Court Rules Website Immune From Suit For Defamatory Posting
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Mick Darling's posterousAll my blogging in one spot. (mostly)Court Rules Website Immune From Suit For Defamatory Posting
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "RipoffReport.com contained an admittedly defamatory posting, by one of its users, about a person who operated a Florida corporation providing addiction treatment services. Although the site was asked by the poster herself to remove the post, it refused. A Florida appeals court has ruled that the site is absolutely immune from suit (pdf), and cannot even be directed to remove the offending post, since under the Communications Decency Act (47 USC 230) 'no cause of action may be brought' against a provider of an "interactive computer service" based upon information provided by a 3rd party."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Dropbox-for-Google Insync leaves beta, goes free and opens doors for business![]() Advertising itself as a cheaper Dropbox alternative with a better feature set, Insync has been in closed beta for the last 15 months. Now, they're finally ready to launch with a service that tightly integrates into Google Docs. It's "8x cheaper" than Dropbox, according to their marketing; in fact, the core service is now free, and customers who paid for the service during the beta period will be offered a refund or premium service credit. The only cost for basic membership is the cost of Google storage. Insync brings a number of novel features to the table, differentiating it from Dropbox's current service. For example, you can share individual files with more granularity -- not just as public links, but specifying read-write or read-only permissions. You can also revoke a sharing link, which isn't possible on Dropbox unless you move or delete the shared file. All your files live inside your Google Docs account, but that doesn't mean you're limited to the supported Google file types; any file can be synced over, as long as it's less than 10GB in size (assuming you have that much room in your storage allocation). You can nest sharing privileges so people have access to just part of a folder structure. You can also set re-sharing permissions, specifying whether those you share with can re-share that material or not. Share recipients are not charged against their storage quota. Insync supports multiple Google accounts and uses Google's storage system. Google starts with 1GB free storage, and then moves to 20GB for $5/year up to 16 TB for $4096/year. Dropbox's pricing rates includes 2GB free storage, and then jump to 50 GB paid storage at $10/month. Dropbox's 50 GB will cost you $120/year compared to Google's $20/year for 80 GB. That's $0.25 per GB per year for Google Docs versus $2 per GB per year for Dropbox. To use Insync, you sign in with your Google credentials and permit it to gain access to Google Docs. You then download and install the client software on your computer. From there, you launch, link the Google account to your machine, and you're ready to go. On OS X, all your Google Docs appear in a Finder window. In its current incarnation, Insync feels a lot like Dropbox, including its menu bar widget and small status indicators next to files (both Egnyte and Box.com use similar UI conventions for their respective cloud sync tools). If you're used to Dropbox, then you already know how to use Insync.
Dropbox-for-Google Insync leaves beta, goes free and opens doors for business originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Biscotti: The Best Product Packaging Since the iPod?Biscotti TV Phone Box
Click here to view this gallery. A cookie-shaped, easy-to-use, $199 video-conferencing solution is impressive, but wrapping it up in packaging that resembles a mash-up between Apple’s design elegance and Henny Youngman‘s penchants for one-liners is an altogether different level of accomplishment. Introduced last month at the Consumer Electronics Association’s annual New York-based CES Unveiled preview event (CES 2012 kicks off on Jan. 9 in Las Vegas), the Biscotti TV Phone is a home video-conferencing gadget that works with your HDTV. Each biscotti-cookie-shaped unit cost $199 and works with any other unit via Biscotti’s proprietary network. You can also chat with anyone on GChat (sorry, no Skype). That’s all pretty cool and I’ll be test driving shortly to see if Biscotti works as advertised. In the meantime, though, let’s all spend a moment oohing and ahhing over this extremely well-thought-out packaging. As with the best packaging, there’s little wasted space. Plus, the colors and retro design—brown paper bag-esque covering, red and white printing– almost invite you to open the box. This is straight from the Apple playbook, and we’ve seen similarly well-executed packing designs from Amazon, Jawbone, and Barnes and Noble. However, Biscotti diverges with some surprisingly playful touches in the packaging copy. On the front it says, “It’s like reality TV. But with normal people. Well, almost normal people.” The bottom lists the product contents, including the TV Phone,” “Remote Control,” “and “Lots of Love.” The back shows the product sitting atop a TV and promises, “It’s tiny!” The Biscotti TV Phone is created, the box notes, “by loveable scientists in Texas.” Inside the box, Biscotti drops the humor, but maintains the deft packaging touch. All the accessories are neatly packaged and the “Get Started” instructions, which are on a rather thick, foldable card, are written and illustrated in the simplest way imaginable. Biscotti is hoping for heavy adoption from tech-averse consumers, especially grandparents who want to talk to and see their kids but might not be comfortable figuring out Skype on their computer. The packaging, minimal accessories, super-simple setup guide and little touch of humor could help them succeed. More About: apple, HDTV, video conferencing For more Entertainment coverage:
Where Do Your Elected Officials Stand on SOPA?
Users of the website can look up elected officials by state or get more focused results by using a street address. After searching, the site displays a list of your Congresspeople in the Senate and House of Representatives. SOPA Track will tell you if your elected officials have expressly stated their support or disapproval of SOPA/PIPA along with the amount of money they’ve raised from pro and anti-SOPA organizations. An office phone number and links to each Congressperson’s social media profiles are also included. The site was designed and built by Randy Meech of Brooklyn, NY. According to Meech, he was following the SOPA story very closely on news sites and on Reddit. Meech found SOPA/PIPA and the deliberation in Congress surrounding the bills “upsetting.” “The debate felt rushed, sneaky and forced,” said Meech. Meech said he liked the idea of an app which showed where local politicians stand on the issues that citizens care about. SOPA Track does exactly that. Will SOPA Track be expanded any further? Not yet. “The site’s basically done until a vote happens,” said Meech. “It’ll be a pivotal moment, and it’s been interesting to be a part [of it].” Image courtesy of iStockphoto, DHuss More About: congress, SOPA, SOPA Track, stop online piracy act, US Congress Doctorow: the Coming War On General-Purpose Computing
GuerillaRadio writes "Cory Doctorow's keynote at 28C3 was about the upcoming war on general-purpose computing driven by increasingly futile regulation to appease big content. 'The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.'"
If you don't have time for the entire 55-minute video, a transcript is available that you can probably finish more quickly.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Dropbox Automator triggers monotonous tasks with uploading of a file
There are plenty of tools and apps out there that automate the essential computing tasks that face us every day. Some are time consuming others are simply monotonous -- but they must be done. Dropbox Automator combines time-saving task mastery with perhaps our favorite cloud storage solution. The service watches a designated folder for uploads, when a new file is added an action is triggered -- everything from converting documents, to resizing an image or tweeting a link. And that's just scratching the surface. There are already plenty of automation scripts in the fledgling service's repertoire and devs can add there own by creating a SOAP webservice. Hit up the source link to get started now.
Dropbox Automator triggers monotonous tasks with uploading of a file originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Dec 2011 06:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink TechCrunch | Dropbox Automater | Email this | Comments
from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/31/dropbox-automater-triggers-monotonous-task...
5 Steps for Finding New CustomersRonald Brown is a successful startup CEO with an extensive background in technology and consumer marketing. His new book, Anticipate. The Architecture of Small Team Innovation and Product Success is available via iTunes, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. The subject of finding customers is one of the most mysterious in business development. I’m often asked how the most successful companies do it, maybe in the hope that there’s a secret or shortcut to success. Sorry to say, no silver bullet exists. Even with large budgets, customer discovery is more art than science. Below are the five basic steps. The most important aspect of this process is to be very methodical in your approach. Knowing where you’ve been is the only way to improve and repeat successes. Pay close attention to the details and record everything in a consistent format. 1. Classification StructureThe first step is to decide on a classification structure, better known as segmentation. You might have a product in mind, or a general concept, but sometimes, you might just be fishing — looking for a problem to solve in a market that seems attractive. That’s OK. Market segmenters are detectives. What makes a market attractive? Maybe you see alignment with your idea or product. Or, maybe something about a segment strikes a chord and gets your creative juices flowing, knowing what you know about your company’s capabilities. Also, segment size is important: Why waste time if long-term financial gains aren’t possible? The segment selection process can be intuitive, based on personal experience, or it can be driven by highly sophisticated segmentation tools that carve up the total market into standardized groups. (Lots of companies start with Standard Industrial Classification codes (SIC codes), a system for tracking the entire economy, managed by the U.S. Census Bureau.) Either way, at this point, you are simply making educated guesses about which ones might be a fit. You have no idea if the fit will materialize. In emerging industries, segmentation can evolve quickly. When the iPad was first introduced, tablets were tablets. Then ereaders became a distinct category vs. general purpose. Then pricing tiers emerged. Now, industry analysts are breaking the market up into broad stroke vertical applications — education, health care, etc. — which will get subdivided further very soon. 2. Hypothesis TestingWith your evaluation structure in place, you now need to determine, one segment at a time, if there is really an opportunity you can address. You dig deeper from a research standpoint, paying particular attention to competitive offerings. Again, there’s a range of tools you can use. A consumer products company might do a formal, quantitative study, and a company selling to enterprises might set up personal meetings with senior executives. Major consulting firms, like McKinsey & Co. or the Boston Consulting Group, rely heavily on in-depth, one-on-one interviews in all of their projects. I’m working on a project in the tablet business right now, and you’d be amazed at how much you can learn from resellers. What are you looking for? You’re identifying customer problems. They should be big ones — “pain points.” If a problem isn’t urgent and important, it’ll be difficult to create a meaningful competitive advantage. At the same time, you’re looking to see how your solution solves the problem. Is it dramatically better? Is it “demonstrable” (a very helpful ingredient when it comes to being socialized)? If you’ve found a pain point in a large market you can address and there are no competitors (yes, it happens), you’ve stumbled upon an “unmet need,” one of the holy grails of new product development. Segment by segment, you are testing a hypothesis related to fit or alignment: that you have something of value to offer a customer group. You are not just collecting information. You’ll discover all kinds of things at this point, from a particular segment being a complete miss, to essential product features that must be added. Hypothesis testing never stops, even after you introduce your product. In fact, the best is yet to come. Once a product is in the market, learning based on actual usage will flow in. That’s why many in the new products field go to market with a “minimally viable product.” 3. Nuance TestingHere’s the step that’s easy to overlook. All problems have context. In other words, when customers solve problems, they are affected by circumstances associated with timing and physical surroundings, and by the nature of the task itself. As a marketer, you won’t understand context by doing a survey, conducting a focus group, or talking to senior executives. You understand context by experiencing customer problem solving yourself. To do that, you turn to customer immersion techniques. Did you know dairy farmers use tablets? To elegantly solve their problems, you better be willing to get up at 3 a.m. on a freezing morning. Some consumer goods companies even live with customers in their homes for a short period of time. Procter & Gamble, considered one of the best marketers in the world, uses such an immersion program called “Living It.” 4. Customer StoriesHypothesis and nuance testing findings get captured as stories. They’re much more descriptive than use cases in that they focus heavily on problem/solution decision making. 5. Solution IterationTight product alignment with a customer is a matter of iteration. You put something out there (an idea, a prototype, an actual product), and you get feedback, and you go away and improve and refine. Your customer stories get more refined as well. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll identify a pain point and address it perfectly in one fell swoop. In fact, to even try is highly risky, especially if you’re building hardware. Most of the time and money wasted in new product development is related to late-stage rework, but you can avoid it by developing in small steps, ever tightening the alignment. This is what agile development is all about, and why it’s gaining so much in popularity in and outside Silicon Valley. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, pixdeluxe More About: Business, contributor, customers, features, Small Business For more Business coverage:
Facebook 2012: What the Future Holds for the Social Media PowerhouseWhat do you do after your site grows to 800 million users and expands to 1 trillion pageviews per month? Why, plan a $100 billion IPO, of course! Going public is clearly the biggest thing on tap for Facebook in 2012, but the world’s most populated social network and its users have a lot to look forward to over the coming year. From the maturation of Mark Zuckerberg as a leader to Facebook’s growth as a media platform to a looming collision with the world’s biggest tech companies, 2012 is poised to be one of the most important years in the company’s short history. Read on for our predictions for Facebook’s upcoming year, and be sure to add your ideas in the comments. The IPOIt’s safe to say that Facebook’s long-rumored IPO will be the biggest public offering of 2012. It could also potentially be the biggest of the current decade, if rumors of a reported $100 billion valuation and $10 billion raise are accurate. That would put Facebook in the top-three American IPOs for highest amounts raised. Of course, an astronomical target does not mean a guaranteed blockbuster IPO for Facebook. Zynga’s unspectacular debut on the public markets in December has some investor’s worried that social media IPOs will generate less enthusiasm going forward, and that could affect Facebook in 2012. “It’s a very telltale sign of how people feel about social media IPOs in general,” Jeffrey Sica, owner of Sica Wealth Management in Morristown, N.J., told Mashable. “[Investors] have become very shortsighted. There’s a lot of fear in the market right now.” Furthermore, today’s tech companies are raising larger rounds of private money more frequently before going to IPO, and are allowing private investors to trade shares prior to going public. That’s adding up to less opportunity for public investors once the offering hits the market. This is another reason why there was lower-than-expected interest from retail investors for Zynga, and could also be indicative of a lackluster future debut for Facebook, which has raised a whopping $2.3 billion from private investors. It’s unclear what this trend of raising mega-sized rounds of private equity means for public capital markets long term. However, it is clear that entrepreneurs and early employees of the few tech companies attracting this sort of attention are reaping the benefits. And aftermarket stock sales have allowed some early employees and investors to cash in, pre-IPO. Facebook has already minted a number of on-paper billionaires that way. If the company’s IPO in 2012 is as successful at the rumored $100 billion valuation, Reuter’s estimates that Facebook will be home to at least 1,000 new millionaires. The Next Steve Jobs?
Shortly after Apple’s iconic co-founder Steve Jobs died in October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook profile, “Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.” Mashable executive editor Adam Ostrow wrote following Jobs’s death, “Although Apple and Facebook have had a contentious relationship, it’s hard not to draw comparisons between Jobs and Zuckerberg, both of whom dropped out of college and founded their iconic companies in their early twenties.” Indeed, even before Jobs died, there was a sense that his retirement from Apple as CEO was a symbolic passing of the mantle to unofficial Innovator in Chief in Silicon Valley, and to the tech world in general. But to whom? Many pundits have prognosticated on that question and the answer usually comes down to one of four choices: someone we haven’t heard of yet, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg. When people ask, “Who is the next Steve Jobs?” they mean, from where will the next giant of the tech industry emerge? Who will be the next larger-than-life figure to drive innovation in tech, design and business for the next few decades? It might not necessarily be anyone from the current crop of big company tech CEOs, but of the candidates, a good case could be made for Zuckerberg. That has a lot less to do with Zuckerberg’s potential as a Jobs impersonator (though he is getting better at channeling Jobs’ confidence on stage), and more to do with his place among the next generation’s influencers. Zuckerberg’s performance at the f8 Developer Conference this year, which included an on-stage lampooning from Saturday Night Live star Andy Samberg, illustrates Zuckberg’s generational advantage. Even though he clearly tries to match Steve Jobs’s charisma, his style is clearly not a one-to-one emulation — and that’s okay. In fact, that’s exactly why Zuckerberg might be the next Jobs: He understands his consumers in ways that competitors have yet to grasp, and that edge has helped him to win the innovation war in social networking thus far. Facebook vs. The WorldFacebook has been on a collision course with the world’s biggest tech companies for a long time, and that could all come to a head in 2012. The company will fight Apple in the mobile space, where a focus on HTML5 and a recent acquisition of mobile platform developer Strobe (makers of SproutCore) is positioning Facebook to be a powerhouse in the mobile space, ideally by delivering a rich user experience across hardware platforms. One big advantage Facebook can offer that other platforms can’t? Massive amounts of social data and one of the biggest installed user bases on the planet. Facebook will fight Amazon and eBay in the consumer space, with the continued expansion of Facebook Credits, which are already being used to sell all sorts of digital content, from in-game items to movie downloads. For now, Credits can’t be used in the purchase or sale of physical goods, but as retailers like Amazon expand their footprint into digital, they’ll start start to bump into Facebook. And Facebook credits are already sold in stores. Therefore, using them for physical purchases might not be far behind, especially as they get added to mobile payment systems. And they’ll fight Google on virtually all fronts. Both Facebook and Google are advertising-driven businesses, but Facebook’s revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to Google’s. That could significantly start to change in 2012, as Facebook rolls out new ad formats and more agencies shift traditional media buys to online advertising. Yet Facebook does face an uphill battle when it comes to convincing big brands to pay for advertising products when they’re accustomed to free Facebook Pages . Facebook Becomes the Media
Somewhat lost amidst Facebook’s new Timeline buzz, three other developments in 2011 fueled Facebook’s aspiration to become the destination for all media. First, Facebook launched an update to its Open Graph protocol called Gestures, which essentially allows users to [verb] any [noun]. Or in other words, websites are no longer constrained to just allowing users to Like items. Now users can read, watch, listen or perform any other action around the web. Second, Facebook launched a new Subscribe feature, allowing users to let fans follow their public updates (and it’s coming soon for websites). Third, Facebook offered an update to the News Feed called Ticker, that serves as a real-time feed of activity away from Facebook. Taken in tandem, these updates indicate Facebook’s growing desire to be to discovery what Google is to search — that is, the market leader for the new dominant form of currency on the web. In the previous decade, the link was the main way to pass information around on the Internet. Google figured out how to harness that information and turn it into a highly useful search engine. In today’s social media-driven world, the link is being replaced by the social recommendation (and more broadly, by the social action), and Facebook is attempting to build a discovery engine around that idea. In other words, Facebook isn’t going to be a creator of media, but it will be the ultimate curator. The Future of TimelineOf course, that hoopla for Timeline was warranted. Facebook’s radical redesign of the profile page marked a huge departure from the traditional design, which in spite of numerous changes and updates, had maintained the same basic UI concept since Facebook launched. The new Timeline is about storytelling. “Timeline is the story of your life,” said Zuckerberg at the f8 Conference. It’s a “new way to express who you are.” That, of course, gets to the heart of Facebook’s oft-stated goal to make the world “more open and connected.” Here is a new profile that encourages you to share even more about your life by documenting and organizing everything you do. (Not coincidentally, that also plays right into Facebook’s advertising-fueled business model.) What happens to Timeline in 2012 would be as difficult to predict as Timeline itself would have been this time last year, but it’s safe to assume that Facebook’s recent acquisition of Gowalla will have an impact on the future of the site’s profile design. With Gowalla, Facebook acquired a team of designers and developers that had created an unquestionably beautiful location-based social network with the stated purpose of helping users document their travel (both locally and abroad). Put another way, Gowalla was made for telling stories about the places you went. Facebook didn’t specifically acquire the technology behind Gowalla, but it did say that it was “sure that the inspiration behind Gowalla will make its way into Facebook over time.” Smart money is that parts of that “inspiration” will find its way into Facebook as improvements to the storytelling functionality of Facebook Timeline and Facebook’s mobile applications. Special thanks to Brian Carter, author of “The Like Economy,” who helped me codify my thoughts about the future of Facebook. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Oxford, Flickr, Andrew Feinberg, Kewei SHANG More About: Business, facebook ipo, facebook timeline, features, mark zuckerberg, trending Dropbox Automator Automatically Processes Images, Text, PDFs and Other Files in Your Dropbox Any Way You Choose [Web Apps]
Dropbox Automator is a powerful web app that connects to your Dropbox account and monitors folders of your choice, performing automated actions you define when new files are detected. This can be anything from converting a document to PDF, resizing images and uploading them to Facebook, plus a whole lot more. More »
Winter Wake-Up Automatically Wakes You Up Earlier If it Snows [Alarm Clocks]
iOS/Android: If you live in a location where you get a lot of snow, you know that employers and teachers don't accept the "I didn't know it snowed" excuse if you're running late. Winter Wake-Up is an alarm app that solves that problem by checking the weather and waking you up earlier if it snows. More »
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