Posted on February 2nd, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Patrick Salyer doesn’t work at Facebook. He doesn’t own any of its stock. But he’s one of thousands of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and around the world who stand to make a lot of money when the Menlo Park social network goes public later this year.
Salyer, 30, is chief executive of Gigya, a Palo Alto startup that helps clients such as Nike and Home Depot reach customers via their Facebook accounts. He said Facebook’s Wednesday filing to go public — which unveiled a trove of data about the company’s revenue and customer growth — will step up spending on social media and benefit companies like his.
The number of startups that have sprung up in recent years to make money via Facebook’s platform easily runs into the tens of thousands, said Steve Garrity, co-founder of Hearsay Social. The San Francisco company helps big brands like 24 Hour Fitness manage relationships with customers using social networks.
Garrity and others say the coming tsunami surrounding Facebook’s initial public offering will impact that startup “ecosystem” in a number of ways. Facebook itself, flush with as much as $12 billion in post-IPO cash, could well go on a buying binge to plug holes in its offerings. And with as many as a third of Facebook’s 3,000 employees expected to become millionaires, valley veterans say a new generation of startups will be seeded.
Full Story Via Mercury News
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Posted on January 29th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Hey, look at this: Kinect on a laptop. OK, so there we go. According to The Daily, companies are well on their way to making laptops–or, at least, laptop prototypes–running Windows 8 and equipped with Kinect motion camera hardware instead of standard webcams.
The Daily got to see some of this technology first hand on what it thinks were Asus laptops. Intel’s CES 2012 press conference featured a stage re-enactment of a similar Kinect-like idea on a laptop, shooting a virtual catapult in a game.
The real question here is, who’s going to use this?
For those not able to easily type, a motion-control camera could be useful. Maybe motions combined with keyboard controls could add touch-like gesture vocabulary to a hinged device like a laptop in a more logical/ergonomic way than, say, a touch screen. Gaming, media- and application-switching controls, and universal access for disabled individuals are the three uses that The Daily’s Matt Hickey discusses. I agree with the latter the most, but I’m skeptical as to how much I’d use motion otherwise.
Full Story Via Cnet
Filed under: Gadgets, Gaming, Laptops, Technology News | No Comments »
Posted on January 26th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Facebook has teamed up with the Washington Attorney General to put real resources toward getting rid of spam on the social network — starting with a lawsuit.
“Security is an arms race, and that’s why Facebook is committed to constantly improving our consumer safeguards while pursuing and supporting civil and criminal consequences for bad actors,” Facebook general counsel Ted Ullyot said in a statement.
The two have filed lawsuits against affiliate network Adscend Media, which Facebook says is known to support “clickjacking” schemes, and other forms of tricking users into giving up personally identifiable information or money.
Clickjacking schemes involve hiding code in a link, or under a picture in the browser that otherwise would be a normal click-through point. In Facebook’s case, this exists as enticing links to see a weird video, or find out what cool thing happened on your birthday. The code in the link, however, executes a download or may redirect a user to an undesirable website. Other scams include creating a fan page that lures users into accessing a web page and inputting personal information or signing up for a scam. This kind of spam is more in line with phishing scams.
Full Story Via Venturebeat
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Posted on January 25th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
The Apple iPhone 4S’ super-tough A5 processor has had hard-working hackers stumped. After 10 months of efforts, however, they’ve released a free jailbreaking download.
The Chronic Dev Team, a group of iOS hackers, has unveiled its GreenPois0n toolkit, a free download enabling Apple iPhone 4S and iPad 2 owners to jailbreak their devices. The download came at the cost of “thousands of hours of brain power and effort from a legion of world-renowned hackers,” the group said in a celebratory blog post.
Apple dictates which applications can run on its devices and would very much like its operating systems to go un-manipulated. Jailbreaking is the process by which the system and user interface are opened up to user changes. Particularly alluring, jailbreaking enables devices to copy files without accepting the iTunes end-user agreement.
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Posted on January 21st, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Apple announced that it was “reinventing the textbook” using the iPad, its iBooks bookstore and a new kind of book creation tool. But despite the tremendous success of the iPad in recent years, and despite the biggest partners in educational publishing, does the company have the ability to effect real change? Or is Apple ignoring some serious obstacles? Content providers and education experts are torn.
During a press event on Thursday, Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller explained that the “iPad is rapidly being adopted by schools” and that the brand-new iBooks 2 app will offer students an interactive way to learn using a device they may already be familiar with.
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Posted on January 21st, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Windows’ contribution last quarter to Microsoft’s revenue hit its lowest point since Vista’s swan song more than two years earlier, according to figures released by the company Thursday.
For the quarter ending Dec. 31, the Windows division accounted for 22.7% of the company’s total sales, its lowest share since the 20.3% that the group recorded during the third quarter of 2009, at the end of Vista’s reign and just weeks before Windows 7 launched.
“Microsoft’s Windows division continued to slide,” said Allan Krans, an analyst with Technology Business Research, in an email late Thursday. “This marked the fifth consecutive quarter of incremental or negative revenue growth for the division.”
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Filed under: Business and Finance, Software, Windows 7 | No Comments »
Posted on January 16th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Current England long jump champion and London 2012 hopeful J.J. Jegede attempts an exhibition jump over three Limited edition 2012 MINIs on September 28, 2011, in London, England. (Julian Finney/Getty Images for BMW)
BMW announced on Monday the recall of nearly 89,000 of its Mini and Mini Cooper cars in U.S. and more than 235,000 worldwide.
The company said a water pump that cools the turbocharger in some models has a circuit board that can malfunction and overheat.
“In an extreme case this overheating can lead to a smoldering of the water pump and eventually can create a vehicle fire,” said BMW spokeswoman Nathalie Bauters.
Read more »
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Posted on January 12th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
Are there too many smartphones on the market?
That and other provocative questions were posed during a CES panel discussion Thursday between journalists for the The Verge and managers for Windows Phone at Microsoft and smartphone makers HTC and Samsung.
The question of whether there are too many smartphone variations on the market was partly incited by Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha’s comment at CES that the company plans to make fewer phones in 2012.
The HTC and Samsung officials agreed there is a profundity of smartphone choices with little to distinguish some of them, but they also argued that competition and demands from users have led to the proliferation of devices. Add in frequent OS changes and the need to have devices at different prices, and the result is a surfeit of phones on the market, they said.
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Filed under: Android, apple, Mobile, Technology News, Wireless | No Comments »
Posted on January 10th, 2012 by ElectroGeek
The main theme of the Consumer Electronics Show this year, in case you’ve been hiding under a rock this week, is the ultrabook. These lightweight laptops are chasing after the MacBook Air, trying to undercut Apple’s $1,000 price tag and add their own flair to the lineup of super-slim devices. Intel, the company behind the chips that make the devices “ultra,” has been pushing this newly named genre hard, announcing in its Monday keynote that at least 75 models are on their way.
There are three main distinguishing features of an ultrabook. First, they’re light and thin — really thin. Acer’s Aspire S5 Ultrabook is just .6 inches thick at its widest point, and the HP Envy Spectre 14 is .8 inches thick. Ultrabook makers favor solid-state hard drives that start up quickly and don’t add nearly as much weight to a device as a traditional laptop. Design is the key factor for any ultrabook, and many of the laptops mirror Apple’s devotion to slender, simple, shiny computers. Second, despite their light frames, they’re still most closely related to laptops than to tablets and run full versions of Windows operating systems instead of mobile software. Finally, they have a fairly agreeable price point, though I’d hesitate to call them “cheap.” Most more or less match the MacBook Air, ranging from around $900 to $1,500. Read more »
Filed under: Laptops, Technology News | No Comments »
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