In the wake of the Justice Department’s closure of the file-sharing and data backup website MegaUpload, most similar sites began reducing or shutting down their downloading features. The owners of these sites are concerned that they will face the same criminal charges as MegaUpload’s founders are, so they are playing it safe.
As if the public needed another reminder to be careful what they publicly share on social networking sites, the FBI is currently working on a new project that will monitor Twitter, Facebook, and other popular sites for keywords related to terrorism and other criminal activity. The FBI is asking companies to create a means of sifting through all the tweets, posts, and pictures in order to identify present and future threats.
The main purpose of the software, once developed and put into place, will be to allow the FBI to identify terrorists and criminals by highlighting social networking posts that include certain keywords. Some of these keywords will include “small pox”, “leak”, “gangs”, and “2600” (the name of a popular hacking magazine).
In order to sort through the data, the FBI wants to have the flagged posts appear on a map. Ideally, the data would be color-coded according to threat level to make it easier to identify possible incidents of criminal activity.
Social networks rise and fall lately with a frequency that is troubling for those who become invested in the new social networks appearing on the Internet. Each Internet social network tries to appeal to a different niche audience and it is intriguing to see which ones take off and which ones fail to find their market fast enough. Arguably the hottest new Internet social network is Pinterest and if you haven’t heard of it yet, it begs the question “where have you been?!” Pinterest has been making quite a lot of news on its own and as a reference – in articles about other up-and-coming Internet social networks – lately.
Pinterest is a budding social network that is most analogous to Twitter combined with StumbleUpon . . . for online photographs. Let’s untangle that, shall we? Twitter only allows 140 characters; the whole point of the social network or messaging service is to provide quick blurbs to your followers to give them instantaneous status updates. They are short, focused and not often all that useful. In a similar fashion, your Pinterest page – which is imagined as a bulletin board upon which you and your friends “pin” digital images – is likely to become a cluttered, messy space as you and your friends find more images to pin. The sense of activity and networking is represented by your friends being able to comment on every image you post.
It is absolutely astonishing to see how fast a social network can rise on the Internet. It seems like Internet social networks fall much, much slower than they rise – one need only look at the slow fading of MySpace to recall how they might linger – but when a new social network is a hit, it can come out of nowhere. That is the story of Pinterest. Pinterest may not be a household name yet, but the little social network had about one third the traffic of Twitter in January 2012, making it a sudden force in the social network market. With such a sudden demand for its service, Pinterest has a great reliance on Aubrey Obata Kendall.
Aubrey Obata Kendall is the chief recruiter for Pinterest. Since November of 2011, Kendall has been staffing up Pinterest in order to help the small company grow to meet the current and forthcoming demand for their services. Because Pinterest is currently so small, the recruiting position is especially important to the company. Aubrey Obata Kendall’s judgment on staff may well affect the course of the entire company, so the reliance Pinterest has on her is actually quite high.
Google Plus has finally opened its virtual doors to the teenagers. Anyone ages 13 and up can now create a Google+ account, although for teenagers, Google has added more safety precautions. It was not that Google did not want teenagers to be able to use the site previously – there was no “mature content” – but simply that Google wanted to get things ironed out and ready before letting in the teens.
Since teenagers and young adults are the more avid social networking users, and the most avid Internet users, it makes sense for Google to allow teenagers to join its social networking site. According to Bradley Horowitz, the Vice President of Google, “We want to help teens build meaningful connections online. We also want to provide features that foster safety alongside self-expression.”
In the quest to make digital music a viable business endeavor instead of just a cool idea, there have been many businesses and websites that have already come and gone. While digital music pirating has been a huge issue for most of the services that have failed, rapidly changing hardware has been a serious issue as well. One quarter, the dominant digital music device is an MP3 player, the next it is a smartphone! Failure to adapt the digital music service to the new technologies has sunk some of the digital music services distributing digital music files over the Internet. Spotify is deeply invested in making sure that does not happen. For that, they have Oskar Stal!
Oskar Stal is the Chief Technology Officer of digital music distributor Spotify. As Spotify developed as a website, but prepared to take its service international, the company sought a CTO who had extensive experience with mobile operating systems. Without a CTO who knew the ins and outs of various mobile platforms, Spotify could not take their business to the next level. Having been employed at mBlox, a company deeply invested in mobile transactions and the technical interactions between mobile platforms, Oskar Stal rose to the top of Spotify’s list of desirable candidates for the position.
Oskar Stal’s resume is more extensive than simply working for mBlox, though spending eight years as the Director of Development in the technical department at that company was the weightiest factor in Spotify hiring him. Fortunately for Spotify, Stal was exceptionally interested in the position; he was already impressed by how much Spotify had accomplished without someone as experienced at the top of their development branch!
It can be very tough to break into the social network and online media markets. Given how YouTube has virtually dominated much of the online media market and how the major Internet social networks continue to develop tools to make it easier to stream videos, share music, and distribute photos, it is a tough time to be a new online service in that niche. Even so, that has not stopped Demand Media and it is not slowing down Joanne Bradford.
Joanne Bradford is Demand Media’s Chief Revenue and Marketing Officer. Bradford joined Demand Media after working for Yahoo!, which is one of Demand Media’s biggest business rivals. It is easy to see why both Yahoo! and Demand Media would want Joanne Bradford; Bradford graduated from San Diego State University with a Bachelor’s of Arts in Journalism (Advertising). Since college, she has trail-blazed with some of the most influential companies in the tech sector and the media world. She started her ascent up the corporate ladder at publishing giant McGraw-Hill where she served as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for BusinessWeek Magazine!
Given that the television has been available to consumers for almost a century now, it might seem odd to make the statement that there are very few people who “get” television. As far as the tech sector and Internet businesses who are trying to exploit the classic medium, there are very few people who “get” television. One need only look at how both Apple and Google have unsuccessfully attempted to market Smart TV products to know that the giants of the Internet simply do not understand how consumers use their televisions. Ashwin Navin, on the other hand, completely gets the television audience and through his company, Flingo, he is enhancing the television-viewing experience.
Ashwin Navin is the co-founder and CEO of Flingo. Flingo is virtually reinventing television . . . without trying to change the sloth-like way that most people view television. While it might seem like a contradiction, Navin’s approach to Smart TV programming has been very different from the approach of his competitors. Instead of trying to change television entirely, Navin and Flingo are working to enhance television. Navin created Flingo to easily provide additional content related to television on smartphones, tablet computers and other mobile devices. As well, Ashwin Navin realized that many people might enjoy seeing their YouTube and other videos on their big, expensive, sophisticated high-definition televisions. A big initial application of Flingo was linking Internet videos to your television!
Some of the coolest ideas in the tech sector come about by accident. These accidental ideas might not have the overwhelming significance to humanity that medical science kismet discoveries – like the discovery of penicillin through bread mold – have, but they can be pretty neat in their own right and lead to surprisingly cool businesses. Andrew Houston is an American Internet pioneer whose frequent forgetfulness led to the creation of Dropbox!
Andrew (Drew) Houston studied computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 2000s. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Drew Houston frequently forgot his USB flash drives while attending MIT. Always on the run, Houston soon came to lament how forgetting his flash drive would affect his time, grades, and travel. Houston began to back up his files so he had remote access to them. When he started doing that, he realized the idea might translate into a service. With his fellow MIT graduate, Arash Ferdowski, Drew Houston translated the idea for the service into a business: Dropbox.
When browsing products on Amazon and you see a product has a five star rating that means it is a great product, right? Unfortunately, you cannot trust that rating as much as you might have thought. At least one Amazon retailer has been paying people to post rave reviews for its products on the site.
Though this highly misleading practice violates Amazon’s stated policies, VIP Deals paid its customers to give the product good reviews. The company is now suffering the consequences – Amazon took down the product page on which people posted the offending reviews and then removed all other VIP Deals products from the website.
When shopping online, many customers place a high importance on peer reviews because they cannot physically see or handle the item they are purchasing. Good reviews are essential for retailers to sell their product amid the multitude of similar products available online. Therefore, some retailers like VIP Deals are resorting to posting anonymous reviews or selling reviews in order to obtain customers.