Category: Tech news

Sure it looks horrible and the video is awful, but believe us when we tell you that the same guys who created the Spirit jailbreak have ported Flash to the iPhone. The video, apparently taken through the pinhole camera truck the Bloodhound Gang built back in the 1980s to see where they were being taken after a kidnapping, shows a Strongbad clip.

This is obviously a proof of concept in its purest sense – it’s basically a bit of Flash ported to the iPod Touch using some unknown method – but it proves that it’s possible. You can keep your eye on the project by following Comex on Twitter.

Read more…

Apparently it’s former MySpace exec venture capital funding day. Earlier we announced the BeachMint news ($5 million). And now gogobot, a new travel website founded by MySpace’s former GM International Travis Katz and Ori Zaltzman, the former Chief Architect of Yahoo Boss, are announcing an impressive venture funding of their own. They first hinted about their startup in March.

They aren’t saying much about gogobot now, except that they think online travel is still woefully inadequate when it comes to discovery and that adding a social layer may fix that problem. “Online travel is a $100 billion a year market in the U.S., and there has been very little innovation in this space in the last ten years,” Katz tells me. “We will leverage the social graph to make planning trips easy and fun.”

I’m in! If you know where you want to go and don’t want to extend discovery beyond price comparisons, Trip Advisor reviews and maybe a few pictures and some descriptive text then current services are fine. But let’s say you’re planning to take a month off and want to rent a house somewhere in the world but you don’t know, say, the perfect village and villa in Tuscany to stay (something I’m currently planning for August). “Will you help me figure that out?” I asked Katz. “Yes,” he says, but pointing out that the site isn’t just for long and/or expensive vacations. But for now, he won’t say exactly how it will all work.

Launch is still months away, but whatever they’re planning seems to have impressed Battery Ventures. The venture firm put $4 million into gogobot and principal Satya Patel has joined the board of directors. And former MySpace founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe is an advisor to the company.

Want to know more? Sign up to join the private beta when it launches on their home page. The company, which is based in Palo Alto, is also aggressively hiring – details here.

News Corp. has just announced that it has acquired e-reader Skiff from Hearst and made an investment in Journalism Online, news monetization venture founded by Leo Hindery, Steve Brill, and Gordon Crovitz. The financial terms of both agreements were not disclosed. Additionally, Jon Housman has been named President of News Corporation’s digital journalism initiatives.

As we’ve written in the past, Skiff is sort of like a Roku box for magazines. The e-reading platform is focused on the representation of magazines in their native format and aims to help move paid subscribers to a different delivery system as quickly and easily as possible.

Journalism Online aims to help news publishers monetize content. Publishers can choose adjust multiple options for paid access. This includes the “metered model” or having to pay for full access. Of course, we know that News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch is a fan of paid content so, the investment isn’t surprising. But’s unclear if an how Murdoch and the company will be integrating Journalism Online’s technologies into News Corp. properties.

In the release, Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer for News Corp said “Both Skiff and Journalism Online serve as key building blocks in our strategy to transform the publishing industry and ensure consumers will have continued access to the highest quality journalism.”

At Wired’s Business Conference in New York City, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz announced that the coffee giant is now offering free Wifi to customers beginning July 1.

Currently, you can connect to AT&T WiFi in Starbucks stores, which is free for two hours if you have a registered Starbucks card. And if you are an AT&T customer, you can access connectivity in coffee shops for free. If you’re not a registered Starbucks or AT&T customer, you have to pay $3.99 for two consecutive hours of Wi-Fi access.

Schultz said at the conference that the company aims to launch its own digital network by creating a third place between home and work. Starbucks wants to create proprietary way to give access to new sources of information and content that you can get only at Starbucks. He addded, “The rules of engagement in building a major brand have changed forever. The consumer is so cynical and distrusting of everything, there has to be a level of intimacy and trust.”

Starbucks is partnering with a number of media companies, including Yahoo, for this new digital venture. When you go to Starbucks and log-in to wifi, you’ll be served with targeted content and news. Yahoo will help run the portal and Starbucks is also working with AOL to integrate local content from Patch in the network. And you’ll get free versions of content from WSJ, Zagat, New York Times, USA Today, and free pick of the week iTunes download. Additionally, there will be no advertising on Starbuck’s digital portal.

Online gambling company 888 has bought the assets of the Mytopia social games development studio from Real Dice. Mytopia, which launched at TechCrunch50 in 2008, is an online social gaming community where people can play casual games together in real time.

The base price is $18 million cash with an additional earn out payment that will be made calculated on the basis of net profit for the calendar year 2011. The total payment to Real Dice for Mytopia’s games is capped at $48 million.

Mytopia sold 12 games in total to 888, which is planning to add microtransactions to the games to monetize the platform. Mytopia also offers a platform that allows developers to write code once and have it immediately distributed and syndicated to various smartphones and mobile operating systems. 888 has licensed this technology along with the acquisition of the social gaming studio.

NPR always has among the most popular news apps in the iTunes Store. Its latest iPad app has been downloaded 350,000 times, according to CEO Vivian Schiller, who spoke this morning at Wired’s Business Conference in New York City. Considering that only about 2 million iPads have been sold, about one in six iPad owners have downloaded the iPad app.

Asked whether she minds getting links from Google News, as Rupert Murdoch and other news organizations like to complain apparently do, she responded: “I have no problems with that whatsoever. I am not in the camp of Google bashers, Google sends a lot of traffic to us. We want our content to be as easily discoverable as possible.”

Of course, NPR’s mission is to provide free journalism to the public, so she is not a big fan of paywalls either. As listeners shift to the Web, NPR is committed to following them and serving them there as well. Ignoring consumer preference, she notes, would be a “path to destruction.” She estimates NPR’s Website traffic to currently be around 12 million unique visitors per month.

To the extent that other traditional media outlets talk actually start erecting paywalls and blocking Google, NPR and other open media sites will benefit.

Schiller also announced the development of a new API for public media broadcasters called the Public Media Platform to share news, content, and data among the websites of public broadcasters, such as NPR and PBS. The Public Media Platform (PMP) will be funded by a $1 million grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The PMP will initially be available to public broadcasters and eventually may open up to other media organizations as well, although it is unclear to what extent commercial media sites or developers will be able to tap into the PMP.

In April, we reported that Diego Berdakin and MySpace co-founder Josh Berman, the two heads of News Corp’s incubator Slightshot Labs, were leaving the company. They haven’t wasted any time in launching their next project: today, less than two months later, Berman and Berdakin are announcing that they’ve raised $5 million from New Enterprise Associates and Anthem Venture Partners for a new startup called BeachMint, Inc.

At this point details on the startup are still a little sparse, but Berman and Berdakin were willing to talk broadly about what BeachMint will be doing. The company will be entering the social commerce arena, with plans to launch a suite of sites catering to individual verticals. The goal, Berman says, is to drive people to curated, authentic choices with recommendations from celebrities and other ‘influencers’— think Kim Kardashian’s association with ShoeDazzle, but for numerous different verticals. Berman also noted that these recommendations will be authentic and may come from people who have less high profiles (it sounds like the sites may tap into your social graph).

The company will be launching its first vertical before this holiday season, with plans to announce it by the end of summer. Each new vertical will have its own brand, but all of the site names will likely incorporate the ‘Mint’ branding (e.g. BookMint or WineMint, though Berdakin was quick to point out that neither of these would be part of the company’s initial launch). Berdakin and Berman are well aware of the established competitors like Gilt Groupe, but believe that there’s still a huge opportunity in online retail spending, explaining that only 6% of retail spending happens online.

The Santa Monica-based company currently has seven engineers building out its product. We’ll have more on BeachMint this summer.

Product: 7 Home Tablet

Manufacturer: Archos

Wired Rating: 5

Following the rather disastrous reception of its Windows-based Archos 9 PC Tablet, the company is back at the tablet game again with a wholly different approach: A cheap, Android-based tablet with a 7-inch screen.

Stripped to its absolute basics, this is a tablet for the user who expects the bare minimum from his gadgetry. This isn’t a smartphone without the phone — it’s a smartphone without the phone or the smart. Nothing in the tablet takes advantage of the features that even basic Android devices on the market provide. Without multitouch, GPS, an accelerometer, or even a Home button, the use case for the Archos 7 can be frustrating.

Fortunately, the device does offer a couple of key features that make it a shade better than useless, namely a headphone jack and a kickstand so you don’t have to prop it up on your knee.

The OS is stripped down and over a year old, but technically it’s still running Android. That means it has a web browser, an e-mail client, and a few basic applications pre-installed, but nothing that will knock your lederhosen off.

Rather, Archos keeps this device squarely focused on its heritage as a media player, albeit a limited one. Without a hard drive, you’re limited to the 8 GB of onboard Flash memory, expandable up to 32 GB with a microSDHC card. The screen, at 800 x 480 pixels, looks surprisingly good, though the speakers are decidedly not impressive. If nothing else, the Archos 7 is a solid “give it to the kids” media player. Load it up with movies for the car ride or plane and don’t look in the back seat.

If you want to use it for real work, though, you’re in trouble. The touchscreen is almost as buggy and difficult to use as the Archos 9’s, and performance is sluggish. The OS implementation clearly has some issues, too. For example, the device started giving us the “zero battery life” alert after just three hours of video playback, but didn’t actually die until more than 8 and a half hours had passed.

But hey, it’s 200 bucks. If nothing else, that’s extremely cheap for a device with a screen this large. Admittedly the Archos 7 doesn’t do much, but at least it doesn’t pretend to be magical.

WIRED Extremely affordable. Sharp and bright screen. Wi-Fi equipped. Keeps kids quiet better than a ball gag and a roll of duct tape. (Kidding!)

TIRED No hardware features (like an accelerometer) to speak of. Wretched typing experience on old-school resistive touchscreen. Old Android version installed (1.5 not kidding!).

This iPad security breach story from last week continues to spin way out of control, and in our opinion fingers are being pointed in the wrong direction. The FBI is investigating the incident, and a few hours ago AT&T finally communicated with customers to tell them about the breach (I’ve reprinted the AT&T email below).

Here’s what happened: Goatse Security discovered a rather stupid vulnerability on the AT&T site that returned a customer email if a valid serial number for the iPAD SIm card was entered. An invalid number returned nothing, a valid number returned a customer email address. Goatse created a script and quickly downloaded 114,000 customer emails. They then turned all that over to Gawker, after, they say, AT&T was notified and the vulnerability was closed. Gawker published some of the data with the emails removed. Says Goatse: “All data was gathered from a public webserver with no password, accessible by anyone on the Internet. There was no breach, intrusion, or penetration, by any means of the word.”

AT&T is characterizing the incident as “unauthorized computer “hackers” maliciously exploited a function designed to make your iPad log-in process faster by pre-populating an AT&T authentication page with the email address you used to register your iPad for 3G service.”

We don’t see much hacking here, and we don’t see anything really malicious. AT&T was effectively publishing the information on the open Internet, and if there’s an FBI investigation, it should be focused on them, not Goatse. The fact is that Goatse was performing a public service by discovering and publishing the vulnerability – they made the Internet slightly safer by doing so. I agree completely with their blog post responding to the AT&T letter. Unless additional facts come out suggesting that Goatse has used the information inappropriately, such as selling it, or has otherwise done some bad act hasn’t yet been alleged, they are completely in the right here.

In fact, companies like AT&T should offer people a reward for discovering vulnerabilities like this, although they’d probably ask that the information be given to them privately after discovered. But by shaming AT&T publicly other companies may take security marginally more seriously, which is good for users. And AT&T customers need to know that AT&T is so careless about security.

Se we’re doing something we’ve never done before – awarding Goatse a Crunchie award for public service – a beautiful 14 inch tall custom designed gorilla statue celebrating technology. Until now we’ve only given these awards at our annual Crunchies award ceremony.

Here’s the AT&T email:

June 13, 2010

Dear Valued AT&T Customer,

Recently there was an issue that affected some of our customers with AT&T 3G service for iPad resulting in the release of their customer email addresses. I am writing to let you know that no other information was exposed and the matter has been resolved. We apologize for the incident and any inconvenience it may have caused. Rest assured, you can continue to use your AT&T 3G service on your iPad with confidence.

Here’s some additional detail:

On June 7 we learned that unauthorized computer “hackers” maliciously exploited a function designed to make your iPad log-in process faster by pre-populating an AT&T authentication page with the email address you used to register your iPad for 3G service. The self-described hackers wrote software code to randomly generate numbers that mimicked serial numbers of the AT&T SIM card for iPad – called the integrated circuit card identification (ICC-ID) – and repeatedly queried an AT&T web address. When a number generated by the hackers matched an actual ICC-ID, the authentication page log-in screen was returned to the hackers with the email address associated with the ICC-ID already populated on the log-in screen.

The hackers deliberately went to great efforts with a random program to extract possible ICC-IDs and capture customer email addresses. They then put together a list of these emails and distributed it for their own publicity.

As soon as we became aware of this situation, we took swift action to prevent any further unauthorized exposure of customer email addresses. Within hours, AT&T disabled the mechanism that automatically populated the email address. Now, the authentication page log-in screen requires the user to enter both their email address and their password.

I want to assure you that the email address and ICC-ID were the only information that was accessible. Your password, account information, the contents of your email, and any other personal information were never at risk. The hackers never had access to AT&T communications or data networks, or your iPad. AT&T 3G service for other mobile devices was not affected.

While the attack was limited to email address and ICC-ID data, we encourage you to be alert to scams that could attempt to use this information to obtain other data or send you unwanted email. You can learn more about phishing by visiting the AT&T website.

AT&T takes your privacy seriously and does not tolerate unauthorized access to its customers’ information or company websites. We will cooperate with law enforcement in any investigation of unauthorized system access and to prosecute violators to the fullest extent of the law.

AT&T acted quickly to protect your information – and we promise to keep working around the clock to keep your information safe. Thank you very much for your understanding, and for being an AT&T customer.

Sincerely,

Dorothy Attwood
Senior Vice President, Public Policy and Chief Privacy Officer for AT&T

I get the feeling that we have just participated in a dare — or the indulgence of a delusion. What else could explain the utterly insane spectacle that just took place in Galen Center here in LA? We were promised an experience. I experienced something, all right. Not something I’m in a hurry to experience again, I’m afraid.

Those of you who weren’t present for this indecipherable boondoggle are probably wondering what the fuss is all about. The fact is there’s no fuss at all; the Project Natal Experience was a complete non-event — and I’d have said that even if the device, name, and launch titles didn’t all leak a couple hours before the show. But the fact also is that this was just too weird not to share. In detail. Do you like to read? Good.

Continue reading…

As we all know by now, comments on the Internet are a fascinating thing. My favorite involve the word “fanboy.” Generally speaking, it means you write (stories, tweets, whatever) about a certain topic with a positive angle. It’s meant to be derogatory, but the truth is that it’s so overused that it’s almost completely meaningless. But for the sake of this post, I’ll play ball. I have a confession to make: I’m a fanboy.

Now, I didn’t say specifically what I’m a fanboy of, because there have been too many titles bestowed upon me over the years. At various points over just the past few months, I’ve been an Apple fanboy, a Google fanboy, a Twitter fanboy, a Facebook fanboy, a Foursquare fanboy, a Gowalla fanboy, and yes, even a Microsoft fanboy. Never mind that most of companies compete with one another, so it would be hard to be a true fanboy of multiple ones without misrepresenting your fanboydom of a few of the others. We’ll just say I’m a fanboy and leave it at that. And that leaves me wondering: why wouldn’t you want to be a fanboy?

To me, the diluted version of the term means that you’re passionate about a certain technology. And isn’t that why any of us do what we do? Sure, you’ll throw the term “objective journalism” at me, but what does that really mean? Is any journalism truly objective? Every human being has an opinion one way or another about everything. Objective journalism is simply the practice of suppressing that opinion. For certain news fields, like politics, I see the value in that (at times). For technology, I’m not sure that I do.

If I’m reading about a new technology, I want to know what the author actually thinks. Take a new tech product for example, I want to know if an author thinks it’s any good or not. Or a new startup — same thing. Or some move a big technology company is making. It’s all the same. If I wanted a completely objective take on the story, I’d read the press release or the spec sheet. Actually, no I wouldn’t. Those are usually more full of bullshit than even the most biased reporting (wait, my laptop is supposed to have 12 hours of battery life on a single charge — it says so right there).

Others will say that the term fanboy doesn’t just mean you love something — it’s that you love something and are unfair against its competitors because of that love. That’s the only way I can explain the angry comments when I write posts with the headlines “An iPhone lover’s take on…” “Your bias is obvious!” the commenters will shout. Well yes, I put it in the title. How observant.

But that’s the funny thing about being a fanboy — you can be a fanboy of anything. You can switch your alliances at a moments notice. There is nothing tying you to the love of a certain product. As I’ve written numerous times before, in the 1990s I would have been called a Microsoft fanboy — I loved Microsoft products and hated Apple ones. Today, I’m called an Apple fanboy. Times change. And they’ll change again.

As always, my only requirement for being a fanboy of a product is that it has to (in my mind) be the best. Right now, in some cases those are Apple products. In some other cases, those are Google products. In some other cases, it’s Twitter. Etc…

Angry commenters seem to want to believe that you can’t actually just like a product. There has to be some ulterior motive. Either you’re paid off, or you’re just blind. Or both. It’s simply an easier (non) argument to make than having an actual discourse.

Make no mistake, those people are fanboys too — but worse. They feel the subject of their adulation is under attack, so they become rabid. But I’ll repeat that I think overall this is a good thing. Balance and all that.

In closing, let me state again for the record that I’m fine with the fanboy label. Apple fanboy, Google fanboy, Twitter fanboy, etc — those are all appropriate and welcomed. But it may be easier (and less contradictory) to just say that I’m a fanboy of good products. And I always will be.

[photo: flickr/terryjohnston]

(Psssst. I’m leaving …)

Yelp co-founder and CTO Russel Simmons, pictured here (left) with fellow co-founder and chief exec Jeremy Stoppelman, is leaving the company. Simmons will be transitioning to an advisor role and take some time off to travel, we’ve confirmed with the company.

Stoppelman and Simmons were both early software engineering employees at PayPal and went on to brainstorm new Internet startup ideas at a business incubator not long after the company was acquired by eBay.

Out came Yelp, which first started as an email recommendation service, was transformed to become a local business review site for the San Francisco area in October 2004 and has now grown into an international network that receives some 31 million unique visitors per month.

Six years later, Simmons is now transitioning to an advisor role at Yelp, we’re told.

Stoppelman says Simmons remains a “significant” shareholder in the company and will continue to provide support and advice as needed. No word on replacement yet.

As for what’s next for Simmons: first, some “much deserved time off to travel” and then probably yet another startup, likely as a founding member.

Yelp has raised $56 million in venture capital to date, from investors like ex-PayPal exec Max Levchin, Bessemer Venture Partners, Benchmark Capital and DAG Ventures. Elevation Partners earlier this year said it would be investing up to $100 million in the Internet company – so far it has injected 1/4 of that.

Late last year, we heard from reliable sources that Yelp was in acquisition talks with Google regarding a whispered $550+ million buy-out agreement. Later, we learned that Stoppelman walked away from the all-but-signed deal to move forward with the company on its own.

(Picture via Fast Company, photograph by Dan Escobar)

This story fascinates me on so many levels. Here are the basic facts: Zynga has been moving its games off of the Tagged social network and encouraging users to migrate to Facebook. Earlier this month Zynga gave out a special code to Mafia Wars users on Tagged that would give them $120 worth of currency on Facebook when they completed the migration. But Zynga didn’t cap the number of people that could use the code, and the form for entering it didn’t give users much of idea what it was for anyway. So word spread, and tens of thousands of users entered the code and grabbed the loot. Somewhere around 100,000 people used the code.

When Zynga realized what was happening they shut down the code. But then they went one step further and rolled back the accounts for every user who entered it at least 24 hours, removing the free currency but also deleting any actions the users took to move their accounts forward during that period. Users complained on the Zynga forum but those complaints were deleted. Zynga also posted the notice below on their forum and then later deleted that too.

When Zynga continued to ignore users they started emailing us instead. Emails thousands of words long came in containing the kind of bitter passion that you usually only see when we say something mildly critical about the iPhone. Some users are saying that they are going to do a credit card charge back on money they’ve previously spent on Zynga games. Others say they’re leaving to try one of the many competitors. Etc.

What really seemed to make the users angry is the tone Zynga used in communicating with them:

Your account was determined to have attempted to use an unauthorized redemption code that would result in $120 worth of Reward Points.
As a result of this action, your account has been reverted to its status as of 5am PST on Tuesday June 8th.

and

Attention:

Our records indicate you have redeemed Rewards Points using an exploit. Please note that future use of exploits may result in disciplinary actions, up to and including the permanent banning of your account.

We will keep your account active at this point, but have rolled back your account to 06/08/2010, the date prior to the redemption of these unauthorized Reward Points.

If you have any questions, please email [email protected]. We will respond to your inquiry in 72 hours.

Thank you,
The Mafia Wars Team

Remember that this is just fake money to buy fake stuff on Mafia Wars that costs Zynga nothing to create. The code was created by Zynga and distributed without any technical restrictions on its use (meaning anyone could use it).

In other words, Zynga screwed up. But it didn’t really cost them anything since it’s all virtual goods. It seems like the smart thing to do would be to simply turn the code off and move on with their lives. But instead the Zynga team really seemed to think that they had been wronged by their users, and took proactive steps to punish and frustrate them. Instead of seeing passionate users engaging with the game, Zynga saw people trying to take advantage of them and responded by going on the attack. Terrible move. These are your customers, not your enemies.

Another observation: Zynga users are more passionate about this stuff than I thought, and while I don’t understand that it does help me understand that the science and psychology behind these games is very real. They are addictive money extraction machines.

Here’s Zynga’s official statement on this: “Last week we uncovered a technical issue with a Mafia Wars redemption code during the migration process of two of our networks. In order to protect the integrity of the game and level the playing field for the rest of the community, we rolled back those involved users to a previous save. Less than half a percent of Mafia Wars players were affected.”

Nick Carr is worried the Internet is making us stupid. It’s not so much our preoccupation with LOLCat photos or videos of fat girls flying off of swings that concerns him as it is the way we read and consume information on the Internet itself. He thinks the Internet is rewiring our brains, perhaps for the worse, and he’s written a book to warn us all about it called The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. Carr also finds links to be too distracting.

Carr raises some good points worth contemplating, but his arguments also strike me as incredibly self-serving. After all, he is an author who makes money writing books. Of course he is going to argue that they make you smarter than the Web, with all of its neurological distractions. Carr is the master of technological alarmism. It sells his books and provokes debate, and this time is no exception. Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker wrote in the New York Times on Friday that “cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk,” and NYT Bits blogger Nick Bilton marshaled some other counter-evidence as well. Carr then responded to Pinker’s Op-Ed at length, claiming that Pinker has an “axe to grind here” because Carr’s point that experiences can change the brain on a cellular level “poses a challenge to Pinker’s faith in evolutionary psychology.” Of, course, Carr has his own axe to grind. Remember, he’s the one pushing the new book.

At the core of Carr’s alarmism is that the Web is simply at odds with deep, contemplative thought and reflection. It’s really a defense of book learning in its most basic form—again, not surprising coming from an author of books who values above all else the printed word. In an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal last week, Carr summed up his position:

When we’re constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking. We become mere signal-processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory.

. . . What we seem to be sacrificing in all our surfing and searching is our capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection. The Web never encourages us to slow down. It keeps us in a state of perpetual mental locomotion.

It is revealing, and distressing, to compare the cognitive effects of the Internet with those of an earlier information technology, the printed book. Whereas the Internet scatters our attention, the book focuses it. Unlike the screen, the page promotes contemplativeness.

Is the Internet really rewiring our brains? Sure, everything we do rewires our brains. That’s how our brains work (On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins is a good primer). That’s how we learn, through experience and repetition, which gets carved into new neuropathways over time. The Internet is no different.

Is this rewiring somehow detrimental? If it is, then all the bookworms like Carr will end up being smarter than the rest of us and evolution will reward them. But something tells me that is not going to happen. The fact of the matter is that the Internet spreads information more broadly than the printed word ever did. It makes it easier to get up to speed on topics that you otherwise would know nothing about, such as the effects of the Internet on the brain. The reason reading online makes me feel smarter than reading a book is the exact same one Carr says makes us dumber: the pesky link. He writes:

Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.

Reading on the Internet is not the same experience as reading a book, no doubt about that. And I do agree with Carr that it is easier to lose yourself in a book than when reading on a screen. But to suggest that reading a book is a richer experience, or that we can’t handle the cognitive load of reading words with links is hogwash.

Personally, I find it difficult now to read texts without links. When guest authors send me draft opinion pieces without any links, for example, they feel barren to me. Links are more than just footnotes that show an author has done the research to back up his arguments. They are what make the written words on the Web alive. An article with links is a living text, which exists in relation to other texts and thoughts on the Web. They let you go as deep down the rabbit hole as you care to go. There is no reason why books shouldn’t be the same, filled with links to be read in a browser on your iPad.

Maybe Carr’s neural pathways are set already and this kind of experience is too jarring for him. But I kind of doubt that—he is quite adept at the ways of the Web. I have another theory. Maybe what he really finds objectionable is a world where readers are no longer content to let the full waterfall of an author’s words wash over them, and then sit and contemplate the genius of those words in isolation from any other words, and how fortunate they are to have gotten a glimpse into the author’s mind for only the $18 price of a hardcover from Amazon.

Yesterday, Robert Scoble wrote a post about “Foursquare’s Yelp problem.” It’s an interesting read, with some good thoughts about how Foursquare can withstand feature-copying from a much larger rival. He asked for my thoughts, so I figured I’d jot some down here. Most importantly, his post got me thinking about the next phase of location, which I think we’re just about to enter.

First, Scoble’s thought that Foursquare might be in trouble because Yelp copied its check-in badge idea seems a bit premature to me. It was a much bigger deal when they added the whole check-in concept back in January, but the fact that Foursquare has started growing faster than ever since that point shows they have an advantage over Yelp in the realm. That advantage is that they have a social graph built for location, Yelp does not (yet).

As we all know, Yelp was built as a rating and review system for local restaurants. It has a social graph, but most people on it are connected to other people because they’re interested in their food/restaurant reviews. It has nothing to do with wanting to see which of their real friends are nearby (which is what Foursquare is all about). That’s why I think it would have been smarter for Yelp to partner with Foursquare (or Gowalla, or Loopt, etc) in the same way a service like Hot Potato has (using APIs). Yelp + Foursquare would have been a formidable power play in the location space. Instead, Yelp’s check-in offering is still pretty weak, while Foursquare’s is still pretty small.

Scoble also mentions that it might be wise for Foursquare to buy another service to bolster its offering. That’s not a bad idea, especially when they close that round of funding they’re working on. Scoble specifically menions Foodspotting — a service I like a lot — and that makes a lot of sense. But it may be wiser to think beyond that (or buy Foodspotting and extend their services). Foursquare needs a way to upload pictures and make comments on check-ins (and pictures). Basically, they need to copy the functionality Gowalla has right now. There’s always a fine line between keeping a service simple and cluttering it up with feature creep, but Gowalla’s mixture of check-ins, comments, and pictures is pretty damn perfect in my view right now.

Another idea Scoble brings up is a “check-out.” I love this. He talks about it from customer loyalty perspective, which is a good point, but I think it goes beyond that. One problem I have with Foursquare is that it’s too often populated with inaccurate (old) information. That is, I may go somewhere check-in when I get there, but 30 minutes later I’m gone. Someone who shows up 15 minutes after that (after seeing my check-in on Foursquare) will have missed me. This happens quite a bit. Sadly, the only way to “check-out” of a venue is to check-in to another one. That’s no good.

The problem with a check-out is that it’s total feature-creep. And I would bet that only a small percentage of those that check-in would ever explicitly check-out too — it’s simply asking users to do too much. That leads me to my main point. I think we’re on the verge of location services getting even more interesting thanks largely to one thing: iOS 4.

Apple’s new mobile operating system (formerly known as iPhone OS 4), which is launching in about a week, brings with it the ability for third-party applications to run in the background for the first time. One of the allowed functions is background location. Here’s how I see this working with Foursquare: you go to a venue, you load up Foursquare and check-in. The app then stays open in the background for a set period of time, notes when your location changes, and checks you out of the venue when you move far enough away.

Obviously, this would auto check-out would need to be opt-in, but it seems like the perfect initial use of the new iOS with background location. The next step is the auto check-in — but that’s a bit more complicated, and I think users may not be ready for it yet. Still, it would be a cool option to have. The app could track you location in the background and if you stop at some place for long enough, it could ask you if you’d like to check-in there.

By now, you Android fanboys have probably already left several comments along the lines of ”but Android has been able to run location in the background for 2 years.” That’s true, but let’s be honest: it’s the iPhone that’s going to help this type of activity take off (just as it was the iPhone that helped background location take off in the first place). Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, etc still see the vast majority of their activity on the iPhone. Android may be able to extend upon these new location ideas, but it will be the iPhone that puts them in the mind of most consumers.

And this is just the most basic functionality made possible by the new iOS. I bet we see a new range of location service pop-up this year thanks to the background location-functionality. And I still bet that a lot of those companies get snatched up by the bigger players looking to compete. And the location turf wars will heat up even more.