Nov 18

All you have to do is ask

By Stefano Buliani News, Thoughts, WWW No Comments »

Last month Valleywag reported that Facebook employees are allowed to see all members’ profile, even if set as private, through a super-user access, which already raises some privacy questions. Apparently the social network has now taken its loose privacy policy one step further.

A poster on the AR-15 Forums, a firearms-enthusiasts website, says her bosses asked Facebook for permission to see her profile – which was set to private – needless to say Facebook docilely complied.
Facebook privacy policy clearly states that they might share your profile if asked by law enforcement or a private litigant armed with a court order.

We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We do not reveal information until we have a good faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets applicable legal standards. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies.

Now from what I’ve heard this woman’s boss had no court order or any real reasons to ask for access to his employee’s profile. Said profile apparently contained some photos of the woman holding firearm, which she legally detained and acquired during her own time.

This really is worrying. Facebook clearly wanted to avoid lawsuits or any legal problem which may ensue but I feel this is hardly good for its “interests or property”. Such a Chinese-ish data sharing policy is certainly not something Facebook’s users want to deal with or be worried about.

Tthis is a big hit for the entire social-networks category. Certainly before joining the next hip community I’ll make sure to read its privacy policy carefully and that it will treat its customers data gingerly.

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Nov 17

Google pushes for corporate adoption

By Stefano Buliani News, Technology, Thoughts, WWW 3 Comments »

Google takes yet another step in its battle against Microsoft for domination of the corporate environment.

The software giant has recently released a set of APIs which will make migration from a Microsoft/any-other-system-you-may-use to Gmail incredibly simple.

“We’ve provided developer documentation and sample code that allows developers to build extremely sophisticated mail migration tools, some of which can be run by administrators to migrate centralized mail and some of which can be run by end-users to migrate mail from the desktop,” — Gabe Cohen, Google Apps product manager.

I couldn’t find any data about the usage of Google documents around. I expect the uptake of the application to be extremely high among non-corporate users. However, It seems that it will take a bit longer for small businesses and startups to get used to the service and start using it. Especially considering that most users have been educated in a Microsoft-ruled environment their entire professional life.

Google had previously released another set of tools to allow users and system administrators to migrate from most IMAP-based e-mail systems to Google Gmail.

Furthermore, as much as this set of APIs is a very interesting development, I hardly see a big corporation spending a considerable amount of dough and development time to migrate its entire system, similarly it’s going to be even harder for small business find the time and money to dedicate to this. Don’t take me to seriously now though. Companies like Capgemini, with 80,000 employees are in fact putting a first toe in the water and using Google Apps for some of its employees.

Nevertheless I’m sure all sort of open-source/free applications will sprout all over the internet to let disgruntled Outlook users switch to Gmail.

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Nov 17

The Funded revealed

By Stefano Buliani News, Technology, WWW No Comments »

The FundedThe Funded, a controversial website which lets entrepreneurs rate VCs performances and behavior, has pulled off a major PR stunt 2 days ago when the mind behind the project revealed himself to the press.
Unfortunately the entire thing didn’t exactly work out as planned as information leaked to the press/blogs well before the scheduled announcement time. TechCrunch and GigaOm among others were already reporting the name of The Man behind it hours ahead of the official announcement.

Adeo Ressi

The man, “Ted”, behind “The Funded” is Adeo Ressi. Ressi founded and sold casual gaming site Game Trust to RealNetworks this September for around $20 million. He also serves on the board of the X Prize Foundation, best known by their cash prize for civilian space exploration.

Not only entrepreneurs but also VCs can create a profile on the site and set the story straight – or rather, tell their side of it.
Oddly enough The Funded is not venture backed.

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Nov 17

Peter Rojas’ new venture

By Stefano Buliani News, Thoughts, WWW No Comments »

Peter Rojas made his fortune with Engadget, of which he is co-founder and editor-in-chief.

Peter has recently started a new venture in the blogosphere which aims at distributing indie music for free.
The company, called RCRD LBL, puts artists under contract on a one-song-at-a-time basis. Everything on the blog is completely free and they’re apparently trying to monetize the entire gig through ads served on the site.

There is also a “social” aspect to it:

What’s my.rcrdlbl.com?

My.rcrdlbl.com allows you to customize your experience on the site. Once you create an account, you can find out when your favorite bands and labels add new music, post news and tour dates and also get updates based on the tags you like too. We’re going to have special contests and give aways just for the folks who picked their favorites, so it’s definitely worth letting us know which bands and labels you are a fan of.

The design is not exactly alluring but the idea is definitely interesting, even though they admit to being still in “figuring it out” mode, and may just be what struggling indie musicians need.

Nov 16

NorgMedia opens local news site

By Stefano Buliani General Babbling, News, WWW No Comments »

NorgNorgMedia has just opened a few sites aggregating local news reported by the random passerby. Or, as they like to put it, local people-powered news sites.

A norg is about people powered news. Anyone can join and contribute to the news as a Cit J (citizen journalist). Add your comments, share your stories, post your pics, submit links to interesting stories, upload your YouTube clips and vote for the stories you feel are important.

So far NorgMedia has launched a “Norg” for Perth, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne – NorgMedia plans to expand its network of Norgs to the US and UK within the next year.

I think it’s a smashing idea, well, at least it could rid us of all the local newspapers (ie TheLondonPaper and Metro for London) which litter our streets just to give us some junk news about prince Harry.

I have only one doubt. Blogs are great fun and quick to read. We, bloggers, don’t expect to have much credibility and everybody who reads blogs is well aware that their getting a piece of mind from a most likely very opinionated writer.
Is a Norg going to try and compete with professional newspapers on the “official news” level? I personally don’t think it can. Every Friday I walk to my local news agent and buy The Economist. Does The Economist require any introduction, I didn’t think so. This is exactly my point, can Sydney Norg reach the same level of credibility? The same status?

That I see as the big hurdle NorgMedia is going to have to jump.

Nov 15

Microsoft acquires mobile content provider

By Stefano Buliani News, Technology, WWW No Comments »

Microsoft has just made official its acquisition of Musiwave for 50 million $ cash. To be precise we’re talking about 46 million in cash plus MS agreed to take over the 4 million debt of the company.

Musiwave is a provider of music and entertainment content for mobile devices. It’s all good and well but I wonder why would Microsoft buy such a company instead of pushing its own system – XBox live and their music store, which has been adding more and more DRM free content. Is it possible that there really is a MS branded phone coming in the near future?

Regardless of whatever Microsoft will do with the company the price-tag must be a big disappointment for the original owner of Musiwave. OpenWave bought Musiwave in 2005 for 121 million $. Perhaps this is just another signal that, between 2003 and 2006 startups-turned-big were too quick to open their at-the-time-deep pockets acquiring other businesses without actually knowing how to integrate them with their current business model and monetize them.

Fred Wilson at AVC has a really interesting serie of posts on the venture capital business from the late nineties to now: post 1 post 2 post 3 post 4 post 5

Nov 15

YouTube stepping up to the plate

By Stefano Buliani News, Technology, WWW No Comments »

YouTubeYouTube co-founder Steve Chen announced yesterday that the giant video provider is currently busy working on HD content.

Chen himself admits the technical difficulties involved in streaming HD content to the vast amount of users currently visiting the site.

High-def is definitely the way to go. However, one sole company can hardly pay/generate the revenue required to maintain the bandwidth necessary for the experiment.

I think Joost and other similar products using a P2P approach to the matter got it right. What in my opinion YouTube should do is try to integrate said technology in a browser plugin. Top of the Top would be flash supporting it automatically.

CNet reports that according to Chen the HD content should start appearing on the site within the next 3 months.

Although YouTube’s goal, he said, is to make the site’s vast library of content available to everyone, and that requires a fairly low-bitrate stream, the service is testing a player that detects the speed of the viewer’s Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if they want it.

Nov 14

ONnetworks series B funding

By Stefano Buliani General Babbling, News, Technology, Thoughts, WWW No Comments »

ONnetworks logoThe online video market is something I have tried to follow closely ever since I became involved with pedanticfilms and the production of the entrepreneurs.

I have now found on TechCrunch news about ONnetworks raising 12 million $ in series B funding led by Accel Partners with the seed investors (Austin Ventures, AT&T). This big an investment definitely marks an important step in the distribution of video content over the internet. Furthermore it also counterpoints exactly how quickly and radically the way we access TV/Old media related content over the internet has changed, and keeps changing.

In the beginning… there was YouTube. User generated content spreading virally over the internet through widgets embedded in blogs all over the place. The old TV/Media industry understood, and made the wrong decision, go against them and send cease and desist for each tidbit of copyrighted material available.
Then along came Joost, completely different, I agree. Nevertheless exactly what people wanted. Their favorite shows detached from the Telly and available for free any time. I’ll gladly put up with some Ads to watch My Name is Earl whenever I want without having to consult the damn TV guide every day.

With digital cameras/camcorders prices constantly dropping and more and more sophisticated home-computer-aimed video editing software producing professional looking content is becoming increasingly easier for everyday users.
ONnetworks has decided to focus on this category of users giving them a “professional-looking” front-end to put them in direct competition with shows realized by professional for commercial television.

ON Networks is a new digital media company that is built around the shifts in how TV shows are created, distributed, viewed and monetized. Put simply, an ON show is coming to pretty much every glowing screen near you.

We have created a haven for smart, engaging and entertaining short-form programs of every pastime and pursuit. And since we believe in the future of our content, we ensure that everything is produced in glorious High-Definition.

I for one am incredibly excited about the site. One thing I haven’t been able to find out is whether they’re planning to implement some sort of revenue sharing option a la YouTube. This, I think, would boost their popularity among the growing indie producers community.

If you have a proven track record in professional high definition production and have an episodic story you want to tell, we would love to know more about you. Please contact us by filling out the form below. Our content development team will review your submission details, and determine if there is a good chance that with your content and our network, we can get it ON.

Nov 09

Is JavaScript the enemy?

By Stefano Buliani General Babbling, My Works, Technology, WWW No Comments »

I have just spent an entire week writing JavaScript code. Am i feeling suicidal? Not really, at least not just yet.

I know exactly how frustrating JavaScript can be, especially when you’re dynamically rewriting big chunks of you pages’ HTML code.
This problem is particularly evident now that your code needs to be tested thoroughly with N different browser, who, obviously, behave in N completely different ways.

Using a framework like Prototype can make your life considerably easier here, especially if you use it the right way. Because if you’re not you’ll be left with just a somewhat shorter version of document.getElementById without any actual benefit. You’ll still have to write tons of lines of code.

I have found just this morning a couple of articles linked on Ajaxian discussing Prototype programming best practices. They solved most of my problems.

Oct 28

Covestor widget update

By Stefano Buliani Covestor, My Works, Technology, WWW No Comments »

Thanks to all Covestor members who took the time to try the widget and sent me lots of feedback.

Working on this widget has been incredibly useful because it made me realize some of the “shortcomings” of the data export APIs.

This new release includes:

  1. Minor bug fixes in the feed validation
  2. Better look and feel (I hope)
  3. Feed filter as on your Covestor page
  4. Changed updated frequency to range between 1 and 20 minutes rather than a few seconds

As usual download it here or from the link in the right navigation bar. My previous post contains a more detailed installation guide.

Covestor widget

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