Crazy For Tech - Gadgets,Cell Phones,Cameras » people

Bang!

A D M I N — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:18:14 +0000

We went to see The Artist last night. I didn’t want to go; if God wanted silent movies he wouldn’t have invented sound, etc. And black and white to boot. Making a black and white 3D movie, maybe. But inexorably the Oscars loom, and the last thing I want is to endure the withering gaze of my long-suffering wife when it wins Best Picture without us having seen it. Of course it turned out to be great. And in the process, it showed some leg about today’s movies that could be useful to the technology community. Namely, that purpose trumps moral ambiguity. Take Google’s trampling of our so-called digital rights, or more precisely our sensibilities, with a callous land grab of its search monopoly. The outrage is appropriate: by inserting Google + results into search they’re shoving the social network down our throat in direct contradiction to previous promises about doing no evil. The Artist parades its conceit at every turn of its familiar romance. We’re doing this no sound thing for you because it’s good for you. Things will work out fine. The dog needs no dialogue. The music tells you what to feel. It’s already half over, and besides, it’s already better than the last five movies you’ve seen. Google Search + parades its conceit at every turn. It’s free, so we can improve it any way we want. We’re already reading everything you write in Gmail, so now we’re blurring the metadata into one big data pool so we can better read your mind and sell the results back to marketers. It’s OK because Facebook already does this. We’d add all the other networks if they would just let us have their data too. And besides, we’re doing this. It’s really quite brilliant. Here’s all this noise about user rights to data. Thanks, Mark Zuckerberg, for blazing the trail with rolling updates, partial rollbacks, and commandeering of key language elements. “The kids of today are not worried about privacy. They want to share.” And thanks, Twitter, for dangling global realtime alerts and then locking the door. With competitors like these guys, who needs friends? We can do anything we want and we are. Why now? Is it another version of Microsoft embedding the browser in Windows to have something to give up while protecting Office and a breakup of the company? What is Google’s real motive in jettisoning the illusion of openness and what’s good for the user? I think it’s less Orwellian and more mundane: they think they can get away with it. I think they can, too. Part of the reason is they are heading off a Google Spring by creating their own filter of social signals. Search is giving way to predictive caching of answers to questions you haven’t yet thought of, a business process layer whose signature is becoming visible via @mentions and private messages. Remember Gmail and Gchat the next time you look for someone. What Google has done is to decouple content from metadata. They may not use the messages, but the signature of relationships will do just fine, thank you. Very early in The Artist, in a very funny series of takes in a movie within the movie, the protagonist meets his match on the dance floor. The camera work is precise, waiting for the slate (minus the clapboard – no sound), then this odd moment where you see the Actor steel himself for the role, then almost zen like turn and swim into the scene with the resolute look of the professional. After three or four of these takes, you begin to be transformed into the craft and art of it. Like the bridge in a Beatles song that never returns, you crave for it until the next take. From that point on you realize the Actor and Director are in perfect sync, that each scene and each element of each scene is staged for maximum precision of effect. Once this realization takes hold, the technology is no longer evident. What was established as silent becomes a tableau where we fill in the colors, the sounds, the dialogue, and the effect it has on us. We are no longer the audience, but now empowered as the director, the actors, the stagehands, the writers, the musicians, all conducted by us as the arbiters of meaning. Silently, invisibly, we change places with the people on the screen. Whether Google has performed the same magic is to be seen. The power play of erasing the old rules seems arbitrary and calculating, but if somehow the move invigorates Google + conversations and drags Facebook and Twitter into the game, the result will indeed serve users. A good track service and @mention alert mechanism would make the hostage service from Twitter irrelevant, and the realtime conversations more than an adequate replacement for the all-but-shuttered FriendFeed. In a way those orphaned services are social media’s silent movies, superseded in the rush to determine monetization and protect business models yet to be thought of. It’s easy to see the Google moves as clumsy and sinister, but the problem then is replacing them with some new white hat. Just because we got sound and color and digital effects doesn’t mean that stories are better, studios are braver, or good small shows find audiences. And whether Jack or Ev or Biz or Doc or Dave runs Twitter won’t change things all that much. Whether Google games their own system won’t determine whether we love it or not. What will make a difference is how we perceive the reality of these back lots, how we flesh out the scenes with wit and rhythm, the precision that defines a calculated leap into the unknown or a pratfall. In this ballet of imbeciles and grifters, we still have to choose our friends and protect our families. It’s not up to Google to not be evil. It’s up to us.

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Bang!

The Future of Peer Review

kram412 — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:51 +0000

This guest post was written by Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu — an online community that revolves around researchers and their work. Instant distribution Many academics are excited about the future of instant distribution of research. Right now the time lag between finishing a paper, and the relevant worldwide research community seeing it, is between 6 months and 2 years. This is because during that time, the paper is being peer reviewed, and peer review takes an incredibly long time. 2 years is roughly how long it used to take to send a letter abroad 300 years ago. Many platforms are springing up which enable research distribution to be instant, so that the time lag between finishing a paper, and everyone in the relevant research community worldwide seeing it, is measured in hours and days, rather than months and years. Some of the strong platforms are Academia.edu , arXiv , Mendeley , ResearchGate and SSRN . What about peer review? One question many academics have is: in a future where research is distributed instantly, what happens to peer review? Will this be a world where junk gets out, and there is no way to distinguish between good and bad research? Content discovery on the web Instant distribution is a characteristic of web content, and the web has thrived without a system of formal peer review in place. No-one thinks that the web would be enhanced by a panel of formal peer reviewers who verify each piece of content before it was allowed to be posted on the web. The web has thrived because powerful discovery systems have sprung up that separate the wheat from the chaff for users. The main two systems that people use to discover content on the web are: Search engines (Google, Bing) Social platforms (mainly sites like Facebook and Twitter, but also generic communication platforms like email, IM etc) Both search engines and social platforms are peer review systems in different ways. One can think of these two systems as “Crowd Review” and “Social Review” respectively: Crowd Review: Google’s PageRank algorithm looks at the link structure of the entire web, and extracts a number (PageRank) that represents how positively the web thinks about a particular website. Social Review : Twitter and Facebook show you links that have been shared explicitly by your friends, and people you follow. One can think of the peer review system in the journal industry as “two person review”: Two Person review: Two people are selected to review the paper on behalf of the entire possible audience for that paper. The drawbacks of the Two Person review process are that it is: expensive: $8 billion a year is spent on subscriptions to journals, which is money that could be spent on more research. slow: the Two Person review process takes about 6 months to 2 years to complete, sometimes more. of questionable quality : the two people who are selected as peer reviewers may be biased against the paper, or unqualified, or just in a bad mood, when reviewing it. unchanging : the judgement is fixed, and doesn’t change as the impact of the paper changes a lot of work for the reviewers : it takes a lot of time to review a paper, and the review is not published, so reviewer doesn’t receive credit for their work. More and more, academics are discovering research papers nowadays via the web, and in particular, via search engines and social platforms: Search engines: Google, Google Scholar, Pubmed Social platforms : Academia.edu, arXiv, Mendeley, ResearchGate, blogs, conversations with colleagues over email or IM, Facebook and Twitter. As research distribution has moved to the web mostly, so the discovery engines for research content are the same as those for general web content. The peer review mechanism is evolving from The Two Person review process to the Crowd Review process, and the Social Review process. But has the research been done to a high standard? People often say that the formal peer review process helps ensure that all the accessible research is above a certain minimum quality. The fear is that if this quality floor was removed, things would start falling apart: an academic would be reading a paper, and would have no idea whether to trust it or not. The experience of the web is that this fear is over-blown. There is no quality floor for content on the web. There is bad content on the web, and there is great content. The job of search engines and social platforms is to ensure that the content that you discover, either via Google or Facebook, is of the good kind. The success of the web shows that the discovery engines do a good job generally. Discovery and credit systems are powered by the same metrics Peer review in the journal industry has historically played another interesting role, other than powering research discovery. It has helped an academic build up academic credit, which is required to get grants, and get jobs. People on hiring and grant committees have historically focused on how many peer reviewed publications an academic has in order to get a sense of the academic’s level of achievement, and in order to see how deserving the academic is of the grant or job in question. The peer review system has historically played this dual role, in powering both the discovery system and the credit system, because ultimately research discovery and research credit are about the same issue: which is the good research? Whichever systems are good at answering that question will drive both the discovery system and the credit system. One new metric of academic credit that has emerged over the last few years is the citation count. Google Scholar makes citation counts public for papers, and so now everyone can see them easily. Citations between papers are like links between websites, and citation counts are an instance of the Crowd Review process. Legend has it that Larry Page came up with the idea of PageRank after reflecting on the analogy between citations and links. Citation counts nowadays play the dual role of driving discovery on Google Scholar, as they determine the ordering of the search results, and help to determine academic credit. Academic credit from social platforms In the case of social platforms, the metric that drives discovery is how much interaction there is with your content on the social platform in question. Examples of such interaction include: numbers of followers you have the number of times your content is shared, liked, commented on, viewed. These metrics show how much interest there is in your papers, and how widely they are read right now, and thus provide a sense of their level of impact. One drawback of citation counts as a metric of academic credit is that they are a lagging indicator, in that they take a while to build up. If you publish a paper now, it is going to take several years for a body of papers to emerge that cite your paper. This leads to academics experiencing a credit gap, where papers they have published in the last 3-4 years hardly impact their academic credit. The advantage of the kinds of metrics that social platforms like Academia.edu, Mendeley, and SSRN provide is that they are real time, and they fill this credit gap. Academics are increasingly including these real time metrics in their applications for jobs and for grants. The competition for jobs, and grants is intense, and having more data that speaks to the impact of your work helps. Funding bodies are also eager to see more data about the impact of research, as it helps them make better decisions. Instant Distribution and Peer Review The prospect of instant distribution of research is tremendously exciting. If you can tap the global brain of your research community in effectively close to real time, as opposed to waiting 6 months to 24 months to distribute your ideas, there could be a wonderful acceleration in the rate of idea generation. The web has shown that you can take out this 6 month to 24 month distribution delay, which occurs when research is undergoing the Two Person peer review process, and see high quality filtering of content done by new peer review mechanisms, Crowd Review and Social Review, which are faster, cheaper, and more personalized. The web is also an incredible place for new ideas to be invented and to take hold. No doubt new peer review mechanisms will emerge in the future that will advance beyond Crowd Review and Social Review.

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The Future of Peer Review

Some Refurbished Xooms Could Put Personal Data In The Wrong Hands

user — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:55:56 +0000

Maybe it was too thick, maybe it was too heavy, maybe you just didn’t like Honeycomb. Regardless of your reasoning, you may want to keep your eyes peeled on your credit score if you bought and returned a Motorola Xoom between March and October 2011, because your personal information may be in someone else’s hands. That’s the story from Motorola, anyway. As it happens, the standard refurbishment process that occurs when a customer returns a piece of hardware didn’t go exactly as planned for some devices. Motorola estimates that out of batch of 6,200 refurbished Xoom Wi-Fi tablets, about 100 of them weren’t properly erased before they were resold in batches on daily deals site Woot.com. Though the odds are in your favor that you weren’t affected, I doubt that same line of reasoning will provide much comfort to someone who was. Motorola doesn’t go into much detail about how exactly the process went awry. Were the tablets simply not wiped before they were resold? Did some glitch cause user-stored data to remain on the device even after a factory reset? According to them, the “information that may be accessible to the purchasers of the impacted refurbished tablets may include any information that the original user elected to store on the tablet.” That could potentially include media like photos and video, as well as “user names and passwords for email and social media accounts, as well as other password-protected sites and applications.” With tablets supplanting notebooks and PCs for a growing number of users, this sort of snafu is the last thing Motorola needs as they and bounce back from a disappointing fourth quarter , though they’ve been pretty forthcoming about the whole mess. If you were one of the people who returned a Xoom between March and October 2011, let Motorola know — they’ll be setting you up with a free 2-year subscription to Experian’s ProtectMyID identity theft alert service. They would also like to have a word with you if you bought a refurbished Xoom from Woot, so mosey on over to their returns site to see if your new old tablet is one of the troublemakers.

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Some Refurbished Xooms Could Put Personal Data In The Wrong Hands

The Wheel: What Is The Foxconn Debate Really About?

vertical8 — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:20:31 +0000

Thirty spokes meet at a nave; Because of the hole we may use the wheel. Clay is moulded into a vessel; Because of the hollow we may use the cup. Walls are built around a hearth; Because of the doors we may use the house. Thus tools come from what exists, But use from what does not. – Tao De Ching There’s a carousel in a small Cape Cod town that we visited this summer and the kids rode it a few times. The carousel is quite old and quite handsome and it makes a great diversion of an evening. I’m reminded now of trying to take pictures of the kids while they rode the carousel. For a while I’d wave and try to get their attention as they roared past, their laughter dopplering around the edge of the curve, and then, after four or five tries I’d give up and just watch. It’s a wheel, an endless circle, designed to delight and enthuse and distract. Reading the recent back and forth between Stephen Fry – an Apple apologist – and Mike Daisey – an Apple user/abuser – I’m reminded of that carousel. The gist is this: Mike Daisey woke up the NPR-listening world with his long piece of Foxconn for This American Life . It was a great piece – dramatic, educational, and eye-opening – but it’s definitely nothing we haven’t seen before. Some could say that it was The Jungle of Chinese manufacturing, a tell-all with just enough outrage to make us rethink a great horror. But the problem is this: Daisey is an actor and knows how to bring out the story, just as John Steinbeck was a writer and knew how to populate the Dust Bowl with Christ figures. That doesn’t make the story less effective – it makes it more so – but it does make the story less true. The problem is the endless circle of blame and apology. Daisey is correct in many of his assumptions, but offers a way forward that is currently unenforceable. But if you argue against Daisey’s points, you’re an apologist. But, as Paul Krugman writes : Such moral outrage is common among the opponents of globalization — of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports. These critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad. We keep going over the same ground here. The argument can be delineated like this: Foxconn is an evil sweatshop. Apple is a huge Foxconn customer. They should change things. Two of those things are true, a third is false. To be clear, I’m with the crowd that says that Apple is, at best, ignorant of Foxconn’s problems and at worst ignoring them. I agree things must change and Apple is in a great position to do it. But I don’t agree with the first point. I’ve seen sweat shops and Foxconn is a factory. If many of the major brands (I recall that Ford was a customer at one factory I visited) knew that their promotional USB keys were made in a building that looked like a gulag, they’d be skewered. Here’s hoping they are, one day. However, Daisey’s Foxconn story – written outside of the factory – and my own research , written inside the factory – don’t jibe. His discoveries that people get sick or are injured in factories are naive and I suspect his sample size of employees who approached him is far smaller than we realize. To go into the Foxconn factory is to see a place staffed by college-age kids and engineers who work 10 or so hours a day building electronics. There is no great Dickensian work house nor are there sad-eyed madonnas of the assembly line chained to the soldering irons. This isn’t the mundanity of evil – this is just mundanity. Nor am I saying that Daisey’s interviewees are malingerers with an axe to grind. I’m sure their lives are ruined or much harder thanks to Foxconn. The value of Daisey’s efforts is his ability to give these people a voice in an environment that would normally quash that voice. He’s doing what artists must do – reflecting a time and place through his own lens. My own opinion is simple: Apple needs to do more for the people in its manufacturing chain. I will not pretend that Apple can simply wave a magic wand and make every Foxconn employee rich and happy, but it has the cash and the wherewithal to further disrupt the Chinese supply chain and improve the lot of Foxconn’s employees. But I also agree with what one Gawker commenter said : “I believe Tim Cook will do more good for those employees (and already has, in point of fact) than Mike Daisey ever will.” Apple on the aggregate couldn’t care less about our existence nor does it deserve our undying respect and admiration. On an personal level there are plenty of folks inside Apple working and worrying about worker’s rights in China, but as an entity we are talking supply chains and price management. Apple makes excellent tools for our digital age, that’s it. To defend or excoriate the company is like screaming into the wind. However, through their constant rejiggering and improvements, they have essentially created a Western, ISO-compliant factory environment in a corporate culture that used to force underperforming employees to stand outside wearing a sign that said “I am a bad worker.” What Daisey did is made us think. Did he do it the right way, using the right tools? Absolutely not. Will he improve the lot of the workers he interviewed? I doubt it. But will his efforts – and the efforts of many who came before him – help bring the Chinese worker out of penury? Sure, eventually. I opened this piece talking about a carousel in Cape Cod, a delightfully bourgeois setting for a piece on poverty wage labor practices. I get to go to Cape Cod and put my kids on a carousel because my job involves dicking around on the Internet all day (I suspect Daisey’s does too). My one wish is that every Foxconn employee, at some point in their lives, will be able to sit down to an unhurried meal, chat with family, and maybe ride a carousel. I think it’s in Foxconn’s best interests to ensure that that happens – and soon – and I think that we’re nearly there. Things will get better, I’m sure of it, and I also feel that they already have.

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The Wheel: What Is The Foxconn Debate Really About?

What Recession? Razer’s $2800 Blade Gaming Laptop Sells Out In 30 Minutes

bestcbstore — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 07:12:04 +0000

For months we’ve been waiting on Razer’s Blade notebook , a $2800, 17-inch beast that we weren’t sure whether to laud or mock. It’s just that it’s kind of a strange thing to see making a big debut when people are more cautious than usual with their money, and PC gaming (as ever) is being declared dead. But after our hands-on at CES , we were convinced that it was at the very least impressive and well-built, and apparently enough other people thought so that Razer sold out almost immediately. Now, the actual number sold isn’t mentioned, but Razer isn’t a small company and they were going all-out with this thing at CES. But we’ve seen devices launch to sales of dozens, so a strong response to a launch like this is definitely good news. The company shared the news on their Facebook page , and urges prospective buyers to sign up for a notification email list . Hopefully that $2800 won’t burn a hole in your pocket in the meantime. Personally, I’m more excited about their plans to disconnect the touchscreen and LCD keys from the laptop, making a customizable piece of hardware you can use with your existing PC. I’m not really down with the small-screen gaming and I like my keyboards a little meatier, so the Blade isn’t for me — but I do have gear envy when I see all those future toys on the side.

Daily Crunch: Wraiths

bestcbstore — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:00:55 +0000

Here are some recent stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: nanox: High-Quality iPod nano Watch Conversion Kit WiGig: Panasonic Tablet Wirelessly Transmits A Full DVD Video In 60 Seconds (Video) Flying People Spotted Over New York City…Film At Nine

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Daily Crunch: Wraiths

Salesforce Launches Assistly-Powered Social And Mobile Customer Service Platform For SMBs, Desk.com

bestcbstore — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:59:25 +0000

Last September, Salesforce bought social customer service SaaS startup Assistly for $50 million-plus to help expand its service cloud offerings to small businesses. Today, Salesforce is debuting a brand new Assistly-inspired social and mobile customer service platform for small businesses, called Desk.com. As you may remember, Assistly helped companies collect and organize all of their customer conversations into a prioritized actionable list and equips support staff with the tools to respond to customers. The application allows businesses to filter conversations, access customer histories, automate processes and even tap into social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. And Assistly provides users with key metrics and analytics, such as case volume, interaction volume by channel, response time, service levels, agent performance and more. Desk.com includes much of the same help desk functionality as Assistly but with a few changes. As Assistly co-founder and vice president and general manager, Desk.com, Alex Bard and explains, the customer service platform has been completely rebuilt from the ground up, including the infrastructure and back-end. There’s a new user interface, new APIs, a new HTML5 mobile client, and a new reporting service. Additionally, Desk.com is launching with an in-depth integration with Salesforce’s CRM Sales Cloud, so you can see customer service cases in the CRM product and more. Built with social at its core, Desk.com allows small businesses work with and respond to customers over Twitter, Facebook and more. Basically, Desk.com integrates Twitter and Facebook customer service comments with other channels like email, phone and web within the agent desktop. Agents can also see data on how many cases customer service agents have opened, resolved, replied to, reassigned, or reopened—regardless of who was assigned the case. Desk.com includes twelve pre-built reports providing data for average handle time, time to first response, first contact resolution rate, and more. Salesforce is also touting the simple deployment of Desk.com for small businesses. With only four required fields, a company can register for its own social help desk in a matter of seconds. Desk.com also provides a checklist to help companies get started, and each task that a company works through earns the company flex hour credits that anyone in the company can use. Clients can use the Desk.com HTML5 mobile app to respond to customers on the go from a variety of devices, including iPhones, iPads and Android devices. Users respond to support cases using the same filters from their desktop client and access the entire macro library without having to type long replies. Users can also re-assign, change groups, change status, change priority for cases, and modify customer information associated with cases. Pricing starts at $49 per full-time agent, per month, for unlimited usage. Salesforce says there is flexible pricing is also available for $1 per part-time agent, per hour. Desk.com already has a number of well-known web companies using its customer service platform including Yelp, Square, Spotify, Vimeo, Pandora, and One Kings Lane. At the time of the acquisition, Salesforce’s CEO and founder Marc Benioff said of Assistly: Salesforce has spent over a decade democratizing enterprise applications in the cloud…The Assistly acquisition doubles down on that strategy by putting us at the heart of the new trend of customer service help desk applications that have instant sign up and zero-touch onboarding, expanding the potential reach of the Service Cloud to millions of companies around the world. Salesforce already offers the Service Cloud to companies, which helps businesses connect with customers across both traditional and social channels, and counts customers such as Southwest Airlines. For Salesforce, this is a way to aggressively go after the small to medium-sized business community who needs a simple and mobile SaaS for help desk support. Desk.com will face competition from another popular customer service app for small to medium-sized businesses, Zendesk. And unsurprisingly, social and mobile are central to how Salesforce is positioning Desk.com to be the premier (yet cost-effective) customer service alternative for businesses and companies. Next up for Salesforce’s new products— leveraging the Rypple acquisition with the launch of a human talent management SaaS Successforce.

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Salesforce Launches Assistly-Powered Social And Mobile Customer Service Platform For SMBs, Desk.com

Twitter, Democracy, and Internet Freedom

vertical8 — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 04:00:31 +0000

Editor’s Note: Richard Fontaine , a Senior Advisor at the Center for a New American Security, is the co-author of Internet Freedom: A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age . Follow him @rhfontaine . Twitter has taken fire in recent days from activists and bloggers who fear that the company’s new censorship policies will muffle online freedom. News reports recall the ways in which protestors have had made use of Twitter to oppose dictatorships, and dissidents express concern that their ability to communicate will be harmed. The more immediate issue, however, may lie elsewhere. Twitter’s new policies demonstrate vividly the complicated relationship between Internet freedom and democratic government. The complications take on greater importance in light of America’s global Internet freedom strategy. The U.S. government began an active policy of promoting Internet freedom in the second George W. Bush term, and its efforts have accelerated in the Obama administration. The State Department devotes tens of millions of dollars to support technology and training for online dissidents, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has given a series of major speeches highlighting the issue. In one , she invoked Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous four freedoms, added a fifth — the “freedom to connect” — and observed that “the spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet.” It is easy to imagine two sides locked in pitched battle over Internet freedom: The democracies, embracing the freedom to connect for all, and the dictatorships, who censor, monitor, and disrupt. Indeed, pressing the cause of Internet freedom has thus far generally meant taking on autocracies, like Beijing and its Great Firewall, the Mubarak regime when it shuttered Egypt’s Internet during the 2011 protests, or Iran as it systematically monitors domestic dissidents. But it has become increasingly clear that autocracies alone do not challenge Internet freedom; democracies do as well. In the blog post explaining its new policy, Twitter hit on this truth, noting that the company will be active in “countries that have different ideas” than the United States “about the contours of freedom of expression.” All democracies restrict speech to some degree, and the forms of banned expression vary, ranging from child pornography (which is illegal virtually everywhere) to hate speech (banned in Europe and other places but not the United States) to country-specific expression (such as criticism of national heroes or monarchs). America, however, is an outlier. The United States recognizes some limits on free expression – slander, perjury, “fighting words” and certain other forms of expression are illegal online or off – but its commitment to free speech is nevertheless the most absolute of any major country. This puts it in potential conflict with fellow democracies about what constitute legitimate restrictions on online expression. Given Washington’s role as the world’s most active proponent of Internet freedom, it also complicates its efforts to rally fellow democracies behind the cause. The examples of differing democratic practice abound. Witness, for example, the recent request by Indian telecommunications minister Kapil Sibal to Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others that they remove content deemed insulting to leaders of the Indian Congress party. Mr. Sibal pledged that his government would take unspecified steps to act if the private sector would not. This month, during a hearing on a related case , an Indian high court justice said that, “like China,” the government could block websites entirely if their hosts do not remove offensive content. Turkey banned YouTube for two years because it refused to remove videos that Turkish courts deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Germany and other countries prohibit Holocaust denial online, and France bans the sale of Nazi paraphernalia over the Internet. Governments in Britain, Italy and Germany have established lists of blocked websites – generally those containing child pornography, hate speech, or online gambling platforms – even though those lists are not always transparent. The differences arise not only in national policy, but in international law as well. A number of European democracies, including Denmark, France, Slovenia and Switzerland, have signed an additional protocol to the European Convention on Cybercrime , which requires them criminalize such acts as using computers to distribute xenophobic material or insult people because of their race, religion, or ethnic origin. The United States faces its own potential contradictions. Secretary Clinton used one of her major addresses on Internet freedom to explain why the notion did not apply when Wikileaks published thousands of classified cables online. A district court recently ruled that, as part of its lawful intercept authorities, the Justice Department can seize Twitter feeds. And then there is the tremendous debate that has emerged over the Stop Online Privacy Act. The truth is that the U.S. government will always enforce some limits on free expression, and our political system will continually wrestle with where the limits should be drawn. But we should not allow this to undermine the important cause of promoting global Internet freedom. Authoritarian governments will inevitably attempt to shield themselves from criticism and pressure by pointing to democracies that ban online expression. Denying them the opportunity to do so successfully will require the United States and other to articulate, publicly and consistently, the critical distinction between the restrictions placed on online speech by democracies and the repression favored by many autocracies. The distinction rests not only in the kind of banned speech, but also in the process by which the decision to restrict it is made. True democracies bar forms of expression based on law and regulation, and they make decisions to do so in accordance with due process. Their pronouncements are generally transparent, with decision makers accountable to the law, to legislatures, and ultimately to the people, who can turn them out of office in periodic elections. There is a world of difference between a democracy banning speech on “security” grounds when the citizens know what the decision is, who made it, and how to change it, and a dictatorship banning its own “security”-infringing speech by autocratic fiat. It is crucial to make that distinction clear. Doing so can benefit America’s diplomatic effort to promote Internet freedom, and it may also help guide policymakers at home. Resolving tough new issues often involves complex considerations of technology, law, and fundamental principle. In remembering what makes a democratic approach to the Internet distinctive, we might avoid falling prey to measures that would suggest we are otherwise.

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Twitter, Democracy, and Internet Freedom

House Party Is A Serious Business, Scores $5.3 Million

jos — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:50:44 +0000

HouseParty.com , a site that helps people throw brand-sponsored home parties , has raised $5.3 million in Series C funding in a round led by New York-based Acadia Woods Partners . Partiers need to apply online, indicate what type of in-home event they’re planning and take charge in spreading the word to their friends and relatives. Once selected for a house party, they receive a package of products from sponsoring brands – ‘Party Packs’ have included food, baby toys, health and beauty products and action figures in the past. The idea is for brands to get some relatively cheap word-of-mouth marketing by gathering people in real life (who do this in exchange for freebies) in the hope that the parties will spark conversations about the brand and, ultimately, turn the people who show up into customers or even advocates. People can also shop for party supplies on HouseParty.com. The company has raised about $8 million to date.

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House Party Is A Serious Business, Scores $5.3 Million

Mint Competitor And Personal Finance Platform HelloWallet Raises $12M From Morningstar

Budowniczy425 — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:25:47 +0000

HelloWallet, a personal finance software, has raised $12 million in Series B funding from Morningstar and TD Fund. The startup previously raised $9 million in Series A funding, from Grotech Ventures and AOL co-founder Steve Case’s VC fund Revolution Ventures. HelloWallet, which launched last year, helps users track and proactively manage their personal finances from both the web and mobile. But HelloWallet aims to be a full-service financial advisor, and looks forward to proactively uncover savings opportunities and potential threats for its members. Additionally, HelloWallet does not allow banks to advertise or promote products, so its recommendations claim to be untouched by any business interests. The startup plans to use the fund to further product development and build out its businesses development team. HelloWallet’s team of consumer finance experts have developed a platform that helps users set and reach specific financial short- and long-term goals for important life milestones including buying a home, saving for retirement, reducing debt safely, and saving for college. For example, HelloWallet stores tuition information for nearly every college and university across the country, and models the tuition out to a users’ expected enrollment date. The service is then able to make specific recommendations for the best approach to educational savings, on an individual basis. The company has sold more than 300,000 subscriptions since it launched its enterprise application in mid-2011. During this same period, HelloWallet’s personalized financial guidance has helped its average members increase their monthly savings contributions by more than 80 percent, creating about $350 in extra savings contributions every month per person. The new funding will be used to expand its client base.