Category: Tech news

It’s pretty rare for a story to be one part sad, one part fascinating, and twenty parts sleazy. Luckily, Facebook and Burson-Marsteller have just handed exactly that to us on a silver platter.

As you’ve undoubtedly seen by now, last night The Daily Beast’s Dan Lyons’ broke the story wide open about how the social network hired the PR firm to plant negative stories about rival Google in the press. As Mike wrote last night, it’s “not just offensive, dishonest and cowardly. It’s also really, really dumb.” And it keeps getting better.

Now one of the sleazy companies in this sordid affair, Burson-Marsteller, is throwing the other sleazy company, Facebook, under the bus.

In an email sent to PRNewser this morning, the PR firm is confirming their involvement (as if that was still in question), defending themselves and their actions, and blaming Facebook for bringing the work to them in the first place.

In other words, they took the job, fucked it up, then blamed the client. Brilliant.

Let’s break down the Burson-Marsteller’s statement:

Now that Facebook has come forward, we can confirm that we undertook an assignment for that client.

If they hadn’t come forward, we wouldn’t have either. But since they’re potentially ruining us, screw you too, Facebook.

The client requested that its name be withheld on the grounds that it was merely asking to bring publicly available information to light and such information could then be independently and easily replicated by any media. Any information brought to media attention raised fair questions, was in the public domain, and was in any event for the media to verify through independent sources.

Facebook was asking us to do something shady, which we were totally fine with at the time. After all, this information is public, so why not do humanity a favor and pitch it to journalists for a smear campaign? We were really just doing journalists a favor — how’d they miss this golden information anyway? Maybe we should be journalists (again). At least we know to do our homework when getting pitched something sleazy. Oh wait, the journalists didn’t bite. So our argument trying to throw journalists under the bus doesn’t work either. Shit.

Whatever the rationale, this was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined. When talking to the media, we need to adhere to strict standards of transparency about clients, and this incident underscores the absolute importance of that principle.

After we just fed you that bullshit excuse, here’s the real deal: we shouldn’t have done this. Or perhaps more accurately, we shouldn’t have agreed to terms under which we were likely to be caught. Next time we take one of these assignments, we’ll simply throw the client under the bus immediately so we look like the good guys to the journalists and public. Or we’ll cover our asses better. And ask for more money.

Scummy. Sleazy. Sordid. A true class act.

[image: flickr/earls37a]

Because Facebook is clearly concerned with user privacy, it’s partnered up with crowdsourced reputation management service Web Of Trust today in order give its population of almost 700 million users protection from links deemed “risky” by the Web Of Trust community.

As of today, if a user clicks on a link with a poor Web of Trust reputation rating, they will see the above warning telling them that the link has been classified as abusive. And then they can either circumvent the link, learn more about the Web of Trust rating or continue browsing.

“Facebook users are passing around links that can disrupt the system, and Facebook is very aware that users are experiencing the effect of opening spammy links, stuff like ‘You just won a prize.’ We are the first of a number of security companies that Facebook is partnering with because people are much more aware of [and concerned about] their privacy these days,” Web Of Trust marketing manager Deborah Salmi told me.

Through the multi browser Web of Trust extension, the Web of Trust community has now classified five million sites as untrustworthy, fraudulent, responsible for phishing or other unsavory behavior. Users who want to see the Web of Trust reputation rating off of Facebook, on Google search results, Twitter links and shortened URLs can download the Web of Trust extension here.

Both Google and Apple got an earful from Congress this week concerning a few different DUI checkpoint apps that were floating around in the App Store and Android Market. Senator Charles Schumer, who was one of four senators to spearhead resolving this issue through a letter to the companies in March, grilled both of the tech giants during the inaugural hearing of the Privacy and Technology Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary this week.

“Apple and Google shouldn’t be in the business of selling apps that help drunk drivers evade the police, and they shouldn’t be selling apps that they themselves admit are ‘terrible’,” said Schumer. Back in late March, Sen. Schumer joined Sens. Harry Reid, Frank Lautenberg, and Mark Udall in scribing a letter asking Google, Apple, and RIM to remove any DUI checkpoint apps from their app stores. RIM was the only company to comply.

Read more…

Let’s say you go to a store and check-in. Then what? Maybe there’s a deal. Maybe. But for many location-based services, the check-in is the end of the equation. Shopkick is pretty much the opposite.

From the beginning, they’ve shied away from the check-in. Why? Because most of them are pure BS. Either they mean nothing, or they’re fake. Retailers don’t yet get this — but then again, most of them still have no idea what a check-in is. Shopkick has been aiming to educate retailers on how to best utilize mobile devices to incentivize customers to come into their stores — and more importantly, shop in their store. And today, Shopkick is launching version 2 of their popular application.

Since its launch last August, Shopkick has been doing very well. Between the iPhone and Android, they now have some 1.5 million active users, co-founder Cyriac Roeding tells us. Of their entire user base, 40 percent are active monthly. 20 percent are actively weekly. And 5 to 10 percent are active daily, he says. Solid numbers. But Shopkick hopes to improve upon them. “The dirty little secret of mobile is retention,” Roeding notes.

And Shopkick 2.0 delivers some new features aimed at making the app more sticky. The biggest of these is the new Favorites screen, which allows users to create a custom area for their favorite retailers. Think of this as the best of the Sunday circulars that you find in newspapers. It’s all the best deals right in front of your face.

But it’s not just deals that are shown, it’s deals and rewards combined. “To consumers, deals and rewards are the same thing,” Roeding says. And within Shopkick 2.0, there are a lot of exclusive deals for Shopkick users, he notes.

Another new feature of the 2.0 release is the ability to toggle between close-by deals and the ones from your favorite merchants. And there’s a top-level Dailykicks area to show you the hottest deals across the system.

With their massive roll-outs in Best Buy, Target, and other huge chains nationwide, Shopkick probably already has the deals that they need to succeed. But they’re still aiming for something larger. “We’re going to invent the physical world click,” Roeding says. “Why can’t you pay anyone for foot traffic?,” he wonders. “And consumer value should come from getting rewarded when you walk in to a store,” he says.

“Check-ins are like a billboard close to a store, but it’s not the store,” he notes. That’s why Shopkick gives these stores their own devices to precisely track when a user actually enters their store and boots up their app. And for their troubles of being tracked, consumers earn automatic kickbucks (the Shopkick currency) and access to special deals. And these kickbucks can be used across many different stores.

Look for Shopkick 2.0 to go live today in the App Store and Android Market.

Networks and wireless sensors have been used for years — by companies like Lighting Science Group, Arch Rock (acquired by Cisco) and D-Link — in a variety of smart building, smart grid and security applications. Their systems can sense occupancy, control lighting and temperatures, and make energy-sucking devices a little more efficient, or make buildings a little easier to patrol and keep safe.

Now, a startup called Insight Innovation & Technology Ltd. (a.k.a. Insight) is using wireless sensors and networks in the wild to predict, prevent and track forest fires. The company installed its technology in Hong Kong’s Tai Lam Country Park with the cooperation of the Guangdong Forestry Department.

The sensors were placed strategically (image, right) to monitor environmental factors like temperature and humidity throughout the forest. The data they pick up is transmitted in real-time via 4.2Ghz radio frequency communication networks. Insight won two awards today for this project, from a major research park and incubator: the Honk Kong ICT 2011 silver award for the “Best Innovation & Research (Postgraduate & Open),” and a certificate of merit for “Best Social Responsibility.”

Twitter for Mac, which launched earlier this year with the rollout of Apple’s Mac App Store, is getting its first major update today.

Besides a design update, you can now see multiple timelines at once and open more than one window in the client. You can click back to previous pages from the client and there is now a separate “New Tweet” button in the bottom left corner of the app. This feature is good news as one of our major pain points with the earlier version of the app was that there was no Tweet box.

Twitter has also updated the design of Direct Messages and user profiles, making it easier to view both features. And the client now has username and hashtag auto-complete.

As we wrote in our initial review of the app back in January, the Mac client was essentially a stripped down version of Twitter’s iPad client. Perhaps with these new updates, the client will become more of a full-fledged client.

Twitter also just updated its mobile site.

I’m a die-hard paper fan. I have a few shelves of books in almost every room of the house and I love taking a stack of magazines or newspapers on a plane – this is so ingrained in my psyche that I actually save magazines a few weeks before a long trip so I have something to read. But slowly, ever so slowly, this love of paper is leaving me. First I abandoned print journalism for the bare-knuckle punch-fest that is blogging and then I stopped reading print books and instead took up the Kindle then the iPad. I literally have not cracked a paperback or hardback for a full, long read in more than a year. I’m not writing this to prove my early adopter cred but because the thought amazes me.

I still read the NY Times in dead-tree form and, although for a little while I thought The Daily would be the future of daily news, I think I’ll stick with the paper version for a few more months, at least until I wrap my head around the psychological process of reading general daily news online.

But the one thing I thought I’d never do was abandon my magazine habit. But slowly surely magazines fell off my radar. First it was Wired because all the news in there I had read months before on the Internets. Then it was the Economist because I’d end up with a stack of magazines full of great stuff that I’d never read. I let my subscription to Fortune lapse and haven’t missed it. But if there’s one magazine I can’t get enough of in print form it’s the New Yorker.

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Like many start-ups, Meebo has been on a recent hiring spree. In this episode of Founder Stories, CEO Seth Sternberg tells Chris Dixon, “for 12 weeks we had to hire a salesperson a week and if we didn’t we would have missed our revenue numbers later this year.”

But it’s not just new salespeople populating Meebo’s workstations. “We started this year at about 130 employees.  I think we are at 175 now, and so for us that is really fast growth” says Sternberg.

From CFO to engineer, Sternberg discusses how Meebo weeds out candidates by running them though, “the sim.” This is a simulation of Meebo’s real-world working environment.

In our “rapid fire” segment below, Sternberg tells Dixon some of his favorite products, what he would do if he ever left Meebo and discusses his thirst for hitting the road—and air.

Make sure to watch Part 1 and Part 2 of this interview, as well as prior episodes of Founder Stories here.

Vente-Privee, the European flash sales giant, has announced a joint venture with American Express to bring the site to the U.S.

Vente-Privee, which was founded in France in 2001, is one of the pioneers of the flash sales model. Because of the site’e massive reach and scale, companies like Amazon and eBay have been rumored to be eying the company for an acquisition.

Currently, Vente-Privee has approximately 13 million members and more than $1 billion in European sales. As part of the agreement, each organization will own 50 percent of the new U.S. entity. This marks the first non-European market entry for vente-privee.com, and allows American Express to expand its presence in the flash sales business.

Of course, a Vente-Privee’s U.S. site has a host of established competitors in the country, included the well-funded leader of the pack, Gilt Groupe. Gilt just raised $138 million and has a growing family of flash-sales sites, including the original Gilt, Gilt Home, Gilt City, Gilt Children, Gilt MAN, and Jetsetter. Other flash sales sites in the U.S. include HauteLook, RueLaLa, BeyondTheRack and Ideeli.

For AmEx, the new site is another way the credit card and payments company is investing in e-commerce and technology, The company just partnered with LevelUp and also teamed up with Foursquare as well.

Talk about sinking to a new low. It seems that Talk about sinking to a new low. It seems that Comcast and perhaps other ISPs are blocking access to the notorious torrent site, ThePirateBay.org. The word comes from TorrentFreak who also reached out to the TPB team who indicated that they can’t confirm if an ISP is blocking the site but “there’s a significant drop in visitors from the U.S.” All I know is I, a Comcast subscriber, cannot access the site.

Comcast isn’t exactly known to be friendly with the downloaders or streamers. In the past they’ve limited and even blocked seeding of torrent files. The term throttling was synonymous with Comcast a few years back. The company eventually entered into a partnership with BitTorrent, Inc and was later asked by the FCC to stop the practices, but perhaps the company just moved to block specific sites in an effort to kill the bandwidth-sucking practice of torrenting.

Update: Comcast responded.

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Demandbase, a company that develops B2B marketing software, has raised $10 million in funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures with Sigma Partners, Altos Ventures, and Adobe Systems participating in the round. This brings the company’s total funding to $18 million.

Demanbase allows B2B marketers to improve marketing conversions and turn web traffic into sales. The company provides a B2B marketing performance-improvement software to deliver a more personalized web experiences and a higher ROI from sales and marketing programs.

Demandbase, which was founded in 2006, offers a Real Time ID service that identifies business web traffic without using cookies, and delivers that information to businesses on demand. Demandbase says it has mapped over 85 percent of B2B traffic on the web and its software is currently being used by over 1,000 companies.

The funds will be used for sales and marketing as well as further expansion of the data network globally.

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Search engine Blekko, ever eager to differentiate itself and make headlines with its countless product development advances, is announcing today that it will reduce its data retention period to 48 hours, retaining far less user personal information (like IP addresses) than the the dominant players in the space.

For comparison, competitors Google and Yahoo are currently at 18 months of user data retention and Bing is at six months, which is the European standard. In fact, Yahoo recently extended its data retention policy from 90 days to 18 months because it needed it to “compete” with Google in offering personalized recommendations. With this move Blekko is essentially saying, “Unlike Yahoo, we don’t need to compete.” Search engines like DuckDuckGo and Startpage do not collect any user info.

Granted, with $24 million from US Ventures, CMEA Capital and Marc Andreessen, Blekko can keep pulling stunts until the cows come home. In addition to this move Blekko will now be introducing its HTTPS Preferred offering, which will automatically point searchers to HTTPs secure websites when available.

Blekko has also amped up its ad opt up services with Super Privacy and No Ads privacy opt out settings which allow users to opt out of advertising while searching. ”Search engines know too much about their users. Our goal at Blekko is to find a balance between retaining information to improve our search engine, and not retaining information that a user prefers to keep private,” said CTO Greg Lindhal.

Blekko is basically pulling out all the bells and whistles, performing parlor tricks like adding Facebook comments to search because it has to, as the search market is currently comprised of Google at 65.7%, Yahoo at  15.9% and Microsoft at  14.1% with Blekko not even ranking in the top five.

Right now the company, which completed 50 million searches last month from 750K uniques (up 33% since March), indexes 3.5 billion URLs, compared to Google and Bing which are both over 15 billion.

And a search engine’s gotta do what a search engine’s gotta do. But is garnering press attention with its weekly reactive maneuvers necessarily worth the effort? We’ll soon find out.

Score Media has acquired sports-focused mobile apps maker SportsTap, whose Android and iPhone apps compete with Score Media’s multi-sport app ScoreMobile.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but SportsTap will be maintained as a stand-alone smartphone and mobile browser app.

Launched in 2007, SportsTap is currently the third most popular free sports app on Android (right behind the 2nd most popular app, ScoreMobile). Both apps offer users access to real-time sports results and statistics from major professional sports leagues.

This acquisition makes a lot of sense for all the right reasons.

According to comScore’s MobiLens March 2011 report, which ranks mobile sports app audiences in the United States, the combined monthly audience of ScoreMobile and SportsTap would rank as #3 behind ESPN and Yahoo and ahead of competitors FOX and CBS.

The strategic acquisition of SportsTap will increase its global monthly unique user base to more than 3 million.

Score Media is a media company delivering interactive sports entertainment. Created in 1997, the company operates the theScore television network in Canada as well as a number of digital media assets, including theScore.com, a theScore iPad app and mobile sports apps ScoreMobile and ScoreMobile FC which are available for BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7.

Facebook secretly hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google, says Dan Lyons in a jaw dropping story at the Daily Beast.

For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.”

Not good.

The source emails are here.

I’ve been patient with Facebook over the years as they’ve had their privacy stumbles. They’re forging new ground, and it’s not an exaggeration to say they’re changing the world’s notions on what privacy is. Give them time. They’ll figure it out eventually.

But secretly paying a PR firm to pitch bloggers on stories going after Google, even offering to help write those stories and then get them published elsewhere, is not just offensive, dishonest and cowardly. It’s also really, really dumb. I have no idea how the Facebook PR team thought that they’d avoid being caught doing this.

First, it lets the tech world know that Facebook is scared enough of what Google’s up to to pull a stunt like this. Facebook isn’t supposed to be scared, ever, about anything. Supreme confidence in their destiny is the the way they should be acting.

Second, it shows a willingness by Facebook to engage in cowardly behavior in battle. It’s hard to trust them on other things when we know they’ll engage in these types of campaigns.

And third, some of these criticisms of Google are probably valid, but it doesn’t matter any more. The story from now on will only be about how Facebook went about trying to secretly smear Google, and got caught.

The truth is Google is probably engaging in some somewhat borderline behavior by scraping Facebook content, and are almost certainly violating Facebook’s terms and conditions. But many people argue, me included, that the key data, the social graph, really should belong to the users, not Facebook. And regardless, users probably don’t mind that this is happening at all. It’s just Facebook trying to protect something that it considers to be its property.

Next time Facebook should take a page from Google’s playbook when they want to trash a competitor. Catch them in the act and then go toe to toe with them, slugging it out in person. Right or wrong, no one called Google a coward when they duped Bing earlier this year.

You’ve lost much face today, Facebook.

Update: Sleazy PR Firm Throws Scummy Facebook Under The Sordid Bus

Well, TechCrunch readers, we thought we owed you an explanation as to why the hell we got onto the BBC TV show The Apprentice last night, and here it is.

Back in September last year I was contacted by TalkBack Thames TV, the independent production company that makes The Apprentice for the BBC. They said they were going to make the creation of a smartphone app a task on the show and would I be a judge. “Why the hell not?” I thought, and a date was set for filming.