Webcam Hacker Luis Mijangos: Newsmakers "Do you want to see something scary?" It was a Saturday night, not much happening in her Long Beach, California, neighborhood, so high school senior Melissa Young was home messing around on her computer. Her little sister, Suzy, was doing the same thing down the hall. The house was quiet, save the keyboard tapping in the girls' rooms, when the odd little instant message popped up on Melissa's screen—an IM from Suzy. Melissa wondered why her goof-off sister was IM'ing from the next room instead of just padding over—she wasn't usually that lazy—so she walked over to see what was up. That night, Suzy's 20-year-old friend Nila Westwood got the same note, the same attachment. A month passed. The more ubiquitous cameras become, the less we're aware they're even there. It's a question that James Kelly and his girlfriend, Amy Wright, never thought they'd have to entertain. Mistah X wasn't done. They were powerless. The campus police were in no position to handle a case like this. "Oh, really?"
BloomReach Crunches Big Data To Deliver The Future Of SEO and SEM Are you ready for a revolution? Today, after 3 years of machine learning development in stealth, BloomReach reveals its big data solution for website relevance optimization. BloomReach is capable of boosting organic search traffic by a whopping 80%, and will flip the search engine optimization and marketing industries upside down. With a huge problem, a team of industry rockstars backed by $16 million from Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, and the patented technology capable of executing, BloomReach could become the first $10 billion enterprise marketing company, joining other core solutions like Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce. BloomReach’s cloud marketing platform attacks the lack of search result presence that plagues the content and products filling up the subpages of most big websites. Here’s how BloomReach’s core product BloomSearch fixes this. The other two products BloomReach launches today maximize conversions from search advertising and social curation.
Amazon Has Tried Everything to Make Shopping Easier. Except This. Doug Strickland/Chattanooga Times Free Press, via Associated PressSanjay Shah, left, general manager of Amazon’s new warehouse in Chattanooga, Tenn., at an opening ceremony on Thursday with the Tennessee governor, Bill Haslam. Much of the discussion about Amazon is focused on its digital side, yet the company is relentlessly expanding into the physical. It has announced five new United States warehouses since late December, all with more than a million square feet. It is testing out delivery lockers in New York and Seattle for those who cannot receive their goods at home. It has been experimenting with a grocery delivery service in Seattle for several years. It has expanded its Prime $79 annual shipping fee program, hoping members will order more of everything.
Web Companies Agree to Support 'Do Not Track' System Mobile's Coming Costs Put CFOs on the Spot CIO CFOworld — The iPad/iPhone-driven BYOD trend means demand for mobile bandwidth is expanding exponentially. That's interesting as a reflection of the boom in mobile devices across consumer and enterprise markets, but means problems for carriers. And CFOs need to think today about how the movement to bring-your-own-device may impact their bottom line tomorrow. Pros and Cons of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) The most recent Cisco Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast draws a picture of growing demand for bandwidth in the post-PC era, setting the scene for carriers to develop new pricing tiers and new demand-based services as they attempt to monetize this demand while attempting to be as frugal as they are able when it comes to infrastructure investment. Carriers Are Businesses Sure, you can look at booming data as an excuse to spend, spend, spend on infrastructure. New Data Charges Ahead Continue Reading
Google’s Mobile Sales Head: US Smartphone Ownership Grew 7% Last Year — Plus, Predictions Jason Spero, Google’s head of mobile sales and strategy, will be taking the stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later today, where he’ll be revealing new research about smartphone growth and making some predictions about what we’ll be seeing in the mobile world over the next year. In advance of Spero’s talk, Google is publishing a blog post that previews some of his comments. It offers a few highlights from new research conducted in January with Ipsos, which will be part of a future update to Our Mobile Planet, Google’s free analysis and data tool. Smartphone ownership grew 7 percent in the United States, to 38 percent of the total population. Here are Spero’s 12 predictions for 2012: More than 1 billion people will use mobile devices as their primary internet access point.10 days where mobile searches represent >;50% of trending search terms.Mobile’s role in driving people into stores will be proven and it will blow us away.
Joseph Turow: How Companies Are 'Defining Your Worth' Online One of the fastest-growing online businesses is the business of spying on Internet users. Using sophisticated software that tracks people's online movements through the Web, companies collect the information and sell it to advertisers. Every time you click a link, fill out a form or visit a website, advertisers are working to collect personal information about you, says Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. On Wednesday's Fresh Air, Turow — the author of the book The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth — details how companies are tracking people through their computers and cellphones in order to personalize the ads they see. Turow tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that tracking is ubiquitous across the Internet, from search engines to online retailers and even greeting card companies. But advertisers are not just limited to tracking your Internet browsing, says Turow. On Facebook
Google sugarcoated privacy policy changes to mislead users, group charges The Center for Digital Democracy sent a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission Wednesday asking it to find Google in violation of a 2011 consent order, conduct an investigation and request the search giant postpone the rollout of its new privacy policies. In the 16-page complaint, the CDD says Google failed to accurately and honestly inform users of the real reason for changes its privacy policy, which go into effect March 1. The CDD claims the changes are not designed to make a users life easier, as Google has stated, but designed to fuel competition against Facebook, incorporate social media data and to boost Google's advertising business, specifically to grow its display advertising to a $200 billion business. See also: Irreparable injury if FTC fails to police Google? | Google fires back at MS privacy claims | Protecting user data in the post-PC era | Congress demands FTC investigate Google's Safari tracking CDD said Google's privacy policy should explain that strategy to users.
Brands Give Facebook F-Commerce an F By Brian Solis On February 22, 2012 With a looming $100 billion IPO on the horizon and a community that’s estimated to hit a billion users this Fall, Facebook seems unstoppable. Yet on one important front–the store front that is–Facebook has exposed an imperfection. People are not proving ready to actually buy goods and services in Facebook – at least not at the scale retailers are used to seeing through traditional e-commerce. F-commerce emerged only three years ago, offering the ability to buy and sell on Faceboook. While initial reports painted promising future for introducing transactional relationships, Bloomberg stuck a pin in the balloons of idealistic social commerce strategists everywhere. I mean F-commerce only makes sense right? F-Commerce is the Failed Execution of the Uninspired The problem is as much the platform as it is the vision of many of the F-commerce strategies we’ve seen in play to date. As in any commerce strategy, the customer journey must be defined.
Spectrum Crunch: The cell phone industry hits its limits - Feb. 21 This is part one of a week-long series on the cell phone capacity crunch. NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The U.S. mobile phone industry is running out of the airwaves necessary to provide voice, text and Internet services to its customers. The problem, known as the "spectrum crunch," threatens to increase the number of dropped calls, slow down data speeds and raise customers' prices. Wireless spectrum -- the invisible infrastructure over which all wireless transmissions travel -- is a finite resource. The U.S. still has a slight spectrum surplus. "Network traffic is increasing," says an official at the FCC's wireless bureau. How did we get here? The number-one biggest driver is consumers' insatiable thirst for e-mail, apps and particularly video on their mobile devices -- anywhere, anytime. The iPhone, for instance, uses 24 times as much spectrum as an old-fashioned cell phone, and the iPad uses 122 times as much, according to the Federal FCC. The good news is that there are ways to buy time.
The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile Editor’s note: Legendary investor Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures. You can follow him on Twitter at @vkhosla. All Khosla Ventures investments, as well as ventures related to Vinod Khosla, are italicized. We are in a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities. Add to it the fact that because of a variety of factors too numerous to cover here, the cost of experimentation has gone down dramatically (one can start a web startup or write an Android app with no more than a student credit card!) What you get as a result are the recent successes in the Internet/mobile space like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and others, all of which have reenergized both entrepreneurs and investors. A few will be successful, many will fail, some will be acquired for a piece of technology or for the team (acqui-hires). So, what have I left out?