Anthony De Rosa

I take on the explosive issue of internet privacy, showing how Google and other sites track your movements on the web and how you can stop them.

Here are some of the most interesting bits of information in Facebook’s IPO filing:

• Zynga accounted for approximately 12% of Facebook revenue
• Net income rose 65 percent to $1 billion in 2011, off revenue of $3.71 billion
• Sheryl Sandberg’s 2011 Facebook compensation: $30.9 million
• Facebook CFO David Ebersman’s 2011 total compensation was $18.65 million
• Advertising accounted for 85% of Facebook revenue in 2011
• Mark Zuckerberg’s compensation in 2011 was $1.49 million
• 845 million active users on Facebook
• Total capitalization as of Dec 31, 2011: $4,899 million
• Full time employees increased from 2,127 as of December 31, 2010 to 3,200 as of December 31, 2011
• Mark Zuckerberg holds stock with total voting power before IPO of 56.9%
• Facebook major ownership: Mark Zuckerberg : 28%, Accel (invested in 2005) :11.4% Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz 7.6% DST: 5.4% Peter Thiel: 2.5%
• Mark’s letter in the middle of the IPO filing
• Mark Zuckerberg’s annual salary will fall to one dollar starting 1/1/2013
• Facebook had 483 million daily active users on average in December 2011, an increase of 48% as compared to 327 million in December 2010
• 425 million monthly active users of Facebook’s mobile products in December 2011
• An average of 2.7 billion likes and comments per day were generated by users during the three months ending December 31, 2011
• Facebook cites Google+, Cyworld in Korea, Mixi in Japan, Orkut in Brazil and India, vKontakte in Russia as competitors
• Also cited by Facebook as competitors: Renren, Sina, and Tencent if they “are able to access the market in China in the future”

Peter Lauria points out that 85% of revenue dependent on advertising makes it more reliant than CBS, the most ad-dependent old-media firm.

Another interesting section addresses risks:

Any number of factors could potentially negatively affect user retention, growth, and engagement, including if:

• users increasingly engage with competing products;
• we fail to introduce new and improved products or if we introduce new products or services that are not favorably received;
• we are unable to successfully balance our efforts to provide a compelling user experience with the decisions we make with respect to the frequency, prominence, and size of ads and other commercial content that we display;
• we are unable to continue to develop products for mobile devices that users find engaging, that work with a variety of mobile operating systems and networks, and that achieve a high level of market acceptance;
• there are changes in user sentiment about the quality or usefulness of our products or concerns related to privacy and sharing, safety, security, or other factors;
• we are unable to manage and prioritize information to ensure users are presented with content that is interesting, useful, and relevant to them;
• there are adverse changes in our products that are mandated by legislation, regulatory authorities, or litigation, including settlements or consent decrees;
• technical or other problems prevent us from delivering our products in a rapid and reliable manner or otherwise affect the user experience;
• we adopt policies or procedures related to areas such as sharing or user data that are perceived negatively by our users or the general public;
• we fail to provide adequate customer service to users, developers, or advertisers;
• we, our Platform developers, or other companies in our industry are the subject of adverse media reports or other negative publicity; or our current or future products, such as the Facebook Platform, reduce user activity on Facebook by making it easier for our users to interact and share on third-party websites.

A social media first occurred this evening when President Barack Obama held a Google+ Hangout to take live questions from five Americans and a few people who were taped beforehand, including a homeless veteran and an Occupy protester.

He answered questions about the economy, job creation, small business, and the use of drones in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama referenced a New York Times story on the use of drones, which he called “overwritten,” and said that the use of drones had not resulted in an unusual number of civilian casualties. Asked about the anti-piracy legislation that set the Internet on fire, Obama said, ”When SOPA came up on the hill, we expressed some concerns about the way the legislation had been written.”

Almost as fascinating as the Hangout itself was the discussion of the Hangout on Twitter.

Many wondered who chose which questions were posed to the president from the more than 130,000 submissions. Alex Howard, who covers “open government” for O’Reilly Media, said Steve Grove, head of community partnerships at Google+, picked the questions.

Was it a campaign stunt, an ad for Google, a great opportunity for citizens to connect with the president, or all of the above?

The videoconference lasted thirty minutes and ended with a request for the president to show off some dance moves. He declined, but suggested he might use a future opportunity to sing. “In some future Google+, I may sing another tune,” he said.

I hear he does a great Al Green.

Update: CNN’s Security Blog points out that during the Hangout, Obama casually admitted to drone strikes in Pakistan

“a lot of these strikes have been in the FATA, and going after al Qaeda suspects who are up in very tough terrain on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. For us to be able to get them in another way would involve probably a lot more intrusive military actions than the one we’re already engaging in.” (FATA being the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan where Al Qaeda and many Taliban are ensconced).

Obama also made another bit of news by addressing a question regarding a young UK man named Richard O’Dwyer who the US is trying to have extradited for copyright infringement. He runs a website called “TV Shack” that offers streaming video of movies and television programs. Obama was asked “Why are you personally supporting the extradition of UK citizen Richard O’Dwyer for solely linking to copyright infringing works using an extradition treaty designed to combat terrorism and bring terrorists to judgement in the USA?” to which he responded that he was “not personally doing anything” because the president does not get directly involved in those type of decisions.

“One of the ways our system works is the president doesn’t get involved in prosecution decisions and extradition decisions and this has been a decision by the justice department,” he said.

“Broadly, we want to make sure intellectual property is protected we want to make sure that the creative works of people in this country aren’t expropriated, but we want to do it in a way that is consistent with internet freedom.”

The Huffington Post has more on this particular story.

Watch the Hangout, via the White House, starting at the 1:02 mark:

Credit: YouTube/WhiteHouse

Will a change in leadership at Research In Motion help change the prospects of this floundering company? The prospects do not appear good. Here’s my video report on location from Davos, Switzerland.

Google has had a series of embarrassing flops when it comes to new products. Google Wave was too complicated and didn’t solve a problem anyone had. Google Buzz never caught on with enough people to become useful. Now, they’ve set their sights directly on Facebook with Google+ and after spending a little less than a day with it, I have to admit I am intrigued.

There are a couple of things that make Google+ compelling. The first is that despite the fact it’s still in limited beta, with many folks begging for invites from friends, it feels active and alive. When you log in, it appears like the early days of Facebook, before they piled on app after app and feature after feature.

Being the new thing is an advantage, because you can focus on the features that people really want. Google+ focuses on a feed of updates, similar to the Facebook Wall, and forces people to place their contacts into “Circles” which is similar to Facebook’s “Groups” that seems to be utilized only by a small audience.

Circles allow you to focus on the things a subset of your contacts are interested in, helping to separate the signal from the noise. This is the biggest problem with not only Facebook but with Twitter as well. Power users on Twitter use “Lists” and this makes the experience of Twitter much better, especially for people who depend on Twitter for information and news.

For those who use social media to consume news, there’s a Google+ feature called “Sparks” that allows you to track Google News sources for any keyword you want and the stream can be accessed within the same space you’re following friend updates.

The largest image hosting website today is Facebook, and with apps like Instagram trying to hone in on their turf, they’re keen to get into the mobile photo sharing game as well. What really kicked up Facebook’s image hosting was picture tagging. Where Facebook has started to fall apart is the presentation of the images, which is a bit wonky. Google+ doesn’t have critical mass with image tagging yet, but they’ve got the same functionality built in, along with a much sleeker, simpler way of presenting images in a nice neat grid format. For either Google or Facebook to remain fresh, though, they’ll need to come up with their own version of what Instagram has done to capture the photo sharing zeitgeist.

The final major feature is Hangout, which lets you have a spontaneous video chat with multiple people in any particular Circle. This is something unique that Facebook doesn’t currently offer and could likely be a big draw for teenagers to socialize with friends. It could potentially be a competitor to Skype and even to WebEx if they allowed screen sharing. Tie it to Google Docs and now you have a really powerful collaboration tool.

Another important component that Google is pushing in order to separate themselves from Facebook is their “data liberation” which allows you to pack up and take your data away from Google+ should you decide to leave the service. They even made a somewhat tongue-in-cheek video to tout it, as seen here:

Privacy has always been one of the pet peeves of Facebook, and how difficult they make it to leave and take your stuff with you. Google was wise to make this a major feature of Google+.

The true test of Google+, though, will be to see if it survives given all the other digital distractions already available. Will it be the shiny new tool that becomes a fast fading fad or will it draw us away from our existing social networks of Facebook and Twitter?

A decade ago, we wondered what happened to the product that Google just announced. The Chromebook, Google’s version of a netbook, finally has the ecosystem and infrastructure to support it. Many have declared the PC age on its deathbed, with mobile on the verge of overtaking its marketshare. Google simply believes the PC will evolve, into the cloud and beyond local based storage.

Google will make their notebooks, running entirely on their Chrome OS, available in June, partnering with Acer and Samsung for the hardware and Verizon for connectivity. Samsung will charge $425 for a Wifi only version and $499 for one that includes 100MB data service. Acer’s version will cost “$349 and up.”

The notebook has virtually zero boot time — hit power and you’re on. The battery is said to last an entire day. Your files, entirely in the cloud and accessible anywhere, have built-in security. Updates to software, purchased in the Chrome App Store, will be automatic.

Some of Google’s strongest and most widely used apps: Gmail, Docs, and Calendar, will be available online and off, within the Chrome OS. This is where Google will attempt to eat into Microsoft’s bread and butter: Outlook and Office. While many large corporations use Outlook for their email, and Office for their documents, the flexibility that Google’s free versions of these applications, which don’t require a download and can be accessed anywhere, are an attractive alternative.

These Google applications are, however, already readily available on existing hardware like your laptop or work computer. In order for Google’s post-PC device to succeed, it will need to attract a market that cannot or does not want a fully functional notebook computer, and have been unimpressed with the netbooks that have come before it. What exactly will the Chromebook bring to the table that isn’t already available over the web with existing netbooks, at virtually the same price?

Perhaps they simply want to play Angry Birds on a bigger screen.

The first time I used Skype I was in awe. The video quality, the effortlessness it allowed me to see and hear my family far away over my laptop computer screen was magic. It was even more magical when I tried it on my iPhone — a Dick Tracy moment. And it was more impressive than FaceTime because it allowed me to talk to anyone with Skype, not just with those who had an iPhone.

Today, Skype will likely begin to be lost in the maw that is Microsoft. Sure, Microsoft still remains one of the most valuable companies this country has ever produced but aside from the XBox, it hasn’t been on the leading edge of innovation in many years. Apple, Google and companies like Facebook and Twitter are seen at the forefront of the digital age. Microsoft, in comparison, seems like the once great star athlete, a Michael Jordan attempting to regain some glory by playing minor league baseball.

The best case scenario here is that Microsoft rolls Skype into a product like Kinect, which hasn’t quite taken the world by storm, and becomes a simple, easy to use videoconferencing device for the living room, that takes us beyond just hunching over our computers to interact with our friends who are far away.

The reasoning, however, provided in a rather unimpressive press conference by the awkward and uninspiring Steve Ballmer, was to bring new customers to Windows and Office. I can tell you with some degree of experience, business users want screen sharing but they don’t have a great need for videoconferencing. It isn’t a tremendous business advantage or productivity tool.

If, instead, Microsoft predictably turns Skype into Windows Messenger Live Video Vista Professional Edition, then we will have watched one of the most exciting products developed in the last century killed off in the interest of its shareholders.

Is Facebook just an elaborate direct marketer’s masterwork? Should I think twice before using my existing Twitter account to log into various services all around the web? Should I be worried about handing my credit card over to Sony? These and other perfectly valid and  simultaneously conspiracy theoretical ideas tend to float in and around my head from time to time. The big scare du-jour, is if Apple’s iPhone and Google’s mobile OS, Android, are tracking and archiving our every movement.

A journalistic tennis match on this topic took place over the course of the last few days. First, this is old news. Apple responded to congress regarding this almost a year ago. Digital forensics specialists have known you could track locations on iOS devices for some time, and have used the data to assist law enforcement. Alex Levinson, an RIT student, even published a research paper and subsequent book last December detailing data acquisition techniques for iOS products, like the iPhone and iPad. He says that Apple is not collecting the data.

The Wall Street Journal added Google to the mix, citing that Apple is not alone in the practice of collecting user information. Julia Angwin at the Journal claims that not only are Apple and Google collecting the data and storing it locally on the phone, but they actually regularly transmit their locations back to Apple and Google. The endgame? Angwin believes they’re racing to build a massive database of location information in order to tap the $2.9 billion market for location-based services. Today, Apple seemed to indicate that was part of their plan, as they revealed they’re building a crowd-sourced traffic service.

Apple outright denies they’re collecting user locations.

“Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone,” the company said in a statement on Wednesday. “Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”

In response to the outcry, Apple will release an update to store less information about location and discontinue backing it up entirely. Apple claims that the information they were receiving was anonymous and only stored the wifi hotspots and cell towers around the phone, which could be up to 100 miles away.

I’m as digitally paranoid as the next guy, but this seems like an odd case and strange timing. Why did something that was discovered months ago only recently receive greater attention? Will we see the same thing happen with the earlier reports about apps collecting and sharing demographic information?

Much like Facebook boycotts, we seem to get up in arms about our data being compromised, captured, leveraged, bought and sold, only to lose interest and go on about our lives. Most of us don’t really have the time to care or feel the convenience and novelty of these devices and websites outweigh the potential of being taken advantage of. That’s exactly what many companies in the business of buying and selling data and demographics are banking on.

• Twitter in negotiations to bring back Jack Dorsey as chief product officer – Business Insider
• CNN moves past MSNBC in primetime viewers for the first time in over a year – Forbes
• Magazines can now count iPad and other digital edition sales toward paid-circulation – Ad Age
• Up-to-the-minute updates on aircraft maintaining the no-fly zone over Libya – Guardian
• Chris Tenant out at Vanity Fair after 5 weeks on the job (2nd item down) – NY Daily News
• Flipboard raising capital at a $200 million valuation – BoomTown
• Google exec : We are not at war with Apple – Telegraph