NewsTrust - Technology - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

News articles as assets and paths

Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - May. 27 (Opinion) - This is the start of a new project I’m working on to brainstorm new forms, relationships, and (business) models for news. Responding to a current discussion on Twitter among @AntDeRose, @felixsalmon, @jayrosn_nyu & @davewiner about the form of articles, I’m posting it here. The discussion started when Jay challenged Anthony, as a representative of Reuters.

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Google’s ‘Project Glass’ Augmented Reality Glasses Are Real And In Testing

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - Apr. 04 (Opinion) - After weeks of speculation and rumors, Google has officially pulled back the curtain on what they have come to call Project Glass -- a pair of augmented reality glasses that seek to provide users real-time information right in front of their eyes. "We think technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t," wrote Babak Parviz, Steve Lee, and Sebastian Thrun, three Google employees who are part of the Google X skunkworks. "We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input." Something tells me that they won't be hurting for feedback.

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Mike Daisey: Reports of my Death have been Greatly Exaggerated

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

mikedaisey.blogspot.com - By Mike Daisey - Mar. 20 (Opinion) - In the last forty-eight hours I have been equated with Stephen Glass, James Frey, and Greg Mortenson. Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoke to any workers. Especially galling is how many are gleefully eager to dance on my grave expressly so they can return to ignoring everything about the circumstances under which their devices are made. Given the tone, you would think I had fabulated an elaborate hoax, filled with astonishing horrors that no one had ever seen before. Except that we all know that isn’t true.

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True Or False? Automatic Fact-Checking Coming To The Web – Complications Follow

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

TechCrunch - By Devin Coldewey - Nov. 29 (Opinion) - The social layer has settled on the web like a dusting of multicolored snowflakes, gracing every story with a little menagerie of sharing counts and buttons. Once basic standards of content publishing were established, basic standards of sharing had to be as well, the internet being as it is a medium of information transmission. First you get the content, then you move it around. We’re still working on the moving around part.

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Occupy PressThink: Tim Pool

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Press Think - By Jay Rosen, Alexis Madrigal - Nov. 21 (Opinion) - “Being a livestream he acts as ‘eyes and ears’ for the viewers. Literally. People will tell him to move the camera somewhere and he’ll do it. They’ll ask for interviews with someone, and Tim will go over and do so… The viewers will ask him questions and he won’t rest until he gets them their answers.” Recently, Alexis Madrigal, the technology editor of The Atlantic and pretty much the smartest young journalist ’round these parts, re-described occupy Wall Street as an API, or Application Programming Interface.

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Why Parents Help Tweens Violate Facebook's 13+ Rule

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Danah Boyd - Nov. 01 (Opinion) - "At what age should I let my child join Facebook?" This is a question that countless parents have asked my collaborators and me. Often, it's followed by the following: "I know that 13 is the minimum age to join Facebook, but is it really so bad that my 12-year-old is on the site?" While parents are struggling to determine what social media sites are appropriate for their children, government tries to help parents by regulating what data internet companies can collect about children without parental permission. Yet, as has been the case for the last decade, this often backfires. Many general-purpose communication platforms and social media sites restrict access to only those 13+ in response to a law meant to empower parents: the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). This forces parents to make a difficult choice: help uphold the minimum age requirements and limit their children's access to services that let kids connect with family and friends OR help their children lie about their age to circumvent the age-based restrictions and eschew the protections that COPPA is meant to provide.

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Fracking Caused the Virginia Earthquake, NOT!

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Writing Corner - By Beth Wellington - Aug. 31 (Interview) - Hurricane Irene, and before that Virginia's August 23 5.8 earthquake with its epicenter only eleven miles as the crow flies, from Dominion Energy's North Anna nuclear plant in Virginia. That date, with life imitating art, the Twitterverse and other social media, spread news of a faster than the quake itself. Unfortunately, the same media also spread misinformation, attributing the quake to fracking. The culprits included Alternet, Open Salon, OpEdNews, and the blog of the author (Stuart Jeanne Bramhall), The Most Revolutionary Act. And it spread from there.

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The Earthquake and North Anna

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Writing Corner - By Beth Wellington - Aug. 24 (Opinion) - I already knew that nuclear power presented problems with waste disposal and potential terrorism. Now I know about earthquakes.

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Facebook's Mysterious Hire: The Guy Who Designed Much of the iPhone

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Marshall Kirkpatrick - Aug. 03 (Opinion) - Matas wasn't just one of many Apple designers; he designed many of the key interfaces you probably interact with every day if you own an iPhone, an iPad or a Mac.

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Facebook Wants Your Unborn Child

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Alexia Tsotsis - Aug. 03 (Opinion) - Sometime in the past week, Facebook flipped the switch on allowing you to add your unborn baby to your list of family members via the “Expected: Child” option on Facebook profiles. Apparently too many parents were creating "illegal" fake profiles for their yet unhatched offspring -- setting their fake babies' ages to 13 instead of negative whatever, the minimum Facebook allows. Also, you can't ask for a better customer acquisition strategy than getting them hooked while they're still in the womb!

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Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Michael Arrington - Jul. 22 (Opinion) - If that headline looks familiar to you, you're probably remembering our story about Google offering to buy Path for $100+ million from earlier this year. Path turned that deal down. About the same time, multiple sources have confirmed, Google was also making a run for Color, the mobile social network founded by Bill Nguyen. This was well before Color launched, and Google was looking at the company's potential as well as the team. Google offered $200 million for the company, according to our sources.

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Telcos could be the key to Twitter’s revenue model

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

GigaOM - By Sam Ramji - Jun. 26 (Interview) - At WWDC this year Apple and Twitter announced a new partnership to bring Twitter to iOS devices. While this is impressive, the total number of new iOS users is dwarfed by the number of people who use feature phones worldwide. So how will services like Twitter bridge this opportunity gap?

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Is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg Tone Deaf About Privacy?

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Writing Corner - By Beth Wellington - Jun. 15 (Opinion) - Remember the uproar when Facebook made your list of friends, pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region and networks publicly available to everyone? Now, the social networking behemoth has silently enabled facial recognition software without your permission under the rather benign tag "Suggest photos of me to friends." Even if you choose to disable the option, Facebook still will have the technical ability to connect your name with your image.

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Khosla Ventures Is Raising, Like, A Billion Dollars

Thu, 19 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Robin Wauters - May. 19 (Opinion) - Venture capital firm Khosla Ventures is raising $1 billion for its new fund, Khosla Ventures IV, an SEC filing reveals. From the looks of it, the new fund will be roughly the same size as the previous one (raised in September 2009).

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Google's Eric Schmidt: Smartphones 'Remember Everything'

Sun, 15 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Catharine Smith - May. 15 (Interview) - Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt sat down on Sunday with CNN's Fareed Zakaria for a segment on "Fareed Zakaria GPS" to talk innovation, Android tablets versus Apple's iPad, and the future of technology. Schmidt also commented on the data that users' phones store and how that data can serve the user. Said Schmidt: Today, you're phone knows who you are, where you are, where -- where you're going, to some degree, because it can see your path. And with that and with your permission, it's possible for software and software developers to predict where you're going to go, to suggest people you should meet, to suggest activities and so forth. So ultimately what happens is the mobile phone does what it does best, which is remember everything and make suggestions. And then you can be just a better human and have a good time.

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Page Sharing Service Bo.lt Lets You Copy, Edit And Share Almost Any Webpage

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Alexia Tsotsis - Apr. 21 (Review) - With $5 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, webpage sharing service Bo.lt launches today after about a year in private beta. Like a “Bit.ly on steroids,” the service lets you paste any URL into its copy engine or bookmarklet, creating a duplicate of the page on its servers. Once copied, Bo.lt lets you quickly edit the page itself. You can change the text, edit and delete images and text and change links — either through the Bo.lt visual editor or its HTML editor.Page Sharing Service Bo.lt Lets You Copy, Edit And Share Almost Any Webpage

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Flipboard: Threat and Opportunity

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Monday Note - By Frédéric Filloux - Apr. 17 (Opinion) - Every media company should be afraid of Flipboard. The Palo Alto startup epitomizes the best and the worst of the internet. The best is for the user. The worst is for the content providers that feed its stunning expansion without getting a dime in return. According to Kara Swisher ‘s AllThingsD, nine months after launching its first version, Flipboard’s new $50m financing round gives the company a €200m valuation. Many newspapers or magazines carrying hundreds of journalists can’t get a €200m valuation today. Last year, for the Groupe Le Monde, an investment bank memo set a valuation of approximately $100m (net of its $86m debt at the time, to be precise). That was for a 644 journalists multimedia company – OK, one that had been badly managed for years. Still, Flipboard is a 32-people startup with a single product and no revenue yet. So, what’s the fuss about? The answer is a simple one: Flipboard is THE product any big media company or, better, any group of media companies should have invented. It’s an iPad application (soon to be supplemented by an iPhone version), it allows readers to aggregate any sources they want: social medias such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr or any combination of RSS feeds. No need to remember the feed’s often-complicated URL, Flipboard searches it for you and puts the result in a neat eBook-like layout.

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Google Doing Some Profile Unification Leading Up To… Well, Something.

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By MG Siegler - Mar. 26 (Opinion) - Google is still hard at work on their social strategy. You know it, I know it, we all know it. What it will actually be, remains to be seen. But there are clues related to it that have started to appear.

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Digital Textbook Startup Inkling Nabs ‘Multi-Million Dollar’ Investment From McGraw-Hill And Pearson

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Leena Rao - Mar. 22 (Opinion) - Inkling, a startup that develops an innovative digital textbook platform, has scored a ‘multi-million dollar investment from educational content giants McGraw-Hill and Pearson. Inkling’s technology delivers interactive textbooks that include the ability to collaborate, add multimedia and communicate within content. The startup adds another layer to online textbooks by adding 3-D objects, video, quizzes, and even social interaction within the content.

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Why Women Rule The Internet

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - Mar. 20 (Opinion) - Female users are the unsung heroines behind the most engaging, fastest growing, and most valuable consumer internet and e-commerce companies. Especially when it comes to social and shopping, women rule the Internet. Consider some more data. Comscore, Nielsen, MediaMetrix and Quantcast studies all show women are the driving force of the most important net trend of the decade, the social web. Comscore says women are the majority of users of social networking sites and spend 30% more time on these sites than men; mobile social network usage is 55% female according to Nielsen. In e-commerce, female purchasing power is also pretty clear. Sites like Zappos (>$1 billion in revenue last year), Groupon ($760m last year), Gilt Groupe ($500m projected revenue this year), Etsy (over $300m in GMV last year), and Diapers ($300m estimated revenue last year) are all driven by a majority of female customers. According to Gilt Groupe, women are 70% of the customer base and they drive 74% of revenue. And 77% of Groupon’s customers are female according to their site.

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Nuclear Planning for the Worst Not Enough

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

aolnews.com - By Andrew Schneider - Mar. 16 (Opinion) - As hopes dim for controlling the explosive self-destruction of six decomposing nuclear plants on Japan's northeast coast, safety experts around the world want to know what was missing in the tens of thousands of pages of repeatedly tested emergency drills crafted to cover every eventuality.

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Tokyo Electric to Build US Nuclear Plants: The No BS Info on Japan's Disastrous Nuclear Operators

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Greg Palast - Mar. 15 (Opinion) - The failure of emergency systems at Japan's nuclear plants comes as no surprise to those of us who have worked in the field.

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Some Perspective On The Japan Earthquake

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

kalzumeus.com - By Patrick McKenzie - Mar. 14 (Opinion) - I run a small software business in central Japan. Over the years, I’ve worked both in the local Japanese government (as a translator) and in Japanese industry (as a systems engineer), and have some minor knowledge of how things are done here. English-language reporting on the matter has been so bad that my mother is worried for my safety, so in the interests of clearing the air I thought I would write up a bit of what I know.

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Nuclear expert: “50-50 chance of a catastrophic radiation” from Japan

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

GlobalPost - By David Case - Mar. 14 (Interview) - To get independent answers about the risks faced by people, GlobalPost turned to Arnold Gundersen, a 39-year veteran of the nuclear industry. Now chief engineer at Fairwinds Associates, he has worked as a nuclear plant operator and he served as an expert witness in the investigation into the Three Mile Island accident.

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The “Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators” Article

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

pressthink.org - By Jay Rosen - Feb. 13 (Opinion) - It's hard to know how much weight to assign to the Internet and its social media tools–Facebook and Twitter–in recent uprisings like Iran and Moldova in 2009, Tunisia this year and Egypt's stunning January 25th revolution. Because the tools are still fairly new they naturally draw a lot of attention from analysts, journalists and headline writers looking for a "sexy" newsy sidebar to the main event. And inevitably some people get carried away. But then a strange thing happens. Even more people get worried that everyone is getting carred away. And they decide to bring us all back down to earth. "It's not that simple!" they cry.

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