When Patents Attack... Part Two! Host Ira Glass and Zoe Chace from NPR’s Planet Money talk with Jim Logan and Richard Baker of Personal Audio, which claims it holds a patent used by all podcasters. Podcasters, they say, owe them money. Only catch: their company never made a digital podcast or invented a way to download it into a listening device. What they did, back in 1996: they patented the idea that such a thing can be done. Now they’ve asked podcasters to pay them licensing fees ... including Adam Carolla, Stuff You Should Know, Jesse Thorn and Marc Maron, who we hear from. Although Personal Audio says they aren’t asking for licenses from non-profits or public radio at this time, Maron’s and Thorn’s podcasts appear on public radio. (7 minutes)Business • Technology.
Marissa Mayer Is The New CEO Of Yahoo. Facebook buys out Lightbox. This week Facebook has been announced as purchasing Lightbox, this purchase topping off their recent $1 billion dollar grab of Instagram and coming up right behind their summer IPO. This service purchase will have lightbox.com shutting down sign-ups immediately and will have current users given a final chance to download their current photo collection before June 15th. This purchase does not include the Lightbox company itself, only its staff, while "portions" of the code written by the staff for Lightbox will be open-sourced through Github in the coming weeks.
This purchase is another gigantic win for Facebook, they acquiring now not just one but two of the biggest mobile-minded photography groups on the planet. This purchase takes the team that made Lightbox a reality for Android and HTML5 platforms and adds them to their already powerful staff of developers for a greater future for Facebook. LinkedIn Is Buying SlideShare For $119 Million. MAC AIDS FUND. Food's Biggest Scam - The Great Kobe Beef Lie. JC Penney Adopts New Logo—Its 3rd In As Many Years. Is Pinterest the Next Social Commerce Game Changer? Social and search continue to be essential inbound marketing channels. And while Google’s generating a lot of discussion around its new social network, Google+, another website is actually driving more inbound traffic: Pinterest. With its U.S. traffic skyrocketing to more than 10 million visits, the virtual pinboard is now one of the top 10 social networking and forum websites. Our latest infographic introduces you to Pinterest and provides ideas on how you can use the social photo sharing website to promote products, build community, and drive website traffic and conversions.
Oh, and Pinterest raised $37 million in funding last year and has an unconfirmed valuation of up to $200 million. So, if you haven’t paid much attention to it yet, you might want to start. Copy to clipboard. Google Teams With Facebook and Microsoft To Phight Phishing | Wired Enterprise. Google has teamed up with Facebook and Microsoft. It’s a very rare occurrence. But even the worst of tech enemies can agree that phishing is bad. On Monday, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo! And 11 other outfits announced they had formed a new alliance to combat phishing — a way of fooling email and web users into providing sensitive information, including credit card numbers.
“One of the worst experiences for a user is being phished,” Adam Dawes, a Google product manager and DMARC representative, tells Wired. Phishing is a relatively simple trick. Today, as Dawes points out, phishing messages are often caught by an email client’s spam filters. Top box: What you see, normally. About eighteen months ago, PayPal began working directly with Google and Yahoo to set standards for Gmail and Yahoo! Eventually, PayPal, Google, and Yahoo! The DMARC protocols are based on existing technologies, including the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).
Heineken: Design Challenge - Print. Corporations Prefer iOS Over BlackBerry and Android. A recent Checkpoint research that surveyed 768 IT professionals from the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan demonstrates that Apple’s iOS is the preferred mobile platform when it comes to corporations. 89% of the questioned have smartphones or tablets connected to their corporate networks but “Apple iOS is the most common mobile platform used to connect in corporate environments”. Cupertino’s mobile platform accounts for 30% of the devices connected, followed by BlackBerry with its 29% and Android’s 21%.
The Windows Mobile / Windows Phone combo still accounts for 18% of the total connected devices. 71% of the IT professionals consider that the addition of mobile devices on the corporate networks contributed to increased security incidents. However, Google’s Android is regarded the less secure among the platforms. It is “considered to introduce the greatest security risks”, and the answer came from 43% of those asked. Source: Checkpoint (PDF) Via: PhoneArena. Facebook's New Advertising Model: You. 10 years of the iPod: a design retrospective. When the original iPod first came out 10 years ago, the concept didn't seem novel to those who had already hopped on the MP3 player bandwagon. What was new—aside from its deep integration with Apple's music store—was the physical design.
The minimalist layout, the screen with playlists, the easy-access buttons—and oh, the scroll wheel! These were all elements that made up a signature Apple design. The iPod in all of its manifestations has now been part of our lives for a decade now, and it has become clear that the world fancies its design. How did the iPod's original design morph over time? The one that started it all The original iPod was a sight to behold. When the iPod was first introduced, the world didn't even know how to react. Over time, the original iPod's form morphed a bit. Then came the iPod mini Why use a full-sized iPod when you could use a miniature version of it? The devil was in the details. Entering the iPod nano era iPod shuffles, too The future: iPod touch. MC Hammer launching his own search engine.
MC Hammer, pictured at a party sponsored by Motorola Xoom, has a team developing a search engine called WireDoo. Say what? Rapper MC Hammer launches a new ... search engineWireDoo will give search results, plus results for possibly related topics, Hammer says (CNN) -- You can't Google this. OK, maybe you can. But MC Hammer doesn't want you to. The venerable rapper, who helped usher hip-hop into the pop mainstream in the early '90s, has rolled out a search engine he hopes will outperform Google, Bing and other established tools. The project, called WireDoo, has been two years in the making, said Hammer (real name Stanley Burrell) Wednesday at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco. At the conference, he said what will make his search tool better than Google (or, too legit to quit, if you will) will be its "deep search" ability. "It's about relationships beyond just the keywords," he said, according to Mashable, a CNN.com content partner.
Other details about the product were scarce. Siri Service on Apple's iPhone 4S Talks Back With Humor. The 10 Commandments of Steve Jobs [Infographic] Newsweek’s The Daily Beast published an interesting infographic on Steve Jobs and his supposed playbook for managing the creative process at Apple. The “10 Commandments of Steve” are: Go for perfectTap the expertsBe ruthlessShun focus groupsNever stop studyingSimplifyKeep your secretsKeep teams smallUse more carrot than stickPrototype to the extreme Click on the image, visit NewsWeek, or jump below to see a larger version of the infographic and read the subtext. It’ll be interesting to see how closely these ideals are followed now that Steve stepped down from the CEO position, but I’d bet things won’t change much at Apple for quite some time. 'Junk Mail' May Be Last Hope for Saving the USPS | News. Opinion: Will Siri Change the Rules of the Search Game?
There are two hallmarks of disruptive innovation that are commonly misunderstood. The first is the myth of the “aha” moment that tends to assign disruption to a single instant of discovery and change, when, in reality, nearly all disruptive innovations are the result of long-term trends, research, and investment that finally culminate at an inflection point. The iPad wasn’t invented in a vacuum, but was the result of decades of research, failed attempts, and gradual technology advancements.
This doesn’t diminish the value of the innovation, but even the lightbulb was only possible after centuries of accretive science. The second myth is that a disruptive event immediately changes the world. Disruptive innovation is a gradual process with a long tail both before and after the inflection event. The Battle for Search -- The search market is one of the most lucrative in the industry; especially for the dominating force of Google, which just posted quarterly revenues of nearly $10 billion.
Is Digital Killing the Luxury Brand? High-end fashion brands have a problem. Let’s call it the “Kreayshawn quandary,” after the young Bay Area rapper made famous by the Internet and her hit song “Gucci, Gucci,” which has gotten over 16 million views on YouTube. Sample lyrics: “Gucci, Gucci, Louis, Louis, Fendi, Fendi, Prada...the basic bitches wear that shit so I don’t even bother.” It may have taken a rapper to say it best, but the message has been clear for a while: Luxury designers are losing their cachet. And the problem is only being intensified by the medium that made Kreayshawn a star.
Just a few years back, most high-end fashion brands distrusted all things digital. Then those haute couture designers who’d shunned new media took some hits—thanks to the recession—from price-slashing department stores and discount websites, at the same time they began paying attention to changing retail statistics. “There is a sense of urgency associated with digital platforms,” adds Vera Wang president Mario Grauso. The Perks of Working at Google, Facebook, Twitter and More [INFOGRAPHIC] Are you a techie looking for work? We recently offered some tips on landing jobs at Google, Apple and Facebook, but there are more companies in the Valley than those three.
And you might be wondering what the culture is like at each of these companies, as well as at LinkedIn, Twitter, Eventbrite, Gaia and Tagged. Back in August, we brought you word of awesome perks at various startups; now, we bring you perks at a number of Silicon Valley's largest and finest. From yoga to catered lunches, 401(k)s to dry cleaning, sports teams to vacation days, these tech companies seem to understand that quality of life affects productivity — and that having to run fewer errands after work means you're more likely to stay at the office.
Check out the infographic below from ResumeBear for a breakdown of who offers what perks. Do you work at any of these companies and take advantage of any of these perks? Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. Are You Cool? If So, 25 Startups Are Willing To Give You Equity For Free. Most people don't have enough spare cash lying around to invest in startups. Most startups need help marketing their products. Wahooly is solving both problems by offering social media influencers free equity in startups in exchange for promotion. It's Klout and Kickstarter combined. Based in Minneapolis, Wahooly gives people a vested interest in the 25 startups it works with. It provides a personalized dashboard for each user, providing real-time information on the companies they've invested in, while also determining each user's equity stake in each company. "The way we view it, money is short term, but brand advocacy is long term," Wahooly cofounder Dana Seaverson tells us.
In order for the equity-owning user to make money, one of their portfolio startups must with buy back the shares, get bought out, or go public. Wahooly is in alpha right now but is planning to launch publicly in January with 200 startups on board. Bloggers Mean Business. There was a moment after New York’s 2009 Fall Fashion Week when fashion bloggers had officially, as the press likes to call it, “arrived.” They had blogged their way to the front row of Bryant Park’s most exclusive runway shows; they were the new army of digital Anna Wintours.
They wrote in Internet slang and posted photos of themselves mixing vintage with Valentino. They were so quirky! And also, influential! Or so news outlets gushed. Stiff, walled-off fashion editors, once secure in their self-preserved ivory towers, were trembling in fear of a coup. Fast forward two years and fashion’s digerati have shown they actually have no interest in Wintour’s job. For the past four years, Midwesterner Jessica Quirk’s blog, What I Wore, has featured photos of her wearing outfits she’s styled. The explosion of this type of blog and the influence of the women behind them are due, in part, to readers of magazine glossies wanting to see relatable ladies in “real world” clothes. Live Blogging the Apple iPhone 5 Announcement. In MasterCard's Future, You Can Buy Things by Waving at Your TV. If a prototype from MasterCard ever becomes a commercial product, you'll be able to order and pay for a pizza by waving at your TV from the couch.
This integration with Xbox Kinect is just one of several mobile payment technologies that MasterCard displayed at a showcase for journalists Thursday. While the focus of the event was Google Wallet — a payment app for which MasterCard is an exclusive launch partner — MasterCard also showed off ideas it has for mobile payments in the future. Google Wallet combines multiple credit cards, loyalty programs and Google Offers into one place and allows customers to pay with these accounts by swiping phones at a checkout terminal. MasterCard's prototypes, however, extend the functionality of mobile payment technology far beyond the checkout line. A prototype app called QkR, for instance, initiates payments from just about anywhere. Most impressive — or frightening, depending on how you look at it — was the Xbox Kinect prototype.
Why Hulu’s Owners Couldn’t Find A Buyer. Hulu, which has been shopping itself around this year, is no longer for sale. Hulu’s owners—Disney, News Corp, Comcast, and Providence Equity Partners—put the online TV site up for bid and got some serious offers from Google, Dish Networks, and Amazon. Even Yahoo supposedly took a look. But in the end, Hulu’s owners didn’t get the bids they wanted. Hulu’s owners wanted above $2 billion, but only guaranteed streaming rights for a couple of years.
Google reportedly offered around $4 billion, but wanted the streaming rights for much longer. So nobody is going to get it. Since Hulu holds a unique and compelling strategic value to each of its owners, we have terminated the sale process and look forward to working together to continue mapping out its path to even greater success. Let me parse the corporate-speak for you. Here’s the thing about Hulu that you need to understand.
As TC contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan noted last summer: Hulu raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation. Fab.com launches its first mobile app and announces 750K users and counting.