Facebook cracks down on fake 'Likes'

Facebook is weeding out fake "Likes" on its social network that are being caused by spammers, malware and black marketeers as it strives to maintain credibility as an advertising platform.
Facebook said the number of Likes, or endorsements by users, on corporate pages is likely to drop by less than 1 percent, on average, after the crackdown.
"Newly improved automated efforts will remove those Likes gained by malware, compromised accounts, deceived users, or purchased bulk Likes," Facebook said in a post on its official blog on Friday.
"While we have always had dedicated protections against each of these threats on Facebook, these improved systems have been specifically configured to identify and take action against suspicious Likes," the post continued.
Thanks to a growing black market, companies can instantly raise their profile on Facebook by purchasing thousands of Likes at a time — a practice that is forbidden by the No. 1 social network, which has 955 million users.
Many of these Likes come from bogus Facebook user accounts rather than genuine users of the social network.
Meanwhile, various spam-like programs on Facebook deceive users into unwittingly liking something when they perform another action, such as clicking to watch a video.
Facebook said the cleanup will benefit both users and companies that maintain pages on the network, by giving a more accurate measurement of fan count and demographics.
Ensuring the integrity of Likes is serious business for Facebook, which depends on advertising revenue from large brands and other businesses. Many of the ad campaigns that companies conduct on Facebook are designed to garner Likes — a sign that their marketing message has resonated with consumers.
"It's their currency," said Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at research firm Altimeter Group. "Facebook is playing the Federal Reserve, to take the counterfeit currency off the market to ensure that there's quality in the marketplace."
The problem is not unique to Facebook, say analysts, who note that Twitter and Google also grapple with fake accounts, spam and other techniques to game the service.
But for Facebook, the pressure to show that activity on its social network is genuine has grown as concerns have mounted on Wall Street about the company's long-term profit potential.
Facebook estimates that 1.5 percent of its users are "undesirable" accounts set up for purposes that violate its terms of service, according to its most recent 10-Q regulatory filing.
"I think what they're intending to do is get a handle on it before it gets really out of control," Brian Blau, an analyst with research firm Gartner, said.
"You can imagine no business wants to pay for advertising to fake accounts."
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012. Check for restrictions at: http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp 



nbcnews

Microsoft makes its Facebook shares pay off, report says

Redmond reportedly sold one-fifth of its shares in Facebook right after the social network's IPO, and thus made a tidy profit.


A report suggests that Microsoft offloaded around 20 percent of its shares in Facebook just after the social network went public. In doing so, the software giant received $249 million back -- close to $10 million more than it first invested.
The Redmond, Wash.-based company invested $240 million in Facebook in 2007 for a 1.6 percent stake in the social network. Back then it wasn't a huge amount, but was a major boost for Facebook to have a dominant player on its roster. Soon after, Bing Search and Bing Maps were brought to the social network to display search results and other imagery for pages and businesses.
An Associated Press report said Microsoft sold 6.6 million shares -- roughly 20 percent -- when the social network went public in May. Despite Nasdaq's embarrassing and ill-timed hiccup, Microsoft sold its shares at the IPO price, a world away from Facebook's current trading price.


Add up the numbers -- number of shares multiplied by the share price -- more than $249 million in total. Maybe Microsoft foresaw the steep decline in Facebook shares and sold early, or maybe it's just good business sense. Either way, Microsoft still has a lot more Facebook stock on its hands.
Facebook is trading at $19 a share, down from $38 at its initial public offering in June. The social network has lost half its share value in one three-month period.
Questions were left with Microsoft, which did not respond at the time of writing.
This story originally appeared at ZDNet's Between the Lines under the headline "Microsoft offloads 20 percent of its Facebook shares: report."


 CNET

Apple iOS will kick in 40 percent of Google's mobile profits, says analyst

Google will have arch-rival Apple to thank for a huge chunk of its mobile earnings in 2012.
The search giant's licensing deals with Apple over its Maps and Search apps have been a healthy cash cow since the iPhone debuted in 2007. This year will be no exception.
In an investors note released yesterday, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said he expects Google to generate around $4.5 billion in mobile revenue this year. And iOS will kick in the largest or close to the largest chunk of that.
iOS will account for around 40 percent of Google's total mobile search revenue, or $1.6 billion, estimates Munster, which ultimately means iOS will generate around 2 percent of Google's total sales for the year.
Those numbers aren't bad, but they're actually conservative compared with an earlier estimate that pegged the iOS contribution at 80 percent of Google's mobile profits, according to AppleInsider.
But what happens if Apple replaces Google Maps with its own in-house map app? Recent reports suggest that Apple has already cooked up a 3D Maps app set to replace Google's app as the default on iOS devices. Regardless, Munster doesn't expect any significant changes to the numbers.
Google Maps will still live on in the App Store, freely available for any person to download, the analyst said. Google recently revealed that its Maps service has attracted more than 1 billion users across the world. Google offers a host of other apps for iOS users, but the Maps app could prove to be the most popular among them even if it's no longer the iOS default



And Google isn't standing still with Maps.
The company unveiled yesterday a host of innovations to the service, including 3D images, offline use, and more shots of Street View.
Still, the move by Apple to replace Google Maps as the default may be just the latest attempt to squeeze out the search giant.
"Moving forward, we expect a continued tug-of-war between Apple and Google," Munster said. "We believe Google is likely to push more of its apps through the App Store, including Chrome, while Apple will continue to innovate around discovery on the iPhone through Siri. Net-net, we believe the core user experience on iOS will remain largely unchanged even if Google Maps is replaced."



Cnet.com

Did lasers find gold-laden lost city of Ciudad Blanca at last?

Underneath the thick, virgin rainforest cover in the Mosquitia region of Honduras, archaeologists have discovered ruins they think may be the lost city of Ciudad Blanca. Legends say the "White City" is full of gold, which is why conquistador Hernando Cortes was among the first Ciudad Blanca seekers in the 1500s.

But the method the modern researchers used was a little different from previous explorers' techniques. The modern-day researchers flew over the area in a small plane and shot billions of laser pulses at the ground, creating a 3-D digital map of the topology underneath the trees.
This is one of the first times this technique, called light detection and ranging (LiDAR), has been used to map ancient ruins. Beyond archaeology, LiDAR researchers at the National Science Foundation are looking to develop the technology for mapping disasters using drones, for military spying and for tracking erosion under rivers and shallow parts of the ocean. 
LiDAR for archaeology Before LiDAR improved enough for their work, archaeologists discovered ruins the old-fashioned way — by hacking through forests using machetes. LiDAR is faster and cheaper.
It's been gaining ground since 2009, when a U.S. archaeology team working on Maya ruins first used the technology to peer beneath 80 square miles (207 square kilometers) of forest canopy in Belize. After four days of laser scanning, team members discovered buildings and agricultural fields they hadn't found in 25 years of study. The team was supported by the then-new National Science Foundation organization for LiDAR science, the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping. [10 Modern Tools for Indiana Jones]
Airborne LiDAR works by sending more than 100,000 short laser pulses to the ground every second while a plane flies over the area of interest. The laser light hits the ground, then returns to the aircraft. The time it takes for the light to make the back-and-forth trip tells researchers the altitude of points on the ground. 
The technology is able to detect height differences of less than 4 inches (10 centimeters) and maps to GPS coordinates within 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters). "It's within a step, in many cases," said Bill Carter, University of Houston engineer who develops LiDAR systems for the National Science Foundation.



The Belize archaeology work and the new Honduras findings both used the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping's LiDAR system. There was one major difference between the two projects, however. At the Belize site, researchers thought it was likely there would be new ruins there. They used the LiDAR to scan regions surrounding structures they had already uncovered. On the other hand, in the new study in Honduras, researchers were running on just a hunch — and plenty of private funding. 
LiDAR in Honduras Cinematographer Steven Elkins has been fascinated with the Ciudad Blanca stories for more than a decade. He previously analyzed satellite imagery of the Mosquitia forest, looking for signs of the city. As LiDAR improved, he gathered private investors to pay for the National Science Foundation's laser mapping center to analyze three areas he thought were especially promising. Elkins had originally approached the Honduran government with his idea, but government officials said they knew the forest well and there wasn't anything there, Carter said.



Over several days, National Science Foundation engineers flew over about 60 square miles (160 square kilometers) of forest for Elkins in their dual-engine Cessna planes. At the end of every day, they sent the data to Carter, who was working out of West Virginia. Carter found the first signs of what appeared to be human-made structures within five minutes of analyzing the data, he said. [Archaeology's Tech Revolution Since Indiana Jones]
"I'm the only person right now on the planet that knows that there's these ruins," Carter recalled thinking when he saw what he said were straight lines and right angles that don't normally appear in nature. "My wife walked in and looked over my shoulder and she was the second person to know." 
Carter sent his analysis back to the archaeologists in Honduras, who agreed the structures were man-made. Now, Elkins, along with a team of Honduran scientists, will visit the structures in person and determine what they are and how old they are. The LiDAR coordinates will help them pinpoint exactly where to look in the thick jungle. 
LiDAR for biology, disasters and the military Carter said he found his involvement in discovering the Honduras ruins exciting, but the National Science Foundation's LiDAR center is looking to do much more with the technology. 
So far, center researchers have used LiDAR to map to the ground to assess flooding risk and to find new fault lines in California. They've pinged Floridian citrus groves with lasers to check on the trees' health. Healthy tree leaves reflect a different quality of light back to LiDAR sensors than do sick trees, Carter explained.



The science agency also recently developed a laser that uses green light, which is able to map features underneath shallow water. Biologists want to use this technology to investigate fish spawning grounds, Carter said, while land managers may use a water-LiDAR to keep an eye on erosion. 
In the future, the center hopes to develop smaller, lighter, less expensive LiDAR that is able to ride in unmanned robotic aircraft. The drones could spy for the military, go on a tough Arctic mapping expedition or assess conditions after disasters, such as earthquakes or hurricanes. 
"As we look in the future, we see the ability to use these types of systems to map the entire Earth," Carter told InnovationNewsDaily. "Certainly all the land areas and shallow coasts."


Msnbc.com

So, is there a tech bubble or not?

The results of Facebook's IPO last week may indicate there isn't -- at least not in the public markets.

By Kevin Kelleher, contributor

FORTUNE – Does anyone want to talk about a bubble now?

Opinion: Why is Samsung so hot right now?

(CNN) -- This summer, Earls Court in London will be the venue for Olympic volleyball, but last night Samsung hired this vast space to launch a single product -- its new flagship phone, the Galaxy S III. (We really liked it incidentally, check out our hands-on preview here).

Hiring such a large space and filling it full of tech heads from all over the world was a sign of extreme confidence from the Korean electronics giant, and you only have to take a look at its last set of figures to see where the bravado is coming from. Net profit for the quarter was 5.05tn won, up 81%, and the main driver for this success was Samsung's Galaxy range of phones.

The Galaxy range has certainly been selling like hot cakes. This week, trend-watchers IDC put the company ahead of the competition in its latest state of the market analysis.

What's interesting to me is how different Samsung's strategy is to its other major smartphone competitor, Apple. There is only one iPhone released every year, and design-wise, each one has been broadly the same as the previous model, with the same size screen.

In contrast, Samsung has a bewildering number of different models that, viewed together, make almost no sense at all to the casual observer. This might seem like a recipe for confusion, but it also means that that Samsung has a phone to suit pretty much every potential customer. Want something pocketable that's cheap? There's a Samsung Galaxy for that. Need lots of power, a massive screen and a stylus to draw pictures with? Samsung Galaxy can help. And on it goes.

Apple is fantastic at making a product that's very aspirational, and it makes an enormous amount of money on every iPhone, but in terms of simply shifting a lot of phones and achieving huge scale, it's Samsung that has the winning strategy.

Both Apple and Samsung are so successful in fact, the battle for the top smartphone slot is starting to look like a two-horse race.

But it won't necessarily always be this way. HTC was the darling of the mobile industry a while back until Samsung arrived to eat its lunch. The transformation in the company's fortunes was rapid, and there's every possibility that Samsung could see an equally rapid turnaround at some point in the future -- in mobiles, you're only as good as your last hit product.

There's also a chance that Samsung's scale could turn out to be a weakness as well as a strength. In some respects, Samsung reminds me of Sony in the years before it all went wrong. There are lots of divisions that don't appear to communicate with each other very well, making a vast number of different products, most of which are decent, but not outstanding.

There's a desire to be the number one player in every category Samsung is in, which is laudable, but probably unachievable. Does Samsung really need to be the number one maker of cameras in the world? Or MP3 players? Probably not. I can't help but wonder whether its smartphone profits are covering up some deeper organizational problems. Then again, it seems to be working for now, so it may all turn out fine.

If a company was to snatch the smartphone crown from Samsung, which would it be? One answer might be Nokia, which may seem like a crazy thing to say following its latest set of disastrous financial results. But there is still a chance that it might not be game over.

Nokia's flagship mobile running Microsoft's Windows Phone, the Lumia 900, has recently appeared in America to decent critical acclaim. In the U.S., Android doesn't have quite the same grip on the market that it does in the UK in particular, so there's an outside chance Nokia could sell enough handsets to convince developers deal with the platform's biggest problem -- a lack of apps.

If that happens, the launch of Windows Phone 8 could open the whole field up again.

CNN

Google sums up its Java case: 'There was no copying'

In closing statements, Google's counsel reasserts that Google employed Java APIs in a fair-use manner for Android, transforming them into a full smartphone stack.

SAN FRANCISCO -- After Oracle made its closing statements on Monday morning at the U.S. District Court, Google's Robert Van Nest stepped up to the plate, defending Android's implementation of the 37 Java APIs at question in this lawsuit.
Van Nest's core defense rested on positioning this as a case of fair use, asserting that Android is not a copy of Java 5.0 SE but rather a "substantially" different work with different success in the market.
"It's a whole platform that didn't exist before and transformed the use of Java for a smartphone stack," asserted Van Nest.
Van Nest outlined four points to Google's position in this intellectual property suit:

• Sun gave the Java language to the public
• Google built Android using free and open technologies
• Google made fair use of the Java language APIs in Android
• Sun publicly approved Android's use of Java

"Copyright infringement requires that you copy something," Van Nest said. "There was no copying here because Google knew that it couldn't use Sun's source code."
Also on copyrights, Van Nest pointed to the jury's instructions about judging "the work as a whole," which actually consists of all 166 class libraries and all that entails (i.e. implementing codes, names, declarations, etc.) -- adding up to 2.8 million lines of code in Java 5.0 SE. Van Nest added that Oracle has to prove that it was "more likely than not that copyright infringement occurred."
"This kind of use of APIs in this way where you use the minimum you need to be compatible is fair use," Van Nest declared.
Additionally, a good portion of Van Nest's closing arguments was based on the testimony of former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz last Thursday.
Although Schwartz acknowledged that Sun wasn't happy that it couldn't come to a partnership agreement with Google, Van Nest recalled that Schwartz did say that Sun supported Android's use of Java nor did it have any grounds to file a lawsuit.
"For years, Sun had been promoting use of Java programming language," Van Nest said. "That was their whole business plan."
Again pointing to Schwartz's November 2007 blog post in which he congratulated Google for the debut of Android, Van Nest reminded the jury that Schwartz knew Android was written in Java and must have included the Java APIs in question ahead of the SDK release.


"If that isn't an affirmative endorsement of a product, I don't know what is," Van Nest lambasted.
To further hammer down Sun and Oracle's previous support for Android, Van Nest reminded the jury about a video of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at JavaOne in 2009, where Ellison said Oracle expected to see more Java devices coming from "our friends at Google," and that Google had done "a fantastic job" in opening up Java.
Although specifics about Android revenue and other financial matters have been banned from the presence of the jury in this trial, Van Nest reasserted the open source status of Android as a benefit to the developer community.
"The point is that Google doesn't make any money on licensing or selling Android," Van Nest said, explaining that Google decided to make it open "to foster innovation and get widespread use."
In his rebuttal argument, Oracle counsel Michael Jacobs spoke again about how Android has blocked Java from success in the smartphone market, reiterating that it is "impossible" to compete with a free version of its licensed products.
Jacobs concluded, "We need the help of the justice system to enforce our intellectual property rights."
After closing arguments for the first segment of the trial ended on Monday morning, Judge William Alsup proceeded with the rest of the instructions for the jury about ruling on copyright infringement contentions.
The jury, made up of seven women and five men, will begin deliberating today for one hour and then pick up again on Tuesday morning. Judge Alsup previously warned both parties that the jury could take up to a week to deliberate, but he predicted that they would come back within a day and a half. The decision must be unanimous.
After they return with a verdict, the case will move into the second segment of the trial, focusing on patents.


Cnet.com

The People vs. Apple

The U.S. DoJ has slammed Apple and several major book publishers with a suit alleging price-fixing in the e-book market. Apple, according to the suit, worked with publishers to foist a new business model onto the e-book industry -- one that took pricing controls away from retailers. Meanwhile, Nokia and Microsoft got serious, Facebook got Instagram, and Best Buy's CEO got out of Dodge.

Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has been accused of acting as ringleader of a price-fixing racket, enlisting half a dozen market-dominating companies in a conspiracy to profiteer through anticompetitive practices and artificial price inflation. The market: e-books.

The U.S. Department of Justice has sued Apple along with a handful publishers, accusing them of orchestrating a sales agreement that effectively changed the business model under which e-books were sold. The syndicate, according to the DoJ, pushed an agency model upon the industry, basically limiting retailers to selling e-books only for the prices named by publishers, as opposed to a wholesale model, which would allow retailers to establish their own prices.
Apple rounded up the major publishers named in the suit and convinced each of them to sign functionally identical agency contracts, according to the DoJ. That would eliminate price competition and facilitate Apple's habit of taking a 30 percent cut of the total revenues earned through downloads of things like apps and e-books. Those publishers then allegedly turned around and demanded that everyone else who sold their e-books jump on the agency bandwagon too.
One of the biggest losers in Apple's alleged dealings with publishers was Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), which lost some control over how it priced its e-books.
About half the publishers named in the suit folded immediately and settled with the DoJ. But Apple and others fought on, and it seems that Cupertino may have a good shot at getting off the hook, for the most part. Even if Apple were the syndicate hub, it's not much of a book publisher itself, so it might be more difficult for the DoJ to sell a case that it was responsible -- to the same degree as publishers -- for price-fixing in an industry in which it participates only indirectly. So Apple may not have to pay as much to make this go away.
The other publishers face a tougher fight. Publishing is their game, and as some of the biggest names in the business, it'll be easier to prove they were colluding to fix prices.
There's also a question of just how much damage this alleged activity really caused. Apple's huge, and the publishers involved are among the biggest in their field, but price-fixing is an accusation that's usually shot at companies that are already enormously dominant in their fields. And in the field of e-books, Amazon happens to be the top player.

All in the Timing

Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) recently outlined a new plan to get itself back on track and compete against online retailers that are profitably running circles around the big-box approach to selling. That plan involves dozens of store closures, layoffs on every level of the corporate ladder, and a new focus on smaller stores that sell primarily wireless products.
What it didn't say at the time was that Best Buy's new direction also involved the departure of the chain's CEO, Brian Dunn.
That news came early this week, and it was quite a surprise. The company insisted the decision was mutual -- Dunn wanted out and Best Buy wanted him gone. But he's spent nearly 30 years there, and despite the slump Best Buy's in, it's unusual to see a boss step down so soon after he lays out a dramatic new plan for the future of his company. He didn't even get a chance to fail.
The situation started smelling fishier by mid-week -- and it was an aroma that triggered memories of a jarring executive ejection from yesteryear, that of Mark Hurd.
Hurd used to be the CEO of HP (NYSE: HPQ). Then came allegations of inappropriate use of corporate funds -- much of them spent in the company of a female HP associate who was not his wife. Big scandal, Hurd got the boot, and HP's top offices were thrown into even more disarray than usual. Don't worry too much about Hurd, though; he more or less landed on his feet with Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL).
With Best Buy's Brian Dunn, the details and allegations began dripping out just after his departure was announced. A Best Buy spokesperson revealed that his resignation came just after a probe into his personal conduct kicked off. That probe involved an audit committee, though according to the spokesperson, it's not related to Best Buy's operations or financial controls.
And after that came allegations -- unsubstantiated at this point -- of an inappropriate relationship with a female staffer. Reports asserting that information cited anonymous sources.
Exactly what that means is still unclear -- we don't know if it was a fully consensual relationship, a possible case of sexual harassment, or even whether anything actually happened at all. But judging by Best Buy's words and actions in this matter, whatever this matter happens to be, it sounds like the company expects a lot of lurid details to bubble up any minute now.

Once More, With Feeling

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) are grizzled veterans of the smartphone scene, but their long-term presence hasn't translated into success for either company over the past few years. Microsoft's Windows Mobile was once a big player in the small world of mobile OSes, and Nokia made very nice smartphones back before most people knew or cared what a smartphone was.
Anymore, though, the market belongs to Android and iPhone, with Research In Motion's (Nasdaq: RIMM) BlackBerry hanging on by its fingernails. Windows Mobile is working out of some guy's closet in Redmond, and Nokia has opted to reinvent itself after turning its back on Symbian and MeeGo, two mobile OSes it had been championing just a couple of years ago.
But these two companies have made a pact to rejuvenate their mobile aspirations as partners -- Microsoft's relatively young Windows Phone platform running on a new generation of Nokia devices directed at the U.S. market. It took months to get things rolling, but it appears now Winkia phones are ready to hit with full force.
The first of these phones to arrive on U.S. shores was the Lumia 710, which debuted on T-Mobile earlier this year. Not much impact there. Middling specs, pedestrian design, and availability only on the smallest of the major U.S. carriers limited its appeal.
That was just the opening act, though. Now the Lumia 900 is available on AT&T (NYSE: T), and that's the phone the companies have really put their weight behind.
The Windows Phone OS has been getting good marks from critics since it first arrived. As for the hardware, they've praised Lumia 900's design. It's still a glass rectangle like pretty much all other smartphones, but it has some interesting details like the rounded edges and a loud blue color option -- or white or matte black if you want something more subdued. Its specs might not qualify it for Superphone status at this moment in history, but it pulls its weight, it has a nice Carl Zeiss lens and an AMOLED screen, it does LTE, and the $100 price point is something that could turn a lot of heads when comparable phones cost about twice as much.
AT&T, Nokia and Microsoft have aligned for a major marketing push to make the Lumia 900 a hit -- promotional programs, big ad spends, even a free concert in the middle of New York. With that kind of coordination, one might think the phone's actual launch day would be made up to be a big event. Apparently not -- it came out on Easter Sunday. Not a huge shopping day in the U.S. In fact, lots of AT&T stores shutter their doors for the holiday.
But that didn't prevent the phone from picking up buzz. Specific sales figures aren't in, but there are indicators that the Lumia may be selling pretty well so far. It topped Amazon's bestseller list for a while, and some buyers claim AT&T stores are running out of inventory fast.
If the Lumia 900 is a hit, Nokia may be the company that needs it the most. Right around the time the phone went to the shelves, Nokia revealed disappointing handset sales for the first quarter of the year, and the news took a heavy toll on its share value. Maybe three months from now it'll be able to tell a different story.

You've Got Patents

In its heyday, AOL introduced millions of Americans to the Internet for the first time, usually through noisy and slow dial-up connections. And believe it or not, dial-up access is still an important source of revenue for the company. Its choking-robot modem song is still being sung every day in households all over the country.
But AOL knows that in order to get any real revenue rolling in, it has to do much more than just rely on a dwindling number of users who either can't get broadband where they live or aren't aware it exists. Its latest gig is selling patents, and its newest customer is none other than Microsoft.
Redmond has paid AOL $1 billion for 800 patents, covering everything from technologies that fill out Web forms automatically to online video to instant messaging functions. Many are relatively new patents, but there are some golden oldies in there too, including several patents that originally belonged to Netscape.
The last big patent buy-off to hit our radar was Facebook's move to purchase rights to 750 technologies from IBM (NYSE: IBM), probably to fend off a legal assault from Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO). In that case, it was an old, enormous great-gramps of a company selling a tiny fraction of its total patent holdings to a young upstart for the purpose of self-defense.
In the case of AOL, though, it just sold a huge chunk of its portfolio to an older, larger company that's already sitting on a mountain of patents. And while Microsoft's purpose for acquiring those patents isn't entirely clear, they're probably not meant to be a counterstrike weapon just in case Yahoo or anyone else drops a legal bomb in Microsoft's back yard.
Instead, the company could use its new patents as weapons in its legal cold war with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG). Microsoft's style isn't to just push the button and launch the nukes like Yahoo did, though -- not all the time, anyway. Sometimes it just sits down with a Google partner -- an Android phonemaker, perhaps -- and talks about how incredibly similar some of its patents are to technologies used in Android, and wouldn't it be a shame if there was some kind of infringement going on. Oh, and we're running a special on licenses this week, don't you know.
This is how Microsoft has managed to draw hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profits from the sales of Android phones.
Then again, perhaps Microsoft was playing defense, in a way. Maybe Redmond just bought those patents to keep them out of Google's hands. If that's the case, it apparently wasn't much of a battle -- Google reportedly didn't even bid on them.

Last Splash

In a matter of weeks, Facebook will stand on the altar of capitalism and take a vow to have and to hold any investor who comes along with a enough cash to buy a share. When it makes that commitment, it'll no longer be a freewheeling commercial bachelor. It'll have to settle down, answer to its shareholders, report its income, and fixate entirely on maximizing profits.
The big day is inching closer for Facebook, and maybe that's one thing that was on its mind when it treated itself to one of the biggest social media splurges on record. It went out and spent $1 billion to buy up Instagram. Maybe this was Facebook's bachelor party, maybe it was a wedding gift to itself, but whatever it was, it was an incredible amount of money to spend on what's basically a photo-sharing application and miniature social network.
Granted, Instagram isn't as ridiculous as Color, the social app that a year ago managed to secure tens of millions in funding before it even launched, then went very quiet very quickly. Instagram actually built up a many-millions-strong user base in the year and a half before it hit the motherlode, though for most of its existence it limited itself to the iOS platform.
What Instagram does is pretty simple. You use your phone to take a picture. Then Instagram throws in a shot of instant nostalgia by way of filters, colorations, distortions -- basically it turns that image from something that looks like it was taken with a high-tech camera into something that looks like it was taken 40 years ago using old film. Then it uploads the image to the Instrgram network, where others can view your photo and you can peruse similar shots.
I will not disclose whether that's art, but some of Instagram's more devoted members do take the service pretty seriously. There was an uproar a couple of weeks ago when a version for Android was finally made available. Before that, Instagram was strictly iOS, and some users lamented what they said was an influx of unwashed hacks.
But does it all sound like a company worth $1 billion? It's worth it if the buyer says so, I guess, and now Facebook is the proud owner of a billion-dollar mobile photo-sharing app and network. Whether it was a good investment depends on what Facebook is going to do with it.
Critics have pointed out that Facebook already does photo sharing, so what did it really get from this deal? A billion-dollar filter pack? Others see more possibilities besides just integrating a few photo features and login options. Instagram could bring some kind of new mobile power to Facebook, which is something the network could really use. The acquisition could be used to give Facebook's visual discovery and search a new sheen, or give brands and companies new ways to reach customers through Facebook, sort of in the way Pinterest has done so far.


TechnewsWorld 

Report: Apple investigating Wi-Fi issues with new iPad

(Mashable) -- Apple is investigating several issues with its new iPad's Wi-Fi connectivity, according to an internal AppleCare document unearthed by MacRumors.

According to the document, symptoms include "intermittent connectivity, slow Wi-Fi speeds" and "Wi-Fi network not seen" -- all of which sound quite serious.

A thread on Apple's online support forums discussing the issues currently has 712 replies, indicating that the problem is very real. For comparison, a thread about the iPad overheating issue, which was widely discusses in the media, currently has 876 replies.

Most of the replies on the thread indicate that the problem affects only the Wi-Fi version of the new iPad and not the 3G model.

If the AppleCare document is real, Apple is currently trying to "capture" and replace iPads which have problems with Wi-Fi connectivity. However, there's currently no official word from Apple about the issue.

CNN

Yahoo confirms layoff of 2,000 employees in bid to renew company

Yahoo, which derives a vast amount of its revenues from advertising, is to review its sales operation. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

Yahoo has announced a massive round of layoffs as the troubled internet company struggles to turn around its fortunes.
In a statement, the company confirmed earlier reports that it was cutting 2,000 jobs, about 14% of its workforce. It is the sixth mass layoff in the past four years for the beleaguered company.
"Today's actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo – smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require," chief executive Scott Thompson said in a statement.
"Our goal is to get back to our core purpose – putting our users and advertisers first – and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal.''
Yahoo is still one of the most popular websites but has struggled to keep up with the growth of rivals Google and Facebook. Facebook last year surpassed Yahoo as the largest online display advertising carrier in the US.
Yahoo has recently announced a series of management overhauls, appointing the former PayPal chief executive Thompson as chief executive in January after a high profile bust-up with former boss Carol Bartz.
The company has been in protracted negotiations about a possible sale of assets including its share in the Chinese internet company Alibaba but talks collapsed earlier this year.
The cuts will be made across the board. Rich Riley, the managing director of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), emailed staff ahead of the meetings to outline some of the changes that will be taking place. Yahoo's EMEA headquarters in Switzerland will be cut back as part of a move to "transition more resources to being country specific as opposed to regional".
Riley wrote that this would give Yahoo the chance to put more senior executives in local markets to better engage with customers. He made it clear that large scale cuts were on the cards in the EMEA region, saying that the plan across Yahoo was to flatten org[anisational] structures.
He also added that Yahoo would consider other ways to gain efficiencies and speed.
Yahoo, which derives a vast amount of its more than $4bn (£2.5bn) in annual revenues from advertising, is to review its sales operation.
Riley said it was likely that different operations within sales would be merged, with a specific reference to a reduction of the company's business in Barcelona. He also pointed to significant cuts at its advertising and account management operation.
"We plan to evolve our definition of the various roles involved in delivering our display advertising business," he wrote. "We think there are opportunities to make this process more efficient, faster and to better serve our advertisers.
"I do believe that our company has to change to compete and grow, and that these changes are a necessity."
The move comes after major Yahoo shareholder Third Point launched a campaign to oust Yahoo's management in a bid to revive a company that, according to its recent letter to Thompson, has been "languishing for years".
Yahoo is also embroiled in a legal dispute with Facebook over technology patents. Yahoo sued Facebook last month, accusing the social network firm of violating its patents. Facebook countersued this week, accusing Yahoo of violating patents that cover display advertising, content personalisation and photo sharing that accounted for about 80% of Yahoo's revenue last year.

Guardian.co

Facial Recognition Lets Apps Guess Your Age

A service offered by Face.com is almost as good as humans at judging someone's age from a photo.

Age estimated: In reality, Alec Baldwin is 53, so the estimated age range is correct. Photos of actors and models are often judged by Face.com's system be younger than they really are.
Face.com

Web users have become used to the idea that most of what they read online—whether it's Facebook comments or personal e-mails—is scanned by software that tries to serve up relevant ads. But soon online advertising companies may start serving up ads based on the age of people in photos that you're viewing on a page.
That's thanks to startup Face.com, which already offers a face-recognition service that websites or apps can use to count the number of faces in a photo, tell their gender, or match them to known individuals. Starting this week, that service will also guess the age of the faces it spots in photos and ad networks and other Web and mobile companies already have plans to use it.
"You send us a photo with a face in it, and it'll send back an estimate of their age," says Gil Hersch, CEO and cofounder of Face.com, which is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. To use the service, programmers have their software send photos to Face.com over the Internet and receive back the results of the analysis. Face.com returns an upper and lower range on the age of the face, a specific estimate, and a confidence score. A demonstration site shows the information that Face.com calculates from a photo.
"We heard from a bunch of clients that they're interested in adding age detection for a variety of applications," says Hersch. "Ad services is one." He says some ad services companies are already using the gender-detection capabilities of Face.com's technology to help choose which ads to display next to a photo.

The operators of video chat sites that pair up strangers have also expressed an interest in age detection, says Hersch. They already use Face.com's service as a kind of safety feature to ensure that people are showing video of their faces. "They're trying to match you with other chatters, and age detection could help with that," says Hersch.
Roughly 45,000 software developers are currently registered to use Face.com's service, which Hersch says processes "a few billion" photos every month.
Face.com's ability to guess age comes from training software on a collection of hundreds of thousands of photos that had been labeled by people who made their own attempts to judge the age of people in them. Face.com's software matches human guesses of the age of a face in a photo about 90 percent of the time, but the company has not compared its accuracy against the true age of people.


Certain types of photograph are challenging for Face.com's age detection. "Women who are stars tend to look younger than they really are," says Hersch, "but this is consistent with how people judge age, because we relied on them to average the truth when we trained the system."
Face.com's technology may never be as good at determining age as a person, but Hersch says that in many cases, just knowing the approximate age is useful enough. "Marketers, 90 percent of them are only into the range anyway," says Hersch.
One possible way to improve the accuracy would be to teach the system to recognize certain lighting conditions that affect how it gauges age, says Hersch. For example, strong light from above accentuates shadows around a person's eyes and may lead to their being guessed as older than they really are.
"I think this has tremendous potential for contextual advertising, as you can pull out the right advertisements for that category of users," says Qiang Yang, a professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Yang previously developed a way to serve ads based on what the images on a page depict. "These features coupled with textual features on a page could paint a very good picture of the person [viewing a page]," says Yang. "If this is a teenage girl, we will be able to show different ads from those for a middle-aged man."
Facial-recognition technology often raises privacy concerns, although it has become a standard feature of Facebook, which uses it to make it easier for users to tag their friends in photos, and in photo management software such as Google's Picasa and Apple's iPhoto.
Hersch says the service he offers simply allows websites and mobile apps to offer more to their users. "This provides more value out of photos," says Hersch. "We're unearthing data that's really there, but just not available."

Technology Review

Facebook Said to Halt Secondary-Market Trading This Week

Facebook Inc. (FB) is halting the trading of its shares on secondary markets by the beginning of April as it prepares for an initial public offering, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
Representatives of Facebook instructed firms that help investors buy and sell stock in closely held companies to cease trading of its equity this week, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the conversations were private. Facebook aims to hold its IPO in early May, one person said.

Facebook, which filed in February to raise $5 billion in the largest-ever Internet public-market debut, is actively traded on secondary markets, including SharesPost Inc. and SecondMarket Inc. The halt gives the company time to account for its shareholding base and would end price fluctuations as Facebook confers with bankers and investors to determine its IPO valuation, said Lise Buyer, principal at Class V Group.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if they wanted to let the market settle down before they head out on a roadshow” to meet with would-be investors, said Buyer, who helped advise Google Inc. on its 2004 IPO. Her firm is based in Portola Valley, California.
Jonathan Thaw, a spokesman for Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, declined to comment.
SharesPost moved the date of a Facebook-share auction to March 30, the online marketplace said in an e-mail to its users yesterday. Previously, the auction had been set for April 2.

Facebook’s Request

“At Facebook’s request, SharesPost will cease facilitating transactions in Facebook stock as of Friday end of day to help ensure the company’s orderly transition into the public markets,” the company said in note to clients today.
While the trading of startup shares lets early employees and investors make money from holdings, it has come under regulatory scrutiny because the transactions can lure investors who may not understand the company and the risks involved.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission settled with SharesPost to resolve claims that the online marketplace acted as an unregistered broker of shares, its first action in a broad probe of trades involving nonpublic startups.
Facebook’s implied value dropped 5 percent to about $93 billion in a late-February auction of a fund that holds shares of the social-networking company’s stock. The sale set a price of $40 apiece for 125,000 units of the fund, according to San Bruno, California-based SharesPost, which managed the auction. A Feb. 14 fund auction valued Facebook at about $98 billion.

Bloomberg.com