets.

Coincidentally, Opera pushed itself as a “social mobile” company in February, when it launched the Opera Mini Next browser, offering “Smart Page” social media sharing features specifically for feature phone users.

Opera says it has some 200 million users of its browsers today, but if its social functionality that Facebook is after, there may be others worth watching, too. For example, the social mobile browser company Rockmelt, which has raised nearly $40 million from Andreessen-Horowitz, Accel, Khosla Ventures and others, currently offers an iOS app.

In the meantime, Opera has seen a little lift in its fortunes since the rumors broke last week: today its share price appears to have been its highest in a year, rising by 24.4 percent and closing at €5.70 a share.

[Additional reporting by Josh Constine]

Every gadget that graces our shelves goes through plenty of tweaks and changes during its design phase, but it isn’t too often that we get an actual glimpse of those scrapped iterations. It can be tremendously cool to see what our stuff could have looked like in some alternate timeline, and a new eBay listing reveals a peculiar iPad that may have been.

The listing is for an early first-generation iPad prototype, and unlike the final model it sports two dock connectors, allowing the iPad to be docked in either portrait or landscape mode.

Astute readers may recall that some of Apple’s earlier iPad-related patents pointed to a dual-docking device, and nearly three years later, we’re finally getting our first real look at one. Long story short, it looks just as dumb as you would expect it to. While the ability to dock the iPad in either orientation is arguably useful, it makes for a design that isn’t as clean or as thoughtful as Apple is (usually) known for.

It probably goes without saying that this early 16GB iPad is more of a conversation piece than a fully functional gadget, though. The seller notes that the touchscreen doesn’t work properly thanks to some funky digitizer issues, though it’s possible that someone with enough gumption (and the right tools) may be able to get it running again.

The prototype also runs an early build of iOS 3.2 along with Apple’s Switchboard hardware testing suite. It’s nothing that will make its eventual owner’s life any easier, but it certainly lends a bit of credence to the notion that it is actually some in-house Apple hardware instead of a carefully crafted hoax.

Between this and that Atari-era Steve Jobs memo, Apple aficionados have plenty of Cupertino memorabilia to lust after. Of course, it’ll cost you a pretty penny should you try to score this piece of iPad history — the prototype currently sits with a $4,800 bid, but it could be yours for a cool $10,000 if the whole bidding-on-things bit isn’t your style.

[via MacRumors]

It may not be the end, but the prognosis doesn’t look good. Social micro-payments platform Flattr is taking an unkind hit in terms of its future growth opportunities on mobile, the company details on its blog this morning. After being integrated into popular third-party podcast manager Instacast back in February, Apple decided at the beginning of May to reject the app from the iTunes App Store due to its Flattr integration. The result? The only way Instacast could get back into the app store was to change the user flow in the app to direct the actual “flattr” (as the micro-payment process is called) to take place in the Safari web browser instead. Not an ideal user experience, Apple admits, but it’s as required by the App Store Review Guidelines.

Flattr, for those unfamiliar, lets users click to donate funds directly to a content creator. It’s a “like button with cash,” TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher once said of the service. To use Flattr, a user decides how much they want to spend per month, then, whenever they see a Flattr button on the web or mobile, they click to donate. At the end of the month, Flattr counts up all your clicks and distributes the funds evenly. The company scored a high-profile partnership with web video giant  Dailymotion at the beginning of this month, which targeted Dailymotion’s top content creators in its “Motionmakers” category. (Butcher, however, still questioned Flattr’s business model at the time).

With the Instacast integration, the Flattr feature allowed listeners to “flattr” (donate to) podcast creators after having finished listening to a show. There was also an “auto-flattr” option, which allowed users to automatically flattr podcasts after the episode began playing.

According to Flattr’s community builder Siim Teller, Apple rejected Instacast on May 6th, citing the App Store Guideline 21.2, reading: “The collection of donations must be done via a web site in Safari or an SMS.” Flattr, of course, was permitting in-app donations. Apple itself says: “We understand that directing your user outside your app may not be the user experience you prefer to offer your users. However it is a common experience in a variety of iOS apps.”

Apple’s final ruling on May 24th was not in Flattr’s favor. Vemedio, Instacast’s maker, was forced to remove the in-app Flattr integration in order to push their critical bug fixes for their app into the App Store.

Although the Flattr blog post is in-party titled “it’s not the end,” the goings look rough – at least in terms of iOS. The guidelines are clear. Despite Teller’s reporting that Vemedio will “continue a dialog with Apple regarding their Flattr integration,” and his promises that Flattr will continue testing different ways of integration, it’s probable that Apple will not change its mind here.

As pointed out on the post burning up Hacker News today, Apple, after dealing with fallout from angry parents whose kids racked up huge iTunes bills through in-app purchases, may just be protecting its back here. Although Flattr users themselves set the monthly donation amount, and would have to manually enable the integration, there’s a chance that confusing dialogs or UX flow could lead to unintended donations.

More importantly, however, is the idea that Flattr could become an alternative to Apple’s own in-app purchasing system, allowing users to “flattr” in exchange for virtual goods, perhaps. That would be a huge no-no, considering Apple’s 30% cut of in-app purchases are a key revenue generator for its app business. Rather than police all future apps with Flattr integration, Apple has decided to break the user experience instead. Developers, users, and content creators may not be happy with the decision, but the end result is worse news for the Flattr ecosystem than it is for Apple’s.

Google just announced that its Google Apps for Business service has earned ISO 27001 certification. This certifies that Google is following the standard ISO information security management protocols and best practices “for the systems, technology, processes and data centers serving Google Apps for Business.”

If you’re a startup or individual user, chances are you don’t care too much about whether a company you are working with is following any of the ISO’s over 19,000 standards. This certification, however, will likely give larger and more highly regulated businesses (and the executives who sign off on these deals) the necessary reassurances that moving to Google’s cloud solutions is safe.

This ISO 27001 certification, which was certified by Ernst & Young CertifyPoint, an ISO certification body accredited by the Dutch Accreditation Council, follows Google’s previous FISMA certification for its Google Apps for Government product. Google also regularly submits itself to third-party audits according to the SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 standard, which is quite comparable to the ISO 27001 standard.

It’s important to note, though, that this certification is not a security “seal of approval,” as security consultant Alec Muffett told Computer World UK’s Anh Nguyen, and does not “guarantee that the applications are 100% secure.” Instead, says Muffett, companies that apply for ISO 27001 certification get ” to design their own high-jump bar, document how tall it is and what it is made of, how they intend to jump over it and then they jump over it.”

Google’s Eran Feigenbaum, the company’s director of security for its Google Enterprise group, believes that “businesses are beginning to realize that companies like Google can invest in security at a scale that’s difficult for many businesses to achieve on their own.” While most of Google’s competitors focus on getting their data centers certified, it’s worth noting that Google also argues that its certification is broader and also includes its networking infrastructure and applications.

Given that all of this isn’t the most exciting news in the world – especially not on a national holiday in the U.S. – here is a video of Feigenbaum, who is also a mentalist – playing Russian Roulette with a nail gun:

So now we’re in for an apparently unlimited amount of blaming Facebook for just about anything that needs a scapegoat. Take the story that crossed whatever we call the wires these days about how social readers are being destroyed by some tweaking of the Facebook engine. I followed all the links on Bruce Francis’ Cloudblog story and now realize this is actually about Facebook social readers. But the net seems to be: don’t trust your friends when they have something to share with you.

I thought this was already well known, starting and ending with Digg and its tyranny of the crowd. Trending topics for me is another way of saying here’s what to find out enough about to ignore everything else until something new happens. All you need to know about this is to see how many unfilled programming jobs there are out there that involve dedupping.

I’m not looking for a social reader in any case. What we really need is a social limiter, a version of the Beatles’ favorite studio tool, the Fairchild limiter. I once sequestered myself for months at the Band’s ShangriLa studio in Malibu, where the producer who ran the place had assembled as many Fairchilds as he could get his hands on. These babies were like some velvet glove you could wrap around guitars, vocals, even drum tracks — and out would come this warm glowing sound bursting with overtones, that felt better than what went in.

Translate that into a stream that discarded the latest rehash of a trending article, the latest numbers why RIM is screwed, why Facebook is the worst IPO in history. How about a size-shrinker that offers some visible clues as to the amount of actual information in the few truly interesting headline grabbers. How about some metrics on what actually is the amount of information we’re looking for per inch. The Fairchild limiter didn’t limit the music; it expanded its impact and clarity.

Social reader is really a misnomer, though. What’s social is the path travelled to the push notification that triggers your awareness of the next thing to absorb. And I’m the reader, not some app on Facebook or anywhere for that matter. More and more, I’m the detective, intuiting what I don’t see in the space between the lines, the posts, the tweets. Now that House is over, we only have his mantra to employ: the relentless odyssey in sea rch of completely irrelevant revenge for some dimly perceived slight that suddenly explodes in insight based on a random piece of dialogue. Remember: everybody lies.

Take Facebook. Supposedly the IPO was rigged to protect the house, as in every other form of legalized and otherwise gambling. The interior logic of the show was that because Facebook has 900 million subscribers, they by definition are inevitably going to be profitable, maybe more so than their competitors present and future. I actually feel that’s kind of right, but have much less clarity as to how I personally can profit by the insight. For example, if everybody who invests $1000 can flip it ten minutes later for $1100, at what point do you run out of suckers?

But just because the stock dove, then recovered, then dove, then barely got back to square one, doesn’t mean we don’t still have that same intuition. Waiting until Monday, Tuesday, even Wednesday and Thursday’s half bump, and Friday’s mini-dive, does nothing to change our minds about the big picture. 900 million, it’s like Sam’s Club, isn’t it? Who’s gonna do better anytime soon? So we didn’t do the flipitydip… it’ll just take longer. Meanwhile, the patient, this means us, is in a coma.

OK, let’s blame Scoble then. Doc Searls does a wonderful job of that in his new Techmemed post, but he somehow misses the point that Robert represents a fairly good bellweather of what actually is going to happen, namely that Facebook will succeed at whatever the hell it is experimenting with right now. Maybe the last minute warnings about mobile cluelessness are true, but I doubt it. My wife’s iPhone is off the hook with Facebook alerts from family, friends, and such. It’s not mobile they don’t get, it’s push.

That’s the big secret Wall Street is struggling with, that push is the monetization model of mobile. Who cares what the UI is, or what the advertising surface is. The moment a push hits your screen, it comes down to a binary decision: do I want to know more, or do I already know enough. To make that decision, we need social metadata to help out. Who said this, who retweeted it, who @mentioned it, and how are these signals parsed to prioritize the queue.

This is why micro-communities like Path and FourSquare persist. Their signal to noise is scoped by the care with which we follow our peers and the precision of the resulting clarity of pushes. In a world of push, the most valuable signals are the ones that don’t interrupt, don’t repeat, don’t strangle the message in a sea of marketing. Push is about permission, which turns advertising into information on request and marketing into paid subscription.

Push requires a PLA, or Push Level Agreement, where we populate our social channels with enough signal from which to derive educated guesses about our intentions and intuitions. Yes, Facebook has plenty of data, but little understanding of how to leverage it because we’re not allowed to tune the inference algorithms. Metadata farming requires not just permission but incentives for broadcasting rich metadata and priority context.

This is why Google + Circles are so brain dead. Yes, they let you know who you are broadcasting to. But no, they don’t let us know who you’re broadcasting to. I can’t intuit the effect a post has on the implicit group, so I can’t tell how important it is to know about in the push queue. Since you’re not telling me how important you think this is, why should anybody else weight it? There’s little incentive to create those signals, and the end result of a push notification of a Google + item is to perceive it as an interruption.

Push is the cloud’s security blanket. It implicitly says, those who trust you will be trusted by you. Everybody else loses. Push capital punishment is to go to the Settings page and turn off an app. SocialCam may be the first if they don’t watch out. I like the early days feeling of the app, but I’m not sure the trust signals coming from its users are visible enough for me to understand. Photo apps are only push friendly to the extent that they don’t go viral, which seems contradictory unless you believe that push is the new money. I do.

Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

Cornell University made big news earlier in the year when it was announced the Ivy League school, located in upstate New York, would open a technology campus in New York City. Leading the charge for Big Red will be Dan Huttenlocher, dean of computing and information science — and a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Dean Huttenlocher was kind enough to come backstage after his session to discuss more details about the campus and program. Cornell will build a technology campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City, which will house a full master’s program that combines academic research in computer science and engineering along with a variety of practical training programs. While the curriculum will focus mostly on software, Huttenlocher did hint at the possibility of having programs focusing on smaller-scale hardware, as well. This video would be of interest to folks who are in the New York technology community, as well as those could have some type of relationship with the campus in the future.

If you’re in the City of Brotherly Love, you’re in a for a treat. Thanks to constant entreaties by one of your own, Anthony Coombs, we’re going to hold a mini-meet up in Philly on June 19 at the Field House, 1150 Filbert St.

Please RSVP here.

As is our wont, we like to hold these on neutral ground and we’d love to sit down with you to chat about what you’re working on during the day. We’ll have very limited time, so if you’d like to sit with us, please submit a request through ohours.org. We’re holding office hours at Caribou Cafe near the venue, also on June 19, at a yet-to-be-determined time.

We’ll have more information on sponsors and hours shortly, but please mark your calendars and we’ll see you soon.

[Image: David W. Leindecker/Shutterstock]

If you’re an older gamer, you will remember the holy trinity of Sierra RPGs – King’s Quest, Space Quest, and Police Quest. All three of these games used something called “imagination” and “storytelling” to immerse early gamers in an Ad Lib sound card-induced gaming coma.

Now you can re-live those heady days with a new game by the makers of Space Quest, Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe (aka “The Two Guys from Andromeda”). Their new game, called SpaceVenture, is a refresh of the old Sierra series and promises spills, chills, and horrible jokes. It’s getting funded on Kickstarter as we speak.

The best part? They hired the original voice actors to spice up the game including Gary Owens, the voice of Space Ghost, and Ellen McLain who plays GlaDOS in Portal 1 and 2. Talk about your crossovers.

The game will cost $15 for early pledgers and runs on Macs, PCs, iOS, and Android. The $30 tier gets you beta access to the game and a soundtrack download.

The game is halfway to its goal with 15 days to go, so get pledging, space cadet.

Project Page

Diversification is the key to longevity. With that likely in mind, GameStop just announced widespread availability of Android tablets throughout its chain of retail stores. This comes after a 200 store trial that started last October.

These aren’t ordinary Android tablets, though. GameStop is pre-loading the Samsung, Asus, Acer, and Toshiba with extra gaming titles such as Sonic CD, Riptide, the Kongregate Arcade app and a free issue of GameStop’s gaming mag, Game Informer. Thanks to these extras and with prices that are inline with other stores, GameStop actually has a chance to capture a bit of the tablet market.

GameStop has recently been bulking up its non-game retail stock in a likely attempt to stop the bleeding. While brick and mortar locations still focus mainly on video games, the website offers headphones, tablet accessories, even refurbished iPods and iPads. The company started testing selling Android tablets last October. Today’s announcement states loud and clear that GameStop sees a future in Android tablets even if no one else does.

As the heat around the “Facebook Phone” story gets higher, our thoughts turn to the days a couple of years ago when it emerged Facebook had been thinking about developing an actual phone. Back then, it transpired that Facebook was working with INQ Mobile on a smartphone. The phone duly emerged – the INQ1 – and did indeed have great Facebook integration. Even if it hasn’t exactly been a smash hit, it’s fared well enough.

Indeed, HTC has also released their own “Facebook” phone, such HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa respectively. INQ’s runs on Google’s Android operating system, but with deeper Facebook integration.

When asked about the INQ phone back in 2010, Zuckerberg said it wasn’t “some massive big thing”. But quite clearly, a phone is now firmly on the agenda.

And with Facebook bringing in $16 billion from its IPO it could in theory buy Research in Motion (around $6 billion) or the ailing HTC (around $11.8 billion).

However, an even cheaper option would be buy the aforementioned INQ from its holding company Hutchison Whampoa. Because it’s not the operating system Facebook needs – that can be developed – but the hardware engineering experience that INQ mobile has.

INQ is already spread across the UK, San Francisco, Europe and Asia.

And as a subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa it has a lot of experience dealing with big software companies, creating the original Skypephone prior to the INQ1 and integrating Spotify and Foursquare into its handsets.

Admittedly, Facebook needs to make a phone that doesn’t suck. By grabbing INQ is might just have that chance.

It’s not clear if this is a one-off glitch, a signal of a bigger issue — or a way of pumping up/sabotaging Klout scores for those who care. But it’s not great news any way you spin it, if it’s true: a Klout user has gotten in touch to say that when he accesses the social influence ratings service, he is getting signed in to Klout not as himself but as someone else.

Using an HTC Sensation device running the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android, IT consultant Halil Kabaca,of Istanbul, Turkey-based Novarum Consulting, tells us that when he goes on to Klout via the phone’s mobile browser, he is being signed in automatically as someone completely different — someone he doesn’t know at all who happens to work for Adobe in business development (see screenshots of Kabaca’s and the other guy’s profiles after the break).

It appears that Kabaca has full access to the other guy’s account, including direct messages, the ability to add influencers, and change all other account information. The access, he says, only happens on mobile, and not on his PC.

Kabaca tells us he uses Klout almost every day from his phone and this is the first time he has seen this happen. “Even if it’s a minor bug, it is very discouraging to use the service,” he said.

As of this writing he says he can still access the other user’s profile, “And I am wondering if anyone is seeing mine.”

Even if this is a one-off glitch, the news is not brilliant, as it comes at the same time that Klout has been sharpening its focus on mobile. In February, it acquired mobile/location startup Blockboard to enhance its mobile services; in April, it released a new iPhone app; and earlier this month, it kicked off with some eye-catching promotions — Perks in Klout-world — with companies to show off how effective those new mobile products can be. A recent one we covered was Klout’s link-up with Cathay Pacific, where users with high Klout scores could flash their status, via the mobile app, to get access to Cathay Pacific’s executive lounge in San Francisco Airport.

Because of the emphasis on sharing information about yourself, social networks — more than other internet services — have been served a pretty big dose of privacy scrutiny. Klout is no different. In November the site was criticized for how it created shadow profiles of people who are not even users.

Klout is not the only social media site that has suddenly seen identity loopholes appear. In March, Twitter had to take TweetDeck offline after one user suddenly found he had access to hundreds of accounts, both on Twitter and Facebook, using the client.

We have contacted Klout, and the other user, to see if they can comment on this development and will update as we learn more.

Update: The other user has come back to us to confirm that his account has been changed around by someone — with a new contact email (the one put in by Kabaca to test the loophole).

EU Cookie legislation is now in force across Europe, but in a last minute change on Friday, the UK’s information commissioner amended the way it will be implemented in the UK. It’s now the case that sites will only have to obtain ‘implied consent’ from users not explicit consent. This is much friendlier for businesses but means the UK is now out of the step with the EU on privacy online and the transparency of cookies. In the middle of a recession, UK businesses probably won’t lose too much sleep. This is a much more pragmatic approach and most websites have yet to even comply with the legislation.

In this guest post, Mark Macdonald, of Skimlinks argues sites should still consider being up-front with users about their use of cookies.

The grassroots of the internet are a force to be reckoned with. With national and international legislation threatening their online way of life, the denizens of 4Chan and Reddit can be relied upon to make life a misery for those US politicians proposing mis-construed acts. We saw it with SOPA and PIPA. They’re holding off ratification of ACTA for the time being, and CISPA is taking a beating.

But where were they three years ago when the EU first debated its e-Privacy Directive?

The directive passed into UK law a year ago ‘on-the-nod’, i.e. without any debate in Parliament, and was intended to protect users’ privacy by forcing sites to seek consent when placing certain cookies. This week marks the end of a year-long grace period during which website owners were issued confusing guidelines [PDF] from the enforcing body, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

You’ve probably heard all about how the ICO enforced its own guidelines and killed its traffic, plenty has been said about how the law is pretty much unenforceable, and I previously wrote, perhaps prematurely, about how the fundamental technologies that fund free content on the web were threatened.

Maybe I missed the point. There’s no doubt that our legislators are behind the technological curve, and crass law writing can be massively damaging, but likewise an honest communication about how your site operates is essential to building a trusting, and valuable, user base.

Advertisers love playing the data game, and will continue to find ways to target their audience with or without cookie legislation. Use of server-side pixels allows for cookieless tracking, and definitions of 1st and 3rd party cookies are increasingly blurred by ad networks to sidestep some interpretations of the laws. Our lawmakers won’t catch up with this stampede of innovation, so it falls to us, the innovators, to implement technologies responsibly and hold ourselves accountable.

The politicians in Washington and Brussels may not have a clue what they’re talking about, but the spirit of respectful user interaction may not be so misplaced.

Monitoring customer behaviour and habit is nothing new. The supermarkets have been collating your data through loyalty card programs since the early eighties, building customer profiles and using this data to ‘enhance the shopping experience’. It’s a pretty honest understanding though: you give me discounts on goods or services, and I’ll let you build a profile to establish how much cat litter I can handle.

This kind of mutual understanding should form the very minimum of an unwritten contract between site owners and users. Am I saying that your grandfather understands the extremes of data crunching each time he swipes a loyalty card? Certainly not, but there’s a policy of providing clear disclosure to customers in order to maintain their hard-earned trust. That policy must be replicated on the web in some fashion.

In an ever more socialized web, readership and user engagement are a site’s biggest asset. It’s that user engagement that drives Facebook’s inflated stock price, and Pinterest’s huge funding rounds.

It’s also user engagement that drives value for advertisers in the long run. Supportive communities understand that making money from a site need not impact on their enjoyment of the site, and will respect advertising technologies that they are informed about.

So what changes? In all honesty, nothing much. Most of the UK’s governmental sites aren’t going to be compliant today.

At Skimlinks, we made some recommendations to all our publishers but the ICO have indicated to us that they’re not going to be prosecuting sites unless they appear to intentionally avoid compliance.

The ICO aren’t likely to come after you this week, but users deserve to be treated with respect anyway. It’s not hard to do either. Disclosure should be a given. If you run a site or web service, tell people what technologies you’re using, and make sure you have clear links to any appropriate opt-outs. Likewise, act as an agent for your users and demand that 3rd party technologies give you a clear indication of what data they collect, and how it is used.

Don’t do it for the legislators. Do it because we’re all users, and it’s what we’d all expect.

But finally here’s a bonus video on why the EU cookie law should just die: