In Hung Tan Phan v. Lang Van Pham, the President of a group of Vietnamese Navy and Merchant Marine veterans sent an email to fellow veterans. In the email, he wrote that another veteran, Hung Tan Phan, had been disciplined by the Vietnamese Navy for abusive behavior in the final days of the Vietnam War.

Lang Van Pham received the email and forwarded it to at least one fellow veteran. He included the following introductory paragraph: Dear Kmap: Everything will come out to the daylight, I invite you and our classmates to read the following comments of [the] President of the Federation of Associations of the Republic of Vietnam Navy and Merchant Marine.

Hung sued Lang. Hung alleged that Lang, as the forwarder of an allegedly defamatory message, was himself liable as the publisher of a libelous statement. Lang moved to dismiss, citing CDA section 230 immunity. The trial court dismissed the case and Hung appealed.

The appeals court noted the general rule that CDA section 230 provides immunity from liability for all content providers for publishing information received from third parties. Subsection (c)(1) states that [n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. The court then framed the question as whether by including an introduction to the allegedly defamatory email the forwarder had materially contributed to the illegality of the Internet message. In other words, whether Lang's cover note constituted active involvement in the creation of a defamatory Internet posting such as to to expose Lang to defamation liability as an original source.

The appeals court ruled for defendant Lang. The court held that, on these facts, Lang made no material contribution to the alleged defamatory message he forwarded.

The defendant here, like others, was able to successfully deploy the CDA to escape liability. Still, republishing defamatory (or potentially defamatory) matter is always a risky proposition. If you're intent on republishing potentially defamatory matter, speak with your attorney first to assess your risks and defenses [Hung Tan Phan v. Lang Van Pham, 2010 WL 658244 (Cal. App. 4th Dist., Feb. 25, 2010)].

RockOn is a music player with cool album-art navigation UI, auto art dl and concert info. You can download the full version from the website (free) but if you do like the concept and wish to support further development please consider buying it from the Market (1.33 ).

Price: Free

AndroidTapp.com Android App Review:

Pros & Cons:

Pros

• Unique twist in the interface and navigation
• Find and download album artwork automatically
• Save and share playlists
• Multi-task. Play music in the background and launch other Android apps

Cons

• Often glitchy
• Although the UI is cool, there could be more finesse regards to smoothing out the edges versus jagged edges on albums
• Automatic album art discovery needs manual tweaking to get the best results
• Processor intense, better use on Android phones with higher processing capabilities or more internal memory storage

Features:

RockOn Music Player is an Android music player with a unique twist in the interface and navigation it displays music 2D perspective. On the left pane is the current track playing with music controls, on the right is a list of albums on your SD card. Swipe the right pane to bring albums only to front view. Amongst playing MP3s you can save and share playlists.

Usefulness:

RockOn Music Player allows you to find and download album artwork automatically, even if it is not saved with albums on your SD card (a cool resource to have). However some manual intervention is needed for some album covers.

Ease of Use:

Its nifty UI brings everything all on one screen, so operation could be any easier.

Frequently Used:

Dependant on how often you listen to music on your Android phone.

Interface:

The user interface has a different twist, though it's no TAT Home experience it has room for improvements!

In accordance with Southwest's "customers of size" policy, Smith had purchased two tickets but then stood by for an earlier flight, which had one seat remaining. That is when the airline forced him off the plane.

Alicia Keys

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Alicia Keys
Keys performing at Pavilho Atlntico in Lisbon, Portugal on March 19, 2008
Background information
Birth name	Alicia Augello Cook
Also known as	Lellow
Born	January 25, 1981 (1981-01-25) (age 29)
Origin	New York City, New York, United States
Genres	R&B, soul
Occupations	Singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, record producer, actress, music video director, author, poet
Instruments	Vocals, piano, keyboards, cello, synthesizer, vocoder, guitar, bass
Years active	1985present
Labels	Columbia, Arista, J
Website	www.aliciakeys.com

Alicia Augello Cook (born January 25, 1981), better known by her stage name Alicia Keys, is an American recording artist, musician and actress. She was raised by a single mother in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan in New York City. At age seven, Keys began to play classical music on the piano. She attended Professional Performing Arts School and graduated at 16 as valedictorian. She later attended Columbia University before dropping out to pursue her music career. Keys released her debut album with J Records, having had previous record deals first with Columbia and then Arista Records.

Keys' debut album, Songs in A Minor, was a commercial success, selling over 12 million copies worldwide. She became the best-selling new artist and best-selling R&B artist of 2001. The album earned Keys five Grammy Awards in 2002, including Best New Artist and Song of the Year for "Fallin'". Her second studio album, The Diary of Alicia Keys, was released in 2003 and was also another success worldwide, selling eight million copies. The album garnered her an additional four Grammy Awards in 2005. Later that year, she released her first live album, Unplugged, which debuted at number one in the United States. She became the first female to have an MTV Unplugged album to debut at number one and the highest since Nirvana in 1994.

Keys made guest appearances on several television series in the following years, beginning with Charmed. She made her film debut in Smokin' Aces and went on to appear in The Nanny Diaries in 2007. Her third studio album, As I Am, was released in the same year and sold six million copies worldwide, earning Keys an additional three Grammy Awards. The following year, she appeared in The Secret Life of Bees, which earned her a nomination at the NAACP Image Awards. She released her fourth album, The Element of Freedom, on December 15, 2009. Throughout her career, Keys has won numerous awards and has sold over 30 million albums worldwide, establishing herself as one of the best-selling artists of her time. On December 11, 2009 Alicia Key's was ranked as top R&B artist, the fifth top overall artist and the second top female artist (behind only Beyonce) of the 2000-2009 decade by the Billboard Magazine decade end chart. ^[

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

Sponsor

This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.

After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana, a play on "mail analysis" since he was initially focused on email social graph analysis.

We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

• In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.
• In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
• The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook's racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.

"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."

Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the Internet with," Warden says.

"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

When the folks at Netbook Navigator first asked me to write about the company's new 9 inch tablet PC I had a hard time getting past the high price tag of nearly $1200. But that price was for an early model that packed 3G capabilities and was intended for early adopters. Now Netbook Navigator has updated the pricing for the Nav 9 tablet and the base model costs just $799. Yeah, that's still enough money to pick up 2-3 netbooks, but here's what you get for the money:

• Display: 8.9 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel multitouch display
• CPU: 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU
• Graphics: Intel GMA 950
• Storage: 16GB SSD
• RAM: 2GB
• OS: Windows 7 Home Premium
• Connectivity: 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth, LAN, optional 3G HSDPA or CDMA
• I/O: 3 USB ports, MiniSD card slot, SIM card slot, port replicator w/VGA/LAN adapter, 1.3MP webcam
• Battery: 3 cell, 1700mAh (2.5 hours max)
• Dimensions: 10 x 6.6 x 0.8
• Weight: 2 pounds
• Other: car charger

The 3G module will cost you extra, as will a higher capacity battery which is good for up to 4 hours of run time. You can also get the Nav 9 with a 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB SSD. The most expensive unit will run you $1399, but the $799 starting price is certainly much more appealing than the $1200 the company was charging earlier.

Netbook Navigator has also put together a handy chart comparing the Nav 9 tablet to the upcoming Apple iPad and the already-on-the-market Archos 9 tablet. The long and short of it is that the Nav 9 supports multitasking, supports USB peripherals and SD card expansion, and comes in more varieties. Oh yeah, it can also run most Windows applications. On the other hand, it's thicker and heavier than the other tablets.

Post from: Liliputing

Netbook Navigator's Nav 9 slate PC gets affordable, guns for the iPad

Nina Bruun is a student at the t The Danish Designschool in Copenhagen. Her Fold chair, which was just completed, will be shown at the Stockholm Furniture Fair. She was inspired by origami and wanted the chair to be fold-able with references to both Scandinavian and Japanese design.

The frame consists of 10 mm plywood cut into six profiles and assembled with hinges. The shell is six pieces of hard plastic, and padded with 3 mm foam on both sides of the plastic. Finally, the chair is upholstered with woolen felt. All the seams on the chair were hand sewn, which took Nina a total of 105 hours!

She says, The seams are visible to create a more industrially expression and to create sharp edges which gives the chair a lighter expression. It was important for me to achieve this light expression', so the chair doesn't have too many references to elder heavy upholstery chairs.

There's the Atom N270 processor, running at 1.6Ghz, for example. And then there's the 2GB of memory and solid state 32GB drive. Lastly, the replaceable battery on this 8.9-in. multitouch tablet is clocked at a mere four hours, which doesn't seem that great (saving grace being that is replaceable).

Pricing is set at $599 when it launches in March. Impatient types can buy a non-multitouch prototype for $780 right now. [ExoPC via Engadget]

The iPad And The World Of Tomorrow

For those who spent yesterday glued to the State of the Union address instead of tech news feeds, Gizmodo has a terrific summary of Apple's new device. To break it down: The iPad looks basically like an iPhone, but with a 9.7 inch screen. It runs the same software as the iPhone, can connect to the internet, and seems to work nicely for reading books, newspapers and magazines, watching video, checking Google maps, reading your email, surfing the web, and casual gaming. Like the iPhone, it has no keyboard - you can touch-type on the screen.

Why is this outsize version of the iPhone so important that the internet basically exploded over it yesterday? Mostly because Apple's last two new mobile devices - the iPod and the iPhone - changed the way people think about computers. They really did change the future, by making it glaringly obvious that computing devices are not all desktop PCs - they can be specialized music players, or telephone/internet toys that put the web in your pocket. They are the beautiful, cool poster gadgets for the mobile computer generation; they are what we imagine when we think of tomorrow's machines.

The Mythical Convergence Device

The iPad promises to be just as revolutionary as its predecessors, for one reason. It embodies, as much as possible, the mythical convergence device that technophiles have been craving for almost two decades. The convergence device, which people began to discuss seriously in the 1990s, would be a unified gadget where you could consume many kinds of media, especially TV and the web, with the same gadget.

This is exactly what the iPad does, helped along by the fact that so much television is available online already. And you can add books to this convergence, too (the iPad even has a Kindle app). The iPad is also the perfect shape for a convergence box. Its screen is about the size of a quality paperback or small television set. There's none of that scrunching your forehead as you peer into the teeny screen of the iPhone to read a book or watch YouTube.

What I'm saying is that the iPad appeals to a very deep and longlived fantasy in the consumer electronics world: A device that does it all. At least, if all you want to do is consume media.

And there's the problem.

Reinventing The Television

Apple is marketing the iPad as a computer, when really it's nothing more than a media-consumption device - a convergence television, if you will. Think of it this way: One of the fundamental attributes of computers is that they are interactive and reconfigurable. You can change the way a computer behaves at a very deep level. Interactivity on the iPad consists of touching icons on the screen to change which application you're using. Hardly more interactive than changing channels on a TV. Sure, you can compose a short email or text message; you can use the Brushes app to draw a sketch. But those activities are not the same thing as programming the device to do something new. Unlike a computer, the iPad is simply not reconfigurable.

The iPad emulates television in another way, too: You can channel surf through the Apps Store, but you can't change what's playing. Every single app that's available for the iPad has to be approved by Apple first, just like apps for iPhones. That means censorship of "offensive" apps, no apps that compete with Apple (i.e., no Google Voice), and no random app you wrote to do whatever obscure shit you want to do. So you've got thousands of channels and nothing on. And because you can't reconfigure the iPad, you can't change that. You can only keep flipping through the channels, hoping in vain to see something other than reruns of Cheaters and Alf.

As futurist Jamais Cascio told io9:

This is Apple's big push of its top-down control over applications into the general-purpose computing world. The only applications that will work with the iPad are those approved by Apple, under very opaque conditions. On a phone, that's borderline acceptable, but it's not for something that is positioned to overlap with regular computers.

The iPad has all the problems of television, with none of the benefits of computers.

Back To The Shopping Mall

So if it's not a computer, what exactly is the iPad? It could be just a really tarted-up ebook reader, which would make sense if you consider that the iPad is competing with Amazon's Kindle. So it's a reinvention of the book, a fairly old technology, but in a gleaming new package. Except that package isn't even very new, as futurist and science fiction author Karl Schroeder pointed out. He told io9 that the iPad isn't about brilliant hardware innovation, and that in fact the device doesn't even use state-of-the-art ebook tech like e-ink.

Speaking to us via email, Schroeder said:

What Apple has done (again) is seize the moment with a combination of a device and a business model . . . even if e-ink provides a better reading experience for books (reading on an iPad will continue to literally mean staring into a lamp, just like reading on a computer screen), it doesn't matter because it's the total package of iTunes, iBookstore, 3G, games, apps etc. that will pull ebook readers along with it. Consider that the iPad is a closed platform that doesn't even multitask; if the technology mattered, those would be major considerations for the buyer. But they won't be, because when you buy an iPad, you buy access to the whole Apple business ecology.

Looked at from this angle, the iPad isn't so much new technology as it is a shiny, pretty doorway to a mall where you can buy everything from books to movies.

The iPad hasn't brought us forward into the future. It's taken us backward to a world of strip malls and televisions.

Another Vision Of The Future

So the iPad takes us back to the 1980s, or maybe even the 1950s. It's likely to be a device that changes our future, but what that means is we're facing a tomorrow where true innovation is sidelined by a device that represents a convergence of old media and shopping.

But as John Connor would say, we can change the future. That might be as simple as pushing Apple to change its App Store policies to make iPads less like TVs and more like computers. As Lifehacker's Adam Pash put it, "The App Store isn't exactly the problem-it's the way Apple runs and limits the App Store." He suggests that Apple could create a special "Restricted section" for its App Store. He continues:

Rather than reject applications that it feels may confuse the user (like they claimed Google Voice or Google Latitude might), or applications that allow users to access naughty pictures, or even applications that it hasn't had time to vet for the App Store proper, [Apple] put those applications in the Restricted section. Before a user is able to install applications from the Restricted section, that user has to agree that the application may confuse their feeble minds, offend their delicate sensibilities, or even slow down their device. Is this such a problem? . . . Even better, [the iPad] could work like the package manager it actually is and allow users to add their own trusted repositories as sources for other applications . . . The point is, users should at least be allowed to flip some switch, somewhere on the machine, that says, "Hey computer, I'm an adult, and I take responsibility over how I use this machine."

A convergence device that can also be reprogrammed the way computers can? Now we're in the twenty-first century.

Another possibility would be for developers and investors to focus on hardware that truly is innovative and futuristic. Schroeder says:

There's really nothing in the iPad that's new; if you want truly new, disruptive tech that would be at a similar price point if commercialized, look at Pranav Mistry's SixthSense and related projects.

SixthSense is a gesture-controlled mobile device with a projector - you can see its telephone app at work above. You project the phone onto your hand and press the buttons. You can also use gestures to take pictures. This is truly the next step in mobile computing, and will likely revolutionize computer networks in ways we can't yet imagine.

What Is To Be Done?

I know a lot of otherwise-savvy consumers and hackers who are already drooling over the iPad and putting in their orders. They hate the idea of a restricted device, but they love the shiny-shiny. I'm not saying that they should deprive themselves of this pretty new toy. What I am saying is that this toy represents a crappy, pathetic future. It is no more revolutionary than those expensive, hot boots I bought at Fluevog, and only slightly more useful.

The only way iPads can truly become futuristic devices is if we hack them so that we can pour whatever operating system we want inside. We need to jailbreak these media boxes so we can install the apps we want, not the ones provided by the Apple shopping mall.

Do not be content with a television when you can have a computer.

Do not be content with yesterday's machines, because the future is before you. Ready to be hacked.

As anticipated, the operating system is best thought of as an evolution of iPhone 3.0. That means that apps are running the show, with the same tray at the bottom and the same accelerometer capabilities.

To access the screen, you slide to unlock, just like on your phone. The display is practically identical (though biggie-sized, obviously), with a Home button situated at the bottom. You call up apps the same way you do on your phone, and they automatically go to full screen. You can also swipe through pictures and pages, again just like on the iPhone.

But how does it feel in the hand? Well, it's an inch thin and weighs just 1.5 pounds, so it's definitely easily portable. And since it's intended to be a portable device, it's got a pretty crazy proposed battery life: ten hours of video playback, and one month of standby charge.

A primary concern has been how the keyboard will work. Our money was a split-screen keyboard, but it turns out they've opted instead for to copy the iPhone again here, with a keyboard taking up the bottom half of the display when called up. It's not meant for your thumbs, apparentlyyou're expected to type on it as you would a physical keyboard.

For web surfing, the page renders just like a browser, with navigation buttons on top. For email, you can bring a pull-down menu of the inbox.

So basically, it looks like the user experience is going to be just like a big ol' iPhone, for better or for worse. I'm especially curious to see how intuitive the keyboard is. But otherwise, all the multitouch features and app arrangements should feel like old hat.

• Aldiko: outstanding e-book reader (better than Kindle on the iPhone in terms of feature set; obviously the book store is not quite as good, but the integration with free eBook download sites is a plus). Currently reading Makers by Cory Doctorow.
• Amazon: search the full Amazon catalog (can use barcodes or photos in addition to typing or speaking your query), track orders in my account.
• APNDroid: useful if you want to disable your phone's cellular data connection (useful if you're often on WiFi and want to turn off your EDGE or 3G data connection)
• AppReferer: builds a QR code (a 2D barcode) that makes recommending an app to another Android user in person a one-click affair.
• Battery Graph: shows a nice chart (exportable, even) of battery usage, which is helpful if you're trying to isolate when the battery started to drain.
• Coin Flip: silly app that lets me flip a coin. Use it mostly to settle disputes between the kids. :)
• Congress: built by Sunlight Labs, a phenomenal "pocket Congressional directory" that includes contact info, committee memberships, news, and YouTube vids of every Senator and Representative.
• DroidLive Lite: Streaming radio (via Shoutcast) from 1300 radio stations around the world.
• Facebook: news feed, photos and profile info for friends
• Fandango: Order movie tickets from movie theaters so I can bypass lines at the ticket counter.
• Finance: Google Finance app
• Flashlight: turns screen bright white to use in dark rooms
• Foursquare: app for playing Foursquare, also has a nice widget for my home screen
• Gmote: turns my Nexus One into a touchpad remote (when paired with a computer running the Gmote server software). Handy for giving presentations, or just doing something nerdy and cool.
• Google Goggles: search Google by taking pictures.
• Google Sky Map: the one app that consistently blows people away. Load it up, turn your camera toward the night sky and you'll get a real-time view of which stars, constellations and planets are above you. An awesome accompaniment to a telescope.
• Jewels: Bejeweled-like game.
• Layar: Augmented reality app that displays info on screen in realtime through your phone's camera.
• Locale: very sophisticated app for scripting events to happen based on certain triggers. (When I'm at home, disable the data connection and connect to my home wifi access point. At 11pm, turn off the sound and put the phone to sleep; at 6am turn the sound back up; when I'm at work, put the phone in vibrate mode; etc.)
• Metal detector: actually works.
• Movies (aka Flixster): Lots of info/trailers/reviews about new and upcoming movies, also integrates with Netflix for DVDs
• My Tracks: built by some Googlers, great app for keeping track of runs/bikes/ski runs you've done; captures altitude, distance, etc., then uploads to Google Maps My Maps.
• OpenTable: make restaurant reservations from the phone.
• Owner: adds my contact info to the unlock screen ("If found, please contact Rick Klau...")
• Pandora: streaming music channels.
• PapiJump: great little game using the phone's accelerometer.
• Pintail: monitors your phone's SMS messages for a message that says "locate" (plus a PIN); once received, activates the GPS and replies with the phone's location. Helpful if you've got a lost phone.
• Robo Defense: addicitve game.
• Scoreboard: Tracks scores of your favorite teams, with realtime updates and notifications as score changes.
• Seesmic: Great Twitter app.
• Shop Savvy: grab a barcode, find out who sells it and for how much.
• TiVo Remote: works with any TiVo HD unit over WiFi.
• TripIt: phenomenal itinerary manager for all travel info.
• Voice Recorder: does exactly what it says it does.
• Yelp: Local reviews.

The week before Thanksgiving, I attended an unusual symposium sponsored by the University of Denver Law Review entitled Cyber Civil Rights: New Challenges for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in our Networked Age. The symposium covered standard Cyberlaw topics, but the raison d'tre was University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron's two recent articles on online harassment of women: "Law's Expressive Value in Combating Cyber Gender Harassment" (Michigan Law Review) and "Cyber Civil Rights" (Boston University Law Review). It is unusual for a law school to celebrate another school's professor and her research, especially when the professor is fairly junior. Nevertheless, Danielle's participation brought together academics from both the Cyberlaw and civil rights communities, which provided a rare and interesting mix of folks..

First Panel

Danielle Citron started off by recapping her two papers. Online participation, such as blogging, is essential to professional standing, and employers are reviewing online profiles of prospective employees as part of their hiring considerations. However, women are being targeted for abuse online. These attacks are harming women by changing their online and offline activities, reducing their job opportunities, and causing women to change their gender representations online. Further, folks are trivializing these problems. Women are underreporting the attacks, and law enforcement only intervenes when there are offline harms. New laws can serve an expressive function to communicate that online attacks against women are socially unacceptable. The new laws can validate women's feelings that they have been harmed and encourage law enforcement to pursue more cases.

Commenting on the papers, Robert Kaczorowski of Fordham Law (and Danielle's stepdad) made an extended analogy between the Ku Klux Klan and cybermobs.

Wendy Seltzer asked if we could deemphasize the effect of words rather than prohibit them. Danielle responded that we don't know how seriously to take any particular threat.

An audience member asked if is there a difference between mobs and individual actors who are just taking advantage of being anonymous. Danielle answered that groups can become more extreme online. I think this point deserves more exploration: a series of uncoordinated individual decisions to pile on to an attack can look like a coordinated attack to the victim. This is part of why I thought the KKK references were puzzlingKKK activities are clearly coordinated, while online attacks against women can succeed without any coordination or ongoing connection between the attackers.

Paul Ohm argued that that legal solutions are better for cyber civil rights problems than technological solutions. Paul discussed what he labeled Felten's Third Law. (He doesn't know of two earlier laws named for Ed Felten; he just assumes they exist given Ed's impressive and influential oeuvre). As articulated by Paul, Felten's Third Law is that in Cyberlaw conflicts, lawyers love technical solutions and technologists love legal solutions. In other words, we love the solution we don't know because we assume it has to be better than the one we do. As both a law professor and technologist, Paul picks law over technology for these problems.

Paul categorically rejects any technical solution that would create a fully identified Internet. For example, we should not mandate server log retention because we know the logs will be co-opted to regulate other forms of unwanted content, not just online harassment.

Wendy Seltzer discussed the unintended consequences of legal intervention. For example, mandatory Internet filtering in school libraries hasn't stopped kids from bypassing the filters, but it has facilitated a marketplace for improving filtering technologies that has benefited repressive regimes. Another example: anti-circumvention technology fails to restrict copying but has reduced innovation around DRMed content. Wendy also noted how norms can help curb abuses. For example, while there are online cesspools, she praised Wikipedia's evolving guidelines for living people's biographies.

In response, Danielle admitted that her solutions need to be more surgical. She said she might consider moving from a notice-and-takedown model to a notice-and-preserve model for intermediaries.

Second Panel

This panel was composed of three women academics from the civil rights community, so it was a noticeable shift from the typical Cyberlaw academic discussion.

Mary Anne Franks is a University of Chicago Bigelow Fellow and soon-to-be full-time law professor. She expresses our collective disappointment that cyberspace isn't a utopia that allows people to escape offline discrimination and harassment. She laments that women can lose control of their identities online, such as when someone creates a fake online profile in their names.

She then addressed how cyberspace is unique/special/different with respect to gender harassment. Many commentators try to duck cyberspace exceptionalism, so it was refreshing to see her tackle the issue squarely. Existing offline discrimination/harassment laws assume interactions between repeat players at work and school; online harassment can be divorced totally from any existing social networks. However, because the online activities still harm targeted individuals at work and school, we should treat the harms the same. Offline, there are switching costs to changing jobs or school; online, search engines' consolidation of results for search on a person's name creates a different type of switching cost. In terms of supervisory power, she thinks web operators have analogous control to employers or school administrators. Thus, when web operators receive notice of online harassment, they should have a duty to do something about it. Offline, employers can develop a variety of responses and policies to combat workplace harassment. Web operators should have similar latitude; for example, they can delete offending posts or suspend/ban accounts.

Helen Norton, a University of Colorado law professor, did not share Danielle's optimism (expressed in her first article) that existing discrimination laws can curb online harassment. Instead, Helen thinks a new civil rights statute is needed, but she might limit its remedies to exclude money damages. Helen is pessimistic that there will be regulation any time soon, noting that it can take years to enact civil rights legislation. Helen would also like to see more precise definitions of the exact harms that women are experiencing only online.

Nancy Ehrenreich, a Denver University law professor, began her talk by saying that we should not overstate the Internet's benefits. She then clarified that we should not assume that disadvantaged folks can overcome barriers online. For example, we impose cultural categories on people in every interaction, so even if people try to mask their identity online, they can't really escape. She wondered why we aren't talking about an anti-discrimination law for the web. Her concern is that discrimination denies individuals access to the Internet.

In Q&A, Paul Ohm observed that civil rights scholars often invoke free speech as the countervailing concern to their desired regulations, but Cyberlaw scholars are often more interested in other generative effects of the Internet, such as new business models, new labor models and new modes of production.

Panel 3

James Grimmelmann (see his slides) started with the Skanks in NYC case. In that case, the defendant criticized someone else in her social network on a blog, calling the plaintiff (among other unflattering things) a skank. The plaintiff sued to obtain the blogger's identity. After a successful unmasking, the plaintiff dropped the lawsuit, having successfully publicly shamed the blogger.

James hypothesized that this unmasking and shaming was an appropriate remedythe blogger got shamed (like an eye for an eye), and unmasking is a better outcome than other legal remedies like damage suits. James then posited a thought exercise that provided plaintiffs with an expedited unmasking procedure if they drop any damages claim. This would have a number of benefits. Unmasking curbs online harassment is especially effective at busting online mobs. Also, an unmasking remedy avoids messy debates over the First Amendment's scope, and it may be more desirable than trying to hold online providers liable.

Having advanced his own strawman, James then cut it down. In some cases, defamation remedies may be more desirable, and plaintiffs may not know that until they learn the putative wrongdoer's identity. In other cases, plaintiffs who just want unmasking would appreciate a lower legal hurdle. Also, we provide legal protection for anonymity for good reasons.

James' lessons from the thought exercise: we should consider ways to decouple an unmasking remedy from litigation. At the same time, we need to protect defendants from pretextual unmasking; in some cases, retaliation is a big concern, and we should incorporate this concern into the unmasking decision.

From Chris Wolf's talk (see his full remarks), the most interesting thing I learned is that 18 states have laws banning wearing masks in public, enacted to suppress KKK activities. This was the second speaker's KKK reference of the day, and it made me wonder if we were experiencing some variation of Godwin's Law.

Panel 4

Viva Moffat observed that secondary liability issues generate the most heat in online harassment discussions. She expressed concern that imposing legal duties on third parties may not help law's norm-shaping effect, and it's not appropriate to impose liability just because the provider has deeper pockets or the direct actor can't be found. She also suggested that imposing liability on third parties creates a greater risk of collateral damage than direct liability. [Note: I would like to know more about this last assertion. I suspect we cannot make a utilitarian calculation a priori]. As a result, she favors focusing more efforts on sharpening direct liability.

Ed Felten talked about identifying and anonymizing online activity. He explained the usual sequence of events in chasing bad online content:

log file => IP address => identity => justice

But the IP address => identity step breaks down when users use an anonymizing proxy or the user's network uses network address translation (used by home wireless routers or in coffee shops) and all connected devices' requests share a single IP address. He said that a majority of Internet connections use NAT.

Because IP address tracebacks can dead-end at the intermediary, an IP address can reveal too little information. However, even when users aren't investigatory targets, IP addresses can reveal too much information, such as geolocation. This paradoxIP addresses simultaneously reveal both too much and too little informationreflects that the IP address system was built for routing, not identification. So could we design a better authenticating technology?

He then conducted a semi-realistic thought experiment of a new technological tag that could be used instead of IP addresses. This tag could have the following attributes:

* can be placed by any intermediary
* conveys no information about the sender unless unwrapped by the intermediary (presumably for good legal cause)
* unwrapping the tag yields the best identity information the intermediary has
* the tag's use is voluntary as a technical matter
* the tag is removable as a technical matter

I then batted clean-up. A summary of my remarks:

Today's conversation has revisited long-standing Cyberlaw issues, such as:

* anonymity v. accountability, and who should be responsible for online content and actions
* cyberspace as a physical place. See, e.g., Noah v. AOL (an online discrimination case), National Federation of the Blind v. Target (also an online discrimination case) and Estavillo v. Sony
* cyberspace exceptionalism and cyberspace utopianism (on the latter point, see my article on search engine utopianism)
* when is the optimal time to regulate rapidly evolving technology? Early, when the technology is still in its infancy, or later, when market forces and new technological evolutions may have cured the early problems?

Danielle's articles convinced me that women are experiencing serious harms online that menincluding mecould easily trivialize. Danielle's articles also convinced me that online harassment has strong parallels to the 1970s legal evolution of workplace harassment doctrines, where a big part of the battle was to get people to take the harms seriously.

While I find a lot of descriptive value in Danielle's work, the normative implications are not as clear. As usual with attempts to regulate rapidly evolving technology, there are many important but overwhelmingly hard definitional challenges, such as who is an intermediary, what are online mobs and what constitutes online harassment. For example, I do not think the Skanks in NYC incident is an online harassment case or an attack, but James Grimmelmann's talk assumed those characterizations.

While we can debate what should be the right level of regulatory intervention, we should not overlook that Congress already enacted a law squarely governing intermediary liability for online harassment: 47 USC 230. The angst that prompted this conferencebad behavior onlineis the logical consequences of 230's broad immunity. The statute enables websites to adopt policies that they will not police user content or retain server logs of user activity. These choices aren't a surprise or a per se abuse of the immunity; instead, they are the unavoidable implications of Congress' action.

We might question Congress' wisdom in adopting 230, but we should not diminish its potential importance to the Internet as we know it. [In Q&A, Chris Wolf asked about the comparative experience in countries that don't have such broad immunity. In those countries, we know that websites take down user content much more freely, and I believe that the most interesting UGC innovations are all taking place here in the US, not countries with more restrictive UGC liability.] I can, at most, only prove correlation and not causation, but I believe 230 is one of the main causal reasons why the Internet has succeeded so well.

When I speak around the country about 230, I often encounter folks who generally accept 230's immunity scope but want just one new exception, i.e., their pet topic. If everyone got their just one exception, the law would be eviscerated. (I said it would be Swiss-cheesed to death; maybe I should have said it would be overcome by a thousand duck bites). I'm not rejecting new exceptions categorically (they should be each considered on their own merits), but in aggregate 230's immunization benefits are actually quite precarious. I believe 230 works precisely because of its strength and simplicity, so adding more exceptions could significantly reduce its efficacy.

I concluded my remarks by observing that online harassment is a subspecies of bullying and incivil behavior in our society. While we can and should work to curb online harassment, I am more interested in addressing bullying and incivility in all its forms, wherever it takes place.

In this regard, I have been impressed by how my son's school is proactively addressing bullying. See more about this effort, called Project Cornerstone. The school is teaching kids not to bully or to tolerate being bullied, and the project gives bullied kids tools to go on the offensive against bullies. There's no guarantee that anti-bullying programs will work in the short or long run, but I remain hopeful that online harassment today partially reflects that many current Internet users never got any anti-bullying education. Perhaps, then, online harassment issues will naturally abate (without any regulatory intervention) as new generation of Internet users, better educated about bullying, come onto the Internet.

Following my remarks, we had more Q&A.

Paul Ohm Q: Some cyber folks argue against secondary liability because they believe that a victim can pursue a direct action, but Ed's talk suggests that user anonymity will continue to be possible.

Mary Anne Franks: civil rights isn't about individual claims because victims have to bear too high a burden to pursue claims. Instead, civil rights are about changing large-scale social norms. The goal is to achieve anti-discrimination by any means necessary. Thus, civil rights scholars have already discussed and concluded that it's appropriate to impose liability on intermediaries like employers and schools.

Danielle: intermediaries are the lowest cost avoiders.

James Grimmelmann: no, the harassers are the lowest cost avoiders. Civil rights folks would get more support from the Cyberlaw crowd if they focused their regulatory desires towards intermediaries who are in active concert with the bad actors.

Danielle's Wrap-Up

We all agree that:

* education can make a big difference
* online communities need to self-police
* there are numerous limits to using the law as a solution, including that lawsuits don't make sense and 230's immunity.

We don't agree on what to do next. There are First Amendment limits, and technology doesn't offer any panaceas.

With the imminent release of WordPress version 2.9 on the horizon and my subsequent lack of excitement, it only seems fitting to put together a wish list for the next version. It is even more fitting since Raanan (@raanan) asked, What's on your wishlist for 3.0 ?

I partially answered that question in the comments with the following:

1. Semantic integration with Zemanta or OpenCalais
   1. This would be like having a librarian with a fancy masters degree in categorizing everything on the planet riding shotgun with you while you write.
2. WordPress recommended vocabulary for categories
   1. This could mirror NYT Open Linked Data RDF or other semantic tools
3. Image upload and modal window to open in advanced mode for properties control
   1. This could be a combo of both tabs but something more powerful from the first time the window opens so that users don't need to perform multiple actions to add padding or custom links to images
4. Feed only choice for publishing posts
   1. This doesn't have to be authenticated and would work by same rules with tags, categories, etc. to syndicate for apps or widgets
   2. Imagine being able to use WP as a CMS to manage the data that is delivered to mobile apps on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry or Palm as one standard

In addition to these four I have some more wishes for this list

1. The return of horizontal navigation to the administration panel or the option to choose vertical left side or horizontal suckerfish style
2. Integrated gallery function for display in themes
   1. Yes, there are plenty of plugins to do this but some of that code like the integration of the fabulous WPTouch mobile theme into central codebase would be huge
3. WordPress.org installs that allow for gravatar uploads through profiles
   1. Hook this into the .com API and welcome these users into the fold
   2. This could turn out to be a great way to make them familiar with the .com platform
   3. But mainly so users can swap them on the fly with their own installs
4. Content libraries from media companies
   1. Stock photos, video, quotes
      1. A new API component to allow multiple third parties to supply this content

I'm sure that over the next few weeks I will think about this some more and come up with a couple other ideas. But for now, what's on your wishlist for 3.0 ?

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

WordPress 3.0 Wish List is a post from: TechStartups.com

The web browser is the the only place that most computer users come into contact with a command line these days. Well, lest I forget the search box that wraps those magic keywords and phrases in some crazy ass query that pings about 8 billion servers on the dark side of the moon that Google owns.

The address bar in a browser is not different except that it requires the user to know the path to a set of files store someplace. The browsers job is to take this command and wrap it up in a request with more information (headers) to identify itself to the host of the requested files.

Most users don't know that this happens, they don't care and even if they did would it matter to them as long as they found what they wanted.

Search is used when people don't know the URL to type and you need assistance. URL's get typed into the browser when a user knows where to find what they what. URL's are like phone numbers to users (I know about IP addresses so hold your horses).

If asked how a phone is able to make a connection to the right individual on the other end. All you would say is, Dail the number. You wouldn't get into exchanges, towers, cables, routers, etc. A phone number is a code. It is a file pointer to get the information you desire.

This mind numbing nonsense regarding the death of URL's is shattering my faith in humanity. With that said, I don't think it was the point of the post. I think this was:

We all know that the internet has won as the transport medium for all data but the universal interface for interacting with the web? well, that battle is just now getting underway. Chris Messina

Let me stand right up and say there is no battle for the universal interface for interacting. There are trends, tools and options. Each person will choose their own, have it chosen for them or develop their own. It's that simple. Do what you like, use what you like and move on.

Attempting to prescribe what a universal interface is a fools errand and a businessperson's opportunity. It's not grounds to loosen one's grip on the reality that the internet will keep moving along with or without you. Just do your best for the groups that you represent and meet their needs.

URL's, phone numbers and file pointers will always exist. Without them nothing works. I don't even know how I came to write this piece or why I found it important. I should have just left these hyperthinking geeks to fight about nothing.

Saying that the trend of embedded graphical navigation systems to find what you are looking for is going to destroy the internet is like saying that because of contacts as graphical representations of of phone numbers that they will disappear.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

No One Is Taking Your URL Away is a post from: TechStartups.com

We've all had to deal with losing our most precious data photos of family, spreadsheets and the 1.5 million images of kitties being cute. I joke, but we have all been there, that moment when you know that your data is gone.

You sit crushed under the weight of the mental notes you are taking about what has been lost. Then you realize that you have a backup maybe. That it might be accessible from another computer maybe.

With a solution offered by Spare Backup there is no maybe. Their software ensures that your data is saved, it's in a format that you can recognize with icons for you applications and it is accessible in more ways than one. More than one? They offer an innovative mobile solution as well as an easily navigated online backup.

My first impressions of the mobile access and online service have been favorable. I have been able to access data backups with ease on mobile. Sure I can't restore my computer from it but without having to wait to get a new one up and running I can look at those cute kitty pictures.

As for internet access, the best feature of Spare Backup's offering isn't really the storage, it is awesome too but plays second fiddle to a masterfully designed user interface for getting to your backup data. The interface is icon driven and succeeds where most consumer backup services fail making the icons useful and descriptive for the kind of files you will find behind them.

Spare Backup offers three levels of service to customers: single pc, family pack to backup five computers to one account and a corporate package. They all offer the standard online backup to the cloud and the ability to burn the data to fixed media like CD/DVD. I'm sure if you are stealthy enough you could use another app to create an .ISO backup and send it over to an external drive.

If you're looking for a new solution for backing up your computer, take a look at Spare Backup. They have a long history of improving their software since going public in 2003. Unlike most startups, if you like the service that Spare Backup provides you can actually buy into the company, as they are publicly traded. Another funding method that we'll address in a future post.

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Spare Backup and Spare Yourself Some Pain is a post from: TechStartups.com

This afternoon I noticed something funny happening with Google Reader shared feeds. It seems that feeds are now mixing namespaces for the main content of the posts.

Previously, all content was delivered via the 'summary' namespace. When I did a check after getting some null data fields in a database I took a look at the shared feed . . . sure enough there was a new namespace, content' for the main content. Makes sense. But it is a pain if you are expecting everything to be returned as 'summary'.

My guess is that they are saving time and money by not rewriting the original source feed main content namspace. However, it creates an XML namespace soup that is harder to navigate.

When stuff like this happens it makes me nervous, especially when I am building something on the back of it.

The last time this happened Twitter turned off pagination for getting recent tweets for your friends. It killed a really cool project that I spent more time working on than I care to recount. I'm hoping that Google will not do the same. Fingers crossed.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Using The Magic API is a post from: TechStartups.com

Can't make it to SoHo anytime soon or in this lifetime? Then you should head over to StyleCaster to get a sense of what ambitious, smart fashion is walking the streets of NYC South of Houston. New York is teeming with this apparel and footwear clacking away to catch a cab.

StyleCaster is most definitely a Big Apple property, which is only to its benefit as they grow their site. The city is a fashion and media capital.

With the new boom of startup activity on the East Coast they find themselves in a great position to gain users, make partnerships (both tech savvy and with traditional media) and to be in the epicenter of the next fashion trends. Think what Portfolio.com used to be, but for fashion.

Fashion sites often suffer from a lack of depth, see content, or lack of tech to make them accessible. They often rely heavily on motion graphics in Flash and a business model based on revenue from affiliate sales. Not StyleCaster. They have mixed all the ingredients and a some other special sauce to create a complete user experience.

It would be hard to write this review if I didn't break their site down from the beginning. StyleCaster is three distinct properties that have been plied together with one smaller cousin: Fashion Recommendations, Social Network, News/Blog and Shopping (the smaller cousin).

Fashion Recommendations

This is the core value proposition for StyleCaster. They deliver a tailored interface for weather and season with 360 degree model views.

Earlier this summer they took this concept and created an iPhone app that was just as robust as their site. The experience that they are able to deliver with their Daily Looks section should make retailers jealous. They have merged seamless cross-selling with the common sense that your friend might recommend and item to you.

Social Network

Everyone wants on this bandwagon for many reasons and the number one being to get funded. I'm not sure if this is what got StyleCaster $4 million but this is how it is done right, in case you were wondering.

They first look to a larger network, in this case Facebook, and integrate with their API through Connect. Second, they take this data and create an onsite profile each registrant. Third, and final in this process of hooking user into their community, they make it drop dead simple to engage with other users based on contributor types, cities, at random and a 15 minutes of fame section. A simple horizontal navigation that tracks users onsite fashionista moves.

News/Blog

Fashion Recommendations might be the awesome wow factor that you need to attract the fashion forward and a Social Network to get users connected and spending time on your site but the most impressive feature of this site isn't really a feature. The Newsroom and Blog sections of StyleCaster are destinations for an insiders perspective on fashion. This is where the magic of this site is made.

This is content that matches the ambition and smarts of the fashion they follow . . . delivers and then some. My only gripe is that the IA and taxonomy is lacking lacking and it can be difficult to find much of the great content that is buried in the site.

StyleCaster's headlines can be seen on other fashion/celeb sites around the net but smart money would probably say that there are more partnerships in the works to deliver full content. I'm not smart money, so I can't say for sure.

Shopping

Well, what would a fashion site be without shopping? I called this the one smaller cousin' and I mean it. Simply put, the focus of this site is obviously to build a company and a brand based on high quality content, technology and a great user experience. It wasn't built with shopping at its core. And that is awesome! There is a solid enough foundation in place that if StyleCaster went down this road they would find success but not as much as they will find by having all of other components in place.

I've gushed quite a bit here over what is just another startup. They are just another startup that needs to prove itself in the marketplace. I believe they will. And even if they don't, this business, with any one of the three aforementioned sections would make any entrepreneur very happy with the traffic they could bring. Kudos to the team that are making this happen. They're getting done the right way.

It wouldn't be right to do a post about a fashion startup without some snark, now would it?

If you have ever wanted to release that inner hater, head to The Daily Looks section and spin them tall skinny models round and round until your petty little heart is content. Not that I did or would want to do this.

Tip if you do: Play house music to make it a party. Remember, you can't do this in SoHo!

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StyleCaster Is Your SoHo Connection is a post from: TechStartups.com

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[atduskgreg] posted this cool looking rig. That's a batting glove, chopped up and equipped with a flex sensor and a pressure sensor. The end goal was to create a new method of drawing. You can see he's interfaced with the servos decently. It seems fairly responsive and intuitive. Looking at his results though, make us wonder if all that effort was worth it. We would probably apply this rig to some kind of animatronics.

Last week we told you about the Intel App Developer Program for Independent Software Vendor, right? Well, to kick start is campaign for more developed apps in time for the launch of the Intel App Store, Intel is giving away free netbooks to the developers who can come out with the first 100 finished apps. In addition, developers of these 100 apps will also be invited to attend the CES 2010.

The categories of apps that you should develop should relate to Home and Lifestyle, Entertainment, Education and Reference, Utilities and Security and of course Games.

For mor details, you might want to subscribe to appdeveloper.intel.com. From November 1, you can snag the SDK that you'll be needing to develop your apps.

Here are some videos giving your some more information:

And here's how you could join:

via Netbooknews.de

A post from the Asus Eee PC blog.

Intel Offers Free Netbooks to First 100 Intel Apps Created

The best way to be sure a contract contains all the terms one needs is to do the same type of transaction over and over until you know it cold. Next best is to find someone else who has to rely on. Those aren't particularly helpful suggestions to someone in unfamiliar territory with a deal on the line, though, so here are some suggestions to help identify missing terms.

1) Make up a hit list. Before you start reading, write down list of the important terms. This step takes a surprising amount of mental discipline but it is incredibly important. Avoid the temptation to dive straight in and see what the contract says. Even if you think you know what terms you need, write them down before you start reading.

2) Take the contract in sections. This goes along with my piece on How to Read a License Agreement. Instead of reading front-to-back, search the contract to find all the terms on your hit list. Do they match your requirements? Is anything from your list missing? Bonus points for lining up your hit list in one column on a piece of paper and writing down the comparable terms in the contract in the next column. I have only taken this extra step a handful of times, but found it very helpful when the deal was complex or I was having a hard time getting through the contract language.

3) Put it Back Together. Now that you have found the biggest points, you can read through and see how other terms flow around them. Do all the defined terms match your understanding of what they should be? Do any subparagraphs under one of the big points limit its applicability?

4) Try to Break it. It's also easy to read a sentence, squint a bit and say yeah, that basically covers it. Instead of trying to read the contract in a way that fits your needs, do the opposite. How could a paragraph be read against you? E.g. if you quit vs. being terminated by your employer, will you lose any vesting in your stock?

5) Read with a Friend. If the deal is important it merits more than one set of eyes. I frequently find that useful points come out of discussion with a co-reader.

6) Search for Exemplars. I am putting this last because it's really hard to find good examples of many types of agreements. The SEC's EDGAR database is a good source, but search is very limited unless you pay for advanced search capabilities. Docstoc and Scribd have pretty good libraries but since there is no clear way to judge quality it is best to look for at least 3 samples of the type of agreement you need, then compare terms carefully before relying on any one contract.

I hope these ideas are helpful. Reading carefully and catching everything is a genuinely hard task. Practice very much makes perfect and these are some of my favorite practice tools.

MSNBC.com just announced that it has acquired EveryBlock, a 'hyperlocal' news and information site that has been publishing and aggregating data and news stories for 16 American cities for the last two years. EveryBlock aggregates local news stories, but it also makes publicly available information like data about restaurant inspections and crimes available in an easy to read format. EveryBlock had been funded by a two-year grant from the Knight Foundation. This is MSNBC.com's second major acquisition after it bought the social news site Newsvine in October 2007.

Sponsor

Neither MSNBC nor EveryBlock released specifics about the price of the acquisition, but the site's founder, Adrian Holovaty, and his team will remain based in Chicago. According to MSNBC.com's president Charlie Tillinghast, EveryBlock will remain an independent brand, though MSNBC will surely to try to integrate some of EveryBlock's data into the main MSNBC.com site, which doesn't feature a lot of local news at this point.

Local EveryBlock sites are currently available for Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. While a number of other companies, including Outside.in, for example, also aggregate local news from blogs and mainstream news sources, EverBlock stands out because of how well it displays local information from public records. The site, for example, aggregates data about everything from building permits and police calls to liquor license status changes and excavation permits - data that is generally hidden away on government websites that are often hard to navigate.

EveryBlock's source code is freely available under the GPL license. The site was built on top of the Django framework.

We just broke the news earlier tonight that Facebook is launching a newer, simplified version of the Facebook platform, called Facebook Lite. This news comes only a day after Facebook made its blockbuster acquisition of FriendFeed and rolled out its Realtime Facebook Search. You may be asking yourself what the heck is Facebook Lite? or maybe why would Facebook launch a stripped-down version of its website? We're here to answer those questions, and we have screenshots of the new Facebook Lite to help us out.

1. What is Facebook Lite?
A: It is a completely stripped-down version of the Facebook platform. From what we can tell, it is almost like a Twitter stream: you can see your most recent status updates and the updates of your friends. There is a left-hand navigation with four main categories: Wall, Info, Friends, and Photos & Videos. It does little more than that.

2. What does Facebook Lite look like?
A: Here is what we believe to be a screenshot of Facebook Lite, courtesy of Hacker News:

Very stripped down, very basic, very reminiscient of Twitter and FriendFeed.

3. Is this Facebook integrating with FriendFeed?
A: Most likely not. The deal is still new to integrate their technologies in this way, and we're hearing reports that these tests have been ongoing for the last 2-3 days. That would put its development well before the FriendFeed acquisition

4. What's the point of Facebook Lite?
A: Speculation says it's a direct assault on Twitter. Facebook continues to find ways to make itself competitive with Twitter. This is why Facebook has been launching features such as public profiles, profile fans, public status updates, and realtime search. Twitter is simple, so Facebook's fighting back with the same.

However, we don't know for sure. They may just be making a speedier version for slow connections. We'll find out more from the Facebook team soon.

5. How can I access it?
A: It's a limited test for only a subset of users. The fact that thousands, if not millions of users got the test notice was a bug. Most likely Facebook will open up the test to more users very soon, especially since everybody now knows about it.

We've contacted Facebook and are awaiting a response on this development. In the meantime, we want to hear your thoughts. Do you think it's a good idea? What do you think is the social network's goal is with Facebook Lite? And will people use it?

Tags: facebook

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

There comes a time for every venture when the owners have to decide whether hockey-stick-like growth is feasible or not. In your initial plan, you indicated a sudden surge in revenue at a certain point in time, i.e. where the hockey stick shows up. You have now reached that point. You may have a great business, but will it hit the big time?

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You need to make an honest, clear-eyed assessment at this stage. You might spend money in the hope of achieving that growth and end up losing everything, which would be a big shame if your business was profitable and growing at normal rates (and therefore valuable). On the other hand, forgoing a chance at the big time just because you are too nervous would be equally unfortunate. How do you navigate this complex decision?

Understand Your Investor's Agenda

If you go for growth and miss your numbers and have to raise more money, your investor will get hurt a bit and you will get hurt a lot. The investor can put in more money, and they will do it on harsh terms if they have to because you have missed your numbers. You may end up with nothing at the end of the day while the investor will get their money back plus some.

If you don't know how that works, look up and understand Liquidation Preference. Your contract with the VC will have a Liquidation Preference clause. It is a perfectly reasonable term (although there are egregious variants), but it can really hurt you under certain circumstances. Basically, your view of risk and your VC's view of risk are different.

Let's look at a simple case. Let's say your VC invested $3 million for a 30% equity share and has a 5% Liquidation Preference (quite reasonable -- not one of those egregious variants) and that your business sells five years later for $3.8 million. What will you and your team get? Because you and your partners and team own 70% of the shares, you would get 70% of $3.8 million, right?

Wrong. You get zip. Nada. Nothing. Just do the compound interest calculation to see why. The fact that you own 70% of the common shares means nothing in this case. The VC gets their money back with interest, which is not a good result but not a disaster either.

If your venture does reasonably well and sells for $50 million, you and your VC will do just fine. The VC will get $3.8 million, and you will divide up $46.2 million (i.e. $50 - $3.8 million) according to the ratio of shares owned. (That works out to over $30 million for you and your 70%-owning team.)

If you hit the ball out of the park and sell for $500 million, the Liquidation Preference becomes essentially a rounding error of interest only to accountants. If your venture misses its numbers and sells for $3.8 million, you will get nothing, which is quite reasonable: the VC bought into a dream and a team, and if you do not deliver, you shouldn't get anything.

Even if the whole business goes kaput without any realizable value, your venture is still just one among many companies in the VC's portfolio. VCs don't like losing ventures, but as they say, "This will hurt you a lot more than it hurts me." This is akin to the chicken and pig contributing to the eggs-and-bacon breakfast: the chicken may be involved, but the pig is "committed."

Just understand that your interests may not be aligned and that your and their views of risk may be different.

Raise More and Go for It?

Let's say you raised $3 million, and you are now gaining traction and everyone is telling you to raise more and really go for it. The VCs are ready to write a big check. It's a no-brainer, right? Wrong. This is when you need to think hard.

Suppose you raise a second round. It's a nice big one for $10 million, and the headline valuation is triple that of your first round. You and your team are giving each other high fives. Perhaps you don't look too hard at the Liquidation Preference. This time, the terms may actually be egregious, but the thought of that $10 million and the headline valuation number cause you to overlook that.

For example, Mark Zuckerberg should be a billionaire because he owns a ton of founding stock in Facebook? Well, Facebook has raised $640 million and some of it a long time ago. There would almost certainly be Liquidation Preference. If Facebook sold for around $1 billion today, Mark Zuckerberg would probably walk away with nothing but a lot of experience and memories. But Facebook would never sell for as little as that, so not to worry, right?

Entrepreneurs are optimistic by nature. They have to be if they are going to get out of bed every morning and work against the odds as passionately as they do. VCs don't have to be optimistic: their downside is pretty well covered.

Run the numbers -- all of them, not just the rosy projections -- and see where you end up. Then make sure your interests and the VC's really are aligned.

And how do you align interests? Five ways.

1. Align Around Facts

Facts are hard to come by in a startup. There is a ton of unknowns. So separate fact from forecast: you can take facts to the bank, but you run sensitivity analysis on forecasts. If that sounds intangible, here is the simple version. Take your forecast and...

1. Double the cost,
2. Halve the revenue,
3. Double the time it takes to do everything in the forecast.

First, do you have enough capital for this scenario?

Secondly, look at what the business would be valued at in such a scenario... not what you hope it will be valued at, but rather what other companies in a similar position are being valued at.

2. Focus on Server Costs

In the Web 2.0 era, we achieved control over the costs that bedeviled the 1.0 era:

• R&D costs have shrunk through a mix of open source, new development tools and offshore resources.
• Marketing costs have shrunk, thanks social media and viral marketing.

Hearing the proud claim that "Our major costs are now only our servers" has become common. For some businesses, that is no longer a proud refrain but a business problem. If you hit that magic viral moment when user traffic takes off, you had better have some of these three things:

1. An incredibly low cost per user as a result of some really smart performance optimization,
2. A revenue model that kicks in right after traffic grows,
3. Enough capital to sustain you until #1 or 2 is figured out.

Ideally, you would have all bases covered, but two out of three is fine. Look at Google. It had #1 and 2. Twitter and Facebook have #3. I would prefer to own Google.

Even if revenue growth is lower than forecast, if the server costs are under control and user growth is booming, you will get more VC money on good terms.

So, don't skimp on that software performance design and coding early in the game. Leaving it as an afterthought was okay for a venture starting out in 2004, not for one starting out in 2009.

3. Control the Business Planning Process

This means you will need a process. If that goes against your grain (because, say, you are a creative type, a great hacker, or a sharp sales guy), then find someone on your team who can really run the numbers and unite everyone around a common planning process.

The type of process will depend on the type of business. At a high level, they all address these questions:

1. Where are we now?
2. Where do we want to get to?
3. How do we get there?

As the entrepreneur/CEO, though, you need to own this process and drive it. The worst thing you could do is let a junior member do this for you. They don't truly understand your business and certainly don't care about it as much as you do, and their interests won't be the same as yours.

The process must be dynamic and based on a financial model. This means you should be able to adjust each variable and re-plan efficiently as circumstances change. Your VC may use earlier plans to beat you up a bit, but those plans are irrelevant; all that matters is the current one (and your VC knows that).

4. Talk to Your Independent Adviser

This is when you will find it valuable to have an independent adviser on your board (see Building an Advisory Board). Being independent means that the adviser was not nominated by the VC. Having someone like that on the board (as opposed to their being merely a friendly mentor) is important because they will then know the numbers and character of the VC better. When you need critical advice in a hurry, it is vital that your adviser knows these things.

5. Do a Deal That Aligns Your Interests

This is possible. If you have a good VC, a good board, and some good advisers, having an honest dialogue to get everyone's interests aligned is quite easy. If you have a lousy VC and a toxic board, you will have a nasty fight on your hands. Don't shirk that fight.

The simplest way to align interests is for the VC to buy some stock from you and your founding team. But the right amount: not so much that they will be afraid (justifiably) that you will walk away to play golf or start another venture, but enough that your family feels secure and personal finances are not a worry. Too much stress is not productive. In other words, you and your VC should be in the same boat and view the world and your risk with the same perspective.

When your business finally gains traction and VCs want to invest more money because they see the big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, your negotiating position will be strong. At this stage, they need you more than you need them. But don't abuse this position of strength: just use it to get what you and your team reasonably need, and then march on together to build the big dream.

Photo credit: jurvetson.

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The application aggregates live streaming and recorded radio broadcasts from across the US, displays their current and planned content schedules and now offers a search function that stretches across all those different types of content: live streams, podcasts and text show descriptions. It's a free app and the the organization that makes it hosts almost nothing on its own servers. The end result is a remarkable user experience that ought to be an inspiration for old media of every kind. It isn't perfect, but it's getting better fast.

The app was made by a non-profit organization called Public Radio Exchange (PRX). PRX was founded and is run by Jake Shapiro, a man who used to be an associate director at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Shapiro used to produce an NPR radio show with Christopher Lyndon and before that he was one of the first tinkerers with web distribution of music for his band Two Ton Shoe.

Two Ton Shoe didn't find a lot of success in the United States, but thanks to the long tail of the web Shapiro says they somehow found a big fan base in Korea. The band toured there and Korean bands have covered some of their songs. "I'm a Korean rock star," Shapiro says, "and I believe there's a 'Korea' out there for everybody."

About a year ago Shapiro says he called around all the major players in public radio and argued that they had a unique opportunity in the iPhone platform if they could collaborate and create a really strong offering. An organization called American Public Media decided to contribute the work they had done so far on their own iPhone app to Shapiro's project and NPR and Public Radio International agreed to lend their support to what would become the Public Radio Tuner, today renamed the Public Radio Player.

Funding Local Radio on the iPhone

Public Radio Player could facilitate that long tail experience for obscure local public radio content by making it far more available on the iPhone. But PaidContent's Rafat Ali worries that by freeing radio listeners all the more from their local radio station, the Player could sever the loyalty and fund raising connections that keep public radio alive.

To that concern Shapiro has two interesting responses. First, he says that survey data shows most users prefer listening to their local stations on the app, along with a variety of favorites from elsewhere.

Even more interesting is the project's collaboration with Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls. Searls is at Harvard's Berkman Center now, developing a framework for what's being called Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) - a customer-based response to the business paradigm of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The VRM project and Shapiro's PRX are developing ways for Public Radio Player users to track what they listen to on the player and make financial contributions to the radio stations they've consumed from the most.

Shapiro says that part of the project faces a major roadblock from Apple. Though Apple introduced in-application payments last month, the feature is only available to paid apps (Public Radio Player is free) and charitable contributions through the iPhone are strictly prohibited. They can't even be talked about, Shapiro says, because Apple doesn't want to deal with the possibility of charity scams, there's tax complications, the platform's standard 30% fee for payments isn't tenable in a non-profit context and Apple has no financial incentive to solve this sticky complex of problems.

For now the app is funded by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That funding is up for renewal this summer. Shapiro says that a second round of funding would be used to create "showcase apps that would break new ground and create new technology." He says the company is particularly interested in technologies that represent a hybrid of digital and broadcast. "With radio," he says, "there is still a tremendous amount of reach that you don't want to give up on when you move into the digital space."

Fixing the App

That hybrid paradigm is very well represented by the new version of the Public Radio Player. The previous version, called Public Radio Tuner, was one of the most popular free apps in the iPhone store but it didn't really work that well. Radio streams got dropped a lot. That's no longer a big problem with version 2.0.

The new version of the app tackles the problem of dropped streams by making the buffering settings much more sophisticated. Remember, the App doesn't host any of the audio, it just points to the live streams or podcasts stored on public radio stations' own servers. Project manager Matt MacDonald says the app now determines what kind of bandwidth the receiving phone has, then buffers the inbound stream accordingly before serving it up to listeners. The end result is a radically more usable radio app on wifi, 3G or Edge connections.

It's still not perfect; this like every app is at the mercy of AT&T's wireless network, but dropped streams appear to be much, much less frequent than they used to be. The interface sometimes hangs when loading menus, but Shapiro says that with the new release today bug fixes are a top priority and though crash reports are appearing infrequently, they are being closely watched. "Just shake the phone," he jokes. "Then it will work better."

More Than One Kind of Content

The new app brings a whole lot more radio to your iPhone. In addition to pointing to hundreds of radio streams, PRX has co-ordinated a number of different sources to pull show schedules down to be stored locally on your phone. "Scheduling data has been a big effort," Shapiro says. "It never existed in one place and is still a moving target."

A company called Public Interactive (recently acquired by NPR from Public Radio International) has a metadata tool that originally captured music playlists but now publishes radio show schedules as well. NPR and many radio stations also display schedules on their own websites. PRX aggregates all that data, stores it on your phone, syncs it with the radio stream links and then checks for changes each time you launch the Public Radio Player app.

Having the particular show that's playing displayed along with a station name makes a very big difference in the user experience.

The 2.0 version of the app also includes support for "on demand" or podcast listening. Hundreds of podcasts are navigable by featured shows, category or alphabetically. Podcasts are integrated into some of the show schedules as well. When listening to a streaming station, you can view the rest of the day's schedule and see what other shows will be broadcast later. Then you can choose to listen to previous recorded editions of those shows. It's a pretty seamless experience.

Search is No Small Matter

The new search functionality integrates all of the above, letting you search for keywords or topics and finding both recorded and currently live shows that match your search. MacDonald says the company used an open source program called ThinkingSphynx on the back end, worked closely with the NPR API team and is still working on teaching local radio stations about the importance of standards-based content titling. Listening to streams and podcasts on iTunes or an iPod may not have been so difficult with incomplete file names, but show a radio station how broken its content looks in a dynamic iPhone directory and the message comes through loud and clear.

There have been other efforts to index all the public radio streams online; Public Radio Fan is the most notable and is more international, but is less sophisticated and is based on the desktop and browser. (After listening to some international broadcasts via Public Radio Fan it's hard not to be a little disappointed with even Public Radio Player's extensive but exclusively US menu.)

As a media technology, Public Radio Player offers a unique blend of content aggregation, focus on both real time and recorded content and extensive data integration on the back end. All on the iPhone. Its design and performance continue to improve. It's a very impressive offering in terms of content delivery; if it can find a way to use the new platform it's on to transcend the public radio paradigm of on-air pledge drives, that would really be remarkable, wouldn't it?

Jake Shapiro says that offering Public Radio Player on other platforms, including a web interface, is a logical next step. You can follow the project's progress on the Public Radio Player blog and download the application here.

Look out mobile phones, because in a decade's time wearable systems may be the primary means of accessing the Web!

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In the TED presentation, Maes refers to this system as a "sixth sense" - a sense that would give us seamless, easy access to information on the fly about situations and objects we come across.

The current system, albeit relatively clunky, could be purchased for as little as $350. Essentially it is made up of a webcam, a battery-powered 3M projector, mirror, phone and colored finger caps. But in 10 years - according to Maes, the period of time when this type of system might be fully developed - it could be one device and as small as a watch. Or indeed maybe even a brain implant.

This type of product will undoubtedly go well beyond what mobile phones are capable of now. As Maes put it, mobile phones currently don't have easy access to all of the relevant information we need on a daily basis. A mobile phone still requires a user to change their behavior, she said.

Plus the Web as we know it today is full of manual steps, such as visiting websites and searching for information. In 10 years time we'd hope that the Web of Data would be much better realized, for example product data easily viewed outside of its official website and no matter what the context.

One example given in the TED presentation was looking at a book in a bookstore. Currently to get access to reviews information, a person would need to take out their cellphone, open up Amazon's mobile website - or a relevant iPhone app perhaps - and search for that book. Whereas with the wearable internet device demoed at TED, the user simply wiggles his or her fingers and up pops the Amazon rating on the front cover (reviews data can be reached by opening up the book).

You can see the power of this as a next generation Internet interface, as it removes several manual steps from the process of receiving relevant, contextual information about something or someone.

We've blogged a fair amount about sensors this year, because they connect the real world up to the Internet. The wearables system relies a lot on them, for example the caps on Pranav's fingers. Add that to the many other points of connection to the Web and it's a powerful system; for example the book has a barcode that, in combination with the wearable device, will pull down data from Amazon.com via the Web.

The Internet as Sixth Sense

As explained in a Wired article earlier this year (found via h+ Magazine), a lot of the information that "helps us understand and respond to the world" doesn't come from the 5 senses humans are usually born with. It comes from computers and, increasingly, the Web. So the goal of this MIT wearable device is to "harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses."

We at ReadWriteWeb are very excited about next-generation Internet interfaces, such as augmented reality and so-called cross reality. These wearable devices strike me as being the most impressive future Web interface that I've seen in a while. Check out the video and see if you agree.

To view a list of all the items that you liked, simply navigate to this URL in your browser to see the list of your liked itemsno doubt the link will eventually be added somewhere in Reader, but for now you can see the list this way.

http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/like

What we'd really like to see is a list of all the items that everybody else liked, sorted by the amount of people that liked them, but so far there doesn't appear to be a way to do that. Thanks, Michel!

For more, use the Google Reader Notifier for Windows, or the Google Reader Watcher for Firefox to keep an eye on your feeds, or check out how Google Reader Gadget brings feeds to the desktop.

I had drinks the other night with Miles Beckett at the Pink Taco in Century City. After a few Mexican Beers and some great service from some of the friendliest Models/Actresses/Waitresses in Hollywood I was able to get some valuable information out of one of the few producers who is making a living in online video.

Miles Beckett and his business partner Greg Goodfried are the guys behind the Internet phenomenon lonelygirl15. They also gave up professional careers (Miles was a doctor. Greg was a lawyer.) to pursue the creative rewards of online video. The interesting thing about Miles and Greg is that not only are they pioneers in web video with their own projects, they are also guides for hire when it comes to helping other content creators figure out the online video space. With some smart partnering they managed to take the success of LG15 and raise $5 million to start their digital studio EQAL. Now they are helping known brands like CBS, Paula Deen and event Anthony E. Zuiker the creator of the hit TV Show CSI navigate this new digital space. Miles and Greg understand what it takes to build an audience and an emotionally engaged community. Something that everyone in this space will have to learn soon or they won't be able to make a living in online video.

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