Category: Tech news

IBM is making another acquisition today, buying up computer security software company BigFix. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

BigFix security software identifies all of a company’s PCs, laptops, server and then monitors and flags IT administrators when devices are not in compliance with corporate IT security standards. BigFix’s software promises to make security fixes across at least 500,000 machines in a matter of minutes.

As if Nokia needed yet another wake-up call, self-declared ‘Nokia fanboy since 1999′ Ricky Cadden, aka Symbian Guru is so utterly fed up with the company and the products it releases that he’s quitting his blog (via Mobile Entertainment).

Cadden has purchased himself a Nexus One and seems well on his way to become an Android fanboy.

Anyone with the slightest interest in the mobile industry should read his goodbye post, which is a scathing analysis of why Nokia and Symbian are in the corner where the punches are being served.

Particularly people at Nokia and Symbian.

Here’s a teaser:

I can’t continue to support a manufacturer who puts out such craptastic ‘flagships’ as the N97, and who expects me to use services that even most of Nokia’s own employees don’t use.

I also can’t continue to support a mobile operating system platform that continually buries itself into oblivion by focusing on ‘openness’ while keeping a blind eye towards the obvious improvements that other open platforms have had for several iterations.

As on his decision to put Symbian-Guru on permanent hold:

And so, after 3 years and 8 months, Symbian-Guru.com is officially done. Thanks to Nokia’s consistently piss-poor hardware choices and Symbian’s lack of ability to even remotely compete in terms of features, abilities, and overall experience, I’ve lost my passion for both.

Ouch. Double ouch.

(More on MobileCrunch)

(Image courtesy of Barrett Hall / popofatticus on Flickr)

eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropic investment firm, Omidyar Network, has announced three new grants today, all to non-profits that are helping to add transparency and accountability to government institutions.

In total, the Omidyar Network has given $2.3 million in grants to the three organizations, Global Voices, mySociety and The XYZ Show.

The network has granted the largest amount, $1.2 million, to Global Voices, an online citizen-media platform. Global Voices aims to create and online newsroom for citizen journalists for developing countries, translating citizen journalists’ blogs into more than 20 languages, helping people speak out online in places where their voices may be censored, and helps marginalized communities use technology. The non-profit will use the funds to support citizen voices from underrepresented regions around the world.

UK-based mySociety will receive $575,000 to help organizations in Africa develop digital tools and websites to help hold their governments to account. mySociety helps power a number of democracy and transparency websites in the United Kingdom.

The XYZ Show, a Kenyan political satire TV program, will receive $500,000 to expand reach and engagement via web and mobile channels and to support an upcoming season of the show.

Some of these investments could be part of Omidyar’s $30 million pledge towards backing high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets, specifically Sub-Saharan Africa and India.

Local business directory and search engine Local.com this morning announced the acquisition of the assets of OCTANE360, a technology startup based out of Los Angeles that provides domain-based local advertising solutions to small businesses, domain portfolio owners, agencies and channel partners.

Under the terms of the agreement, Local.com is paying $5 million in cash and stock with an earnout of up to $5.9 million if certain performance criteria are met in the two-year period following the closing.

OCTANE360 will become a wholly-owned division of Local.com Corporation.

Founded in 2008, OCTANE360 offers a number of services to its client base, which consists mostly of small businesses and agencies, on a direct, wholesale or private label basis. The services it offers include targeting and registration of geo-category based local website domains (examples), website creation, hosting and management, an ad exchange system to manage the selection and deployment of ad inventory and a content marketplace for the management of geo-category content.

Following the acquisition, OCTANE360 will be managed within Local.com’s Sales & Ad Services business unit, and its products and services will be utilized by the company’s Owned & Operated and Network business units. OCTANE360 CEO Adam Rioux will become Local.com’s vice president, leading the newly added division.

Finally, Local.com also announced the closing of a $30 million revolving credit facility with Silicon Valley Bank. The facility, secured by all of the company’s assets, is expected to be used primarily for general working capital and to fund more ‘strategic growth initiatives’.

Sex.com, considered to be one of the world’s most valuable domain names for obvious reasons, is up for sale at domain broker Sedo along with two related USPTO trademark registrations.

Sedo has entered an exclusive agreement with Sex.com owner Escom to privately broker the sale of the domain name.

Sex.com was sold to Escom in January 2006 for a reported $14 million price, widely cited as the highest priced domain sale in history. As of February 18th, 2010, the domain name has been ordered to be sold at a foreclosure auction.

As of March 18th, 2010, in a last minute twist to the story, the foreclosure auction looked likely to be cancelled as creditors of Escom filed an involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition against the company in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California. This action was taken by creditors to prevent a possible loss of value by selling the name as a foreclosure auction.

The Central California Bankruptcy Court earlier this month issued an order approving a settlement between the managers of Escom, which basically meant that the company could move forward with trying to sell the domain name via Sedo.

If you’re interested in getting your hands on it, you can email Sedo at [email protected].

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is showing early signs of a ‘comeback’, reversing a practically constant slide in browser usage over the past few years for the month of June, according to figures just released by Net Applications.

Still the dominant browser in terms of market share any way you slice it, Internet Explorer appears to be reclaiming share at the expense of Mozilla Firefox, specifically, with Google Chrome and Safari also showing decent growth for the first part of the year.

According to Net Applications, IE had already reversed its trend in the U.S., gaining usage share. In June, the trend reversal has apparently become global.

Internet Explorer gained .57% in June across all operating systems with Internet Explorer 8.0 gaining .66% worldwide. The gains for Internet Explorer were the largest in Europe (+.88%) and Asia (+.81%).

Mozilla’s Firefox, meanwhile, dropped in usage from 24.3 percent to 23.8 percent, while Chrome saw modest growth climbing from 7.0 percent to 7.2 percent from May to June 2010. Usage of number four, Apple’s Safari, increased from 4.8 percent to 4.9 percent, while that of Opera’s browser slipped from 2.4 percent to 2.3 percent. The latter browser just got a significant update with the release of Opera 10.60.

Net Applications attributes the increase in usage to Microsoft’s ‘Confidence’ campaign, but other factors may be involved as well, like the success of Windows 7 and the browser choice screen that now turns up with new Windows installations in Europe (I think a lot of people choose to install IE8 out of familiarity with the browser’s name and logo).

Microsoft was quick to gloat over the increase in usage in a blog post by Ryan Gavin, Senior Director, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing. Gavin points out that Internet Explorer 8 grew faster than Google Chrome last month, calling the trend ‘encouraging news’.

He’s cautious enough to say that he and his team don’t judge business on just two months of data, but goes on to write that the future is looking bright for Internet Explorer. Indeed, the previews we’ve been shown of Internet Explorer 9, the next version of the browser, seem very promising.

Who said IE was dead?

Arguably a little late to the party, Yahoo! today announced the release of their very first Android apps for Messenger and Mail, a Yahoo! search widget for your home screen and some HTML5-optimized sites for the iPhone.

The Messenger app does pretty much what you’d expect: it allows you to chat with your Yahoo!/MSN friends, and can run in the background (with push notifications) for that always-on availability. If you live in Canada, Indonesia, India, Kuwait, Malaysia, Philippines, Pakistan, Thailand, United States, or Vietnam, you can also use the app to send SMS to friends, which will appear in the current conversation.

A mere two weeks after releasing the beta version, Opera Software has just announced that Opera 10.60 is now available in its final iteration.

The desktop browser client, as mentioned in our earlier post, comes with geolocation (see an interactive map with downloads of the Opera browser in real time here), a fresh UI, WebM support for HTML5 video and speed improvements.

In fact, with the final version of Opera 10.60, the browser scores more than 50 percent faster than its predecessor, the company claims.

This should translate into a faster browsing experience for users on JavaScript-heavy sites like Gmail and Facebook, so it shouldn’t be too hard to do some rudimentary speed testing to see how it stacks up against the likes of Chrome, Firefox and IE.

Give it a whirl and tell us what you think.

San Francisco based Samasource is on a mission to help women, refugees and young people in developing countries earn a living wage on the Internet. The model is straightforward – Samasource works with companies that need certain types of relatively simple tasks done, like database cleanup, translations, transcriptions, etc. Samasource charges companies on a per action basis, and then pays workers in Kenya, Uganda, India, Pakistan and Haiti to do the work.

The tasks are generally more complicated than Mechanical Turk stuff, and the company pays a minimum of $1/hour to workers who were previously living on less than $3/day. Some workers, who build up to more complex tasks, make as much as $10/hour.

And what’s more important is that these workers develop a long term relationship with Samasource. They work via local companies that organize and hire the workers and do quality control, and that model seems to work. Today the company has 800 workers in various countries and wants to scale that up significantly. CEO Leila Janah says there is an infinite amount of labor available at a few dollars per hour, and that these jobs make a huge difference in the lives of the workers. There are 4 billion people living on less than $3/day, she says, and $1.4 billion living on less than $1/day.

They are building slowly because they don’t want to lay people off if there’s no work, so part of their job is to find long term customers with a steady work flow. They recently signed a $450,000 contract with a new customer that will allow them to hire another 200 or so workers, for example. To date Samasource has made $1.2 million in gross revenue, and all but 15% or so of that was distributed to workers.

Samasource is, like Kiva, a non profit organization. What this company really needs is to get a large government or other grant to try to scale their work. A large part of Janah’s time seems to be spent on chasing that money, and a few million dollars as a grant would go a long way to providing thousands of people with work. Or, Samasource could turn into a for-profit entity and raise more traditional venture capital for growth. But that would limit a lot of the goodwill the entity now receives as a full fledged non profit. We discuss all of that in our interview. And we also discover that Janah believes in her company so much that she had it tattooed onto her wrist.

I actually didn’t know much about Samasource before meeting Leila last weekend at Foo Camp. But we’re already likely to become customers – we have a huge need for data massaging on Crunchbase as well as transcriptions for TechCrunchTV.

The interview is below (the tattoo is at the end, if that’s all you want to see):

Amazon continues its revamping of the Kindle line. Fresh off of big price cuts for the traditional model, a roll-out of picture/video software for Apple devices, new social media features, and a new Android app, Amazon today announced a new version of its larger model of the Kindle: the DX. The key differences? It’s cheaper, sharper, and available in black (or as they call it, graphite).

The Kindle DX is particularly interesting because of its 9.7 inch screen — the exact same size as the screen on the iPad. And now, with the new black trim around the screen, the Kindle DX looks more like an iPad. Of course, the key difference is that the iPad’s screen is both in full color, and it’s a touchscreen — the Kindle DX still has neither of those features. What it does have, is a more attractive price: it’s now $379.

The price cut is also interesting. Previously, the Kindle DX was $489, which is only $10 cheaper than the cheapest version of the iPad. Undoubtedly, that was a very hard sell for Amazon to make. It’s still going to be a hard sell, but Amazon is pushing hard for the reading crowd with 50 percent better contrast and darker fonts on its e-ink screen.

Not surprisingly, Amazon is also playing up the Kindle’s access to a huge digital library — one larger than the one the iPad has access to. Amazon says that over 200,000 titles have been added to the store in just the past six month (in other words, since the iPad was announced). And they now have over 620,000 books in the store to buy — on top of 1.8 million free, out-of-print books.

It’s still not clear why anyone would get a Kindle DX when they can get the iPad for a little bit more — or a regular Kindle for much less. But it’s clear that Amazon it willing to try different things to see what, if anything works.

The Kindle DX is available for pre-order now. It ships July 7.

Embed Anything is a recently launched startup that blends image sharing with an ad network. The startup’s technology allows allows anyone to quickly grab a code to embed a publisher’s image directly from the image. The image, once embedded on another site, will be displayed with an overlay ad, a follow link back to the original image’s site and will be clickable back to the source.

Embed Anything shares ad inventory revenue the image owners, giving them complete control on what they want to display in the ad space, which can be sourced by the ad network of their choice, for 50 percent of the impressions. For the other 50 percent of impressions, Embed Anything can display an ad of their choice, which is powered by Google AdSense. Eventually Embed Anything will allow for an RSS feed or Twitter feed to be displayed within the ad space as well. An example of a sample publisher site can be found here.

The startup also provides an interface that gives publishers stats on where their images are being embedded, the number of impressions they’re receiving, as well as the ability to remove any unwanted image embeds. The technology is free and fairly simple, involving a single piece of code into a template or through a WordPress plug-in.

The idea is to help publishers profit off of image theft, which Embed Anything says happens often. While this may be ideal for publishers, some of the people who are embedding these images may not want an image with an ad in it on their sites.

The startup competes with GumGum and Image Space Media.

Lookout, a company that offers security data backup services for smartphones, has reached a significant milestone: the startup now has one million users for its security application after only six months in operation.

Lookout, which just raised $11 million from Accel, Khosla and others, says the growth in smartphone adoption, mobile app downloads and increased consumer awareness of mobile security threats have helped make the offering a popular and necessary option for users. While smartphone use is growing rapidly, there are security risks associated with the increased data and application usage on these devices. Similar to a PC, users need to protect their phones from malware, viruses, data loss and more. Lookout’s web-based, cloud-connected application indentifies and block threats on a consumer’s phone. Users simply download the software to a device, and it will act as a virus protector much like security software downloaded to a computer.

For now Lookout, which is on more than 400 mobile networks in 170 countries, is only available for BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile devices. Lookout has over 80% of its users on Android and BlackBerry with the remaining users on Windows Mobile. And 70% of users are in the US.

Over the past six months, Lookout has seen the number of malware and spyware threats per hundred devices double to nine in every 100 devices being affected annually. Lookout has helped find more than 130,000 lost or stolen phones, backed-up over 87 million photos, and backed-up over 300 million contacts.

Lookout’s CEO tells me that the next step for the company is to start looking at monetization angles with product development. While the application is free, Lookout sees potential in offering an enterprise version of its software.

Earlier this afternoon, Mozilla submitted what would be its first iPhone application to the App Store. No, it’s not Firefox — well, not exactly.

Mozilla has submitted an app called Firefox Home for approval. While it’s not the native Firefox web browser, it is an app that lets you easily move your Firefox browsing history, bookmarks, and open tabs to the iPhone. You can then either open these within the app or with mobile Safari.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: no way Apple accepts a Firefox app. But actually, I’m pretty sure they will.

Again, this app is not a new web browser, it’s just a tool for moving your data from your desktop to the phone. The browser that is built-in to the app is a WebKit-based one built with the tools Apple includes in the SDK. On its FAQ page, Mozilla says the following about Firefox for the iPhone:

Does this mean Firefox will be available on the iPhone?
No. We do not have plans to ship the Firefox browser for the iPhone. Due to constraints with the OS environment and distribution, we cannot provide users Firefox for the iPhone.

Apple did allow Opera to put its browser on the iPhone to the surprise of some. But there’s some talk that the only reason Apple did that as a way to quiet critics — because they knew the app wasn’t that great. After an initial surge in downloads, you don’t hear too much about it anymore. Mozilla, which is the world second most popular browser (well ahead of Safari), might be a different story. And Mozilla apparently knows it.

This app also isn’t Firefox Sync. Sync is a two way syncing of information between Firefox browsers on different machines. Firefox Home is a one-way push to the iPhone. “We only sync changes since the last update for bookmarks and open tabs. And history is limited to about 2000 items. And there is no auto-sync. The median disk space used by Sync users is about 2-3 MB total for all of their Sync data and Home only has a subset of that.,” Mozilla says.

Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler seems worried that Apple may not approve the app. But as long as it’s not using any undocumented APIs, I can’t see a reason why Apple would reject it — at least not without a lot of outrage, once again. And the app looks good, it should be very useful to users of Firefox.

Yesterday, Wired published a report detailing an issue with Foursquare privacy, whereby a program could effectively harvest Foursquare checkin data by constantly refreshing venue pages and looking to see which users were showing up in the “Who’s Been Here” section, which shows a grid of users who recently checked in at that venue. According to the article, white hat coder Jesper Andersen was able to log around 70% of all check-ins in San Francisco — or 875,000 checkins — over the last three weeks.

Today, Foursquare has addressed the report with a post on its official blog outlining the issue. As data breaches go I’m not sure this one was especially “sophisticated”, as Foursquare keeps calling it, but they apologize and explain what they’ve done to fix it.

From the Foursquare blog:

A little over a week ago (on Monday the 21st), our developers were alerted to a problem that enabled sophisticated users, by continuously scraping venue pages from our website through anonymous gateways, to capture private check-in information that users didn’t intend to share with the general public. Three days later, our team began rolling out a number of solutions to this problem. First, we ensured that any user that had opted out of appearing in the “Who’s Here” lists no longer appeared in the “Who’s Been Here” photo mosaics on our site (this fix went live last Thursday). Second, we updated the language on our “Settings” page to clarify what opting into the “Who’s Here” feature entails. Third, we randomized the order of the photos being posted under the ”Who’s Been Here” headings on our venue pages to prevent anyone from scraping this data to try to estimate check-in times of various users.

This won’t be the last time we hear about privacy issues with location-based services, where security and privacy are going to be key. That said, the privacy concerns for Foursquare, where users are explicitly checking into venues, are less worrisome than if this had happened with one that constantly monitors your location, like Google Latitude. And privacy hasn’t really been Foursquare’s big selling point, either — don’t expect to see much of an uproar from its users over this.

Wesabe, an online personal finance site that looked to help users better keep track of their spending trends, is shutting down. The startup’s homepage now consists of a letter to Wesabe users instructing them to download their account information by July 31, at which point nearly all of the service’s features will be taken offline and data deleted. The lone feature that will remain online indefinitely is the site’s ‘Groups’ page, where members can trade advice about their finances (this part of the site is being taken over by one of Wesabe’s current customers).

In the letter, Wesabe CEO Marc Hedlund writes that the site has been operating on a shoestring budget lately, which has led to both some poor customer experiences and the potential for security issues, which is why they’re pulling the plug:

In recent months Wesabe has been operating on a shoestring budget, with support from some of the developers and operations people who made up our core team. While the site has remained online and we continue to hear from people who find it helpful, we have not been able to provide the support people need to use it for something so central as financial management. I’ve felt especially terrible that some members have a good initial experience but then hit a problem, often after investing many hours, and aren’t able to get help with it. That’s obviously a bad experience, and not what we want to offer. Also, because Wesabe stores such highly sensitive data, continuing to operate the service with shoestring operations and security staff is not acceptable, and we do not want to continue accepting new accounts if we cannot guarantee the security level we believe our service requires.

Wesabe was showing some growth in April 2009 when it launched its iPhone app, but traffic has dropped steadily since then. The site has largely been overshadowed by competitor Mint, which launched at (and won) TechCrunch50 and later went to on be acquired for $170 million by Intuit.

We’ve been covering the site since 2006. In Feburary 2007 it raised $700,000 from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and later that year raised $4 million in a round led by Union Square Ventures.

Wesabe has been added to the Deadpool.