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Chances Are You're Paying Way More for Mobile Than You Need To

John Paczkowski — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 20:24:34 +0000

Does your wireless plan suit your needs? Truly suit your needs? Because if it doesn’t, you’re potentially wasting hundreds of dollars. According to a yearlong BillShrink survey of more than 230,000 wireless users, people waste an average of $336 annually by miscalculating their voice and data needs. And in doing so, they unnecessarily hand an estimated $79 million to their carriers.

A few key findings from the survey:

People estimate they need 711 wireless anytime minutes per month, but in truth they need quite a bit less. BillShrink found 651 minutes to be the average.
The average person uses 1,555 text messages per month, yet most consumers believe they use 2,566. (1,555 per-month is the average!?!)
People assume they need 54MB of data per month, yet most need 81MB. Ironically, most tiered carrier plans start at 150MB.

What’s driving these disparities? Consumers’ skewed perception of their wireless needs, obviously. But the carriers are to blame too. Their tiered pricing plans might offer more choice, but they also make it tougher to assess our voice, text and data needs, and make it quite a bit easier to overpay for them.

Verizon Upholds Tradition of Bumpy iPhone Launch

John Paczkowski — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:30:03 +0000

“We’ve been working on this for a very long time. We expect unprecedented demand, bigger than anything we’ve ever seen before. We feel good about being able to handle it.”

– John Stratton, Verizon Wireless COO.

AT&T must be snickering into its cornflakes this morning (okay, perhaps it’s more of a hollow chuckle). Verizon began taking pre-orders for the forthcoming CDMA iPhone this morning and is suffering some of the same issues for which AT&T has been taken to task in the past (though AT&T’s problems were substantially more severe).

I received multiple reports from eager buyers whose purchase attempts were thwarted by infuriatingly slow page loads and/or error messages. Twitter is full of similar notes. This despite Verizon’s claim that the iPhone’s launch on its network would go flawlessly. “We are not going to have any flaws on the execution of the iPhone launch,” Fran Shammo, president and CEO of Verizon’s telecom and business unit, said ealier this year. “We’ve been preparing the network for the last year anticipating the launch of the iPhone.”

Well, perhaps a few flaws, as Verizon Wireless conceded this morning. Still, nowhere near as bad as the ones that troubled AT&T, which had to issue a formal apology.

“We have been processing orders all morning and most customers are not experiencing problems,” spokesperson Brenda Raney told me. “On balance this has been a smooth availability launch. In instances where customers get an error message, they tend to be specific to that individual versus a system wide issue. For example, if customers on a Family SharePlan log in and use a mobile number other than the one belonging to the primary account holder, they will get an error message. We are working to address that now.”

Of course, “on balance” doesn’t help if you are the one who has waited for years for the Verizon iPhone and find yourself unable to order one.

PREVIOUSLY:

AT&T Now Dropping iPhone Calls and iPhone 4 Pre-Orders

Apple: Sorry We Sold So Many iPhone 4s Yesterday

Time to Cut AT&T Some Slack, iPhone Users?

[Error Image Credit: Business Insider]

A Very Short Letter From a Friend in Cairo

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 01:27:09 +0000

For the last few days I’d been trying to reach an old friend and graduate school classmate named Abdalla, who lives in Cairo. As you might have guessed, I didn’t hear back. I assumed, correctly, that he was unable to check his email or receive the voice mail messages I’d left on his wireless phone.

Today I heard back from him. His sister, who lives in New York, had checked his messages for him, and kindly replied to my email messages. She then gave me the number of a wireless phone he has that is for one reason or another able to send and receive text messages.

I sent a message to that number and heard back from him, mere minutes after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had finished giving the speech in which he said he wouldn’t be a candidate in the forthcoming election in September.

It is one thing to see the media reports that have been emerging from that country, but quite another to hear from someone you know on the ground, especially under the difficult communications circumstances that the government has imposed. Because of that, his terse messages feel all the more precious.

In response to my first message he wrote:

Hosni Mubarak is clinging to power despite everything. There is a lot of impatience among Egyptians for him to leave office now. Protests are intensifying and they are drawing bigger crowds. I am working on some filming.

I replied that I thought at first the people would be feeling victorious following Mubarak’s announcement. He replied back:

They want him to leave this minute! They don’t want him to stall. He is already 20 steps behind the demands of the street. His time is up. Mubarak is in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. But if he were in Cairo, he would have fled the country by now, fearing protesters might charge the presidential palace.

I sent another reply containing the phone numbers for Speak2Tweet, the service Google and Twitter launched yesterday that allows people in Egypt with working phone lines to leave audio messages that are then broadcast to the world via Twitter. That Twitter account has now carried more than 1,000 messages from people in Egypt, some of which, like the one from the young woman below, are in English. Judging by her tone, events there have yet to reach their conclusion.

For those messages not in English, some volunteers have been translating the messages into English and publishing them into a continuously updated spreadsheet on Google Docs. This effort in turn led to a site called “Alive in Egypt,” where SayNow messages continue to be translated and transcribed.

I haven’t heard back from Abdulla after his last message. Now that Mubarak has pledged to leave office in September, there is as yet no information about when Egypt’s communications infrastructure will be restored to a normal operating posture.

Meanwhile, the folks at Internet research firm Renesys, who have so deftly tracked the finer technical details of Egypt’s disappearance from the Internet, have produced yet another visualization of the peculiar event as it unfolded. The video below is a minute-by-minute graphical representation of Egypt’s four major Internet service companies as they went dark. In a new blog post, they point out that what you’re watching is the silencing of the voices of 80 million people. One of them is my friend.

[Image Via: SheKnows]

As Egypt's Last Internet Connection Goes Down, Alternatives Appear

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 23:50:29 +0000

Even as the main Internet service providers in Egypt were shut down last week in a move to quell anti-government protests, one connection remained online: The Noor Group (usually found at www.noor.net). Its ties to various financial concerns and the local stock exchange gave it some political cover.

Now Noor is gone too, reports Renesys, the Internet intelligence research firm that has so closely followed the Egypt’s strange disappearance from the digital realm.

That has some Egyptians turning to spotty dial-up connections cobbled together by Internet activists, most of them in Europe. Telecomix, an organization that promotes Internet freedom, published a list of reliable numbers that Egyptians can call with their modems. The French Data Network reactivated a barely used but still perfectly functional bank of modems.

For those with functional fax machines, a German outfit called We Rebuild set up a fax-to-Internet service that allows Egyptians to send fax messages that can then be relayed as email messages or posts they can publish immediately.

Finally, some folks at Google, Twitter and SayNow, the phone service that Google acquired last week, hacked together a Speak-to-Tweet service for Egyptians to use: Call an international number, leave a voice message and it’s published on the Twitter account @speak2tweet. People in Egypt can hear the same messages by dialing the same numbers used to send the messages.

Here’s one message from an Egyptian woman speaking in English:

Cisco Security Survey Finds Windows Vulnerabilities And Spam Decreasing

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 14:40:09 +0000

Cyber criminals have fewer ways to attack Microsoft Windows, and sent less spam in 2010 than in 2009–a first-ever decline of spam from year to year. Those are among the findings in an annual report on the state of Internet security released today by networking giant Cisco Systems.

All the security attention paid in recent years to securing the Windows desktop and the applications running on it have paid off a little, Cisco found, making it harder for computer scammers to successfully carry off their intended crimes on that platform. The trouble is they’re now starting to focus more attention on mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone and iPad, and devices running Google’s Android operating system, Cisco said.

Meanwhile, the overall global volume of spam, which often contains troublemaking links that are used to deliver attacks, decreased for the first time ever in 2010. Even so, spam still increased in some developed countries where broadband connections are multiplying. In the United Kingdom, spam volume nearly doubled, while the volume in France went up 115 percent. The U.S. saw a slight decline–11.1 trillion messages down from 11.3 trillion in 2009. Spam in Brazil, China and Turkey also declined. Some of the decline can be attributed to last year’s arrest by FBI agents in Milwaukee of a Russian accused of being the “king of spam,” and to the shutdown of a few botnets used by scammers to send spam.

One thing about Cisco’s report that’s likely to draw some attention is its finding that the raw number of vulnerabilities on Apple products appear to be growing. Apple users are usually pretty sensitive about this topic, and any comparison of the Mac to Windows on the security front tends to make them grind their teeth and pound out annoyed comments on tech blogs. I know because I’ve done the same teeth-grinding and have in the past criticized other reports for similar findings.

Here Cisco is addressing vulnerabilities that Apple has itself documented and patched in software updates. One thing that’s not clear to me–though it sure looks like it–is whether Cisco is combining vulnerabilities found on both iOS (iPhone and iPad) and OS X (the Mac). The data it’s using is from its IntelliShield service, which tracks vulnerabilities and security incidents, and shows that over five years Apple’s vulnerabilities rose, from less than 200 in 2006 to more than 350 in 2010. That rate was higher than Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard and Cisco itself, the report found, though it goes on to say that Apple has worked harder than most other vendors to protect its users. Security is one of the reasons Apple imposes such strict rules on what’s available in the App store, though people still jailbreak their phones.

Another trend Cisco found is something called “money muling.” Tom Gillis, VP and general manager of Cisco’s Security business unit, describes money muling as using unsuspecting people who are attracted by “work at home” spam messages and Web ads to participate in money laundering by moving small amounts of money into bank accounts, just a few thousand dollars at a time. He says the operations around this are becoming increasingly elaborate, and criminals will devote a lot of effort to developing it this year.

I talked with Gillis about the report and other security trends that Cisco found. Here are a few highlights from our conversation:

NewEnterprise: So you’re seeing fewer attacks on Windows and more on mobile devices. Is that simply because there are more of them?

Tom Gillis: It’s the simple fact that there’s this new class of mobile device coming into the enterprise that used to be a phone and now it’s a computer, and it can access enterprise information. So what we’re seeing is that the raw number, but not the severity, is down on Windows. Part of this is that Windows 7 was a very good release on Microsoft’s part from a security standpoint. And we’ve got these new devices coming into the enterprise, and so we’re seeing a shift in focus of attacks on these mobile devices. They’re vulnerable to attack and they’re relevant in the enterprise. Two years ago this would have been too small a population to be meaningful.

What kind of attacks are you seeing?

It varies. In some cases there’s a little “phone home” code in a free gaming app. Pretty gentle stuff so far. But as people start using smartphones to access sensitive information we need to start thinking about security considerations on these devices. There’s a larger theme here that the whole nature of attacks is changing dramatically. The fact that spam volumes dropped at all is a big tell. For 10 years this has only gone up. We’re not forecasting a steady decline in spam, but the fact that it slowed down at all is an indicator of the shift in the way that attackers are using email. The attacks are more targeted and personal, for one thing.

Can’t some of this decrease be attributed to some of the arrests that happened last year?

It can. There’s been a handful of arrests. And they went after not only the botnet operators but other parts of the spam value chain. There are firms and entities that build botnets of compromised machines that relay the spam, and then there are other firms and entities that rent time on those botnets that do the merchandising. The biggest category is selling fake pharmaceuticals. Some of these fake pharma operations were shut down and the people associated with them arrested. It’s not an easy thing to do, because they’re global, they move around, and so to make an arrest in this space is a huge accomplishment.

So what is the thinking now about securing the mobile device?

We think there are two ways to make mobile devices work in the enterprise. The flood of devices into the enterprise is huge, and everyone wants to use them to check their email and access corporate directories and other fundamental things. There needs to be some kind of software on the end point–the phone or device. It will have to be light. You can’t have some kind of antivirus suite running on the phone. It would be a little piece of software that’s on all the time that knows when you’re behind the corporate firewall and when you’re not, and manages your connection accordingly. We bought a company called ScanSafe that has 40 data centers around the world. When you’re outside the firewall it connects to you the nearest data center and enforces your corporate policies, but all you as the user know is that it just works. This notion of being on or off the corporate network goes away. And we can do all kinds of scanning for security, independent of the device that’s being used.

This year we also saw the Stuxnet attacks, which we now know for certain were carried out against the Iranian nuclear program. Clearly this is a new kind of attack that can be mounted against industrial control systems via computer networks. Is Cisco researching this?

Massively. Often these types of attacks are targeted against Cisco’s biggest enterprise customers. Who buys Cisco’s infrastructure? The biggest banks in the world, the defense contractors. If the goal of an attacker is to disrupt an economy, their targets will be our customers, and they’re demanding a response from us. I like to call it global threat correlation, but it comes down to taking huge samples of network traffic and picking out good traffic from the bad. Cisco has a good advantage here because our equipment is so widely deployed around the world. As we start measuring traffic we can develop reputation data on every publicly routable IP address on the Internet. As we start putting telemetry info into that equipment–and the customer can choose to enable it or not, and it’s turned off by default. But people turn it on because it helps them against the unknown kind of attacks that are popping up. If a Web server says its a Web server, but you just saw it sending spam three minutes ago, there’s a pretty good chance it’s part of a botnet. Once you know that you know that, you can start to mount a pretty good defense. We’re putting a lot of energy into developing that, and it’s proven to be pretty robust.

A New Social Network Where Inquiring Minds Run Wild

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 23:38:35 +0000

If brief communications like Twitter’s 140-character messages, Facebook status updates and text messaging leave you longing for more substantial discourse, you may be in luck. This week, I took a look at Quora, a question-and-answer site that encourages thoughtful—even long-winded—discussions.

[ See post to watch video ]

Quora (Quora.com) was launched about six months ago by two former Facebook employees who wanted to create a forum where in-depth questions could be posed and answered. Users vote answers up or down according to how good they are, the idea being that the best answers get pushed to the top of the queue by the community of users. Few of these questions can be answered with a simple yes or no. For example, one question asks, “What role did social media play with regards to the revolution in Tunisia?” (See here for the answer with the most votes: http://3.ly/8Gqf.)

One thing to be wary of: There’s nothing that qualifies the most popular answers as accurate, nor do people who write the most popular answers necessarily qualify as experts. This could lead to confusion or even danger, like medical questions that are answered incorrectly. Quora users are required to register their real email addresses, and some answers are more believable than others according to who answers, like the CEO of Netflix answering a question this past fall about how much the company spends on postage per year (answer: between $500 million and $600 million).

As soon I signed up for Quora by submitting an email and password, I walked through steps to “follow” certain topics that interest me—like technology, journalism, media and news—so whenever those topics are discussed, the related questions and answers appear on my Quora home page. I also linked my Twitter and Facebook accounts to my Quora account, which clued Quora in on some topics or people that might interest me according to the information in those accounts. Once these accounts are linked, it’s a lot easier to share Quora questions or answers with people on Twitter and Facebook.

People, like topics, can be followed. If someone I follow posts a question, answers a question or votes an answer up or down, this activity appears on my Quora home page.

Though Quora may sound simple, I found it uninviting, geeky and poorly explained. The site lacks instructions on how to use it; people just have to figure it out as they go. For example, a newcomer might not know that Quora answers can be voted up or down by seeing two tiny triangles that appear beside each answer. If I select the up triangle, this indicates I voted for that answer, and news of this vote is shared on the Quora home page of anyone who follows me. A number beside each answer indicates how many votes it has received so far. But unless you’ve used the site for a while, you wouldn’t know any of this.

After a few weeks of use, I found I preferred using Quora less for asking my own questions and more for reading other people’s questions and answers about topics I liked. I occasionally voted on answers to show whether I supported them or not. One user asked me a direct question, which I answered. I asked a question of the Quora community, but no one replied.

I found Quora’s questions and answers to be rather smart and entertaining. Its Silicon Valley roots are evident in its numerous technology-related questions and answers. I typed “tennis” into a box at the top of the screen and one of the first questions that surfaced was “Is tennis popular in Silicon Valley?” Instead of that question, I selected “What is the history of tennis’s strange scoring system?” and read the answer with the most votes, which seemed right to the best of my knowledge. Interestingly enough, this answer also included a link to a related article on Wikipedia.

But compared with the rest of the Web, where images, videos, animations and sound entertain website visitors, Quora’s text-filled pages can come off feeling a bit like textbook reading assignments. This is because all but a handful of questions are answered with just text. Video isn’t enabled on the site, though founder Charlie Cheever told me that this might be possible in the future.

Another problem with Quora is that most people who use the Internet are conditioned to rely on search engines like Google, Bing or Wikipedia for queries, typing the right key words to get the intended results. And people are often searching for quick answers that take just a couple seconds to read.

Plenty of other question-and-answer forums exist, like Yahoo Answers, which has been around since 2005, ChaCha.com and Ask.com. Facebook introduced Facebook Questions to a small number of its users over the summer, but when asked, a company spokeswoman wouldn’t say whether or not this offering would be available to all users anytime soon, if at all.

Quora’s combination of social networking (following topics and people) and in-depth answers helps differentiate it from those services.

Private messages can be sent from one user to another through Quora, and new messages are indicated with a red number that appears over your personal “Inbox” at the top of the Quora site. Likewise, when new notifications appear on the home page, a red number is shown above Home at the top of the page. This home page can be viewed in one of three views: Your Feed, All Changes or Followed Questions; users can toggle between these views.

Only people who have created accounts can browse the Quora.com site, though links to content can be opened by anyone. This differs from Twitter.com, which can be visited and searched by anyone regardless of whether or not they have a Twitter account. Quora also lacks one central home page where everyone can go to see every Quora question and answer, or which answer received the most votes on the entire site. Mr. Cheever told me that the site deliberately tries to keep your world small so you can focus on the topics or people you follow.

Quora relies on its community members to police one another, like Wikipedia, and less than 100 users are also granted administrator privileges to do more serious operations like deleting answers that use hate speech or other offensive remarks, which aren’t permitted according to the site’s policies. Every edit made to an answer is logged in the Quora system for everyone to see. This helps users understand an entry’s history on Quora.

This site doesn’t put much emphasis on interaction with others, though you are notified whenever someone follows you and you may be prompted to suggest topics for someone who starts following you. Like Facebook and Twitter, a list of users who you might want to follow is suggested in Quora.

For now, Quora feels like a website designed for techie insiders without instructions for mainstream users. But its smart community, intriguing questions and way of showing users just the content they want to follow will keep people coming back to the site. With a lot of polishing, Quora could be a social network people use every day.

Google Apps Adds an Anti-Spam Weapon to Its Arsenal

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 17:05:04 +0000

One of the most frustrating aspects of the battle against spam over the last several years has concerned overly aggressive filters. You can be a perfectly innocent person sending a perfectly routine email, yet the spam filter on the other end of the line treats your message as if it came from a dodgy pharmaceutical company in Kazakhstan, and diverts it to the spam folder. There are lots of reasons this can happen, but one of the most common is when those who are actually sending spam falsely place your email address in their “reply” field.

The way to solve that problem, and this is especially true of companies, governments and nonprofits whose domains are often used for the purposes of spamming, is to vouch for the messages you do send, making it easier for spam filters to correctly catch the ones that really are spam.

One widely used method of doing this is by using DomainKeys Identified Mail. DKIM is an industry consortium that over the years has absorbed similar email security work done by Yahoo and Cisco Systems. One key problem is that it’s tricky to put DKIM in place.

Google announced today that its Google Apps customers will get a new feature that easily enables DKIM-certified mail. Google has long supported the DKIM standard, and in 2008 worked with eBay and PayPal to authenticate inbound messages from those domains. Now Google Apps customers can get the same certification. DKIM-signing for outbound messages will be enabled for Google Apps customers who turn on the feature in the “Advanced Tools” tab of their dashboard. Take that, spammers.

How Much Copyright Infringement Can You Cram Into a Single Tweet?

Liz Gannes — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 19:09:32 +0000

If you run a user-generated content site, takedown notices from copyright holders are a fact of life. That even goes for Twitter, where messages are limited to 140 characters of text. Even though a single tweet can hardly contain more than a few sentences, and Twitter still does not host its users’ rich media, the site received on the order of 300 takedown notices in the last month.

In late November, Twitter started contributing its DMCA takedown letters to Chilling Effects, the online clearinghouse jointly organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and many universities and law schools.

Chilling Effects says it received records of 11,500 total takedown notices in 2010, as of Dec. 15. Major contributors include Google, Yahoo and Digg.

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick flagged the Twitter takedowns, noting that many of them are for tweets that contain links to copyrighted material. Why go to Twitter and not the content host itself? he asks.

Chilling Effects founder Wendy Seltzer said she believes Twitter has been getting the takedown notices for a while but only recently started submitting them for public posting.

Using Twitter to get out the word about content may well be a growing phenomenon. In August, BitTorrent released a tool for more easily tweeting about torrent files. A friend of mine who’s an avid Green Bay Packers fan recently told me about a Twitter account he follows to find streams of football games he doesn’t have access to on TV.

“It’s interesting that they are receiving takedowns, given that most of what they’re hosting is little 140-character bursts of expression,” Seltzer said on a phone call yesterday. “Copyright holders are pushing the complaint out further, not going after the user who hosted, or even the user who pointed, but going after Twitter because it’s made itself a central location for the collection of information.”

Seltzer said that under the U.S. Supreme Court Grokster ruling, it’s possible that users could end up on the wrong side of the law for inducing infringement by posting a link with the intent to encourage their Twitter followers to access or download infringing material. But as long as Twitter complies with takedown requests, it should be within the safe harbor rules of the DMCA, which protect providers of information tools, said Seltzer. “Twitter doesn’t have an intent to infringe, so they would have a solid argument.”

A spokesperson for Twitter declined to comment, citing mellowness in the office over the holidays.

Jawbone: You Won't Pay a Penny for Our Thoughts

Ina Fried — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 23:15:32 +0000

Headset maker Jawbone thinks it has found another nifty use for its electronic earwear. The company is using D: Dive Into Mobile to announce Thoughts, an iPhone app that lets road warriors dictate a quick thought that gets delivered as an audio file to whomever they like. If the recipient also has the Thoughts app, they can get messages delivered there. If not, the program can send either an email or text with a link to the recorded message, or even a computer transcription if they need one.

It’s really convenient for senders. With just a press of a button, they can dictate the equivalent of a text message and know that it will reach the person. It’s like sending a voicemail without having to listen to that annoying message or–heaven forbid–talk to someone. You can even share your thought with various groups of people.

As for the recipients, I’m not sure how they will take to an influx of “thoughts” should their friends or company really start digging the new messaging option.

In any case, Thoughts is a free download due shortly at the App Store, so it won’t cost a thing to try it out. You don’t even need a headset, though it integrates well with Jawbone’s gear and software. However, the goal of the software is to make headsets more versatile.

Plantronics is also trying to expand the device’s utility, in its case expanding from a cellphone-only headset to one that can talk to Skype and enterprise phone systems, in addition to cellphones.

[ See post to watch video ]

Live Notes

4:15 pm: Aliph/Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman takes the stage with Walt and Kara.

4:16 pm: He starts taking out the Jambox, a wireless speaker system and speakerphone in one.

4:17 pm: Aliph is offering 40 percent off the device to D: Dive attendees.

4:17 pm: They transition to the real demo.

Rahman says they are usually talking about headsets, but today they are here to talk about an app they have developed.

4:18 pm: He says we all live in a distracted life.

“People are constantly bumping into stuff now, with all the touchscreen stuff.”

4:19 pm: He says they love texts because they are asynchronous and you don’t have to get back to people immediately.

He says they love voice because it is the oldest method of communication. “It’s better for expressing emotion,” says Rahman.

4:20 pm: He opens Jawbone Thoughts on his iPhone 4.

The app is a hybrid between texting and voicemail–quickly sending a voice message to an individual or group.

4:21 pm: Rahman sends a message, and now we switch to the receiver’s phone.

The interface is slick, and avatar-driven. Feels like playing song demos in iTunes–just a snippet to get a quick idea.

4:23 pm: The app also has a text-to-speech engine for text messages.

Kara asks, “Can you control it with voice…so no tapping on the screen?”

“Soon. We are waiting on some APIs,” says Rahman.

4:25 pm: The app can also send voice messages or texts to people who don’t have the app. It just sends a text message or email.

The demo ends with a mention of version 2.0 for the app.

Here’s Aliph’s own demo video of the Thoughts app:

And by "Variety of Ways to Leverage the iPad," We Do Not Mean Angry Birds and Infinity Blade

John Paczkowski — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 11:19:39 +0000

Another small victory in enterprise for Apple.

As part of a six-month pilot program, J.P. Morgan is outfitting its staff with iPads. Every associate in the company’s global investment banking division will have one to use until the program ends on May 1, according to internal messages obtained by Bloomberg.

“We believe there are real benefits in our working environment that can be realized using this device–as well as the personal productivity and enjoyment that come as part of the package,” one email reads. “There are a variety of ways to leverage the iPad. Some work off-the-shelf whilst others rely on JPMorgan software/security tools.”

And what will happen once the trial ends? That’s not yet clear. J.P. Morgan describes it as a “one-time initiative,” but notes as well that it may repeat or expand it if it proves successful.

So, as I said, a small win for Apple, remarkable only because the bank chose the iPad and not RIM’s forthcoming and purportedly more enterprise-friendly PlayBook tablet.

Facebook Acqhirees Make a Quick Mark on Its Products

Liz Gannes — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 13:00:12 +0000

Facebook has a well-defined M&A strategy of bringing in talent from young, small companies*. The company has reeled in 10 acquisitions this year, in most cases shutting down acquired services soon after a deal closes. The most it is known to have paid for a company is $50 million for FriendFeed. This has helped shape the epidemic of short-term thinking in today’s Web start-ups; sometimes, showing you are technically adept and have interesting ideas is all it takes for you to get a lucrative contract with Facebook and give your backers a mild return on their investment.

Bret Taylor

But there’s also a pattern emerging for what happens to that talent once folks arrive at Facebook. Acqhired CEOs hold prominent roles on Facebook’s product team; nearly every recent Facebook product launch seems to have been led by an acqhired employee. Most recently, Facebook Messages was product-managed by Dan Hsiao, who joined the company with the FriendFeed acquisition. Hsiao had actually been a more junior member of the FriendFeed team, having started there as an intern in 2008. Now he is managing what Facebook called the largest engineering team it has ever put together for a launch.

Meanwhile, former FriendFeed CEO Bret Taylor is CTO of Facebook. Hot Potato CEO Justin Shaffer was product manager for Facebook Groups and is now product manager for the company’s Places and Events products (his company was only acquired in August). Divvyshot CEO Sam Odio is now product manager for Facebook Photos. Nextstop CEO Carl Sjogreen now holds the title “head of platform development,” according to a Facebook spokeperson.

And Gokul Rajaram, known for his seminal work as a product manager on Google AdSense, is now in charge of Facebook’s ad technology. Rajaram came to Facebook through the acquisition of his company Chai Labs, also last August. Multiple sources confirmed Rajaram’s role at Facebook, though Facebook declined to.

Gokul Rajaram

Facebook has its reasons for keeping a big-name hire like Rajaram under the radar; for one, Google can’t be happy to have lost the opportunity to buy his start-up. The former Googler has been an adviser and director to multiple companies, including Canoe Ventures and Associated Content.

Elsewhere, Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt from Facebook’s first acquisition, Parakey, have had significant roles on products like Facebook Questions and the Facebook iPhone app. Ross’s title is Director of Product, though he is currently on sabbatical. Hewitt is working on undisclosed projects but “more on the engineering side,” said the spokesperson.

Facebook is not yet talking about where it will assign Sam Lessin, CEO of the just-acquired storage start-up Drop.io, and Cory Ondrejka and Bruce Rogers, founders of the just-acquired gaming start-up Walletin.

Facebook says it has about “two dozen PMs,” so the acqhired folks account for a significant but not dominant portion of that corps.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told me last month:

We have a big footprint but we want to operate like a startup and take risks, and the best way to do that is to get people who self-select towards being entrepreneurs… The only real theme is that we haven’t bought any companies yet to get the company. It’s always been because we have a lot of respect for the people involved.

This kind of track record may make Facebook an even more enticing acquirer for small start-ups. On the other hand, it’s probably disheartening for Facebook’s homegrown talent to see these opportunities handed to people who are brand-new and who, in many cases, have little experience working at the scale of hundreds of millions of users.

*Facebook has also explored larger acquisitions of companies like Twitter and Foursquare (though Kara Swisher reported those talks were less serious than portrayed elsewhere), but those deals were never consummated.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Bret Taylor photo (CC) Brian Solis.

Twitter Partner Gnip Raises $2M for Social Media Monitoring Data

Liz Gannes — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 17:32:52 +0000

Gnip, which helps social media monitoring companies collect data, and yesterday became the first company authorized to resell Twitter data, has raised $2 million in funding.

In a bit of coincidental timing, said Gnip CEO Jud Valeski, the filing for the round was posted yesterday on the SEC site (which is where I found it). He confirmed the round amount as $2 million, coming mostly from previous investor Foundry Group and including First Round Capital again. This brings the company to $6.6 million raised so far.

Gnip’s deal with Twitter finally brings pricing clarity to usage of Twitter’s data streams, at least for analytics and monitoring companies. The company has permission to collect significant revenue on the streams. Previously, Twitter’s only paid data option was the Firehose full stream of all user status messages, for which it charged different amounts depending on the size of the customer and what it was doing with the data. While Microsoft paid $10 million to incorporate the Firehose into its real-time search, some start-ups that create Twitter clients were getting the Firehose for free.

As I reported yesterday, Gnip will offer social media monitoring companies the Halfhose (50 percent of Tweets at a cost of $30,000 per month), the Decahose (10 percent of Tweets for $5,000 per month) and the Mentionhose (all mentions of a user including @replies and re-Tweets for $20,000 per month), with the caveat that they can’t publicly display the data.

Boulder, Colo.-based Gnip has gone through a big turnaround in the last year. In September ’09, it laid off seven of its 12-person staff, saying the huge increase in creation of social media data had overwhelmed the company’s self-built database and it needed to start over. In May of this year CEO Eric Marcoullier left the company, leaving it in the hands of his co-founder Valeski. Marcoullier, who had previously founded IGN and MyBlogLog, is now working on another start-up, the “Foursquare for Web sites” OneTrueFan.

But a deal with Twitter–a company that has historically expanded into its developers’ territory much to their dismay, rather than blessing third-party companies with partnerships–is a firm indication that Gnip is back on track.

What Facebook Messages Means and Why You Should Care

Liz Gannes — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:18:57 +0000

Facebook yesterday launched an interesting product that tries to get at the heart of how highly connected people communicate casually. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others from the company reiterated over and over again (see my live notes; the repetition is excessive) that the product is “not email.”

In large part, that’s because if Facebook Messages were evaluated as an email system, it would look terrible. There’s no incorporation of IMAP so you can access your mail from other clients, there’s no way to save drafts, there’s no way to cc people, there are no folders.

Even more jarring, there are no subject lines or time stamps, and you only ever have one continuous conversation with a contact. Instead, like instant messaging, when you type a message and press enter, it gets set loose to your contact.

But maybe Facebook has a point, and we don’t need all that cc, bcc gobbledygook for personal communications. Maybe we just want to more casually correspond with each other. And some of these email conventions have probably outlived their usefulness. Facebook says prior to the change its top three subject lines were blank, “Hi!” and “Yo.”–if that tells you anything.

The problem is, the way Facebook Messages works is a bit complicated and unfamiliar. You can see why the company is rolling it out very, very slowly–it’s the kind of new experience that aggravates people and makes them whiny.

Facebook Messages treats the correspondence between you and another person as a single conversation, whether it’s by IM, within the Facebook Messages interface, received as an email or as a Facebook-delivered SMS. Often those channels overlap. Messages that are not from Facebook members, and those from entities other than individuals, get shunted to a second-tier inbox.

Yesterday I was playing with the new Messages, first within the Messages interface on the Facebook Web site, then on IM on the Web site, and then via text message when I closed my computer. A few things confused me–for instance, chat is disabled and disappears when you go into Messages. I guess it’s redundant to have the same conversation in two places. But as someone who felt like I was in an IM chat, it was super weird.

Another thing that’s odd is that those life-time conversation threads only really work for one-to-one relationships. Group messages seem like a little bit of an afterthought; for instance, group threads show a split-screen image of two of the participants’ profile pics, no matter how many people participate. The system is prejudiced against people who email you from outside Facebook (say, your mother emails your @Facebook.com address from an @Yahoo.com address), until you explicitly say you want to see them in your main Facebook inbox. If a person sends you messages from two email addresses, Facebook doesn’t allow you to help it understand that they are the same person.

While I will probably acclimate to the Messages experience over the next few weeks, one thing that’s going to continue to be very annoying, and accentuated by Messages, is redundant Facebook notifications. Already a problem for those of us who use Facebook on multiple platforms like the Web and a phone app, redundant notifications run rampant in Facebook Messages. Say someone sends you a message from the Web site and checks the box to send it to your phone. Without changing any defaults, you could get a text message from Facebook, an email message from Facebook, a new IM on the Web site and a flag that you have a new message in the Facebook nav bar.

I spoke to Messages product manager Dan Hsiao yesterday, and he said the team had thought carefully about trimming down notifications but decided it would be worse if users weren’t alerted to the fact that they had a message.

Hsiao said that his mantra in building the product was to make it “email compatible but not email complete.”

I think there will be two main outcomes from the new Facebook Messages:

Other Web mail outfits will (and should) better integrate their email and instant messaging conversations, based on Facebook’s example. Folks like Gmail can go one better, and incorporate additional forms of communication like voice messages. Facebook is right–there’s no reason this shouldn’t all be condensed and scannable.
Provided the Facebook Messages product doesn’t have major usability issues, it will continue to supplant email, especially for young people. There will be a bigger distinction between formal, especially corporate, correspondence via email and personal messages. If you think about it, we all already make a distinction between messages from people and messages from mailing lists, and Facebook is right to say the ones from people are more important.

The thing is, Facebook Messages splits out a part of the communication experience that is, for most, a part of other tools and services.

Facebook Messages won’t replace email for people who use email for professional purposes, people who prefer desktop mail clients or people who firmly associate themselves and their archive of emails with an existing address.

Rather than killing Gmail (and its much larger competitors Hotmail and Yahoo), Facebook Messages will probably have the biggest impact on usage of IM services like AIM and GChat. The only thing the new product will fully replace is the previous version of Facebook Messages–which, by the way, has 350 million active users, and four billion messages sent per day.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Live from Facebook's Email Messages Launch

Liz Gannes — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 18:04:49 +0000

Facebook has called the press to yet another launch event, this time in San Francisco for a new Facebook email system. Luckily, they brought their own cafeteria chairs so our butts will feel right at home after a long summer of launches at the company’s Palo Alto, Calif., office.

At the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg says young people say email is too slow. They prefer Facebook or SMS.

Zuck: IM or SMS are much simpler, and people want lighter-weight things that they can use all over the place. So we need…a modern messaging system.

350 million people actively use messaging on Facebook, in part because it’s really simple. Four billion messages are sent per day. This is “private, private sharing.”

Next-generation messaging would be: seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short. (Those are a lot of synonyms, no?)

“This is not email. Email is one way that people will use this system, but it’s not even the primary way we think they will use it.”

Now a three-panel slide is up showing the key topics of the announcement–”seamless messaging,” “conversation history” and “social inbox.” Zuckerberg promises, “We can do some really good filtering for you to make sure you only see messages you really care about.”

Zuck brings on Andrew Bosworth to demo the product.

So this is actually a relaunch of the “Messages” tool. Not email-specific. Takes all correspondence between two friends and puts them in one place.

Everyone gets an @facebook.com email address with their username. “As much as we’re providing an email address, the system’s not email,” says Boz–more like instant messaging.

Boz uses convo about dinner plans as an example, with messaging across different platforms, including IM on Facebook, email, iPhone notifications, etc. The example restaurant is Piccino in San Francisco, where, fun fact, I was for a short time the Foursquare mayor. No longer though.

Integrates with Jabber, IMAP and one more I missed. (Sorry, first time liveblogging with this tool!)

Boz shows the history of Facebook messages with his girlfriend of the last four years. But doesn’t include their instant messages and other communication. Individual messages may not be profound, but collectively they provide a narrative about someone I care about, says Boz.

Facebook rebuilt infrastructure for this project, because it’s especially important that messages don’t get lost.

Instead of Cassandra (which FB created for email search and then open sourced), the company chose something new: HBase. They also used Haystack, Thrift, ZooKeeper and memcache.

This is the biggest engineering team Facebook has ever put together for a launch–15 people, Boz says.

Users have three categories: 1) Messages: Conversations with actual people. 2) Other: Email lists and the like. And 3) Junk.

The big idea is “picking up where you left off” no matter what device or medium.

This project has been in the works for the last 15 months.

Zuck: “This is not an email killer. This is a messaging system that includes email as a part of it. We don’t expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say, I’m going to shut down my Yahoo account or my Gmail account and switch to Facebook.”

(Read: You silly press, we’re not competing with Gmail, we’re bigger than Gmail!)

Rolling out slowly over the next few months, starting with an invite system (ha! how Gmail!).

Oh, about IMAP: No support yet, so users can’t synch with other email systems. But Facebook wants to add later.

Interesting: Facebook messages won’t have subject lines. You just have a single messaging history with each person.

If you have been interacting with someone through email, then we’ll send replies back to email. You can indicate that you want a message to go directly to their phone. If you’re online, you get a message as an IM.

Boz: This is the end of “BRB” or “GTG.” Follows you wherever you go. (Sounds ominous when you say it like that.)

Question from audience: Will you add voice or video?

Zuck: For now only SMS, IM, email and FB messages–all are text. “We think this is a pretty big step by itself, and one we just wanted to take before we get started on the next set of things.”

Question from audience: Will you have contextual ads?

Zuck: Yes, ads work the same as on the rest of Facebook, but not targeted specific to content in a message.

Zuck on Gmail competition: “They have a great product. Email is still really important to a lot of people. If we build a great product that people want to use, then people will use it.”

Question from audience: Can users go off the record like in Gmail?

Boz: Users can delete any message.

Zuck: Off the record like in IM doesn’t make sense because users may be receiving messages in a different way than you send them. If someone gets something in email instead of IM it would be unnatural to have it off the record.

Question: How will this treat communication with people who are not on Facebook?

Boz: You can communicate with whoever you want to, and will have access to all that history of the conversation.

Zuck: If you’re not a part of the FB system and outside the social graph, your emails to FB users will go into “Other” folder to start off with, rather than the main. Once the recipient says you’re an important person, you’ll go into the main folder.

Question: What about silly joke emails from your mom? Can you filter those?

Zuck: There’s only one thread with every person.

Question: What about Facebook employee email addresses?

Zuck: “After a long discussion, the Farm Bureau has agreed to give us fb.com. And in the terms of that we have agreed not to sell farm subsidies.”

Facebook hasn’t mentioned this, but Microsoft just emailed to make sure people know they’re involved.

“As part of Facebook’s new messaging system: http://apps.facebook.com/facebooklive/ –Microsoft is integrating the Office experience. Over the coming months, customers will be able to access and share Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents as attachments to their Facebook messages. Sharing new ideas, key points of inspiration and important information just got easier–even when the need to access or share that content strikes in the middle of your latest status update.”

Question: Can you fill in the blanks of associating email addresses with Facebook friends?

Boz: Not yet, but it’s imaginable.

(Uh-oh–how is this going to work when people have multiple contacts for themselves?)

Question: Storage?

“If you’re a good user, you have no concern. For people who try to find limits, they will find them.” Another ominous comment from Boz.

Okay, they’re cutting us off.

Here’s the Facebook blog post on the announcement.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Liveblogging Google's SF Mobile Event: Voices Actions, Chrome to Phone, No Video-Calling, But Will There Be Donuts?

Kara Swisher — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:05:46 +0000

BoomTown was sitting front row center–better to scare Google Mobile Product Manager Hugo Barra–at the Silicon Valley search giant’s press event in San Francisco this morning.

Google (GOOG) called together a group of reporters to discuss some “cool new features” for its Android operating system.

While many have been expectantly waiting for Google to announce a video-calling offering, to match the Apple (AAPL) FaceTime service, that was not to be here.

Instead, it was a low-key rollout of a few whiz-bang features to ooh and ahh at.

Happily, Google provided unusually delicious donuts, which was my entire reason for coming, because donuts are the pastry to the gods.

Let’s get to it:

10:05 am PT: PR dude Mike Nelson introed Barra, who said there will be two new features announced.

Ooh and Ahh.

First though, we were forced to endure yet another lecture on how important mobile is and where the future is headed that comes from every single company that throws a mobile event.

Mobile is the big show now?

Really? We had no idea this cell phone thing was going to take off! Thanks, Professor Barra!

Barra pressed on with lots of talk about MIPS (millions of instructions per second, which you should care less about, but is important).

Barra said that innovative smartphones were becoming “super-computers in your pocket.”

Again, master of the obvious!

I obviously needed to have a bite of my lovely sprinkle-laden donut to gain some balance.

10:12 am: Barra moved onto voice recognition. He asked the phone movie times in Palo Alto, Calif. and how high the Empire State Building, results which were promptly delivered.

(When my kid asked me on a trip to New York, I just said it was a badillion feet high, which also worked as an answer.)

But such technology is cool, for sure.

But Barra upped the ante by speaking four languages–Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese–to get results. It worked! Get this guy on “The Amazing Race” pronto!

Now, tricks over, it was onto the first product announcement!

And, drum roll…it was a new feature that Google is a calling “Voice Actions” in Voice Search, available today for Android 2.2 Froyo devices.

This sounded like a band name from the 1980s.

Instead, it is the ability to speak into the phone and have it instantly do things, such as sending text messages, automatic dialing and mapping and more, all via speech commands in English.

Speech recognition, natural language processing and semantic Web search–you could kind of do this before on Android, but it was neither seamless nor automatic, said Barra.

He did not say, but Voice Actions is an awful lot like Siri, the mobile app assistant start-up that Apple bought recently.

But there were more on Voice Actions, according to the adorkable demo dude Mike LeBeau, a baker’s dozen (13!) of actions, and there will be more.

He spoke into the phone a request to “Listen to the Decembrists.” Presto (and also props for the hip musical choice)!

Then, LeBeau spoke an email about some scuba diving trip. Presto!

But then he added a smiley face! Unfortunate and decidedly unhip, but presto!

After that, LeBeau kept showing off, setting the alarm clock, going to Wikipedia, doing a search for art galleries in Amsterdam.

10:28 am: Now for product announcement #2.

Barra brought up engineering manager Dave Burke, who built it in his 20 percent time.

It’s a synching feature called “Chrome to Phone.”

This sounded like a 1990s band name.

“It is a low latency way to push information to the phone,” said Burke, using Google’s browser and an app for the mobile device.

There is a little icon on the Chrome browser you click that sends a variety of stuff to the app on an Android phone.

It’s certainly helpful.

10:35 am: Onto Q&A about the two perfectly fine, though hardly earth-shaking, announcements.

Questions about the languages, bookmarking Chrome to Phone (not yet) and what’s coming next.

More!

It was all about solving “pain points” said the Voice Actions dude LeBeau.

All I know is donuts are the only thing that solves my pain points. Presto!

(And here is a post of some videos and screenshots of both Voice Actions and Chrome to Phone to enjoy.)

Twitter's New Security Strategy: Rewriting Some Users' Links

Peter Kafka — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:04:53 +0000

Beset by phishing attacks and other scammy behavior, Twitter is taking a step I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else before: The social messaging service says it may change the text of its users’ messages in order to protect them.

Specifically, Twitter is going to rename links that users send to one another via direct messages, which allows the company to track them and shut them down if they turn out to be malicious. You’ll be able to identify the renamed links, because they’ll be shortened using a “twt.tl” prefix.

In typical Twitter fashion, the company has a blog post that explains the change, but in somewhat vague and hazy terms. As best I can tell, what Twitter is really doing is rewrapping some links that users send with its own code.

This doesn’t appear to change the core characteristics of the link–publishers and marketers who use the bit.ly link shortening service, for instance, will still be able to track the data generated by their links. But it does give Twitter the ability to track bad behavior.

If you want to view the move in a positive light, you can think of it as the tag an airline slaps on your luggage when you check it–the only changes to your message are superficial. Or, if you’re so inclined, you could shiver just a bit at the thought of a messaging service changing any part of your message, no matter how trivial.

Twitter only announced the change this evening, but the company appears to have been testing it for some time: Searching Twitter for “twt.tl” turns up shortened links going back several days. As best I can tell, this one–what appears to be the retweet of a direct message from a marketer–is the first one to show up in public:

There’s a good chance many or most Twitter users won’t see the shortened links–if you’re not sending or receiving direct messages, you may never see one, period. But Twitter seems to leave the door open to expanding the program to regular tweets as well: Its blog post says the company has “focused [its] initial efforts” on direct messages and email.

Just to be clear, I checked with Twitter spokesman Sean Garrett via email. Here’s our exchange:

Q: But to be clear: Do you reserve the right to change links in regular tweets?

A: This is our focus right now.

The One-Year Report Card of Yahoo’s Carol Bartz–Product Innovation: D From Readers, A From Sheila and C- From BoomTown

Kara Swisher — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:05:12 +0000

Yesterday, BoomTown asked a question on Twitter about what grade people thought I should give Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz for product innovation.

I began handing out marks to Bartz last week, after she gave herself a B- for overall performance for the year since she took over the troubled Internet giant.

But I decided to be more specific, splitting the grades for Yahoo (YHOO) in 2009 into five categories: Management, financials, product innovation, deal-making and moxie.

So far, I have given her an A- for management and a C+ for financials.

But I resorted to the lazy reporter trick of using Twitter, because I was torn when it comes to product innovation.

One main reason: Bartz inherited a company that has been suffering from a serious and chronic case of product constipation, after many years of leading the Web in new and innovative offerings.

In fact, from its amazing content products to its early attempts at personalization to its way-ahead-of-the-pack email to its cool design breakthroughs, Yahoo had always been the one to beat when it comes to the consumer Internet in Silicon Valley.

But that has decidedly not been the case for many years now, even as other key players have been very busy inventing some cool stuff.

Consider: Facebook with The Wall, News Feed, pokes and friending; Google (GOOG) with Chrome, Android and a plethora of major search innovations; Amazon (AMZN) with Kindle, Prime, EC2, S3; Twitter (the whole dang idea of it); and Apple (AAPL) with the iPod, the iPhone and, soon, the iPad–have you heard of them?

And–yes–even Microsoft has jumped in with a saucy new Bing search service in 2009, and it has been introducing features regularly, despite its weensie market share.

Product innovation also includes keeping a sharp eye out for new companies to snap up, and Yahoo used to do that, grabbing innovative start-ups, such as Flickr, Del.icio.us and many others.

But Yahoo made both of those purchases in 2005, and the entrepreneurs from those start-ups have since exited under a cloud.

In 2009, Yahoo made a few minor acquisitions, focusing instead on shedding and closing down former purchases it could not successfully integrate.

That kind of cleaning up is doubtlessly a good thing for Yahoo, and I did not think it completely fair to ding Bartz for a situation that obviously requires a lot of fixing, made even harder since there have been a lot of other issues to deal with at the company.

Nonetheless, as the year ticked on and other Web players marched ahead with all due speed into a range of new arenas, it has become increasingly worrisome to hear not a peep out of Yahoo or see any true spark of innovation, even as Bartz hired a passel of new execs, most of whom have more enterprise than consumer Internet experience.

While Yahoo did complete a significant overhaul of its homepage and launch a new marketing push, competitors such as AOL (AOL) and Microsoft did much the same.

As to the variety of key fixes across the site that should happen as a matter of course at any company, all of which were necessary–that’s great. But while Yahoo is in the midst of a brand revitalization, it simply does not get credit for keeping its existing properties properly updated.

Thus, my grade comes down to a C- in product innovation, since I cannot point to a single unique and striking innovation from Yahoo in 2009. Neither can I call its two very decent acquisitions–photo organization start-up Xoopit and Arab Internet portal Maktoob–game-changing in any way whatsoever.

My grade is better than the dozens of suggestions I got from readers in tweets, direct messages and emails, most of which rated Yahoo’s innovations effort of late at a D or D- grade (with one F–Hello, Keith R!).

Wrote one smart techie I know well, in a typical sentiment:

I’ll give them a D for product innovation. They have outsourced search to Microsoft. They made so many small, smart acquisitions over the years, but they killed them first and now looking to divest every one of them. They want to get into the social game, but have had Delicious, MyBlogLog, Upcoming for all these years and did nothing with it. They incubated Y! Pipes, same result.

And now their big game is social activity aggregation. They have the right assets–mail and messenger are still popular, news is still popular and they just renewed their deal with AP, users are still on Flickr, don’t agree with their home page strategy but with that and the Facebook Connect integration, Y! has the potential to know a lot about a user. They’d then be able sell targeted display ads for a premium, that Facebook has been (so far) reluctant to do. We’ll see how well they execute this year. I’m not very hopeful though. They have lost their product DNA.

We’ll have to see about that in 2010.

And, to be fair, Yahoo PR exec Sheila Tran respectfully disagreed with my assessment and sent me a cogent and well-argued email about how Yahoo did a lot better in this area than you might think, awarding it an A.

Here is her email in its entirety, so judge for yourself:

High-level Points

· Product innovation is not just about launching “new” products. We focused on continually innovating on our core/leading products/properties.
· Making these updates are key to our brand revitalization and core to our success moving forward.
· Other competitors may have updated some similar products this year but they don’t have the reach and leadership we have. Our updates in several areas such as the homepage, search, mail, mobile and messenger were differentiated from others.
· We have innovations that span across the consumer AND advertising experiences
· We’re focused on innovating globally ie launch of Meme

Product/Property

New Homepage

· In the US, we’ve seen a 12% year over year increase in UU’s on our homepage (Dec 08-09, comScore).
· The web is open and in 2009, Yahoo!’s homepage opened up, too. With the integration of the Yahoo! Application Platform and the new homepage (September 2009), we gave developers the ability to get in front of one of the largest daily audiences on the web.
· The new homepage takes the number of codebases from 33 to 1. The benefits of moving towards a single code base are many–faster time to market, less duplication of efforts, and a more robust technology platform to operate from, to name just a few.
· We expanded the use of our content optimization technology to the Today module, helping fill the page with more relevant and engaging content. While this isn’t always apparent to users, our content optimization algorithms work behind the scenes to help us fine-tune how we identify and display the most popular content. We are now testing how we can use the engine to help us personalize content to peoples’ interests–for example, if you’re a sports junkie we might increase the amount of sports news you see when you visit the Yahoo! homepage.

Mail
· Launch of open apps which is aligned with what we have done across the homepage and search.

Messenger
· Yahoo! Messenger has seen video instant messaging minute use grow 3x since its introduction last year.

Search
· Launch of SearchPad: online personal research assistance when people search. Only one that offers this
· Continued success with SearchMonkey and BOSS which resulted in a differentiated search experience on Yahoo! Search and outside of Yahoo!
. BOSS: more than 30 million queries a day
. SearchMonkey: live in more than 23 markets, more than 70 million enhanced searchmonkey results are viewed daily
· Launch of the new search results page: open apps, blended results, 3 column look and feel which google then announced, enhanced results with search monkey
· Launch of video and image search refiners: no other competitor has taken our approach which really provides a more relevant experiences for people.

Artist Pages
· Launch of the artist pages consumer experience that aggregates the best music products, services, information, and content the Web has to offer about more than 500,000 artists. Pulls together “best of the Web” music products such as iTunes, Amazon.com, Last.fm, Rhapsody, Pandora and others in one place.

Connected TV
· In 2009, Yahoo! revolutionized the TV experience by making the connection between TV viewing and the Internet a reality and signing distribution partnerships to embedding the Yahoo! Widget Engine directly in TVs from Samsung, Sony, LG and Vizio.
· In 2010, we continue to expand partner distribution globally (new partnerships with Hisense, MIPS, Viewsonic and Sigma), and move beyond the TV (into set top boxes, blu-ray players and more.) We also opened the WDK and introduced new Widgets providing users with thousands of content channels.

Mobile
· New Y! Mobile Homepage–33 countries across 1,900 devices; tighter PC to mobile synergies (http://m.yahoo.com)
. Over the past two years, we have seen the usage of our homepage more than triple – globally. (Yahoo! Internal Data)
· Adds voice search for iPhone and increases availability across other mobile devices
. Emerging markets are a key growth driver; for instance, in Indonesia we see nearly twice as many more mobile search users than we do on the PC. (Yahoo! Internal Data)
· iPhone / BlackBerry Apps for Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Fantasy Football and Flickr (iphone only, as there was already a BB app for Flickr)
· New Y! Mobile Homepage for US Hispanics
· Continue to sign strategic partnerships for leading mobile services, including Chunghwa Telecom and o2 Germany (mobile search, displacing Google)
. We have over 100 mobile operator and OEM partnerships around the world.

Advertising
· Rich Ads in Search: Most innovative way to bring display benefits to search and launched before any other search engine could have.
· Search Retargeting: Yahoo is the only media company that can leverage display and search effectively, as such Search Retargeting (uses a recent search query to serve up a relevant display ad) is something only we can do and do well.
· Innovative Strategy: Right Media going upstream. We have the largest ad exchange, in 2009 we decided to make it all about premium to have our exchange community be more appealing to big brands and publishers.

Acquisitions
· Xoopit–2008 Hack day winner. Brings phenomenal photo organization, improved photo sharing, and the serendipity of discovering forgotten photos to Yahoo! Mail.
· Maktoob–Acquisition accelerates Yahoo!’s strategy of expanding in high-growth emerging markets where we believe Yahoo! has unparalleled opportunity to become the destination of choice for consumers.

[The C- photo is from Yahoo's still-terrific Flickr.]

The CLIQ, Storm2 Join Long Parade of iPhone Threats

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 02:02:09 +0000

(See Correction & Amplification below.)

It’s raining smart phones. No, make that super-smart phones, the type of hand-held computer, like Apple’s iPhone or the models powered by Google’s Android software, that browse the Web well, have sophisticated communication functions and are made to run a wide variety of modern third-party apps. This holiday season, new super-smart phone models seem to be appearing weekly.

[ See post to watch video ]

So far, the king of this new field, in my view, remains its pioneer, the iPhone. Apple’s phone has its limitations, but its design, usability and versatility have kept it ahead. There’s a well-equipped iPhone model available for as little as $99, and the platform offers a staggering 85,000 downloadable apps. By comparison, there are around 10,000 apps for Android, 3,000 for the newer models of the Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry, a few hundred modern apps for phones running the latest versions of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile software, and even fewer than that for Palm’s (PALM) Pre and its soon-to-be released little sibling, the Pixi.

But nobody is conceding the game to Apple (AAPL). A flood of new Android models is upon us, and RIM, which has a fanatical following for its BlackBerry models, is still potent despite the disappointment surrounding its first touch-screen model, the Storm.

Motorola CLIQ

I’ve been testing two new contenders, and both represent second chances of sorts. One is the revised version of the BlackBerry Storm, called the Storm2, from Verizon (VZ). The other is the first super-smart phone from Motorola, the fading former phone leader. It’s an Android-based model called the CLIQ, which will be offered by T-Mobile.

Here’s a quick look at these two new pocket computers.

Motorola CLIQ

The CLIQ is a hefty slider phone, with a touch screen on top and a slide-out physical keyboard underneath. It has a smaller screen than the iPhone or Storm, and comes with just two gigabytes of memory versus 16 gigabytes for the $199 iPhone. But the CLIQ claims six hours of talk time, an hour more than Apple’s device, and, unlike the iPhone, it has a removable battery and expandable memory. It also has a higher-resolution camera—five megapixels versus three megapixels.

It boasts all of the standard Android features. But what sets the CLIQ apart is that it’s built around the idea of consolidating all your communications and social networking, and making them easy to access. Motorola (MOT) does this with special software called Blur, part of which exists on the device itself and part on a special Motorola-run server.

Blur takes the form of special on-screen widgets. One constantly displays your own status on various services, such as Facebook and Twitter. Another, called Happenings, shows your friends’ latest updates on social-networking services, without requiring you to enter separate apps. A third, called Messages, offers a quick snapshot of current emails and text messages from all your accounts. Each entry in your address book also displays the person’s social-networking status and information.

In my tests, all of these Blur features worked nicely and proved handy, except that I couldn’t get it to consolidate both of my Gmail accounts.

My biggest gripe was with the physical keyboard, which I found cramped and hard to use. The top row is too close to the bottom of the screen and, on the bottom row, I kept hitting the symbols key when I was aiming for “M” or “N.” So I found myself constantly resorting to the virtual on-screen keyboard, which worked pretty well.

BlackBerry Storm2

The original Storm, RIM’s first phone without a physical keyboard, didn’t convert droves of traditional BlackBerry lovers. This was partly because it had an odd typing mechanism where the whole screen moved with each tap on the virtual keyboard. Also, the phone lacked Wi-Fi and, when held vertically, the device offered only a cramped on-screen keyboard with multiple letters on each key.

BlackBerry’s Storm2

The Storm2 fixes all those flaws. The screen now stays still when tapped, providing tactile feedback electronically instead of mechanically. This allows for faster, smoother typing. The new model also has Wi-Fi. And you can now use a full, albeit squeezed, virtual keyboard in vertical mode.

In addition, while the dimensions haven’t changed, the Storm2 looks sleeker and has a few user interface refinements, like an on-screen Send button.

Overall, I found the Storm2 worked well in my tests. Battery life was decent, with 5.5 hours of claimed talk time, and typing was much improved, though I doubt it will satisfy lovers of physical keyboards.

The browser is still inferior to Apple’s, Google’s and Palm’s. And the traditional BlackBerry interface cries out for a major overhaul in a touch device like this, especially when you add a lot of apps. RIM’s menu and folder metaphor seems tired on this device.

Verizon hasn’t set a launch date or price for the Storm2, but it’s likely to appear in November at around $200.

The super-smart-phone war is still in its early stages. There are more and even better devices on the way, and Apple will have plenty of clever competition.

Corrections & Amplifications

The Motorola CLIQ comes with two gigabytes of memory and the $199 iPhone comes with 16 gigabytes. A previous version of this column incorrectly expressed these figures as megabytes, not gigabytes. An earlier version of this column also mistakenly stated, based on a BlackBerry fact sheet, that the Storm2 will ship with two gigabytes of memory. Wednesday night, after the column was published, the company said the Storm2 will actually ship with 18 gigabytes of memory.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Twitter Tackles Spam, and Sets Its Sights on Bigger Challenges (Take a Guess)

Peter Kafka — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:00:49 +0000

Now that Twitter doesn’t have to worry about raising money ever again (right?), it can spend time tackling all sorts of projects, big and small. Here’s one of the latter: The company has created a better way for users to flag spam accounts.

I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that Twitter has replaced a cumbersome and completely nonintuitive process with one that makes more sense. That’s good, right?

The flip side is that spam really isn’t one of Twitter’s most pressing problems.

In fact, Twitter’s antispam qualities were one of its best features from the very start: “Spam” on Twitter isn’t like other services’ spam since no one can actually send you spam and clog up your inbox. You only see it if you’re gazing at messages that include your name. So it’s aesthetically offensive, but not the kind of thing that actually makes Twitter less useful.

In the more proactive category: Twitter’s “lists” feature, which curates interesting groups of Twitter users to follow, should debut next week, I’m told. This one does tackle a more significant problem for Twitter: New users come to the site and have no idea what to do or whom to pay attention to. (Twitter’s quasicontroversial “Suggested Users List” doesn’t really cut it, though it does drive Robert Scoble nuts, which is amusing.)

And in the time-to-get-serious category: Actual revenue generation. Twitter’s giant cash pile means the company doesn’t have to start making money anytime soon. But it’s going to start trying, I’m told, with a series of…well, I heard them described by someone familiar with the company’s plans as “experiments.” Alternate name for them: “Don’t freak out if this stuff doesn’t work.”

We already know what one of them is: A plan to sell both Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) access to Twitter’s data stream. But I’m told we should see other kinda-sorta trials in coming months.

Twitter Gives Spam Apps a Thumbs Down, Ads a "Maybe"

Peter Kafka — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:00:05 +0000

It’s one of those mysteries that are so deep, so mysterious, they may never be solved: When Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the company would “like to leave the door open for advertising,” what exactly does he mean?

Twitter Kremlinologists are currently scouring Stone’s Delphic statement, contained in a blog post yesterday, announcing changes to the company’s Terms of Service.

My guess: Twitter would like to leave the door open for advertising. One day. Maybe. Possibly. You never know.

Or, as the company notes within the new TOS itself: “We’re leaving the door open for exploration in this area but we don’t have anything to announce.”

Okay. So maybe not quite so mysterious.

The rest of the new TOS seems similarly uneventful, and given that Twitter reserves the right to change any of it at any time–that’s boilerplate language for these things–methinks it’s hard to get worked up about any of this. It’s certainly hard to see a Facebook-style flare-up in the works.

Anyway, if you want to go really, really deep here, go nuts: Twitter has helpfully kept a copy of its old TOS up on the site (nice catch, ReadWriteWeb). So you can compare and contrast to your heart’s content.

One change that might actually be a tiny bit meaningful for run-of-the-mill users comes not from the TOS itself, but from Twitter’s new rules for developers who tap into its data stream to create their own Twitter-powered services.

The relevant language: “Get each user’s consent before sending Tweets or other messages on their behalf. A user authenticating with your application does not constitute consent to send a message.”

If you’ve ever played with a few Twitter apps, you know what Stone and company are talking about here: You try out some app, give it your account name and password, and the next thing you know it has sent out a Tweet in your name that you didn’t approve.

It usually says something along the lines of “I’m using Fantasticapp and it’s changed my life. You should, too!”

Embarrassing, and/or annoying, but not the end of the world, obviously. And you might even put up with that kind of slippery behavior in another service. But Twitter is both so personal and so public that it needs to be explicit about banning this stuff.

Pink-Slip Thursday at Cisco

John Paczkowski — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:00:55 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

iPhone 3.0 @ 10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT

John Paczkowski — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:05:08 +0000

10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT.

That’s when Apple (AAPL) is expected to roll out iPhone 3.0, an update that will bring a number of long-anticipated features to the iconic device. Among them: voice memos; a landscape keyboard for Mail, Messages, Notes and Safari; a phone-wide Spotlight Search; push notifications; the long-overdue cut, copy and paste; and MMS and Internet tethering–neither of which is currently supported by AT&T (T).

Let’s hear it for carrier exclusivity!

iPhone 3.0 @ 10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT

John Paczkowski — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:05:08 +0000

10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT.

Let’s hear it for carrier exclusivity!

Senators Call BS on Carrier Exclusivity

John Paczkowski — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:30:58 +0000

We absolutely will offer MMS on iPhone 3G S in the late summer, once we complete some system upgrades that will ensure our customers have the best experience with MMS. These upgrades are unrelated to our 3G network. … We plan to offer a tethering plan but we don’t have anything to announce today.

– AT&T spokesperson Seth Bloom

Welcome news for folks who love the iPhone, but hate AT&T. The increasing prevalence of exclusivity agreements between wireless carriers and cellphone manufacturers, like the one between Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T), is drawing some government scrutiny. Four U.S. senators are urging the Federal Communications Commission to review such deals with an eye toward determining whether they unfairly restrict consumer choice and hamper competition. In a letter, the four asked that the Commission specifically consider the following:

Whether exclusivity agreements are becoming increasingly prevalent between dominant wireless carriers and handset manufacturers

Whether exclusivity agreements are restricting consumer choice with respect to which handsets are available depending on a consumer’s geographic region, particularly for consumers living in rural America

Whether exclusivity agreements place limitations on a consumer’s ability to take full advantage of handset technologies, such as the ability to send multimedia messages or the ability to “tether” a device to a computer for Internet use.

Whether exclusivity agreements are manipulating the competitive marketplace between commercial wireless carriers. Specifically, whether the ability for a dominant carrier to reach an exclusive agreement with a handset manufacturer is inhibiting the ability of smaller, more regional carriers to compete

Whether exclusivity agreements play a role in encouraging or discouraging innovation within the handset marketplace

An interesting list and one that seems to single out AT&T, though it doesn’t mention the carrier by name. Indeed, limiting “a consumer’s ability to take full advantage of handset technologies, such as the ability to send multimedia messages or the ability to ‘tether’ a device to a computer for Internet use” is exactly what AT&T will do later this week when the iPhone 3G S and iPhone OS 3.0 debut without the carrier’s support for their new tethering and MMS capabilities.

And then there’s this: The iPhone 3G S is compatible with high-speed packet access 7.2 technology, which offers theoretical peak download speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps. But AT&T doesn’t plan to begin deploying HSPA 7.2 until later this year and the company doesn’t expect to complete the rollout until 2011.

Finally, the company’s refusal to sell the iPhone in rural areas where it provides only roaming coverage certainly restricts “consumer choice with respect to which handsets are available depending on a consumer’s geographic region, particularly for consumers living in rural America.”

Clearly, if the senators responsible for this letter were looking for a case study for the problems with exclusive carrier-device agreements, they’ve got one ready-made in AT&T.

Uh, Hello? Cut-and-Paste!?!

John Paczkowski — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:00:34 +0000

November 21. That’s the day iPhone 2.2 is rumored to arrive at market. And when, or if, it does, it’s expected to include some slick new features. Among them:

Enhancements to Google Maps, including support for Google Street View, plus bus schedules and walking directions
Support for over-the-air podcast updates via the iTunes Store
An app-scoring feature that allows users to rate applications purchased from the the App Store before deleting them
Support for line-in audio via the iPhone’s headphone jack

Wonderful additions to the platform, all of them. Of course, there are still quite a few missing. MMS support would be nice, wouldn’t it? As would support for Flash and the ability to compose messages in landscape mode.

And what about cut-and-paste? Seriously, at this point, it’s almost like Apple (AAPL) is purposely withholding it, out of spite.