Category: Tech news

Amazon this morning announced that its Android app is the first Kindle application to receive an update that enables users to buy, read, and sync over 100 newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times and Newsweek.

Kindle for Android users can now purchase a single issue or subscribe to a host of newspapers and magazines, and have them automatically delivered, in color, to their Android-powered device.

For a list of newspapers and magazines available on Kindle for Android, head on over here.

Other updates to the Kindle for Android app include the addition of an in-app store, (finally) enabling customers to discover, buy, and download over 750,000 Kindle books without leaving the app, as well as social network integration, which allows customers to share their progress in a book using Google’s built-in Share functionality.

The new Kindle for Android app is available from Android Market, and customers who have already downloaded the app should receive the update automatically.

So why start with Android? According to Russ Grandinetti, VP Amazon Kindle, it’s the fastest-growing application.

That may be the case, but the real question is when – and if – this functionality will hit the iOS platform. An iPad version, in particular, would be quite exciting.

HelloTXT, a product from mobile media and technology company Buongiorno, is just one of many mobile and Web applications one can use for updating various social networks from a single interface. It is, nevertheless, a smooth and mighty fine one.

The company has just announced a slew of improvements across all supported platforms, including for iPhone, iPad, Android and its Web app.

New features include in-line media viewing, which lets users see links, photo, videos and whatnot on supported networks without having to leave the feed view, and a new display for blogs and other online content via RSS. Social activities such as retweeting, liking and commenting have also been improved.

What makes HelloTXT worth a whirl in my opinion, is the Doodle feature, which lets you draw status updates and make fun of your Facebook friends (sorry Alexia), as well as the Suggestions feature, which gives you amusing suggestions for status updates whenever your mind goes blank.

Try it out and tell us what you think.

Citrix Online, a division of Citrix Systems, this morning announced that it is to acquire Netviewer, a privately-held SaaS vendor in collaboration and IT services based in Germany. Netviewer will become an integral part of Citrix’ online services division, but the terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Opera released a new version of its desktop browser yesterday, Opera 11. The new browser shipped with a number of new features, including support for browser extensions and a new tabbing functionality.

It looks like the release was a success; Opera just announced that it saw 6.7 million downloads of the new browser in the first day alone. So how does that compare to downloads of Opera 10? Well, the company says that in its first week open to the public, Opera 10 was only downloaded 1.7 million times per day.

One factor that helped increase downloads, says Opera, is the auto-update feature which sends existing users a message to download the new version of the browser. But the company admits that not every user received the auto-update message. And Opera advertised Opera 11′s release, including a mouth-watering ad on Reddit using bacon as a lure. A survey of people downloading Opera for the first time had 53% of its respondents coming from Firefox, and 43% coming from IE. And none from Chrome?

Opera’s iPhone app saw 1 million downloads in its first day in the app store earlier this year. And Opera just announced that it hit 150 million users worldwide across its desktop and mobile browsers.

For comparison, Microsoft’s beta version of IE9 was downloaded 2 million times in the first two days the browser was open to the public.

Micro-blogging sensation Tumblr is down again. It’s only been a good week since the service was unavailable for more than 24 hours (yes, hours, not minutes).

I’m not even a Tumblr user, but this is getting out of hand.

Update: and they’re partially back up now, but still terribly unstable.

I mean, even Twitter is up for the moment, but their status blog – hosted on Tumblr – is down. How’s that for irony?

Worse, my colleague MG Siegler’s personal blog is also – gasp – down!

We’ll check back in a day or so to see if Tumblr is back up.

At least they’re aware of the issues.

Update 2: wow they totally deleted that tweet! Here’s what it said:

We’re experiencing slow loading or intermittent errors on certain pages and are working quickly to restore performance.

Twitter is undeniably a great way to catch the vibe on what’s going on pretty much anywhere in the world, and trending topics and search / hashtags facilitate this tremendously. Kudos to the EU for experimenting with live Twitter stream projections at official summits in that regard … but they still need to learn that moderation is important, too.

Using Tweetwall Pro, a way for event organizers to feed live tweets onto screens, an experiment in the atrium of the EU summit building in Brussels held yesterday didn’t quite proceed as planned. The live tweet stream, which was displayed on multiple plasma TVs throughout the building, was abruptly shut down after Italian Twitter users hijacked the #euco stream with anti-Berlusconi messages, calling the politician a mafioso and a pedophile.

Photograph by Greg Bloom

There’s now a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of HDTV available. You just need the right media streamer to serve up the goods.

1. Logitech Revue

Supercharged with Google TV, the Revue grabs content via the web, cable, or apps and aggregates it all in a slick menu system. Search for Daily Show and you get everything from 15-second YouTube clips to full episodes on Comedy Central. You can even record directly to your DVR. It can multitask, too: Need to settle a debate on whether Shaq was ever on Curb Your Enthusiasm? Check IMDB without interrupting SportsCenter. This isn’t a novelty act; it’s the future of TV.

WIRED Kicks down walls between Internet and cable content. Keyboard controller doubles as a universal remote for A/V components. Up to 1080p resolution. HDMI cable? Included!

TIRED Huge keyboard screams PC, not TV.

Early-adopter price tag. $300, samsung.com

2. Apple TV

Smaller and cheaper than its predecessor, the second-gen Apple TV is also, unfortunately, less capable. Not that Mac addicts will care: The handsome black slab looks cool in any entertainment center, and usability is decent—provided you like getting all your content through iTunes and Netflix. But minor annoyances abound. The lack of a hard drive means you can only rent, not buy, content, and the pack-of-gum-sized remote is better at raising blood pressure than pulling up menus.

WIRED Superb design. Setup so easy Australopithecus afarensis could do it. Plays nice with other products—so long as they were conceived at One Infinite Loop.

TIRED Don’t like iTunes? Too bad. Resolution tops out at 720p. Wi-Fi streaming sometimes stutters.

$99, samsung.com

3. Western Digital TV Live Hub Media Center

This little box is pure geek bait. Besides dual USB ports and automatic syncing for PC and Mac, the Live Hub flaunts an enormous 1-TB hard drive. Try maxing that out. We fed it our Back to the Future, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings trilogies, plus 40 gigs of music, and barely made a dent. Streaming from Netflix or Blockbuster on Demand is fraught with buffering hiccups, though, and the clunky menu, revamped from previous WD streamers, is a chore to navigate; cool features get lost in the backwaters of the interface.

WIRED Even Torrent junkies will be hard-pressed to fill drive. Surprisingly easy to sync with Wi-Fi networks.

TIRED Labyrinthine OS obscures some of the best apps. Blockbuster on Demand … really?

$200, samsung.com

4. Seagate GoFlex TV HD

What offended us most about this train wreck? Not the chintzy chassis—after all, looks aren’t everything. It wasn’t the fuzzy video or inconsistent sound quality, either. Those were actually bearable after navigating the bewildering menus. No, the worst thing about the GoFlex is the wait. We had to press buttons repeatedly, occasionally three or four times, to operate any of the streamer’s functions. If there’s a God watching, he’ll either bestow a firmware update to fix this mess or smite every Seagate GoFlex in existence.

WIRED Setup is fairly straightforward. Supports 1080p video. Slot for loading a Seagate hard drive.

TIRED No hard drive included. System is glacially slow. Are those buttons on the remote just decorative?

$130, samsung.com

Photograph by Nick Veasey

Like most ski instructors, Wagner Custom Skis are both strikingly attractive and performance- oriented. But instead of giving you gentle words of encouragement like Janica would, Wagner loans you a pair of test skis outfitted with two data-crunching sensors called vLinks (pictured), which analyze every nuance of your form—from speed and turn radius to slippage and imbalances. The vLinks are essentially souped-up optical mouses that grab data 6,500 times per second to track movement spatially along X, Y, and Z axes and rotationally, capturing pitch, roll, and yaw. After your day on the slopes, Wagner runs the numbers through proprietary software and combines them with the results of an in-depth questionnaire to craft truly custom equipment. The skis’ materials, stiffness, and shape will match your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses. And unlike Janica, you get to take them home.

In the modern media equivalent of a Greek myth, the Gawker empire was hit hard over the weekend when it was revealed that a hacker group had infiltrated its commenter database via a vulnerability in its source code, exposing the user names and encrypted passwords for over 1.3 million commenters. To further drive the moral of this story home, the group, which goes by the name Gnosis, pulled a dictionary attack and unencrypted about 188K of the easiest ones like “password” or “qwerty” releasing the whole database and source code package in a torrent on Pirate Bay.

Apparently the Gawker data breach was no secret on the Internet and people had offered Gnosis money for the Gawker database before the release. According to a Gnosis representative who gave details to TechCrunch, the group received several offers all in the vicinity of 2K, mostly from spammers and re-salers, “certainly not for good.”

Already Internet nogoodniks are taking advantage of the exploit. A hack-related Twitter attack on Sunday forced users to tweet about the Acai berry diet. TechCrunch Senior Editor Erick Shoenfeld fell prey to what looks like the second iteration of the Acai attack this morning. The New York Post reports that one woman had her entire life “turned upside down“ when her social media accounts were taken over and used to post anti-Semetic messages. Behemoths LinkedIn, Yahoo and World Of Warcraft have all taken measures to protect against further attacks.

Because many people use the same password across multiple sites, this spammer’s delight is going going to get worse before it gets better. Especially if the attacks spread from social media to financial services. It’s time to get an entirely new password if you’ve ever commented on Gawker, for everything, even if your password (like both of mine) is still encrypted in the full_db.txt file. You can check if your information has been exposed here.

@pkafka
Peter Kafka

Damnit. Can't remember all my new passwords.

about 3 hours ago via TweetDeckRetweetReply

When asked why they didn’t accept any of the offers, our Gnosis source replied, “We didn’t sell because we thought that would be too far. It’s one thing finding out that your database was leaked, and its another to find out that it was sold. We are not heartless, we know the implications for selling it, even though a minority of the group wanted to sell it.”

While the Gnosis representative admitted that there are lot of interesting things that can be done with a hacked database, the more serious issue here is the public availability of the PHP source code which leaves open the possibility of further exploits, “Just say if Gawker recovers fully, and all is well, six months down the line some Eastern European hackers jump in and do the whole thing again, because they had access to the source and found a way to exploit it.”

In a comment explaining the breach Gawker founder Nick Denton, who reportedly has a meeting with the FBI today, hinted at hiring an independent security firm to improve security. Not enough says the Gnosis rep, who holds that all the sites’ API keys and cookies are in still in the source code and that while difficult, those with nefarious intent can still impersonate Gawker users, “I would bite the bullet and release all the source code if I were them officially, and go ‘open source.’”

Denton, who is in the unenviable position of being the busiest person in the world at the moment, did not reply to my questions about the measures being taken to further protect users and the ethical implications of such a large breach. He only responded with this link to show that Gawker site traffic hadn’t fallen since the release, when asked about that in an addendum to my first email.

Looking over the tech news today, you’d think Chrome OS is dead. Nevermind that it hasn’t even officially launched yet. Dead.

Early reviews for the Cr-48, the prototype device (which Google has no plans to officially release) running Chrome OS, have ranged from mediocre to poor. And Paul Buchheit, the man often credited with creating Gmail for Google back in the day, kicked up the firestorm this morning when he predicted that Chrome OS would be “killed” next year in favor of Android.

So that’s it, right? Not so fast.

Before I begin, remember that I’m the person who wrote perhaps one of the most scathing long reviews of the Cr-48 and the initial build of Chrome OS. Simply put: neither that device nor the OS are anywhere near where they need to be if Google wants to release these devices to the public. But we knew that would be the case. And Google had to as well. It’s a little bit odd just how many Cr-48s they’re sending out, but they really seem to believe that third-party developers will help solve some of their woes.

I don’t know about that. But I do know that at its core, Chrome OS remains a good idea. And it seems like one that ties directly to Google’s entire essence. If they put the resources necessary into it, and give it time, I do think it has a good chance to succeed.

Of course, both of those are pretty big “ifs”. One issue is that Google, like every other large tech company before it, seems to be spreading itself too thin. Despite some spin to the contrary, the company still essentially makes all of its money from one thing: search advertising. Other revenue sources are starting to emerge, but the actual potential of those businesses is still a bit cloudy — namely because there is a lot of competition in places like display advertising, local, and mobile.

Google may not win all of those spaces. Hell, they may not win any of them. That doesn’t mean they won’t be money-makers, but if they don’t win in the same way they’ve won search and search advertising, none of those businesses will be anywhere near the size of the core business. And that makes Google vulnerable.

But this concern isn’t stopping Google from pushing full steam ahead on dozens of projects ranging from books to self-driving cars. You could argue that all of that stuff is eventually in Google’s interest both from a product and business perspective, but no one, including Google, knows for sure. And because they’re dividing their awesome engineering talent between all of these various projects, they’re making it hard to nail any single project — such as Chrome OS.

My sense is that it’s becoming an empire divided. Sort of like Microsoft. There’s just too much going on, and too many people who aren’t on the same page — or even know what’s going on in other areas of the company. That doesn’t seem to be the case right now at the smaller tech companies like Facebook and Twitter. And perhaps that’s part of the reason why Google is losing talent to those places. Talent like Chrome OS’s chief architect.

But back to Chrome OS. While there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, there’s also plenty of reason to believe in it. Again, fundamentally, it seems to be the closest product to what Google is at its core. That is, the web.

Android is not that. Android is a company Google smartly acquired when they realized that the mobile web was not going to be good enough, fast enough for the smartphone revolution. There needed to be native applications. It will probably go down as the smartest acquisition Google ever made.

But saying that Android will kill Chrome OS is myopic. Right now, apps are all the rage. But again, that’s because web technologies are not yet where they need to be. Apple found this out at first when they asked developers to create web apps and not native applications for the original iPhone. A year later, they had to open up native development. But the original idea was web apps.

And there’s a pretty solid chance that this will still be the future. The web governing bodies move too slowly, but they do move. And eventually mobile web apps should be on par with their native counterparts. And if that’s the case, developers will have a huge incentive to develop once for one unified platform, rather than three or four different ones.

We’ve already seen this happening on the web at large. Web apps are eating into traditional desktop apps for this very reason (along with others like ease of distribution, etc). Mobile is just a newer and different beast. One that has to be tamed natively first.

It seems as if all of this is cyclical. Native apps are the rage on mobile now. Walled gardens are hot because they make it easier to nail user experience — especially on the limited dimensions that mobile devices offer. But open will come charging back. I don’t know when. But I know it will.

And that’s likely to be the web. Again.

And the web is Chrome OS. In following up on his earlier post, Buchheit noted his surprise that an OS with roughly “zero users” had so many fans. But that’s not really the case. Chrome OS already has millions of users — because Chrome OS is just Chrome. Say what you will about the OS, but that’s what it is. It’s Chrome with a few little bells and whistles to make it so that you don’t need all the bloat that Windows has forced down our throats over the years.

In many ways, Chrome OS is the anti-OS. And that’s refreshing. It’s not where it needs to be yet, but when and if it gets there, it could be really, really great. Imagine a computer that boots in two seconds. Imagine one that lasts for an entire day on a single charge. Imagine one that costs less than $100. It could change the world.

Just think about what you use your computer for these days. There’s a very good chance that it’s mainly to use the web. I’m at a cafe right now. Looking around, every single screen has a web browser open. That’s important. That’s why Chrome OS was created.

Again, as I said in my Cr-48 review, unlike Google CEO Eric Schmidt, I don’t believe we yet live in a world fully ready for Chrome OS. So the key is for Google to keep the dream alive long enough for us to get there. That could mean several years of backlash and questions as to why they continue to work on it when Android is exploding. But the answer is because Chrome OS — at least the concept behind it — will eventually win. And when the time is right for that to occur, Google will be in prime position to really hit Microsoft where it hurts — in the wallet.

It’s a nuclear bomb that has been dropped, but could take years to explode.

That’s not a popular concept in today’s instant gratification world. Especially for a publicly traded company that has to answer to shareholders. But if Google does kill Chrome OS next year, mark my words, someone else will create it down the road. And Google, in full Microsoft-mode by that point with Android, will scramble to copy it. And they will lose.

[photo: flickr/andy z]

Carol Bartz has been the fashionable Silicon Valley punching bag for much of 2010, and that’s no doubt escalating in private conversations in Sunnyvale today as hundreds of Yahoo employees are told they no longer have a job– just in time for Christmas!

But give her credit for one savvy move: Not naming herself to Alibaba’s board as she signaled she would earlier in the year. Or, give the board credit for telling her she wasn’t. Whoever made the decision should be applauded by Yahoo’s shareholders because it would have only made an already intractable situation worse.

Yahoo founder and former CEO Jerry Yang sits on the Alibaba board now and has been a pivotal go-between and the only real palatable representative, as relations between the two companies have deteriorated. But Yahoo had a contractual right to take a second seat in October of this year, and Bartz had said she intended to take it.

You can understand why: Alibaba is propping up a good part of Yahoo’s stock price and the CEO might well want to have some input on that investment. But there were two better reasons not to. The first is that Jack Ma & Co. just loathe Bartz. They want out of the relationship, and she is standing in their way. Add to that some diplomatic gaffes when she first took over as CEO, and she’s a walking symbol of everything Alibaba hates about this tie-up with Yahoo.

The second reason is that American Yahoo having two of five board seats of China’s largest ecommerce company wouldn’t be, let’s say, welcome by the Chinese government. Especially, when you consider Softbank’s CEO Masayoshi Son– who also isn’t Yahoo’s biggest admirer– has a seat as well. Right now Alibaba’s board is made up of two foreign company representatives and two Chinese representatives, and Bartz — or any Yahoo US appointment– would tip that balance to three-to-two.

And that could potentially cause more problems for Alibaba, its employees, investors and the millions of small businesses that rely on it– especially as Alipay seeks to expand its foothold into more traditional small business banking services. Alibaba has been a goldmine of an investment for Yahoo because it gets a stake in the largest and fastest growing Internet market in the world, without having to navigate the country itself. If it hampers Alibaba’s ability to do so– what was the point of the investment?

So it wasn’t too surprising that Bartz didn’t take the seat in October, but it is a bit surprising that two months later, Yahoo still hasn’t named someone to the board. The situation with Alibaba isn’t an easy one. Many Yahoo investors want some sort of tax-advantageous sell off of the assets so they can get a pop and get out of the stock, but Bartz knows full well Yahoo will lose at least a quarter of its value once Alibaba is gone.

The only way this situation gets easier the longer Yahoo stalls? If these rumored Yahoo purchases or private-buyout deals happen. In the event of any deal, Alibaba would almost certainly be free because the company has the right of first refusal if the shares go into play, according to a source familiar with the matter. I think I know what Jack Ma wants for Christmas…

When ‘New Twitter‘ launched earlier this year, it brought a slew of new features alongside its UI overhaul. One of the coolest additions was a new Preview mode — click on a tweet, and in some cases you can see the linked photo, YouTube video, or other piece of content in the right sidebar without having to leave your Twitter stream. There’s just one little problem: Twitter only shows embeds for a limited number of services. And today, Embedly has released a new plugin for Chrome called Parrotfish that goes a long way toward fixing it.

According to the Embedly blog, at launch, Twitter was showing previews from 16 services like YouTube and iTunes— they’ve since upped that number to 31, including favorites like Instagram. But there are still a lot of services that Twitter doesn’t support, like The Onion and or ESPN. With Parrotfish installed, the number of supported services jumps up to a whopping 165 providers (you can see a partial list of them below).

It’s a free extension for Chrome, and it includes a handful of other features as well, like additional phishing detection for links shared on Twitter. And there’s another really cool feature: for sites that don’t have supported embeds, Embedly will still generate a preview of the site that displays an image, headline, and brief excerpt (think the previews you see when you share a link on Facebook and you’ll get the idea).

The extension was built by Embedly, a startup that makes it easy for developers to convert a basic link into a rich embed (a link to Amazon can be converted to a visual product overview, for example). The startup recently raised funding from Y Combinator, Lowercase Capital, and SV Angel.

After weeks of no official response from Yahoo on the rumored layoffs taking place this week, a spokesperson for Yahoo has finally confirmed that the company is issuing pink slips to employees today. Yahoo will be letting go approximately 4% of its global workforce, which adds up to around 560 employees.

Here’s the response:

Today’s personnel changes are part of our ongoing strategy to best position Yahoo! for revenue growth and margin expansion and to support our strategy to deliver differentiated products to the marketplace. We’ll continue to hire on a global basis to support our key priorities.

Yahoo! is grateful for the important contributions made by the employees affected by this reduction. We are offering severance packages and outplacement services to these employees.

From previous reports, Yahoo was rumored to be laying off about 5 percent of its worldwide staff of 14,100 (from October’s third quarter earning results), so it’s good news that cuts are lower than expected.

As we wrote a few hours ago, Yahoo employees have been venting about the layoffs on Twitter and via email. According to anecdotal reports, severance packages appear to be pretty generous to employees.

Okay, readers, here’s our holiday gift to you. Come see the coolest movie of the season, TRON LEGACY, with us in New York City or San Francisco on Thursday night. This might be your last chance to join our Tron-tourage. TRON LEGACY officially opens this Friday, December 17th, but we are inviting you to see it with us before the big release date. Buy a ticket for yourself, your friends, your family, and invite a co-worker or two. This is going to be a blast, right before Christmastime. Heck, if you are startup CEO, take the whole company out for drinks before, then bring everyone to the show and call it a holiday party.

Did we mention we are seeing in two of the biggest theaters in each city, with more than 400 seats each, and that it is in 3D? We’ve already bought out the theaters.

We are releasing our next batch of tickets right now. The regular ticket price would be $16.00 or $17.50, depending on the city, but we are asking for a minimum donation of $10 per seat. 100% of your donations will be given to the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital (and we are matching donations up to $10,000.) So far, our two top donors are John Norton from San Francisco, and Chris Kelly from New York. Together, they donated a total of $90 for two tickets. A huge thank you to both of them.

When we released the first batch of tickets yesterday, San Francisco sold out much faster than New York. Let’s see if the NYC startups can beat Silicon Valley in something and fill up their theater faster (just kidding, we love both cities). Here are the details and tickets for each venue:

NEW YORK:

Thursday, December 16th at 11:15 pm EST (check-in)

Regal Union Square Stadium 14 – House # (TBD)
850 Broadway (at 13th)
New York, NY 10003

BUY NEW YORK TRON TICKETS HERE

SAN FRANCISCO:

Thursday, December 16th at 11:15 pm PST (check-in)

AMC Metreon 16 – House #13
101 4th St. (at Market)
San Francisco, CA 94103

BUY SAN FRANCISCO TRON TICKETS HERE

Like Michael said before we do keep a small number of tickets in reserve. So, if tickets sell out before you have a chance to purchase them, leave a comment below on why you want to come with us, true or not, and we may give you a seat to the best party in town! Hope to see you this Thursday!

Yahoo may be tight-lipped about the layoffs that are taking place today within the company, but that’s not stopping employees who have been handed pink slips from going down quietly. A Yahoo employee in the Flickr group just Tweeted “All I got For Christmas from Yahoo is a pink slip. And hugs from Flickr. And a nice package. Adios Y! Good luck on your downslide.” The Tweet was deleted moments later but we have a screenshot.

The layoffs in the Flickr group are consistent with early reports of cutbacks that we received. And the tidbit about a “nice package?” We received this anonymous tip yesterday:

The atmosphere here has never been worse. I have heard of dozens of current employee\’s who have provided years of service who were recently asked by their managers if they wanted to be voluntarily let go in order to save someone elses job…I expect hundreds of Yahoo\’s who will be collecting lucrative severance packages in addition to having had months to secure new jobs for themselves in 2011….Lucky me l get to enjoy an extravagant 6 week vacation abroad on Yahoo\’s dime starting just before xmas. I\’ve already booked travel and am actually going to be meeting up with several other employees who also did essentially the same as me… I have worked here for 5 years and I can say without question I have never seen this place in such shambles.

Here’s another one we received today:

Please keep this anonymous, but I was just laid off from Yahoo! and it sounds like there are more people getting laid off today.

These reports are of course anecdotal, but join the throngs of emails that we are receiving from employees about the layoffs.

From various tips and reports, it appears that Yahoo is laying off about 5 percent of its worldwide staff of 14,100, although some business and product units are getting hit harder than others. The total numer of layoffs is rumored to be 650 to 700.

We’ve reached out Yahoo, as we have repeatedly throughout these layoffs, but have yet to hear back from them. So far they refuse to even acknowledge publicly that layoffs are occurring. We’ll keep you updated if we hear any more news from Yahoo or its employees on the status of layoffs taking place at the company today.