Google Offering $1 Million Bounty for Chrome Exploits
 Google is offering up to $1 million in total bounties for hackers who can find security exploits in its Chrome browser. There's no better way for the Chrome team to shore up security problems than by inviting people to point them out. The contest will convene at Chrome's table at the CanSecWest security conference from March 7-9.There are three tiers of rewards, all for bugs in the Windows environment. A full exploit of bugs in Chrome itself will net you $60,000, a partial exploit that combines a Chrome bug with other bugs gets $40,000, and the consolation prize is $20,000 an exploit of Chrome using bugs in Flash, Windows or something else. All winners also get a Chromebook.Sponsor
 From the Chromium blog: $60,000 - "Full Chrome exploit": Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using only bugs in Chrome itself.$40,000 - "Partial Chrome exploit": Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using at least one bug in Chrome itself, plus other bugs. For example, a WebKit bug combined with a Windows sandbox bug.$20,000 - "Consolation reward, Flash / Windows / other": Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence that does not use bugs in Chrome. For example, bugs in one or more of Flash, Windows or a driver. These exploits are not specific to Chrome and will be a threat to users of any web browser. Although not specifically Chrome's issue, we've decided to offer consolation prizes because these findings still help us toward our mission of making the entire web safer.  The budget for winners is $1 million, and Google will pay out as many rewards as it can on a first-come-first-served basis until the money expires. All submissions must be judged by Google before they're submitted anywhere else.Google planned to offer Chrome as one of the target browsers in the conference's Pwn2Own contest, as it did last year. It withdrew that sponsorship after learning that contestants didn't have to reveal their exploits or bugs to vendors in order to enter. So this year, Chrome offers its own contest, and it promises to send bugs found in software other than Chrome to the vendor immediately.Discuss
 
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Facebook Expands Media Sharing on Timeline - Too Much Content, Not Enough Social?
 One of the intriguing aspects of Facebook Timeline, ever since the initial launch last September, is how it highlights the media you consume. Music you listen to, videos you watch, newspapers and books you read, and (more recently) images you "pin" on Pinterest. Facebook termed the concept frictionless sharing, because it allows you to automatically share the media you consume with your friends.Earlier this month, Facebook added new third party apps to its platform. Now, a change to Timeline itself has made media sharing even more prominent. The right-hand half of my Timeline is now dominated by my favorite third party media apps: Rdio, Pinterest, Goodreads. The question is: does this make Timeline too focused on media content, over socializing with friends?Sponsor
 This may be a limited user test by Facebook, so here are some screenshots of what I'm seeing on the right-hand side of my Timeline. It expands the sections for Rdio, Pinterest and Goodreads (the three media sharing apps I use the most on Facebook). It uses the extra room to add images - of albums, books, Pinterest imagery - thus making my Timeline more colorful.   That's just two of my third party apps, Rdio and Pinterest, but it now takes up a significant amount of real estate on my Facebook Timeline. Is More Media Sharing a Good or Bad Thing?Not all of you are fans of media (MEdia) sharing on Facebook. Judging by user reactions to Timeline over the past 6 months, many of you hate the firehose stream of songs from apps like Rdio, Spotify and MOG appearing in your News Feeds. Although to be fair to Facebook, you're much more likely to see media sharing in the News Ticker, the constantly scrolling little ticker in the top-right of Facebook (if you have the sidebar open). Facebook does a pretty good job making sure your News Feed isn't clogged up with this "frictionless sharing."That's why, in my view, it's a good move by Facebook to expand the media sharing areas in your Timeline. You may not be interested in the majority of media sharing that happens among your friends, but if a new song or book does catch your eye in the News Ticker, then you can click on that person's Timeline to find out more. For example, you may happen to be a Sharon Van Etten fan and see that I'm listening to the new album. If you check my Timeline, her new album is right there for you to click on and listen to it yourself. And you can start up a conversation with me about our shared love of Van Etten. Or check out some of the other music I listen to, as that may be a match for you too.In the battle for the Interest Graph (essentially a graph of what you like) between Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, Facebook has one huge advantage. It has third party content deeply embedded in its platform. Google+ is actually better in many ways for finding and tracking media content, but it has no advanced API and therefore third parties cannot integrate into Google+ like they can on Facebook. And Twitter is too ephemeral. Media sharing is of the moment in Twitter and it's not properly archived - like on a Timeline.With expanded media sharing on its Timeline, Facebook once again trumps Google+ and Twitter as the place to discover and share media.What do you think about the enhanced media sharing on Timeline? Do you think it's a good thing, or is it making it even more difficult for you to do "real" social things - like have conversations and post images of cats? Discuss
 
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RSA 2012: Bruce Schneier on the Threat of "Big Data, Inc."
 It's not the "Big Data" we usually talk about, which refers more to the size of the data than of the company behind the management tool. It's the term Bruce Schneier uses to refer to the industry that has evolved around data as a commodity, the way the energy industry was once considered "Big Oil." Schneier - the celebrated cryptographer-turned-technologist and easily the RSA Security Conference's biggest draw, and a CTO at BT - believes "Big Data, Inc." poses as great a threat to personal security and privacy as malicious actors."I mean Big Data as an industry force, like we might talk of Big Tobacco or Big Oil or Big Pharma," Schneier told an overflow crowd of attendees. "I think the rise of Big Data is as important a threat in the coming years, one we should really look at and start taking seriously."Sponsor
 Schneier defined this industry as "the companies that collect, aggregate, and use personal data," citing as one example data aggregation company ChoicePoint (now part of Reed Elsevier and integrated into LexisNexis). To this mix, he added Internet magnets like Google and Amazon, social networks including Facebook, a certain very large company named Apple, "and really the entire marketing ecosystem that surrounds the Internet. I think that is becoming a powerful industry force, and is a risk to our community."But a risk in what regard? Can this risk be quantified, anticipated, managed? Amid a growing community of risk managers who are joining the RSA attendees, many for the first time, did Schneier use the right choice of terms?Here's how he explains the situation: The onslaught of new consumer cloud services that provide free storage have rendered it as easy, or even easier, for individuals to hold onto data as it is to throw it away. "The marginal utility of saving some data is so low, because the cost of saving it is so cheap. You know this in your own lives: We all hit a point some years ago where we stopped throwing away e-mail that wasn't important, and started saving it all because it was just easier. And search became cheaper than sort. When that happened, we just saved everything, because why not?"More devices now than ever before contain sensors, but Schneier describes that these devices are being coupled with more organic entities through the Internet, gathering aggregate data from user transactions. "The collection is becoming ubiquitous. More importantly, it's all being aggregated. And we kind of knew this in the background, but we're seeing new examples of it: Google's new privacy policy talks about the aggregation of data. They're no longer going to silo their search data from their Google+ data from their Flickr data. It'll all be collected because they want to make more money serving you ads."Our computers are becoming more like terminals again," he added, citing the degree to which they're serving as collection points for data and documents for cloud storage. Younger users are accustomed to engage with the closest available screen, he said, as the most convenient collection points. The companies that operate in this space are competing, he explained, to be the first to monetize your data."Monetizing data has a variety of different faces. There's showing you personalized ads. But there's [also] credit-worthiness, employment assessments. There are linkages with government databases," he added, citing recent controversy over the Transportation Security Authority's recent proposal to access a broader base of personal data in assessing whom it should ban from flying on airplanes.The actual threat comes not from Big Data, Inc.'s size in and of itself, BT's Bruce Schneier explained, but from the way it leverages that size. "These companies are now very powerful, and they are using their muscle to resist changes that hurt their industry. And their industry does not equal our industry. Our industry is IT; their industry is basically advertising. And this affects security, because [with] a lot of these changes, the result is that control is taken away. We have no control over our Facebook data." Pulling out his own iPhone, he continued, "Even more importantly, I have much less control over this iPhone than I do over my computer. As a security guy, I cannot do things on this machine that I can do on my computer. I can't erase data to my satisfaction, I can't run an antivirus program to anybody's satisfaction. Because Apple isn't giving me the same level of control, of access, that I have to a PC or even to a Mac." He added that Amazon's Kindle renders pages prior to delivering them. "This might be good for performance, but for security, it depends."There's kind of a war against general purpose computing going on," the security expert pronounced. "I actually believe the companies realize they made a mistake when they created general purpose computers, because they gave users too much control, and they're trying to get that control back. Whether it's smartphones or tablets or game consoles or cameras, all of these special purpose Internet devices, give much more control to the companies in the back that run them."Bruce Schneier's latest book, Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive, is - perhaps ironically - very highly rated on Amazon.Discuss
 
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Twitter Ads Gain Mobile App Exposure
Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets will reach on-the-go consumers.
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Facebook Marketing Conference: What's On Tap?
Tomorrow's fMC may include ad product surprises.
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Execs: Embrace Social Media or Wither
113 company leaders offer insights via a report from Forrester and Facebook.
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Would an Internet of Things Threaten of the Internet of People?
 If 50 billion, or however many billion, devices share the same Internet as some 8 billion humans by the year 2020, will the weakest links in data security be on machines that have any degree of human control? Put another way, could a not-so-smart client on a machine-to-machine (M2M) network become a future target of malicious Internet activity? These are questions worth asking; and this morning at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, security consultants at mobile security firm ActiveMobile asked them in a very bold way, starting a discussion that's resonating worldwide - including as far as the RSA Security conference in San Francisco.On the other hand, are these questions being answered to any significant degree? Or just being "focused on?" In an interview with ReadWriteWeb this afternoon from Barcelona, AdaptiveMobile's Cathal McDaid spoke to some of the questions asked in a new report published for MWC. Entitled "Machine to Machine: The Future Threat?" the report asks whether a new universe of relatively simple and unsophisticated communications devices will lead to an Internet that is, by design, insecure.Sponsor
 "The security that we have for mobile networks has really been designed for humans," McDaid tells RWW. "For example, if I send you a spam message, you're going to report us to the operator or some concerned party. But if you're actually a mobile device and I send you a spam, you're not going to report it - you're not going to do anything about it. You're going to continue on. If I send you a thousand or tens of thousands of messages, you have a potential for denial of service... So what we're trying to push is, when it comes to security, we need to have security by design, and we need security by design that takes account that we have people and machines communicating with other machines."The nature of malicious attacks will not be made harder or easier by the infusion of M2M, McDaid believes. They will be different. Because they're low-power devices, the automated clients on M2M networks will not be able to run security software, he says. The Low End as the Vulnerable OneThe AdaptiveMobile report goes into that point in greater depth: "The latest smartphones and tablets come with complex, high-end operating systems that can be protected and reinforced against even the most advanced mobile security threats," the report reads. "Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of all of the devices that will be connected to the M2M enabled 'Internet of Things.' Without hard drives and with any processing power often devoted solely to performing the operation it was designed for, the limited nature of many M2M devices means there is less ability to embed security software."McDaid cites statistics showing that 1 Internet message in 20 is sent from machine to machine. The protocols involved, he says, are not sophisticated, streaming solutions but rather something as simple as SMS. While consumers may drive newer and more sophisticated communications protocols for their mobile devices, M2M communications may not require an upgrade of format for the foreseeable future - certainly not, by McDaid's estimate, within the next 20 years. So during that timeframe, the same protocol will need to be supported as the foundation for secure communications between machines."Those protocols were designed for people, essentially," he says. As his report puts it, "The upgrade mentality does not apply." But shouldn't the age of that technology, if it does carry on for a few decades as McCaid predicts, help ensure its viability and reliability? He answers, "Yes and no.""Yea, we know how all about new technologies, we know all about how the communications medium works. But on the other hand, our security model has included humans in the past... If somebody's [mobile] device get compromised by virus, one result could be high data usage [on the bill]. This isn't going to happen on M2M. It's going to simply keep processing and running. So you would hope in that situation that somebody notices, which is not guaranteed."M2M Access May Not Be Open By DesignWe ran McCaid's conclusions today by Alex Brisbourne, the president and COO of KORE Wireless Group, and a world-recognized expert in the construction and management of M2M networks. KORE has been delivering M2M connectivity systems since 2003. Reading through the AdaptiveMobile report today, Brisbourne called its interpretation of M2M networking as a security strain on existing human networking "an interesting observation but one not wholly legitimate."The fact is, as you make more 'doorways' into the internet, the challenges of controlling access will become ever more acute," Brisbourne tells RWW, also from Brisbourne this evening. "Machine devices will add significantly to the 'access doorways' - just as increasing delivery of smartphones, etc., will do. But this is where there is a substantial difference: Smartphones typically create open access mechanisms to the Internet. Each has its addresses, just as any PC does. Most are using browser technologies that have not been tested in the white heart of hacking, but it's a fact that virus management, malware, and security attacks via smartphone browser are rising fast. Part of the reason is their very openness."By contrast, Brisbourne goes on, a true M2M environment is already very closed. It is not, as some corporations' marketing has suggested, an extension of the Web into the everyday life of soulless devices."Edge devices typically use dedicated network access (custom APNs, etc.) that route data solely to/from specific network resources (servers, hosts) with quite complex (not impossible, however) challenges to getting outside of those domains," Brisbourne remarks (with plenty of parenthesis). "In addition, the streams are often subject to security processes from encryption to SSL support, depending on the application. In sensitive markets such as energy utilities or payment processing, the industries are further beefing this up with industry specific security overlays that go far beyond simple 'end point ingress' - PCI in the payment area, and NIST driving security standards for utilities. These look at both end-to-end as well as indemnity of the points in between. This will certainly continue to grow."Put another way, just because the endpoint of an M2M transaction doesn't contain Norton Antivirus, doesn't mean it will be insecure. There are architectural differences in the M2M platform that transcend the level of how humans communicate over the Internet.Cathal McDaid believes these differences are not widely known, which is why a new approach to securing both communications models is necessary. "You don't throw away what you have for human communications. You need to operate like P2P but smarter when it comes to M2M." That extra layer of smarts, he says, should come in the form of some kind of authoritative arbiter, to determine whether a party has the authority to communicate with a device. This is where McDaid and Brisbourne come to some modicum of agreement, especially with regard to the need to decide how much authoritative access a system should grant, and at what time."Do you want absolute denial of access (Fort Knox) or do you want simply to impede access until timeliness no longer makes any action relevant (border fences in a prison)?" asks Brisbourne. "Each situation is different, each market different, all have to be considered. M2M, as a part of a broader enterprise data management architecture, is not immune to needing this level of thought."Discuss
 
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'Covert Affairs' Star Shares Tips for Social TV
Christopher Gorham says some people should avoid social networks. [Video]
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Measuring Facebook: Advertisers Lament Insights Data Lag
Facebook has been as much as a week off in brand page reporting.
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25% of Groupon Purchases Made Via Mobile
Company's app eclipses 9 million user mark.
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Where Google & Others Crossed the Line on Safari Privacy
 Last week's online privacy fracas-of-the-week was about the revelation that Google (and other advertisers) had learned to circumvent Safari's settings to let third-party cookies track users more easily. Apple's browser's default setting messes with the way advertisers track users.The gist is this: Cookies are set by the site you're on, but some allow third-party sites to set a tracking cookie through them. That's how advertisers (like Google) personalize ads for you all around the Web. By default, Safari allows cookies from the site you're on, but it blocks third-party cookies. Google and others found a way around that. That sucks... I guess.Sponsor
 For the most part, I'm with my colleague, Dan Rowinski: track me all you want, just don't think we won't catch you if you do something wrong. I don't think Google's new privacy policy is a big deal. All browsers worth their salt make it very easy to either block cookies or go totally incognito, and Google lets you dump your entire Web history if you so desire. So while I'm public, track me. I'd rather have personalized ads than totally irrelevant ones.I don't have a problem with the idea of ad tracking. But this end-run around Safari's settings has wider implications. I just read a post by Jonathan Mayer at Web Policy about this topic, and he makes some excellent points. There's a slippery slope here. Even if Google's tracking is innocuous now, cracking other companies' preferences sets some bad precedents for users. "No account, login, or user preference was required for circumvention. The circumvention behaviors affected all users, independent of whether they had a Google account, were logged into a Google account, or had made a choice about social advertising." Users who have a Google account can change their Google privacy settings. They can tell Google not to track them, and they can delete their histories. But Google tracks users without accounts, too, and there's nothing they can do about it."Circumvention is not a commonly accepted business practice. We only identified four advertising companies that deployed technology for circumventing Safari's cookie blocking, and all have since stopped the practice." That doesn't look good."Furthermore, a self-regulatory organization for the online advertising industry cites Safari's cookie blocking feature as a way to stop cookies from advertising companies: '[Safari's] default setting will block all third-party cookies, including those of our member ad networks and those of other, non-member ad networks.'" And, as Mayer points out, Apple makes it pretty clear that this setting is intended to block ad tracking. Whether or not Google's tracking is inherently bad, it's messing with Apple's user experience without regard for Apple or its users. But, importantly, Safari has worked this way since long before Google was advertising this way. Apple just wants its users to have this privacy when they're browsing the Web.Google argues that its users had "opted to see personalized ads" in their Google preferences, so it thought it was fine to honor those preferences over Safari's. But first of all, what about people who didn't have Google accounts? Secondly, why do Google's Web preferences get to overrule the user's browser preferences? Google used to say Safari's default preference "effectively accomplishes the same thing" as opting out of its tracking. As of last Tuesday, that's gone.Again, it's my opinion that Web ad tracking, in and of itself, is not a big deal. But Mayer's points are important. Google and the three other advertisers who did this (and stopped when caught) were breaking into the agreement between Apple and its users, even when they had made no agreement whatsoever with Google or the others. That's not kosher.Lead image courtesy of ShutterstockDiscuss
 
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Daily Wrap: Facebook Admits to Reading Your Texts and more
 Facebook admitted to reading the text messages of users who had downloaded their smartphone app. This and more in today's Daily Wrap.Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well. Sponsor
  It may have upset you to find that Path and Twitter were uploading your phone's address book to their servers, but another high-profile web firm has admitted to snooping around on your phone. Facebook admitted to accessing the text messages of people using their smartphone apps while testing their own messaging service. Et tu Facebook? From ReadWriteWeb reader, evansfinch:More Must Read Stories: How do machines understand what place you're talking about when you say the name of a city, a street or a neighborhood? With geocoding technology, that's how. Every location-based service available uses a geocoder to translate the name of a place into a location on a map. But there isn't a really good, big, stable, public domain geocoder available on the market. (more) Questions continue to mount about Pinterest's uneasy relationship with copyright law, with one attorney (and avid Pinterest user) saying the company needs to upgrade its Digital Millenium Copyright Act policies or risk being shut down. (more) Early Monday morning (GMT), Wikileaks started publishing the first of "more than five million emails" from Strafor. The company, a "subscription-based provider of geopolitical analysis" by its own description, is (according to Wikileaks) also a provider of "confidential intelligence services" to Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and several governmental agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (more) Three of the four Washington, D.C. lobbying firms Facebook had hired abruptly terminated their contracts with the social networking giant.Citing conflicts of interest, Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock, the Glover Park Group and TeleMedia Policy Group have all walked away from contracts with Facebook, which upped its spending on lobbying efforts to $1.4 million last year from $351,000 in 2010. While all of the firms and Facebook declined comment, Politico is reporting that the firms are siding with content providers over Internet firms in the growing battle on Capitol Hill. (more) There's always the risk when you first step into the world of productivity that you lose yourself -- that you spend far more time immersed in productivity books, lectures, podcasts, videos and apps than you do actually being productive. That instead of Getting Things Done, you'll Get Productivity Books Read. (more)![[Review] God's Jury: The Inquisition, IT & Privacy](http://rww.readwriteweb.netdna-cdn.com/god%27s%20jury%20150.jpg) If you were hunting for a book most ReadWriteWeb readers would, based on the title, find irrelevant to their pursuits, you could do worse than "God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World" by Cullen Murphy. But, as Murphy adeptly shows, both information technology and the institutional corruption of privacy would not have assumed their current forms without the Inquisition. (more) Apple has pushed back its deadline for developers to "sandbox" their applications. Last November, the original deadline was pushed back to March 1, 2012. Now Apple is giving developers through June 1st "to take advantage of new sandboxing entitlements available in OS X 10.7.3 and new APIs in Xcode 4.3." (more) The decision to censor material because it is dangerous or highly offensive is a difficult one, but it's not uncommon. Community managers are faced with situations like this often, and while the decision is subjective, it's never taken lightly. We weigh many things as we consider to remove content, but mostly we look to see if it violates community standards or guidelines. The grey areas are spelled out in the site's abuse grid. (more)Keep up with ReadWriteWeb by subscribing to our RSS feed or email newsletter. You can also follow ReadWriteWeb across the web on Google+, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.Discuss
 
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Can OpenGeocoder Fill the Platform Gap Left by Google Maps?
 How do machines understand what place you're talking about when you say the name of a city, a street or a neighborhood? With geocoding technology, that's how. Every location-based service available uses a geocoder to translate the name of a place into a location on a map. But there isn't a really good, big, stable, public domain geocoder available on the market.Steve Coast, the man who lead the creation of Open Street Map, has launched a new project to create what he believes is just what the world of location-based services needs in order to grow to meet its potential. It's called OpenGeocoder and it's not like other systems that translate and normalize data. Sponsor
 Google Maps says you can only use its geocoder to display data on maps but sometimes developers want to use geo data for other purposes, like content filtering. Yahoo has great geocoding technology but no one trusts it will be around for long. Open Street Map (OSM) is under a particular Creative Commons license and "exists for the ideological minority," says Coast himself in a Tweet this week. And so Coast, who now works at Microsoft, has decided to solve the problem himself. This has been tried before, see for example GeoCommons, but the OpenGeocoder approach is different. It is, as one geo hacker put it, "either madness or genius."The way OpenGeocoder works is that users can search for any place they like, by any name they like. If the site knows where that place is, it will be shown on a big Bing map. If it doesn't, then the user is encouraged to draw that place on the map themselves and save it to the global database being built by OpenGeocoder. 
Above: The river of my childhood, which I just added to the map.Every single different way a place can be described must be drawn on the map or added as a synonym, before OpenGeocoder will understand what that string of letters and numbers means with reference to place. Anyone can redraw a place on the map, too.Then developers of location-based services can hit a JSON API or download a dump of all the place names and locations for use in understanding place searches in their own apps. It appears that just under 1,000 places have been added so far. It will take a serious barn-raising to build out a map of the world this way. It wouldn't be the first time something a little like this has been done before though."If only it was that simple :(" said map-loving investor Steven Feldman on Twitter. "Maybe it is?"The approach is focused largely on simplicity. Coast said in his blog post announcing the project:
"OpenGeocoder starts with a blank database. Any geocodes that fail are saved so that anybody can fix them. Dumps of the data are available."There is much to add. Behind the scenes any data changes are wikified but not all of that functionality is exposed. It lacks the ability to point out which strings are not geocodable (things like "a") and much more. But it's a decent start at what a modern, crowd-sourced, geocoder might look like." Testing the site, I grew frustrated quickly. I searched for the neighborhood I live in: Cully in Portland, Oregon. There was no entry for it, so I added one. But there are no street names on the map so I got lost. I had to open a Google Map in the next tab and switch back and forth between them in order to find my neighborhood on the OpenGeocoder map. Then, the neighborhood isn't a perfect rectangle, so drawing the bounding box felt frustratingly inexact. I did it anyway, saved, then tried recalling my search. I found that Cully,Portland,Oregon (without spaces) was undefined, even though I'd just defined Cully, Portland, Oregon with spaces. I pulled up the defined area, then searched for the undefined string, then hit the save button, and the bounding box snapped back to the default size, requiring me to redraw it again, on a map with no street names. Later, I learned how to find the synonym adding tool to solve that problem.In other words, the user experience is a challenge. That's the case with Wikipedia too, and OpenGeocoder just launched, but I expect it will need some meaningful UX tweaks before it can get a lot of traction.I hope it does.That's just my experience so far, though. Not everyone feels that way. GIS geek Paul Wither calls it "addictive." There are certainly high hopes for the project, too."I'm obsessed with the need for an open-source geocoder, and this is a fascinating take on the problem," says data hacker Pete Warden about OpenGeocoder. "By doing a simple string match, rather than trying to decompose and normalize the words, a lot of the complexity is removed. This is either madness or genius, but I'm hoping the latter. The tradeoff will be completely worthwhile if it makes it more likely that people will contribute."Coast will certainly be able to gather the attention of the geo community for the project. As we wrote when he joined the Bing team 18 months ago:
Coast is a giant figure in the mapping world. In 2009, readers of leading geo publication Directions Magazine voted him the 2nd most influential person in the geospatial world, ahead of the Google Maps leadership and behind only Jack Dangermond, the dynamic founder of 41-year old $2 billion GIS company ESRI. Coast will turn 30 years old next month. The more I play with OpenGeocoder, the more it grows on me. I hope Coast and others are able to put in the time it will take to make it as great as it could be.Discuss
 
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Cartoon: We Are One with the Trunk
 There's always the risk when you first step into the world of productivity that you lose yourself — that you spend far more time immersed in productivity books, lectures, podcasts, videos and apps than you do actually being productive. That instead of Getting Things Done, you'll Get Productivity Books Read.I got into productivity kind of sideways. I read Susan RoAne's How to Work a Room out of desperation shortly after leaving university; I offered to stand as a little-to-no-hope candidate for a political party, and I urgently needed a crash course in how to walk into a room full of strangers and actually talk to some of them. I was nervous, because the title sounded like the kind of icky insincerity I'd hate to embrace - but to my happy shock, her advice was excellent. True, that wasn't a productivity book as such. But it was the gateway drug that led me to try out the Day-Timer system.Sponsor
 And then I read Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It achieved the absolute sweet spot for any author hoping to sell sequels, in that it completely changed my perspective on personal productivity while in no way altering my behaviour. Again, not a productivity book as such... but it teed me up to read Getting Things Done.Like 7 Habits, GTD changed my outlook but also started me down the road to some degree of organization. Anyone who's seen my desk since then can tell you that hasn't been a road without detours, hairpin turns, switchbacks and at least one head-on collision with the 18-wheeler of my-god-where-did-all-this-paper-come-from. (All of which inspired this at one point.)But I'm back on the productivity straight-and-narrow these days. I'm using OneTask to remind me that what I'm doing right now isn't tracking down interesting hashtags on Twitter; WriteRoom to bang out text without distraction; and a few OmniGroup and 37Signals products to figure out what comes next. And - efficiency of efficiencies - I managed to marry not only the most interesting and amazing person I know, but Earth's best early warning system for life-altering productivity tools. (She's the one who first clued me into the tool that sparked this cartoon.)What productivity gems have you uncovered? Or are you one of those amazing people who keeps lists of tasks, priorities, dependencies and deadlines in some hyperdeveloped lobe of your brain?If you've been productive enough today, spend some leisure time browsing through the rest of Rob's cartoons at Noise to Signal.  
 
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posted at: 12:00am on 27-Feb-2012
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Wikileaks Lets Loose "Global Intelligence Files" from Stratfor Emails
 Early Monday morning (GMT), Wikileaks started publishing the first of "more than five million emails" from Strafor. The company, a "subscription-based provider of geopolitical analysis" by its own description, is (according to Wikileaks) also a provider of "confidential intelligence services" to Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and several governmental agencies like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.Wikileaks claims – and it's important to note up-front that it's not verified – that it has emails from Stratfor showing "privileged information about the US government's attacks against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and Stratfor's own attempts to subvert WikiLeaks," among other less than savory practices:Sponsor
 There are more than 4,000 emails mentioning WikiLeaks or Julian Assange. The emails also expose the revolving door that operates in private intelligence companies in the United States. Government and diplomatic sources from around the world give Stratfor advance knowledge of global politics and events in exchange for money. The Global Intelligence Files exposes how Stratfor has recruited a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards. Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world.The material shows how a private intelligence agency works, and how they target individuals for their corporate and government clients. For example, Stratfor monitored and analysed the online activities of Bhopal activists, including the "Yes Men", for the US chemical giant Dow Chemical. The activists seek redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India. The disaster led to thousands of deaths, injuries in more than half a million people, and lasting environmental damage. So far, Wikileaks has only released 167 files. Some of the documents released already include what is supposedly a forwarded email from Fred Burton about "The Dems & Dirty Tricks" following the last presidential election, dated November 7th, 2008. The email, which wouldn't win any awards for political correctness, claims "the black Dems were caught stuffing the ballot boxes in Philly and Ohio as reported the night of the election and Sen. McCain chose not to fight" and goes on to speculate about "sleezy Russian money [funneled] into O-mans coffers. A smoking gun has already been found."Wikileaks also claims that the emails show that Stratfor was using its intelligence to "start up a captive strategic investment fund" of "questionable legality." CEO George Friedman explained in a confidential August 2011 document, marked DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS : "What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor's intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like". The emails show that in 2011 Goldman Sach's Morenz invested "substantially" more than $4million and joined Stratfor's board of directors. Throughout 2011, a complex offshore share structure extending as far as South Africa was erected, designed to make StratCap appear to be legally independent. But, confidentially, Friedman told StratFor staff : "Do not think of StratCap as an outside organisation. It will be integral... It will be useful to you if, for the sake of convenience, you think of it as another aspect of Stratfor and Shea as another executive in Stratfor... we are already working on mock portfolios and trades". StratCap is due to launch in 2012. The email in question is titled "Labor Day Review of Where We Are."Other emails released show monitoring of The Yes Men for Dow Chemical, among other monitoring of Bhopal activists.There's a lot to dig through already, and there is meant to be a lot more to follow. The group says that it is working with more than 25 media organizations to make the body of documents public. "The organisations were provided access to a sophisticated investigative database developed by WikiLeaks and together with WikiLeaks are conducting journalistic evaluations of these emails. Important revelations discovered using this system will appear in the media in the coming weeks, together with the gradual release of the source documents."Given that Wikileaks has released fewer than 200 documents out of what it says is more than 5 million, we'll be covering a lot more in the near future.Discuss
 
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posted at: 12:00am on 27-Feb-2012
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How Two Startups Use Games to Beat the Developer Crunch
 "You can't judge if someone is one of the best programmers in the country in 1 minute, but it turns out you can in 5 minutes."Good software developers are hard to find. Startups are all about finding creative solutions to common problems - so why not this one too? Two startups that have found creative and interesting ways to solve their developer shortage problems are travel photo network Jetpac and app search startup Quixey. Both used contests and games to overcome their challenges and get access to the high-level coding talent they needed. Their efforts may illustrate a part of what people call the gamification of work that's expected to be a big part of the future. Sponsor
 How Jetpac Built a Photo Quality Algorithm for $5k in 3 WeeksJetpac is a young San Francisco startup that asks you to log in with your Facebook account, then it searches through all the photos your friends have uploaded. It looks for photos with the names of places in their captions, then builds a personalized travel photo magazine out of your friends' pictures. One member of the founding team is leading data hacker Pete Warden. (Disclosure, Warden told me this story while I was staying at his house on a trip to SF, but it's such a cool story I've been telling it ever since - and it works well with the Quixey story too.) Warden says that when the team was first showing off its service in demos, far too many of the photos that came up were terrible. They were blurry, boring, bad photos. It was easy for a human being to look at these photos and know they should be excluded from the collections displayed. Could a machine be taught to look at new photos and determine whether they were high or low quality? Warden suspected that it was possible, but recognized the limitations of his own knowledge. He didn't have the machine learning skills to build something himself, much less at the pace the company needed a solution. Here's what they did: They looked at 30,000 photos with their human brains and quickly judged whether each was a good or bad photo for a travel magazine experience. Then they visited the website Kaggle, where data science challenges gets turned into contests with prizes that anyone in the world can win. The Jetpac team took all the metadata they had about these 30,000 photos, including the dimensions, and they substituted standardized numbers for words that appeared more than once. They uploaded all that data onto Kaggle but they only included the corresponding human judgement of whether a photo was good or bad for 10,000 of the photos.The challenge they set up was this: could Kaggle participants write code that could analyze the patterns of metadata effectively enough based on the 10k photos they were told the human judgements about well enough to accurately guess whether humans would call the other 20k photos good or bad just based on the other metadata available about them? The startup put up a tiny $5k bounty, one of the smallest Kaggle had ever hosted, and applied a deadline in 3 weeks.People loved it. All kinds of computer scientists moonlighting as Kaggle competitors jumped into the fray and wrote algorithms they thought could predict photo quality. They drafted something up, uploaded their "guesses" for the other 20k photos to Kaggle's server, then were told what percentage they got right - how often they accurately predicted a person would deem a photo good. Then they changed their code and tried to improve their results.212 teams, consisting of 418 people, competed for 3 weeks. The contest leaderboard showed the top ten teams all had more than 85% accuracy. All the algorithms found that there were some words in photo captions that make them far more likely to be connected to a good travel photo than a bad one. Among the best words: Peru, Cambodia, Michigan, tombs, trails and boats. What photo captions are the most likely to signify a bad photo for a travel magazine? San Jose, mommy, graduation and CEO, Warden says.All the algorithms found that there were some words in photo captions that make them far more likely to be connected to a good travel photo than a bad one. Among the best words: Peru, Cambodia, Michigan, tombs, trails and boats. What photo captions are the most likely to signify a bad photo for a travel magazine? San Jose, mommy, graduation and CEO, Warden says.
Bo Yang, a USC PhD whose team had just narrowly lost out on winning the Netflix prize, squeaked out a small improvement in his photo quality algorithm to take the top prize in the very last day. Yang was interviewed by the Kaggle team here.Part of the Kaggle terms of service are that contest sponsors must have non-exclusive IP rights to the work, so the Jetpac team was able to put code from the contestants directly into their app. Jetpac's Warden says of the experience as a startup,
"The two biggest enemies of a startup are lack of money and lack of time. Packaging the data didn't take as long as we thought and after we uploaded it to the site, all of the details of dealing with the contestants were automated. So it saved us a massive amount of time compared to finding, hiring and explaining our problem to an outside contractor."And we would never have gotten anywhere near the quality from the circle of people we know. The short term nature of the project wouldn't have made it attractive as a project for most - just the overhead of setting up a contract and that sort of stuff. The caliber of people participating in these contests is amazing. They aren't starving college students, many are highly skilled professionals who make a lot more money than I do, in their day jobs. They do this for fun." Jetpac had to think through how to set up the contest, but the Kaggle team helped them, too. It's hard to imagine a way that such a complex problem could get so much brain power thrown at it so fast and so inexpensively. Warden says the end results have been great.How Quixey Finds Great Developers with $100, 60 Second ChallengesQuixey, a Silicon Valley app search engine (it's cool, try it - I found this on it), faces the same struggle to find developers that so many startups do. They have high-profile VC backing (Eric Schmidt of Google, among others) and had been paying $20k per developer hire to traditional recruiters.Liron Shapira, co-founder and CTO of Quixey, says the company came up with a very elegant solution. Called the Quixey Challenge, it's a simple contest. If you can find and fix a bug in the code for an algorithm you're given, in under 60 seconds, the company PayPals you $100. In order to qualify for the monthly contest, you've got to succeed at least 3 times in challenge rounds over the weeks prior to the big event. If you qualify, then the company calls you on Skype and administers the challenge face-to-face. It only lasts 60 seconds. If, in preparation, you succeed 5 times - then the system automatically contacts you to see if you might be interested in working for Quixey.Shapira says that 38 prizes were awarded in the December challenge, and it resulted in 3 full time hires and 2 intern hires. Winners also receive Quixey Challenge hoodies, which Shapira says can be seen floating around the elite student body of Carnegie Mellon University."We've had about 5k users sign up and practice and we've reached out to 500 or something," Shapira told me. "Those are incredibly valuable leads to have."
"We just hired a guy named Marshall who doesn't have a college degree and lives in Grand Rapids Michigan. He wouldn't come in from a Silicon Valley recruiter, but he reads Hacker News and he nailed the interview. "You can't judge if someone is one of the best programmers in the country in 1 minute, but it turns out you can in 5 minutes. You only need 3 practices to qualify for the challenge but people take 10. A low percentage like 1 in 15 or 20 users will be good enough to get contacted, so we are able to filter people out with high accuracy."We wasted so much time figuring out peoples' skills before. Many times we'll do the challenge or interviews and it will take 15 minutes. The fact that some people can do it under 1 minute and others, also working in Silicon Valley, take 15 minutes, is evidence of the 10x engineer idea. Debugging is something you do every day at work, if you can get more than half of the bug fixes that we put in front of you, fast, then you are probably very good and we want to talk you." Quixey says it is looking to outsource its process to other startups sometime in the future.
It's not just these two companies that are using contests and games to get software development done. The US Government has Challenge.gov and SeatGeek has gamified not just their developer hiring but also their communications hires. Then there's the gamification of everyday employee management.Examples are just beginning to emerge, but they do seem to point towards some relief in the face of a very difficult talent shortage challenge. "We think we're still on the leading edge of this trend and it's going to get bigger," says Quixey's Liron Shapira."We didn't know if people would be able to produce a good result out of this," says Jetpac's Warden about his startup's experiment with gamification of development, "but we were amazed by how effective the solutions they come with were.""The most important choice you make as a data scientist is deciding what problems you're not going to solve," Warden says. That equation changes when you've got access to compelling ways to use other peoples' skills to solve those problems.Basketball hoop photo from MinimalistPhotography101.comDiscuss
 
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posted at: 2:17pm on 26-Feb-2012
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When Bots Go Mad
 There may or may not be robots that are truly "good" someday, but there will probably be bad robots, if there aren't already. If not bad robots, then bad robot situations. You can catch a taste of the feeling of what might go wrong in the robot pricing wars that elevate the cost of certain used books on Amazon into millions of dollars.For example, you can't buy a used copy of Lee Betteridge's book "How to Survive Personal Bankruptcy" on Amazon today for less than $2.3 million. (Unless you buy it on Kindle! It's only $7 there.) It's not just that ironic title, either. Last Spring, a scientific text titled "The Making of a Fly" (about fruit-flies) was found selling for $23m on Amazon. This is amusing, but there's something deeper and potentially disturbing going on under the surface. It's an issue of the relationship between human beings and robots.Sponsor
 If there's ever a time when it's ok to gaze at the meta navel, I think it's when considering the unfolding relationship between humanity and the technology we build to serve ourselves.I was testing the new version of the semantically intelligent social stream reading application Bottlenose this week (RWW's review) and I really like the content recommendations it offers. (And the custom filtering is incredible!) There's a stream of individual messages that are suggested for you by Bottlenose that look quite good. One of mine today was a Tweet about a used book on Amazon caught in a bidding war between bots and now priced at millions of dollars.  Above: If you want "Like New" - you're going to have to pay dearly for it!The tweet was a link directly to the auction, not to a news article about it. I searched for mentions of Amazon and bots in recent tweets and found a related article, but it looked like no one had written about this phenomenon yet.So I asked my virtual assistants at Fancyhands if anyone else had written about this before, because I needed to go meet my wife for dinner and didn't want to take the time to search around myself. Before I left, I fired off emails to a number of people who work in Artificial Intelligence, asking for their comment on the phenomenon.It turns out that UC Berkley evolutionary biologist Michael Eisen found out about this and wrote a very compelling analysis about why he thinks this is happening, last Spring. CNN's John D. Sutter found Eisen's blog post and kicked-off a chain reaction of media coverage. That's what the person on the other end of the virtual assistant task allocation algorithm at Fancyhands found out and emailed me about, anyway.Eisen's belief is that the book sellers operating on Amazon are running low-quality pricing algorithms that are getting caught in an escalating loop. Effectively, one bookseller is running an algorithm that says, "if we've got a book and someone else is selling it on Amazon too, change the price to be just under whatever they are charging." Then the other bookseller is running an algorithm that says "if someone else is selling a book on Amazon, let's say we're selling it too, just at a slightly higher price. Then if someone buys it from us, we'll go buy it from the original seller, resell it to our customer and pocket the profit." In the case today of the stay out of bankrupcy book, somehow it's the same seller making two offers of the same book. One offer seeks to leave a minimum of money on the table but always undercut the other offer, the other offer seeks to arbitrage price discrepencies by offering a book the offer-maker doesn't posses. It's a crazy situation.I asked Neal Richter, an expert on machine learning and the Chief Scientist at the Rubicon Project, a leading real time online ad buying technology provider, how he thought this could happen and what it meant. "The APIs available for adding and removing inventory from a site like Amazon, plus the transparent pricing, means that anyone with minimal skill can trade on any price discrepancies between marketplaces," Richter said by email.
"It looks like the flaw in Mr. Eisen's example was due to the software writers not imposing any limits on their pricing."Amazon and other retailers need to have a tax or API fee on some kinds of function calls. If they were to charge $0.05 for every change to a unit of inventory it would setup incentives to better QA the software."The expansion of API usage in marketplaces means:Version 1) Any PhD with an idea can create a startup to add value to a marketplace.Version 2) Any idiot with an questionable algorithm can screw things up for everyone."Failure to account for boundary conditions will screw up a good model in a hurry." That's an interesting solution, and it may be the best way to solve this particular manifestiation of the problem of bots gone wild, but it's not the only option, either.Artificial Intelligence technology provider NextIT powers chatterbot services for customers like Alaska Airlines and the US Army. NextIT CTO Charles Wooters says that the fundamental strategy his company employs when it puts artificial intelligence together with big data (millions of real-time customer service queries) is to focus the machines on making it easier for humans to catch errors. "We can compare what our statistical systems think should have happened with what actually happened, then find high frequency errors," he explained. "Those benchmark systems aren't always smarter, but we apply the rule based benchmarks vs the statistical realities - then we always have humans in the loop. We help humans get to the answers that are wrong, quickly. We intelligently sort queues so humans can quickly go through and fix errors."That's how NextIT describes its relationship with Big Data and I think it's pretty interesting. Several people I talked to said that what we can see in the Amazon bot pricing battles isn't really a problem, until this kind of dynamic plays out in real-world financial markets. Presumably something similar could throw a real Stuxnet-style wrench in industrial systems, too.We do live in a world where a bot can recommend that I read what a person said about bots gone out of control selling an author's book, where I can find all the best writing about the phenomenon with the help of a virtual assistant on the other end of a queueing mechanism and where other bot-masters can tisk-tisk such a lack of self-control and offer better examples of bots focused on helping humans discover botly errors.That's where we're at - let's hope nothing goes too wrong!Crazy robot attack image by Sean McMenemyDiscuss
 
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posted at: 2:17pm on 26-Feb-2012
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Report: Facebook Read Users' Text Messages
 The London Sunday Times is reporting that Facebook read text messages of users who downloaded the social network's smartphone app.The story is behind a paywall, but Fox News summarized the article and said Facebook admitted to reading text messages as part of a trial to launch its own messaging service. It is not clear whether Facebook has discontinued the practice.Sponsor
 We've asked Facebook for comment and will update when we hear back from them."Your personal information is a precious commodity, and companies will go to great lengths to get their hands on as much of it as possible," Emma Draper, of the Privacy International campaign group, told the newspaper.Facebook, according to the report, joins several high-profile Web firms that have been caught snooping on their customers. Flickr, dating site Badoo and Yahoo Messenger have all been accused of accessing users' private data, and YouTube can remotely access and operate a smartphone's camera, security experts told the Times. My Remote Lock and the app Tennis Juggling Game have the ability to intercept phone calls.Discuss
 
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posted at: 2:17pm on 26-Feb-2012
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Obama Touts Auto Job Growth in Michigan Web Ads
Obama camp backs TV ad buy with persuasive ads on Detroit sites.
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posted at: 12:00am on 25-Feb-2012
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Online Upfront Gains Steam With YouTube, Yahoo, Et Al
Annual Digitas event enlists AOL, Google/YouTube, Hulu, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
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posted at: 12:00am on 25-Feb-2012
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Jeremy Lin Helps Knicks Score Huge Digital Wins
NBA team has added 500,000 Facebook fans in two weeks.
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posted at: 12:00am on 25-Feb-2012
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Infographic: Obama vs. Republicans in Online Ad Spend
Democrats and Obama's campaign outspent Republicans 2 to 1.
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posted at: 12:02am on 24-Feb-2012
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Canoe Ventures Scuttles Plans for Interactive TV Ads
Lays off 120, including CEO Kathy Timko, and shutters New York office.
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posted at: 12:02am on 24-Feb-2012
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Fitness Brand Shoots for #Linsanity on Twitter
Beachbody targets buzz surrounding basketball star Jeremy Lin.
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posted at: 12:02am on 24-Feb-2012
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Ford and Chevy Get Band-Happy to Reach Young Car Buyers
Auto brands lean on recording talent to spark social media buzz.
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posted at: 12:01am on 23-Feb-2012
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Gannett Touts Digital Growth Plans, Partners With MLB
Major League Baseball Advanced Media will team up with Gannett on digital content products.
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posted at: 12:01am on 23-Feb-2012
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Researcher: Facebook's 2012 Ad Sales to Top $5B
But Google will soon catch up in the display category, eMarketer says.
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posted at: 12:01am on 23-Feb-2012
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Surprising Leaders in Super PAC Web Ad Spending Race
Super PACs spent $5.86 million on web ads to support or oppose 2012 presidential candidates.
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posted at: 12:01am on 22-Feb-2012
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Forget Twitter Fans, China's Tencent Wants U.S. Brands to Sign Up
English-language site doesn't want to compete with Twitter for U.S. users, but to capture ad dollars.
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posted at: 12:01am on 22-Feb-2012
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Adidas Throws Twitter Bomb for 'RG3'
Sneakers brand buys a Promoted Trend to push its Heisman Trophy-winning spokesperson.
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posted at: 3:34pm on 21-Feb-2012
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Microsoft Accuses Google of More Browser Privacy Foul Play
Google hits back, claiming Microsoft's browser privacy system is flawed
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posted at: 3:22pm on 21-Feb-2012
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Zatarain's Parties on Social Media for Mardi Gras
The NOLA food brand is using Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, and a "Krewe" of bloggers to help revelers get in the spirit.
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posted at: 12:02am on 18-Feb-2012
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Twitter's Self-Service Ads Lean on Amex at Launch
SMBs with American Express cards should help get Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts off the ground.
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posted at: 12:02am on 18-Feb-2012
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Opera Buys Two Mobile Ad Nets in Shift to Demand-Side Ads
Firm once known strictly for browsers continues expansion into mobile and ads.
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posted at: 12:02am on 18-Feb-2012
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Chimichanga-Gate Spurs Hispanic Group's Facebook Ads
Hispanic Leadership Network is testing a new form of direct Hispanic Facebook targeting.
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posted at: 12:01am on 17-Feb-2012
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FTC Sees Privacy Failings in Mobile Apps for Kids
Agency examined hundreds of apps in the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace.
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posted at: 12:01am on 17-Feb-2012
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Video: Glamour's Shoppable Wall in the Meatpacking District
2D products can be scanned and bought with mobile phones.
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posted at: 12:01am on 17-Feb-2012
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Jersey City Protests Snooki Show Online
Residents take up virtual arms to fight a "Jersey Shore" spinoff.
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posted at: 12:01am on 16-Feb-2012
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Deals Site Flies High at Fashion Week, Focuses on Social
Ideeli has found its niche at the glamorous industry show.
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posted at: 12:01am on 16-Feb-2012
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Facebook Timeline Apps Increase Visits to Pinterest, Fab.com
Social site claims big traffic increases for its social app launch partners.
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posted at: 12:01am on 16-Feb-2012
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Zynga's Q4 Ad Revenue Jumped 230%
Ad sales brought the social games publisher $74.5 million in 2011.
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posted at: 12:01am on 15-Feb-2012
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Facebook Tests New Actions in Sponsored Stories
Social context ads appear ripe for new verbs, more nuanced meanings.
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posted at: 12:01am on 15-Feb-2012
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Obama Outspent Romney On Web Ads 2 to 1
Romney spent far more online in 2011 than his GOP opponents.
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posted at: 12:01am on 15-Feb-2012
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LivingSocial Opens Lavish Events Center
Washington, D.C. hub is a gathering place for merchants and consumers.
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posted at: 12:00am on 14-Feb-2012
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Twinkies Busy on Facebook, Despite Hostess Bankruptcy Filing
Facebook branding campaign is a first for Twinkies and Hostess Cupcakes.
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posted at: 12:00am on 14-Feb-2012
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Kraft Voices Twitter Love for Valentine's Day
CPG brand returns to the tweet well with help from formerly homeless voiceover star Ted Williams.
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posted at: 12:00am on 14-Feb-2012
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Shopping Site Fab.com Courts Mobile Customers
E-commerce site says 25 percent of its orders coming from customers on mobile devices.
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posted at: 11:42pm on 11-Feb-2012
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LinkedIn Plans Mobile Ads This Year
Execs say mobile accounts for more than 15 percent of unique visits.
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posted at: 11:42pm on 11-Feb-2012
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Retail Politics Comes to 2012 Web Fundraising
Candidate emails look more like ecommerce pitches from retailers.
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posted at: 1:39pm on 11-Feb-2012
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