The Secret Service Plays Video Games to Prepare for Trouble. The Secret Service is scrapping the tabletop model, dubbed Tiny Town, that it has used for security training scenarios over the past 40 years. Now, instead, the agency will practice on something called the Site Security Planning Tool, a kind of "Virtual Tiny Town" that uses 3-D models, game-based virtual environments, touch interfaces, and virtual disaster response scenarios to help Secret Service members prepare for the worst. In other words, the Secret Service is prepping for possible disasters with video games. Virtual Tiny Town is made up of three 55-inch touchscreen monitors, a computer running the Virtual Battle Space simulation game, and an attached projector and camera.
In-game happenings can be displayed on large LED 3-D monitor for demonstrations and class teachings. So far, Virtual Tiny Town can help agents prepare for chemical, biological, and radiological attacks, as well as armed attacks and suicide bombers. Plentyoffish CEO: We Were Hacked, Almost Extorted – So I Emailed The Hacker’s Mom. The title of strangest WTF story of my morning is Plentyoffish CEO Markus Frind recounting how his online dating site got hacked, he and his wife were harassed and someone clumsily attempted to extort his company in the aftermath of the events.
If that is in fact what happened … First up, Frind points out that the site has indeed been hacked last week in a “well planned and sophisticated attack”. Apparently, POF users’ email addresses, usernames and passwords were downloaded, although Frind does not say how many. Plentyoffish has already reset the passwords for all users and claims to have plugged the security hole that allowed the hackers to enter.
An official statement will apparently be published tomorrow, but Frind’s personal, sleep-deprived recount of what happened – “what it feels like to be hacked /extorted and the intense pressure and stress you are put under” – is well worth a read – for starters. Then, this happened (still, according to Frind): Nordstrom Acquires Flash Sales Site HauteLook For $270 Million. In one of the larger exits so far in the flash sales business, retail chain Nordstrom has acquired flash sales site HauteLookfor $180 million in Nordstrom stock and three-year earn-out of up to $90 million.
HauteLook has raised $41 million in funding. Thanks to the immense popularity of members-only, online sample sales, HauteLook has grown to 4 million members since launching in 2007. The site offers massively discounted sale events in women’s fashion, men’s fashion, accessories, kids’ clothing and toys, travel and home and beauty. The basic idea behind the flash sales model is this: designers ad retailers, such as Marc Jacobs or Versace, place excess inventory on a sale site at 50 to 70 percent discounts over a several day period.
The flash sales space is definitely competitive; and the amount that HauteLook sold for isn’t entirely surprising. One Kings Lane, has also recently raised a large amount of money and is growing like a weed. Can you fire someone for disparaging your company on Facebook? (Editor’s note: Curtis Smolar is a partner at Ropers Majeski Kohn & Bentley. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.) A reader asks: I have an employee who has gone onto Facebook and griped about my company. Can I institute company policies that prevent employees from doing this and terminate their employment them if they continue? Answer: It’s a frustrating and embarrassing situation for a business to see its employees assailing it via social media platforms – but penalizing them for it is a tough, if not impossible, task.
The debate over the First Amendment rights of the employee to post their negative feelings about a company and the rights of the company to protect its private informa tion used to skew in the employer’s favor. That has changed, however, and today the federal government counsels against restricting employees’ Internet chatter, regardless of its nature, because it may violate their First Amendment rights. The case settled this month. Nowhere to Hide: Assessing Your Work Reputation Online: Tech News and Analysis « By now if you haven’t heard of Klout and in a moment of vanity checked your own Klout score, you’re in the online minority. Klout engenders a lot of debate about its algorithms and relevance, but regardless of opinion, the undercurrent of the conversation is that we’re heading into a world of Klout whether we like it or not. More broadly, we’re heading into a world of unprecedented measurability.
Historically, great advances in society have been directly correlated to progress in two things: computational capability and measurement. Take for example the early age of American discovery. As more of our daily activities move online, our ability to measure these activities is increasing. Crowdsourcing marketplaces are taking measurability to the next frontier: work activity.
Much like Klout, the algorithms, complexity and understanding required to move from qualitative to quantitative assessment are in their infancy. In the Future, Robots Will Surf Their Own Internet. If robots are to become our overlords, they will need their own Internet to communicate with each other. RoboEarth, a just-launched robot information sharing network, gets them that much closer to world domination. The EU-funded RoboEarth project is bringing together European scientists to build a network and database repository for robots to share information about the world. They will, if all goes as planned, use the network to store and retrieve information about objects, locations (including maps), and instructions about completing activities. Robots will be both the contributors and the editors of the repository. The point, according to the RoboEarth project, is to allow robots to learn from past experiences and share them with their peers. The site explains: Rapid development of sensor and networking technology is now enabling researchers to collect vast amounts of sensor data, and new data-mining tools are being developed to extract meaningful patterns.
Cynthia Breazeal: The rise of personal robots. Livestream: Debating the National Broadband Plan : Tech News and Analysis « As the Federal Communications Commission strives to deliver broadband access to every American under the National Broadband Plan, it faces the challenge of connecting residents — and keeping them connected — at competitive rates and with competitive features in a not-so-competitive market. Today GigaOM and the New America Foundation are sponsoring a debate between Craig Settles, an author and broadband consultant, and Blair Levin, the author of the National Broadband Plan, to discuss how America can meet the broadband needs of its citizens for the current century. Please follow along in the live stream below from 10:00 a.m. EST (7:00 a.m. PST) until 11:30 EST, or on Twitter with the hashtag #broadbandplan. If there’s a lull in the debate, feel free to read the posts between Levin and Settles that started this all:
How Bradford Cross Plans to Save the Media Industry: Tech News and Analysis « By now, it’s become obvious that the web is disrupting the media business in some fundamental ways — and not just the distribution of content, but the monetization of it as well. Publishers and content producers of all kinds are desperately trying paywalls, metered access, iPad apps and pretty much anything else they can think of, while users are turning increasingly to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook for their news, as well as aggregation apps like Flipboard.
Bradford Cross, co-founder of a new startup called Woven, thinks most of those solutions attack only part of the problem. He wants to solve the entire thing — the content-discovery side and the monetization side. That’s a pretty big assignment, as Cross freely admits. In fact, it’s a little like saying you want to cure cancer and make hospitals fun places to stay at the same time.
“These are some really big problems,” says Cross, “but if we can solve them, we could have something really huge on our hands.” Paper.li ? read Twitter as a daily newspaper. Paper.li Raises $2.1 Million For Social News Curation, Hits 2 Million Users. Exclusive - SmallRivers, the Switzerland-based company behind Paper.li, a service that taps social streams from users and turns them into personalized online newspapers, has just raised $2.1 million in funding from Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital and Endeavour Vision. The fresh capital and relations will service to grow SmallRivers’ team, establish partnerships with global service and content providers and set up shop in the United States and Asia. For starters, SmallRivers is planning to move part of its team from Switzerland to California. Disney looks beyond apps with HTML5 game maker Rocket Pack. Disney has acquired gaming startup Rocket Pack, a specialist in games which use HTML5, the latest version of the Web’s lingua franca.
The deal signals a move in the game-development community towards HTML5 games, which can be played across almost every modern device and Web browser. Games and other apps built specifically for Apples iOS devices or Android devices have to be rebuilt in order to work on other platforms, so HTML5′s portability makes it appealing to developers and game publishers alike. The move mirrors Disney’s larger corporate strategy as well, in which it seeks to distribute its content across as many platforms as possible. Rocket Pack, based in Helsinki, Finland, will become a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company in the Disney Interactive Media Group. According to Fast Company, the price of the acquisition was between $10 million and $20 million.
The one-year-old startup just released the first HTML5 game based on its Rocket game engine for developers. Social Games vs Multiplayer Games: A Commentary on Raph Koster’s Social Mechanics Presentation. [Editor's note: Guest columnist Tadhg Kelly has an in-depth review, below, covering a presentation recently given by veteran game developer Raph Koster at the Game Developers Conference happening this week in San Francisco.
Please note that in order to follow along with Kelly's commentary, you'll need to reference Koster's original presentation. Please view the presentation itself, here, for reference.] The excellent Raph Koster delivered a long presentation (190 slides) at GDC on Monday on what he called social mechanics. The presentation covered topics such as common social actions that occur in social games and potential innovations in social structure or gameplay that developers could adopt. Raph often delivers talks about game design issues – especially as they apply to online gaming – and since he has been at Playdom for a while, social games and social structures have very much been on his mind.
Initial Impressions I dislike the term game mechanic. Synchrony This sets the stage. Zynga buys social browser Flock … or maybe just its engineering team. The Future of Cities, Information, and Inclusion. The Future of Cities, Information, and Inclusion Over the next decade, cities will continue to grow larger and more rapidly. At the same time, new technologies will unlock massive streams of data about cities and their residents. As these forces collide, they will turn every city into a unique civic laboratory—a place where technology is adapted in novel ways to meet local needs. This ten-year forecast map, The Future of Cities, Information, and Inclusion (PDF), charts the important intersections between urbanization and digitalization that will shape this global urban experiment, and the key tensions that will arise.
The explosive growth of cities is an economic opportunity with the potential to lift billions out of poverty. What economic opportunities will urban information provide to excluded groups? Realizing the opportunity from urban data will require combinatorial local innovation: continuous, rapid, dirt-cheap cycles of prototyping and testing.
Join the Conversation. State, Local Government Agencies Reach Agreement with Facebook on Legal Concerns. State and local agencies are now more enabled to use Facebook to disseminate information to the public after attorneys general from 15 states reached an agreement with the social network. Specifically, Facebook and representatives of the state worked on the company’s terms of service in order to address legal concerns some of these public entities encountered when using the site. The deal shows that Facebook is willing to cooperate with governments, meaning future deals regarding other things like government access to private information or compliance with potential privacy legislation might similarly go smoothly.
Facebook could become a more significant way for communities to become closer. In the past, a town newspaper, newsletter, or bulletin board might have held important information about municipal policy and planning. Now these could appear in user feeds. And yet, just because the Pages are created doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily get popular and therefore be effective. Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future. 2010: the year in internet stats. Five overhyped tech trends for 2011. January brings with it enough hype and hyperbole to confuse even the most hardened of technology trend watchers. With CES now behind us and a few weeks to hone our forecasting skills, here are the trends we believe are worth your attention and the ones that should be looked at with a skeptical eye. Top 5 overhyped technology trends for 2011 Google Chrome OS An innovative new OS for netbooks sounded great — in 2009. Consumers looking for netbooks are already shifting their attention to tablets, a trend which will intensify as Android tablets hit the market en masse later this year.
Chrome OS will be among the biggest casualties of this shift, as businesses will ignore Chrome OS and consumers will be too busy playing Angry Birds on their iPad 2 to care.Internet TV. Landfills are littered with the remains of the many failures in this category. Top 5 technology trends you actually should pay attention to in 2011: Windows Phone 7 will be a sleeper hit. Social Media Week / Event Spotlight: Startup Lab, Hosted by Augmendy. MindJolt to feed games to 110M users through deal with local web site aggregator. Social game company MindJolt is expanding its reach to more than 110 million users through a partnership with Broadcast Interactive Media. The deal will give MindJolt the kind of reach it needs to attract better games and become a player in the social game market. MindJolt operates a social game platform for third-party game developers. Under the deal, MindJolt will distribute hundreds of games to the BIM network of 900 web sites, which reach 110 million unique visitors per month.
The hope is to drive up engagement, or the amount of time users spend on the sites, by offering games that typically hold user attention for a longer period of time. BIM’s sites offer local news and entertainment. MindJolt already reaches about 20 million players a month through its portal on social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and its own MindJolt.com site. Gartner Forecasts Mobile App Store Revenues Will Hit $15 Billion in 2011.
More Tech Tools for Egypt's Protesters: Movements.org, an Online Hub for Grassroots Activists. Technology 500: Tech industry is on an upward swing. How Social Media Is Pushing the Limits of Legal Ethics: Tech News and Analysis « Game Design Has Become a Game. Social media case studies from JetBlue Airways, Saab, Sony Ericsson, and 10 more. Hacking is the new cheat, News from GamePro. How LinkedIn Today Will Change Your Social Media Life.