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Tech start-up bubble won’t get any bigger - John Shinal's Tech Investor. By John Shinal SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Last week we gave you our latest take on the public market for technology stocks. Now let’s look at what’s going on in the private markets. In short, some of the same forces driving down the price of public tech stocks are working on private-company valuations as well. Investors in that market, however, are too optimistic to notice.

Nevertheless, the global economic slowdown, which already has begun according to America’s recession arbiters, will hurt sales at companies both large and small. Dublin's rising tech start-ups Ben Rooney picks six start-ups from his visit to the Irish capital, from an easy way to file expense claims to a voice-recognition tool that lets you analyze your own voice. While there are many important young firms being built right now in tech — innovators that will survive and change markets — evidence is building that the rising tide that has lifted all start-up valuations during the last two years has ebbed. Volume: 0.00. “Serendipity: The Hope and the Myth” - Oli Shaw at London IA. At London IA last week, Oli Shaw was reprising his EuroIA talk about serendipity. It is, he said, a lovely word on the tongue, but has been rated as one of the hardest English words to translate into another language.

The origin of English language usage comes from a folk tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip”. Replacing “serendipity” has been the key selling point of many digital services - Oli named Wajam, Discovr and The Situationist amongst them. Oli says it is increasingly used as a silver bullet to solve problems that we know variously as search, recommendations or discovery. Trying to solve this problem occupies the minds of engineers at a lot of big companies, where algorithms, however sophisticated, still cannot replace the human suggestion. Amazon’s entire pages are built out of synthetic serendipity, said Oli, but just because I’ve looked at a fitness skipping rope doesn’t necessarily mean I’m also interested in a sports bra. From the man who discovered Stuxnet, dire warnings one year later. One year ago a malicious software program called Stuxnet exploded onto the world stage as the first publicly confirmed cyber superweapon – a digital guided missile that could emerge from cyber space to destroy a physical target in the real world.

Skip to next paragraph Subscribe Today to the Monitor Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly Digital Edition It took Ralph Langner about a month to figure that out. While Symantec , the big antivirus company, and other experts pored over Stuxnet's inner workings, it was Mr. Days later, he and other experts refined that assessment, agreeing Stuxnet was specifically after Iran's gas centrifuge nuclear fuel-enrichment program at Natanz . After infiltrating Natanz's industrial-control systems, Stuxnet automatically ordered subsystems operating the centrifuge motors to spin too fast and make them fly apart, Langner says. In the end, Stuxnet may have set back Iran's nuclear ambitions by years.

Google's Negative Ranking Factors - Whiteboard Friday. By now you've heard about SEOmoz's study of Google ranking factors, but what about negative ranking factors? Sure, positive factors such as the correlations between social media shares and higher rankings earn a lot of attention - and they should. Smart SEOs look at all the factors, including those at the bottom of the list! Today we look at negative ranking factors - those SEO characteristics correlated with lower rankings - and how to avoid them.

Howdy, SEOmoz! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to be talking about negative ranking factors. Now, we talk about ranking factors a lot here at SEOmoz. Some of the more positive famous ranking factors that we talk about are such things as page authority, which has a 0.28 correlation to higher rankings. What we don't talk a lot about is the opposite effect, the negative correlation. Domain Name Length Starting with some simple ones, an obvious negative correlation is the domain name length, 0.07. Response Time. Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action.

Taken as a whole, Anonymous resists straightforward definition as it is a name currently called into being to coordinate a range of disconnected actions, from trolling to political protests. Originally a name used to coordinate Internet pranks, in the winter of 2008 some wings of Anonymous also became political, focusing on protesting the abuses of the Church of Scientology. By September 2010 another distinct political arm emerged as Operation Payback and did so to protest the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and a few months later this arm shifted its energies to Wikileaks, as did much of the world's attention. It was this manifestation of Anonymous that garnered substantial media coverage due the spectacular waves of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks they launched (against PayPal and Mastercard in support of Wikileaks).

This difficulty follows from the fact that Anonymous is, like its name suggests, shrouded in some degree of deliberate mystery. NeuroFocus Uses Neuromarketing to Hack Your Brain. Online-Reputation-Management Firms Struggle With Ethics | Guest Columnists. Value Of Tech M&A Deals Nearly Doubled In Q2 2011 To $52.1 Billion. While tech company IPOs have captured buzz of late, it looks like M&A activity in the sector has been booming. According to an Ernst & Young report, big deals drove the aggregate value of global technology M&A to $52.1 billion in the second quarter of 2011, nearly doubling the deal value from the first quarter (up 92 percent to be exact).

Ernst & Young said that the surge was attributed mainly to industry consolidation and by ongoing innovations in areas such as cloud computing, smart mobility, internet and mobile video, the smart grid and solar energy. Overall, deal volume for the quarter increased 24% year-over-year (YOY) to 777 deals, but declined 2% sequentially from 794 deals in 1Q 2011. It was the first sequential quarterly decline since 1Q 2009.

This past quarter’s M&A value was 69% higher than the same quarter in 2010, when M&A deals were valued at $30.8 billion. More companies are also looking outside their own countries for acquisitions. Exclusive: SEC Will Likely Toughen Rules for Secondary Markets. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission officials in March met with secondary market executives to warn them of impending regulatory changes, peHUB has learned. The regulators told the executives that they want more stringent checks of individuals’ accreditation and improved diligence regarding the financials of companies being auctioned to investors, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.

One participant in the discussions, who asked not to be named, said he expects the agency to formally propose new regulations for the secondary market by the end of this year. “You will likely see more requirements coming out,” from the SEC, the source said. “There is no public information available [on some secondary market companies]. This is not good for investors.” Murphy declined to provide specifics on talks held with the SEC. Word of the SEC’s push against secondary market operators comes at a bad time for the budding industry. Google throws a tantrum -- accuses Microsoft, others, of "hostile, organized campaign"

A few weeks ago, Google was involved in bidding for 6,000 patents being offered by Nortel, which many thought if Google should win, would beef up their defense against patent litigation. Instead, they lost to a consortium of Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Sony, EMC and Ericsson for $4.5 billion. Basically everyone won except Google. At the time this story was spun two ways: Nortel's patent were old, outdated and not worth the money for GoogleGoogle wasn't taking it seriously, with Reuters calling their behavior "mystifying" because their bids reflected famous mathematical constants (Brun's, Meissel-Mertens and Pi). Yes, Google actually bid Pi ($3.14159 billion). After all the gnashing of teeth by tech analysts, who kept pounding Google on their lack of patent strategy, Google has come out with some name calling and accusations of their own: That's David Drummond, Senior VP and CLO of Google, who can't even get that's its called Windows Phone, not Mobile.

Source: The Official Google Blog. The 25 Hot New York City Startups You Need To Watch. Fast-Growing Bitcoin Exchange Ruxum to Begin Trading in European Currencies. With all the hullabaloo surrounding Bitcoin and, in particular, Bitcoin exchanges it’s a ripe time for new players to enter into the market and wow people involved in the peer-to-peer virtual currency market. While this mathematically interesting currency concept has been around for a few years, it took it until recently to springboard into the mainstream media and with that attention came a lot of trouble. But as we know, trouble and attention often become the engine of innovation. Leading the innovation curve, Ruxum Exchange, a swiftly growing Bitcoin exchange seeks to provide a much friendlier face to the extremely rough commodity market of the bitcoin economy. Major factors that have discouraged an even larger interest in the cryptocurrency have been difficulties interfacing with the various exchanges, transferring bitcoins, and actually trusting in the security of the exchanges themselves.

Ruxum has big shoes to fill. No date is yet set for the exchange to go public. Welcome to the age of the splinternet - tech - 20 July 2011. What's next for the internet? (Image: Jasper James/Getty) 1 more image Editorial: "The rise of the splinternet" Openness is the internet's great strength – and weakness. With powerful forces carving it up, is its golden age coming to an end? How quickly the world changes. Today, most of us in the developed world and elsewhere take the internet for granted. Though it was the World Wide Web that opened the internet to the world, the underlying structure dates back much further. For Baran's plan to work, every message would be broken up into small packets of digital information, each of which would be relayed from router to router, handed over like hot potatoes. Baran's work paved the way for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (see "Internet evolution"), which then led to the internet and the "anything goes" culture that remains its signature.

These basic ingredients - openness, trust and decentralisation - were baked into the internet at its inception. Should we care? (YouTube) Jumio's Payments Breakthrough Challenges PayPal, Square, And Others. Posted by Tom Foremski - July 26, 2011 Jumio's breakthrough "NetSwipe" payment processing technology that transforms any webcam into a credit card terminal, has the potential to threaten PayPal and emerging payment startups such as Square. With NetSwipe customers simply show their card to the video camera on their smart phones, laptops, desktops, or anything with an Internet connected camera.

It takes just seconds for the Jumio service to read the information on the card, check for fraud, and complete a payment. Daniel Mattes, founder of Jumio, says that video scanning improves security and reduces fraud risk, which leads to lower processing costs for merchants. Payments can be accepted through any Internet connected camera: smart phone, laptop, desktop, or tablet. While that's an impressive feature, it is Jumio's ambitions to extend credit card processing capabilities to small vendors and individuals, where the company has huge opportunities to grow quickly.

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Sigmoid function. Other examples of similar shapes include the Gompertz curve (used in modeling systems that saturate at large values of t) and the ogee curve (used in the spillway of some dams). A wide variety of sigmoid functions have been used as the activation function of artificial neurons, including the logistic and hyperbolic tangent functions. Sigmoid curves are also common in statistics as cumulative distribution functions, such as the integrals of the logistic distribution, the normal distribution, and Student's t probability density functions. Definition[edit] A sigmoid function is a bounded differentiable real function that is defined for all real input values and has a positive derivative at each point.[1] Properties[edit] In general, a sigmoid function is real-valued and differentiable, having either a non-negative or non-positive first derivative[citation needed] which is bell shaped. . . , with the inclusion of a boundary condition providing a third degree of freedom, Examples[edit]

Massive botnet 'indestructible,' say researchers. News June 29, 2011 04:19 PM ET Computerworld - A new and improved botnet that has infected more than four million PCs is "practically indestructible," security researchers say. "TDL-4," the name for both the bot Trojan that infects machines and the ensuing collection of compromised computers, is "the most sophisticated threat today," said Kaspersky Labs researcher Sergey Golovanov in a detailed analysis Monday.

"[TDL-4] is practically indestructible," Golovanov said. Others agree. "I wouldn't say it's perfectly indestructible, but it is pretty much indestructible," said Joe Stewart, director of malware research at Dell SecureWorks and an internationally-known botnet expert, in an interview today. "It does a very good job of maintaining itself. " Golovanov and Stewart based their judgments on a variety of TDL-4's traits, all which make it an extremely tough character to detect, delete, suppress or eradicate. But that's not TDL-4's secret weapon.

Msgboy Makes All Your Favorite Websites a Push Experience. Push me, pull me, real time web: we've now got enough options available to us when choosing how to consume our favorite web content that we may as well start mixing things up a bit, no? Push delivery technology company Superfeedr today released a new Chrome browser plug-in called Msgboy. (The first 200 people to use this link can get it.) The plug-in accesses your browser's history and uses it to make a big list of web pages you like and feeds you're subscribed to. Then it uses Superfeeder's XMPP and Websockets technology to push new updates from those sources to your browser, in the form of a Chrome Notification.

Click the plus and minus buttons in the pop-up and you can quickly train it to know what kind of notifications you want or don't want to see. Superfeedr's Julien Genestoux says that push technology is now very widely used, but end-users don't get to see it very often. "The msgboy addresses just that : it sends you the web you care about and stores it in your browser.