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Facebook shifts privacy policy goalposts

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 04:12:00 GMT

Facebook has rocked the boat with the most recent updates to its governing documents, which sees users losing their ability to vote on changes to the website's privacy policies.

The social media giant announced the changes in an email to members on Wednesday, stating that the public voting component of the site governance process "incentivised the quantity of comments over their quality."

Facebook is now proposing to "end the voting component of the process in favour of a system that leads to more meaningful feedback and engagement."

Campaigners are opposed to the changes and are urging disgruntled users to comment on the announcement.

Under Facebook's current rules, 7,000 opposing votes on the issue will result in a vote before the changes go through. However, the votes will only be taken into consideration if 30 per cent of the site's user base takes part.

Resultantly, given that Facebook recently reached its one-billionth sign-up, over 300 million users would have to take part in the vote for its results to take effect.

The new proposal also outlines plans to combine user data across various services owned by Facebook, such as popular photo-sharing app Instagram.

This move has caused speculation that the company intent to merge data profiles in a similar way to Google, making it easier to hit users with targeted advertising.

Those opposed also criticise Facebook's statement as being too vague.

A spokesperson from the Our Policy group told the BBC: "We want Facebook to use clear and understandable language.

"We oppose that Facebook is using 'like', 'may' or 'could' instead of clear statements. This makes it impossible to clearly know what we consent to."

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Samsung wins court ruling to access detail of Apple-HTC patent deal

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 04:00:00 GMT

An American court has ordered that Apple must disclose details of a recent patent agreement with HTC to their bitter rivals Samsung.

The ruling by the judge means Apple will have to share the specifics of their 10 year license agreement, although the information will not be publicly available.

Samsung's lawyers were able to convince the court that the Apple-HTC deal related to at least some of their own patent disputes, that they are currently locked in worldwide litigation with the Californian company over.

Andrew Milroy, vice president of ICT research at Frost & Sullivan, commented to the BBC about Samsung's actions, saying, "It is clearly a very smart move from Samsung - because the general feeling is that a lot of its patent disputes with Apple are very likely to be similar to those between HTC and Apple.

"And if there are similarities, it gives Samsung an advantage in any future legal issues and negotiations with Apple. Apple has been having a really bad time of late in its legal battles. They are going to have to re-examine the legal approach they take from here on."

Apple's deal with HTC is thought to have ended legal disputes in around 20 countries that dated from March 2010. Samsung is currently fighting 10 patent battles with Apple, with the two companies suing and counter-suing each other over alleged design infringements.

This latest loss comes amid a string of other recent legal defeats for Apple. The South Korean company has appealed Apple's award of £662 million compensation for patent infringement in the US whilst also winning a case in the UK and defeating an attempted American sales ban.

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Wavii takes on Facebook

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:37:00 GMT

A new start-up is ready to zero in on Facebook's weaknesses with its news stream service that aggregates popular topics from around the net.

Founded by former Amazon and Microsoft engineers, Wavii offers users a customised feed on its smartphone app that scours tweets, news stories and blogs for topics of interest.

The service selects stories based on users' likes and interests - as gleaned from previous Facebook activity - and gives them the opportunity to select a minimum 12 topics or people, ranging anywhere from celebrities to politicians, business acquisitions and gadgets.

"Facebook is aggregating all this structured data about your friends, and we are aggregating all this structured data about the world - the other half that Facebook doesn't have," Wavii founder and chief executive Adrian Aoun told the BBC.

"We are looking at everything and mapping it into story types. We try to look for patterns."

After selecting topics, Wavii's "learning" algorithms crawl the web for content and present it in to users in a structured, ordered way.

According to Wavii's creators, the service processes up to 1,000 articles a minute and is sophisticated enough to detect rumours and story duplicates, selecting only those stories that are the most important and relevant for each feed.

"We live in a sea of information, it's really hard to decide what to pay attention to," Wavii technical advisor Jim Pitkow said. "With Wavii you can access more information with less effort."

Wavii is already generating buzz with its sophisticated technology - which could see the start-up eventually overtaking similar services such as Flipboard and Pulse - however, early adopters have been critical of Wavii's use of Facebook logins for its own service.

Semantic search expert and professor of computer science at the University of Washington Oren Etzioni told the BBC: "I haven't seen anyone do anything close. Wavii is tackling an incredibly hard problem. Google and Microsoft's Bing have worked on this for years."

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"Little bird" says CNN to buy Mashable

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 01:01:00 GMT

Rumour has it CNN is planning to buy the social media blog Mashable.

Reuters blogger Felix Salmon, reporting from the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, said a "little bird" told him CNN was set to announce "an acquisition of Mashable for upwards of $200 million" (£128 million), and that the official word could come as early as Tuesday.

The New York Times confirmed today that CNN - a subsidiary of Time Warner - and Mashable were in advanced acquisition talks, but reported CNN officials denied an announcement would be made on Tuesday.

Mashable was founded in July 2005 by Pete Cashmore in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The site quickly made its name for its social media and technology news, and more recently expanded its coverage to include business and entertainment.

According to its website, Mashable currently has "20 million monthly unique visitors and 4 million social media followers."

Mashable is known for having hired aggressively and for its early partnering with several mainstream news sites, including CNN and ABC News. CNN already syndicates some of Mashable's stories on its website, CNN.com - which is currently one of the most popular news websites in the U.S.

Should the acquisition of the seven year old company go through, it will be considered quite the coup for Cashmore and his associates. It would reportedly be the largest acquisition by CNN.com to date.

And, never underestimating the ubiquitousness of Facebook, The New York Times also reported there was a social media hint that the potential acquisition was imminent - early Monday morning, Adam Ostrow, the executive director of Mashable, "liked" Salmon's story for Reuters on Facebook.

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Schmidt plans to part with 2.4 million Google shares

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 03:37:00 GMT

Google chairman Eric Schmidt intends to sell up to 2.4 million shares of his Class A common stock in the company, according to a filing with U.S. regulators.

Experts predict Schmidt's move is part of a predetermined stock trading plan for the Mountain View search giant, as the chairman adopted the Rule 10b5-1 of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) - a rule relating to trading on the basis of material non-public information - plan last November.

Selling off the $1.45 billion (£914 million) worth of shares will be Schmidt's biggest ever annual disposal and the first big Google sale in four years. Since Google went public over seven years ago, Schmidt has already parted with 5.7 million shares, but the 2.4 million shares disclosed on Friday is more than a quarter of the chairman's remaining stake.

The official company line is that Schmidt wants to diversity his portfolio.

"The pre-arranged trading plan was adopted in order to allow Eric to sell a portion of his Google stock as part of his long-term strategy for individual asset diversification and liquidity," reads the official SEC report.

"Using this trading plan, Eric can diversify his investment portfolio and can spread stock trades out over a period of one year to reduce market impact."

Schmidt stepped down as Google chief executive last April and the new sale may bring his voting power on Google's stock to around 7.3 per cent, from 9.1 million shares to 6.7 million. It is reported that, despite this, Schmidt still has more than $4 billion (£2.5 billion) of his own money tied up in the company.

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Population growth dominates Facebook's newsfeed

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 02:12:00 GMT

Facebook has revealed its list of top ten most-mentioned news stories of 2011 in the UK, with a BBC story concerning global population growth.

In addition to the number one article, other newsworthy topics included the UK riots, the Royal Wedding and The Only Way Is Essex.

The social networking giant put together the list by counting the number of clicks on its site for stories posted from the UK's top media outlets. These articles can have appeared as shared items, wall posts or likes.

Coming in at second place was the Sun's story about a woman who received a tattoo with a scatological theme from her boyfriend for cheating on him. Other popular articles came from the Guardian and Daily Mail newspapers.

As for talk and comments on news topics, the Royal Wedding topped the chart. Kate Middleton was the most mentioned person when talking of the event and more than one million people logged on to the site to discuss her royal walk down the aisle.

However, Facebook say the conversations surrounding the year's big events were not just confined to simple chatter - many used the network to organise their communities' response in cleaning up their area after the violence and looting that occurred in English cities during the summer.

"People continued to turn to Facebook in the aftermath of the riots to organise their communities to come together for the clean-up - the two biggest groups set up to motivate operations and rally positively against the riots were huge with over 600,000 fans," the company said in a statement.

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YouTube brings streaming film selection to Britain

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 06:13:00 GMT

Following a debut of streaming films for rent in the US market in May, YouTube - the online video hosting haven propped up by Google - has brought the feature to British shores.

The portal will begin renting films with an initial smattering of classics and blockbusters, such as Reservoir Dogs, The Meaning of Life, The Dark Knight and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The YouTube blog post about the release also contends that each film will be delivered in high-quality video.

In addition, YouTube hopes to offer users an experience beyond the surface of just idly watching the original films.

"There's always more to explore on YouTube," business product manager Matteo Vallone said. "Many movie pages also feature YouTube Movie Extras with free behind-the-scenes videos, cast interviews, parodies, clips and remixes from YouTube's unique community of content creators.

"Over time, we'll also be adding additional videos and features to YouTube Movie Extras so that you can get even more into movies on YouTube."

A visit to the website's dedicated film rental site reveals it will stream many films free of charge. Other films have been set with a two-tiered pricing system at £2.49 and £3.49. Most new releases to the service register at the higher price.

The revelation by Google-owned YouTube comes shortly after rival Facebook's similar expansion into the streaming sphere, though Palo Alto's route has been decidedly more geared toward music lovers. However, back in August, Facebook announced it would facilitate film rental as well.

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Spotify users seeing red over Facebook partnership

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 01:25:00 GMT

Spotify users resisting the social network Facebook are in for a surprise if they try to sign up for the streaming service.

Users wishing to register with Spotify must now do so with their Facebook accounts.

Visitors to the Spotify homepage are now greeted with: "You need a Facebook account to register for Spotify. If you have an account, just log in below to register. If you don't have a Facebook account, get one by clicking the 'create an account' link below."

The new requirement comes following the f8 developer conference last week when Facebook announced it would team up with Spotify to allow users to stream music on their profile pages. In addition, existing users have been asked to approve increased integration between the social services when signing in to Spotify.

As a result, any songs users listen to are displayed on the Facebook Ticker, a particularly troubling feature for any hardcore metal fans secretly listening to the Spice Girls.

Previously, Spotify was an invite-only service, and while the Facebook partnership makes it easier for users to join, it also permanently links the two accounts and excludes anyone who makes use of alternative social networking platforms.

CEO Daniel Ek said: "We'll try lots of things, and probably screw up from time to time, but we value feedback and will make changes based on it."

The new changes sparked a firestorm of angry users, who took to the Internet to voice their complaints on Twitter.

According to CNET, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek responded to concerns, saying: "We view it differently. There's been a big barrier to sign up, we wanted to remove that, and make it a seamless experience."

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Press conference sparks rumours of Amazon tablet

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:49:00 GMT

Amazon is rumoured to be announcing a new tablet this week at a press conference scheduled for Wednesday in New York.

Speculation about an Amazon tablet has been growing for months, reigniting this week when word broke about Wednesday's press conference.

Analysts speculate the Amazon tablet will be a revamped version of the existing Kindle e-reader. It will be priced cheaper, however, undercutting Apple by selling its tablet for $250, but, similar to the iPad, will operate by touchscreen.

Unlike other competitors, Amazon is well positioned to take on Apple's stronghold on the market because of its online store, which makes books, movies and music available to users at the touch of a button.

While the Amazon tablet is expected to be a simpler tablet than the iPad, it could offer consumers the features they want most at a lower price.

Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps told the New York Times: "The No 1 thing consumers do on tablets is email. The No 2 thing is look up stuff on the web. Then playing games and watching video. Amazon will offer all the tablet that many consumers need."

In its first, largely unchallenged fifteen months on the market, Apple sold 29 million iPad tablets.

The success of the tablet sparked a number of rival tablets, almost all of which failed to sell. According to the New York Times, The BlackBerry PlayBook shipped 200,000 units in three months, roughly equivalent to the number of tablets Apple sells in three days.

Regardless of whether Amazon manages to take a bite out of Apple, Barclays analyst Anthony DiClemente said the consumer stands to gain from competition between the two rivals.

He said: "The consumer is going to be the winner. The fact that Amazon is making such a huge investment might make Apple come back into the market at a lower price point. What's to prevent them from slimming down the iPad?"

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Blogger haven Tumblr takes in $85m investment

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 01:12:00 GMT

Tumblr is the latest social outlet to see a surge in spending cash, as venture capitalists - including Sir Richard Branson - poured $85 million into the start-up.

First reported by the New York Times and subsequently confirmed by the company itself, Tumblr found the financing through Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners, the Chernin Group, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and Sequoia Capital in addition to Branson.

"This additional capital allows us to continue to scale our business and give real focus to the further development of Tumblr," chief executive and founder David Karp said in an email.

Tumblr launched just under five years ago as a more social alternative to traditional blogging services. Incorporating features such as simple 'reblogging' - similar to retweeting, only on a larger scale - the site has grown to become a powerhouse in the social media sphere.

A report published by Nielsen earlier this month confirmed the surge of the social standout, saying it had nearly tripled its number of unique US visitors in just one year - and purely on word of mouth advertising.

The New York-based firm also recently eclipsed 10 billion total posts, based on nearly 30 million unique blogs, and all signs lead to an IPO for the company some time in 2012.

According to Karp, monthly page views grew from two to 13 billion over the course of 2011, making the new found financing even more important.

"It is incredibly important to us that we work with partners who understand our vision and share our ambition to build the best platform for the most creative people in the world,"

In an email disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, Greylock investor John Lilly likened the site to the early days of other sites now at the top of the social ladder.

"At Greylock we see some of the same early dynamics in Tumblr that led us to invest in Facebook, Pandora, and LinkedIn, and so are very excited to add Tumblr to that list," he said.

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