Rojo

 

MySpace, then Facebook and then Google all recently launched services for third parties to access their users’ data through other sites.

Google, though, uses Facebook’s developer platform to distribute Facebook user data through its own service, Google Friend Connect. Now, Facebook has cut off that access.

When Google announced Friend Connect on Monday, I asked the company for clarification on its relationship with Facebook — strangely, Google didn’t offer MySpace data even though those two companies are partners on Open Social. A main point of the announcement, after all, was that Open Social applications could run on other sites, with better access to social networks’ data.

Instead, Google announced that third party developers would be able to access data from Orkut, smaller Open Social member network hi5 and Linked — and Facebook. Google, it seems, wanted to see just how open Facebook’ social network rival was.

For Google’s response to my question, check out this audio clip. As the company tells me in the clip, it has no business relationship with Facebook.

From the Facebook company blog, today:

In the past, when we found applications passing user data to another party (for instance, to ad networks for the purpose of targeting), we suspended those applications and worked with those developers to ensure they respect user privacy. Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.

 

As expected, Carl Icahn has sent a letter to Yahoo Chariman Roy Bostock indicating his plans to nominate an alternative board of directors, which, amongst others, includes Mark Cuban, who has been a proponent of a combined Microsoft-Yahoo since the news first broke. Ironically, Cuban made his fortune when he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.6 billion back at the peek of the first dot-com boom. This move paves the way for Yahoo shareholders to elect the alternative board at the company’s annual meeting, which would then set the stage for Microsoft to make a new bid to acquire the company.

In the letter, Icahn discloses that he has acquired 59 million shares of Yahoo. Hence, if he’s able to get his board elected and Microsoft to re-offer $33/share, he stands to make several hundred million dollars. How’s that for motivation?

The letter has some awesomely stern-worded sound bites, including:

“It is irresponsible to hide behind management’s more than overly optimistic financial forecasts.”

“During the past week, a number of shareholders have asked me to lead a proxy fight to attempt to remove the current board and to establish a new board which would attempt to negotiate a successful merger with Microsoft, something that in my opinion the current board has completely botched.”

“It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo’s closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer.”

Here’s the full text of the letter, which also includes Icahn’s full set of board nominees:

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Pushed By Icahn, Yahoo Jumps Back Into Ad Deal With Google?
The Microsoft-Yahoo Dream/Nightmare Lives On: Billionaire Icahn Makes a Move
More Love Notes: Yahoo Responds to Icahn’s Master Plan
Jerry Yang To Workforce: Nevermind The Pitchforks And Torches. Keep Coding.
Yahoo Gives Microsoft More Time to Nominate Directors
Yahoo Gets Sued for Not Selling to Microsoft?
The Daily Poll: Is Microsoft-Yahoo Inevitable?

 

 

lilac_leaf has added a photo to the pool:

this was a small cascade, with the green light effect adding to the ambiance...

 

CaverScott has added a photo to the pool:

 

By Sean Maguire

Standing strong at number 24 on Forbes list of the 400 Richest Americans, with a cool $8.7 Billion to his name, Carl Icahn can haz lots of cheezburgerz! Guess what? He wants more.

Oh, the intrigue; the recent breathtaking game of “Deal or No Deal” between Microsoft and Yahoo. Unless you’ve been rafting down the Bolivian mountains’ Tuichi River for the last three months, you’re well aware of Jerry Yang and Co’s, repeated rejections of Microsoft’s increasingly generous overtures. The last one being a lofty (cough cough) - $33.00/share or $47.5 Billion dollars! This represented a full 70% premium over Yahoo’s closing price of $19.18 on January 31. With Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer playing the role of Howie Mandel, Yang sent two of his yings to politely tell him “No Deal Stevie…No Deal”!

On May 3rd, Ballmer finally had enough and sent a little love letter (or nastygram), depending on how well you read between the lines, to Jerry Yang, thanking him and telling him how disappointed he was that they couldn’t get a deal done. Marketing translation - “Jerry – you really screwed your investors on this one. Oh, and thanks for wasting my time.”

Nevertheless, Yang must have been thinking he had successfully fended off his unwelcome rival. There was one problem. The banker in the booth was seething. His name? Carl Icahn. One of the shrewdest investors in America, Mr. Icahn is not someone to be taken lightly. In fact, as of this writing, Reuters is reporting that Icahn is filing a full board slate for Yahoo, readying himself to take the big stick to Mr. Yang and Co.

Looks to me like Messrs. Brin, Page and Schmidt may be having that 30 minute strategy meeting afterall, since it won’t be long before Jerry Yang gets back on the phone to his buddy in Redmond to deliver a one word message: “Deal.”

My prediction? Carl Icahn will get his cheeseburgers and ultimately drive the sale to Microsoft. My sweepstakes number is $34.00 a share. Give us your opinion and price here at the Pilgrim and let’s see who the sharpest trader is.

About Sean Maguire.

Sean Maguire is the Founder and Managing Partner for 360SELL, Inc., an Austin, TX based internet sales and marketing consulting firm. Sean has over 20 years experience working with venture funded startups through Fortune 500 industry leaders.

Pilgrim’s Partners: - Launch RSS, SMS, video, podcasts, widgets, email campaigns – in one application. Check out Shoutlet

 

An anonymous reader writes "Colossus Cipher Challenge winner Joachim Schueth talks about why he settled on Ada as his language of choice to unravel a code transmitted from the Heinz Nixdorf Museum in Germany, from a Lorenz SZ42 Cipher machine (used by the German High Command to relay secret messages during the World War II). 'Ada allowed me to concisely express the algorithms I wanted to implement.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

 

The Churchill Club of Silicon Valley just wrapped up one of its most anticipated events: the Annual Top Ten Tech Trends Debate. Five well-known and opinionated venture capitalists weighed-in on the million-dollar question: What trends will take flight and what trends will fizzle out in the months ahead?

(The VCs are pictured, from left to right: Steve Jurvetson, Vinod Khosla, Josh Kopelman, Roger McNamee, Joe Schoendorf.)

The audience of around 300 people was asked whether it agreed or disagreed with the VCs’ predictions.

Last year’s predicted trends included a shakeout of Web 2.0 companies and the rising economic power of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Trend maker 1: Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and well-known for his founding investment in Hotmail.

Trend: There will be a booming market for healthy aging technologies that allow people in their 60s and beyond to continue working and living a good life. Every 11 seconds, a baby boomer from the 1940s turns 60. These people have time and money and are Internet-savvy, so they represent an enormous market for services like mental exercise programs and online education in various topics. It fits into a larger vision that could also include an eBay for information services that exceeds the market for physical goods.
Audience: 70 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend: Algorithms will be constructed to develop new industrial chemicals, new biofuels and eventually artificial intelligence.
Audience: 50 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend maker 2: Vinod Khosla (pictured left below), founder of Khosla Ventures, which focuses on alternative fuels and green technologies. Khosla was the founding chief executive of Sun Microsystems.

Trend: Your phone is going to be your most important personal device. Applications will extend beyond e-mailing to include a virtual credit card, your ID, access to location systems and personal information filing systems. If you lose your phone, it is all going to be in the system. Ten years ago people thought it would be ridiculous to have a camera in your cell phone, in two years you will have two cameras per phone – one for taking photos of yourself, and one for taking photos of others.
Audience: 40 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend: Oil will have increasing difficulty competing with biofuels made from cheap non-food crops for transportation. Coal will become less competitive compared to reliable solar thermal and other alternative energy sources.
Audience: 90 percent voted “Yes”.
Trend maker 3: Josh Kopelman (pictured right), managing partner at First Round Capital, a seed-stage venture fund. In 1999 he founded Half.com, an online retailer that was sold to eBay one year later for $300 million.

Trend: Customer data stored by different service providers online is going to be combined to create more intelligent services. This data includes your financial records, dinner reservations, preferences in the iTunes store, random searches on Google and much more. In this way the Internet goes from satisfying explicit user needs (like searching for a friend to add on Facebook) to satisfying implicit needs (like telling who you should add and why adding them would be helpful to you).
Audience: 95 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend: There is going to be a venture capital shakeout. Lower costs and barriers to entry for startups will have a dramatic impact on the venture capital industry and lower returns.
Audience: 40 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend maker 4: Roger McNamee, co-founder of Elevation Partners that he leads together with U2 lead singer Bono. In 1999 McNamee co-founded Silver Lake Partners, the first private equity fund focused on technology businesses.

Trend: The mobile device industry’s migration to smart phones will produce even greater disruption than what the PC industry experienced as it moved from character mode to graphical interfaces. It will disrupt the competitive balance, with big market share shifts. It is going to hurt Motorola, Microsoft and probably LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. Apple, Nokia, Palm and RIM will do better.
Audience: 75 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend: Within five years everything that matters to you will be available on a device that fits on your belt or in your purse. This will cause a massive shift in Internet traffic from PCs to smaller devices.
Audience: 30 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend maker 5: Joe Schoendorf, partner at Accel Partners. He was previously the vice president of marketing for Apple.

Trend: Water-tech will replace global warming as a global priority. The world is running out of usable water and this will kill millions more people in our lifetime than global warming.
Audience: 80 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend: Four-fifths of the world population will carry mobile Internet devices within five to 10 years. They are rapidly becoming the leading device category.
Audience: 50 percent voted “Yes”.

[Photos by Cecilia Aronsson]

 

Just to show how bad things have gotten for the music industry, in one day, Grand Theft Auto IV sold more games than all but one album sold in all of 2007. Ironically, one of the things that makes the game so enjoyable is that you can just cruise around in your car listening to music. I have found myself playing the game sitting in the car waiting for the song to end before I got out of the car to get some hot coffee. This month’s quiz is dedicated to songs that can be found in a previous GTA games. As always you need to put both artist and title in the comments section (or you can e-mail me) and if you are correct I will un-bold it and give you credit. The Lyrics Quiz is for entertainment purposes only so please do not use anything besides your own meandering mind to help you up with the answers. Now onto the quiz:


1. Reaching out for something to hold, looking for a love where the climate is cold. Manic moves and drowsy dreams or living in the middle between the two extremes.
2. I am the one who would dance on the floor in a round.
3. Oh, the night is my world. City light, painted girl.
4. I know her love is true, but it is so damn easy making love to you.
5. We are young but getting old before our time. We’ll leave the TV and radio behind.
6. Heart of the city street is beating. Light from the neon’s turning dark today.
7. So you think my singing’s out of time: it makes me money. I don’t know why.
8. I said to my reflection, “Let’s get out of this place.”
9. Diary sits by the bedside table. Curtains are closed, cat’s in a cradle.
10. Baby it’s all I know that you’re half the flesh and blood that makes me whole.
11. And so the conversation turned until the sun went down. And many fantasies were learned on that day.
12. Ladies love me; girls adore me I mean even the ones that never seen me like the way that I rhyme at a show.
13. Your bark was loud, but your bite wasn't vicious and them rhymes you were kicking were quite bootylicious.
14. Some drop science, well I’m dropping English.
15. Lovers, I know you've had a few. But hide your heart beneath the covers and tell 'em they're the only one.
16. Worried, why do I let myself worry. Wondering what in the world did I do?
17. I love to hear the thunder, watch the lightning when it lights up the sky. You know it makes me feel good.
18. Patti gave birth to a ten pound baby boy.
19. Got a surprise especially for you, something that both of us have always wanted to do. We’ve waited so long.
20. After three days, in the desert fun, I was looking at a river bed and the story it told, of a river that flowed made me sad to think it was dead.
21. Never trust a big butt and a smile.
22. From fancy cars to diamond rings, I've just about given you everything. There’s really not much I won't do for you. I bought you twelve yellow roses and candy, too.
23. If you got the money, honey, we got your disease.
24. Neon lights, Nobel Prize. When a leader speaks, that leader dies.
25. Where you going with the mask I found?