Tag Archives | technology issues

Your Facebook Friends Are Watching You—Did We Just Move Closer to 1984?

By on August 21, 2010 in Company Content


George Orwell’s novel 1984 begins with Winston Smith, the main character, seeing posters saying BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. In 2010, that could be replaced with FACEBOOK IS WATCHING YOU. Or rather, YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK ARE WATCHING YOU. You and your friends can now post where you are and share this information, if you so chose.

Facebook showed off the power of this new location feature at a launch event this week with a giant projections of a U.S. map showing where people were checking just moments after Places launched. TechCrunch writer MG Siegler called it “Facebook’s Awesome Dark Knight-Esque Live Check-In Display.” But it was one of the scariest things I’ve seen.

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Is Search Now A Strategic Industry in China?

By on August 21, 2010 in Company Content

Editor’s note: This is a guest post penned by Michael Cole, Managing Director of RightSite.asia, China’s largest online marketplace for commercial and industrial real estate. Cole has also successfully launched, grown and profitably exited from media ventures in China.

After a modest amount of time observing China’s economy it becomes clear that the government likes to arrange organized competition in industries it considers strategic. Thus the country gets three major airlines—China Eastern, China Southern and Air China—as well as three major mobile phone networks in China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom.

Now, with the recent announcement of two major new search engine companies, it appears that search is joining transportation, phone networks and Internet service providers as a strategic industry to be managed more directly by the government. And maybe China will soon have three search giants to match up with its telephone and airline triplets.

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Chop-Shop Workers and Bootstrappers: Chile Really Wants You

By on August 21, 2010 in Company Content


Silicon Valley’s vitality depends on a constant influx of bright people who challenge its inhabitants to work harder and think smarter. And, as I noted in my last post, America’s economy depends on startups to create jobs and innovation. Skilled immigrants have provided both. So, given the miserable state of the economy, we should be laying out the welcome mat for the world’s best and brightest.  Yet they’re doing the exact opposite. Meanwhile other countries have figured out the secret of the Valley’s success and are laying out their red carpets and welcome mats, not only for the foreign skilled workers we’re turning away but also for our techies.

Fifty-two percent of Silicon Valley’s startups from 1995 to 2005 were founded by foreign-born workers. And in 2006, 26% of America’s global patents—including 40% of those filed by the U.S. government, 72% of Qualcomm’s, 65% of Merck & Co.’s, and 64% of General Electric’s—were invented wholly or partly by foreign nationals residing in the U.S. You would think that we would develop policies to bring in more of these people. Yet, sadly, the only immigration legislation our political leaders have been able to agree on, unanimously, is to hire 1000 more border-patrol agents and to fly drones on the Mexico border—like the ones we use to kill terrorists in Pakistan—to keep the nannies, gardeners, and farm workers out. Ironically, to pay for all this, the new border-security law levies taxes on companies that the bill’s sponsor, Senator Schumer (D-NY), calls “chop shops”—because they bring in tech workers who compete with Americans and supposedly “take their jobs away”. These “chop shops” are Indian companies such as Infosys, Tata Consulting Services, and Wipro—which have the best employee-training and -development programs, and are amongst the best-managed companies, in the world. They compete head to head with American “chop shops” such as IBM Global Services and Accenture, and increasingly with management consultants such as McKinsey & Co and The Boston Consulting Group. (In the U.S., the term “chop shop” is typically used to describe an illegal business which disassembles stolen cars for selling off the parts.)

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Foursquare’s Crowley: The Giants Are “Generic,” We Are Fun. I Wonder Who He’s Referring To…

By on August 21, 2010 in Company Content

Foursquare may have a tenuous partnership with Facebook Places— but don’t let the Kumbaya presentation fool you, these frenemies are gunning for the ultimate mayorship and Dennis Crowley is feeling very confident.

On Friday’s taping of Gillmor Gang with former TechCrunchIT Editor Steve Gillmor, Kevin Marks and John Taschek, Crowley discussed the opportunity for places, outlined his plan for the next iteration of Foursquare and knocked Google for its social awkwardness. While his disgust with Google’s mismanagement of the ill-fated Dodgeball is well documented, in his explanation you don’t need to read between the lines to understand he’s also talking about Facebook and how he plans to beat Goliath.

“It’s difficult to build services that are supposed to scale to you know 30, 50, 100 million users right off the bat, because they got to be kind of tailored down, by definition they have to be a little bit generic to speak to that large of an audience.” Video ahead.

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Facebook Kept Thousands Of Check-Ins On Lockdown For Months. Impressive.

By on August 21, 2010 in Company Content

As we noted a couple days ago, the video Facebook made to explain their new Places feature was a bit Apple-esque. But something else they pulled off recently was even more Apple-esque: the secrecy surrounding their location launch.

Sure, we spotted the code for it months ago when an overzealous engineer likely pushed the code (but not the actual feature) to the touch.facebook.com version of the site a bit early. And everyone generally knew that something in the space was coming from them. But what’s odd is that we hadn’t heard from anyone who was actually using it out in the wild in the past several months. The best we got was all the way back in March when someone saw a very early beta of it. As we noted at the time:

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Lady Java Video Marks Exact Point Where Geek Culture Jumped The Shark

By on August 21, 2010 in Company Content

Lady Java, whose whiny drone is making me pretty nostalgic for the days when non-developers thought Java was a kind of coffee, is the creation of the supremely dorky folks over at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway. And while you might argue that the Java developer community is still small and tight knit, that thing is currently rounding out 100,000 views on the originally posted YouTube video and countless others on repost.

“I want to program like they do at Oracle …”

I personally blame Twitter for killing geek culture. You know who else has a combined love for coding and Lady Gaga? Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who yes, follows her on Twitter. You know how I know that? Yes, again Twitter.

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Weekend Giveaway: A 1TB ioSafe SoloPRO Rugged Hard Drive

By on August 21, 2010 in Company Content

In honor of the launch of ioSafe’s new SoloPRO rugged fireproof/waterproof hard drive I present to you the “Win a 1TB Hard Drive Plus Nirvana Weekend Giveaway.” What can you win? Well, a 1TB hard drive, for starters, and you can choose either the eSATA or USB 3.0 model. You also win true happiness and enlightenment, although the attainment of these things requires years of right practice.

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AP Tries Its Hardest To Tie Rand Paul To Porn Industry

By on August 21, 2010 in Company Content

Kentucky senate candidate Rand Paul is being partially bankrolled by the porn industry, apparently. At least that’s the story that the AP’s Bruce Schreiner is pushing today. This is what appears to be the AP’s most recent hit job on Paul. Schreiner in particular has been accused of subtle bias (compare the headline to the text) in his Rand Paul reporting even before this story today.

What’s the evidence for today’s story? Zivity cofounders Cyan Banister and Scott Banister made personal donations to the Rand Paul campaign totalling $4,800. The Paul campaign has raised a total of over $3.5 million. Donors must state where they work, so they wrote down Zivity, says Cyan.

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Forget Ads In Books, Lit-Lovers Face An Even More Hideous Prospect

By on August 21, 2010 in Company Content

It’s a pity readers don’t want to pay for stories about the death of traditional media, because otherwise journalists and commentators would be riding a big fat cash cow.

In recent months it’s been impossible to open a newspaper or magazine without being drenched by a tidal wave of “waaaaah”s and “woah”s and “oh my God we’re all doomed”s from those of us who make our living selling words. If it’s not newspapers – the fall of advertising! the rise of paywalls! the death of columnists! the birth of citizen journalists! – then it’s magazines – no more long-form writing! the iPad! – or movies – piracy! Netflix! – or cable news – Twitter! YouTube!

This week it’s books (again), and a stark warning from the Wall Street Journal’s Ron Adner and William Vincent to anyone who prefers literature unsullied by full-page ads for SUVs and tobacco.

“With e-reader prices dropping like a stone and major tech players jumping into the book retail business, what room is left for publishers’ profits? The surprising answer: ads. They’re coming soon to a book near you.”

Oh my God! Lock up your Little Women! The Mad Men are coming!

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It’s Official: Google Acquires Like.com

By on August 20, 2010 in Company Content

It’s official. Google has acquired Like.com. In a post on Like.com’s homepage, the company’s CEO and Founder Munjal Shah writes that the visual search engine has been bought by Google. We originally reported the acquisition last weekend. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we’ve heard it’s valued at upwards of $100 million.

Shah’s message doesn’t really give us any hints as to what Google will be doing with Like.com but he alludes to the fact that he (and his team) will continue to work on visual search and cross-matching in e-commerce for Google.

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