masenoproject.com

The expansion in question will encompass many of the features that Adelson and founder Kevin Rose repeatedly talk about in their quarterly town hall Webcasts. Additionally, the site plans to explore geographic expansion options, including translating Digg into languages other than English, and “significantly” expanding the size of its San Francisco workforce.

For more, see Rafe Needleman’s interview with Mike Maser, Digg’s Chief Revenue & Strategy Officer.

The company has not disclosed a post-funding valuation. But it’s rumored that even the most attractive buyers weren’t willing to offer a dollar value that Digg’s executives wanted, so it’s possible that a bigger valuation–in addition to helping it weather an increasingly difficult economic climate–could make it easier for Digg to insist on a price. Whether Digg has given up on a sale for the time being, or is still trying to make itself more attractive to a buyer, remains to be known.

Social news site Digg has raised $28.7 million in a Series C venture round led by Highland Capital Partners, and has in turn announced a major site expansion.

Digg had long been rumored to be up for sale, with buyers from both the media and Silicon Valley sides of the aisle reportedly interested. The company walked away from a $100 million offer from the Al Gore-founded Current Media, which eventually launched an in-house social news service called Current News. News Corp., which acquired MySpace in 2005, has also been mentioned as a potential suitor, and there always seems to be a rumor that Google has wanted to buy Digg.

“Today is a big day for Digg,” CEO Jay Adelson wrote on the company blog. “We’re announcing a major expansion effort–the largest we’ve undergone in our history. With a new round of funding, we’re accelerating many of the programs that we’ve been working on over the past several months, including investments in infrastructure, new feature development, international expansion and hiring all the people we need to get there.”

The inventor of the increasingly ubiquitous Pleco Chinese-English dictionary software for Palm and Windows Mobile devices said the company is “very seriously considering developing” an
iPhone version.

It’s next to impossible to buy a cell phone-less Palm or Windows Mobile handheld in many parts of the world nowadays, but the
iPod Touch is all over the place, so for those people who are willing to buy a handheld just to run Pleco, it would be a better option than they’ve had in quite a while.

We’re not thrilled about Apple locking down distribution and charging developers a 30 percent commission to sell iPhone software, but we really like the platform and think it has enough potential to be worth the hefty fees.

The iPod Touch is actually more exciting to us, in some respects, than the iPhone, since it doesn’t force you to change your cell phone carrier and can be found almost anywhere.

In an interview in April’s China International Business (not yet online), Michael Love tells of developing the 6-year-old product and how it’s getting popular enough that many foreigners in China are buying PDAs or PDA phones just to use Pleco.

I, for one, would not have bought my Windows Mobile-running HTC Touch if not for this program, and untold dozens of my Beijing friends and acquaintances are carrying around Treos for the same reason. (Love said he switches between a Treo 680 and an HTC Touch, himself.)

Here’s what Love had to say about the iPhone prospects:

If a few crappy TV shows and the Lone Ranger can do that much, can you imagine what a little Mario and Solid Snake can do? The generation that has been reared on video games may be able to fly to Mars, set up a colony, play a quick round of 18 on the moon, and call it a day.

Now, the RIAA, on the other hand…

But only 1 percent of those respondents had poor social skills and shyness, suggesting the cheerleaders in school were wrong: video game addicts are cool too.

Ah, yes, the sweet smell of victory. Remember all the times we were forced to listen to the uninformed drone on about their penchant for “active pastimes?” You know, people like Giles Whittell who wants children to “overdose on wind, rain, mud, gravy, tents, mountains and overcooked bacon. (Oh, and do their homework.)” What wonderful days those were, weren’t they?

But I don’t care because, well, we all know the truth. Years ago, television was said to harm the development of children and yet, that generation carried the country through wars, saw an African-American become a major party presidential candidate, and ushered in the technology age.

But alas, we now have some evidence (at the very least) that video games are not the root of all evil and succeeding generations will not be the dolts of the world, but just like you and me–pillars of society (I think).

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 53,000 times–video games are not bad for us, video games are not the root of all evil, and for cryin’ out loud, video games will not ruin the world’s children.

Sweet, sweet justice.

According to a report from Reuters, Daniel Loton, an Australian graduate student found that “15 percent of 621 adult respondents to an online survey were identified as “problem gamers” who spend more than 50 hours a week playing games.”

When I was a kid, I usually found myself doing one of two things: playing video games at home or trying as best as I could to attract every girl I saw. Was I a video game addict? Probably. Was a socialite? Yep. And you know what? I wasn’t alone.

For more on what Don is up to, follow him on Twitter by clicking here!

Of course, we shouldn’t get too comfortable. Countless studies will soon crop up telling us why social interaction will never be the same because of video games and we’ll be forced to listen to the same rhetoric all over again.

The beauty of this new study isn’t that it tells us something we didn’t already know–I was known as the cool dude on campus for a reason, you know–but it helps us combat the fools who insist that video games are bad for children and hinder their ability to interact in the real world.

Years ago, for my wife’s birthday, I bought her a terrarium for her orchids. You know where I got it? Terrariumsale.com. Because that’s what showed up in Google. Now, Terrariumsale.com is not a business unto itself. It’s one of several front-ends to a catalog of goods sold by FineWebStores. I was reminded of this today when I got a pitch for FreeShippingOn.com, a site that helps you find items available for sale online that you can get without paying shipping fees. I wrote back to the person who sent me the pitch: “You’re kidding. That’s a whole business?” It’s not, of course. But it’s a great strategy.

The idea of shopping by shipping cost is dumb. (Better bet: use a shopping service like NexTag that computes total price for you including tax and shipping.) But that’s not for me to judge. If people want to buy items based on shipping cost, and FreeShippingOn can get those eyeballs and those affiliate dollars, more power to the person who launched the service.

And that person is Jonathan Lieberman, president of Deallocker, and a man who runs focused sites for consumers, like TypoBuddy (for finding deals based on misspellings in eBay and Craigslist postings), the new Buy-discount-gift-cards.com (a front end to Lieberman’s eBay sales of gift cards), and the “Secret Amazon Discount Finder” section of DealLocker. None of his sites is technically ground-breaking. And, like FreeShippingOn, some are based on the erroneous economic proposition that getting dollars off a retail price is more important than the actual out-of-pocket dollars the product costs you. But as I said, that’s not the point. The point is that people look for very specific things online, and the businesses who know the mind of the consumer–and not necessarily what’s right or sensible–are the ones that make the bucks.

When questionable economics makes for good business.

In the next 12 months, iPhone buyers are going to be all the people who couldn’t justify spending $399 on a phone as well as those who would have never considered buying a phone that ran on a slow network, plus the hard-core upgraders, I suppose. Some analysts expect Apple to sell as many as 18 million iPhone 3Gs in the next six months, although that seems quite a stretch to me. But it doesn’t seem impossible that Apple would ship at least 7.5 million iPhones over the remainder of the year, hitting its 10 million goal for 2008.

Let’s take a quick look back at the first year of the iPhone. Apple sold 6 million iPhones from a year ago this weekend up until around the middle of May, when it ran out of the older generation model ahead of the debut of the iPhone 3G on July 11. The company said it “underestimated” demand for the older model when it made its purchasing decisions for 2008, meaning that Apple will not have sold a single iPhone during the last six weeks of its first year.

(Credit:
Apple)

When the iPhone was first released, Apple was willing to forgo the usual subsidies attached to a high-end phone in exchange for the long-term revenue-sharing agreement, perhaps believing that its marketing expertise could sell iPhones as combination high-end iPods, phones, and mobile browsing devices at the higher prices. But once the initial hype wore off during 2008 and a general economic malaise set in, phone buyers–especially in Europe–seemed put off by even the $399 price. Some experiments with lower pricing by O2, the iPhone’s U.K. carrier, quickly moved its remaining inventory of iPhones.

But Apple still appears to hold the high ground in terms of software design and the appeal of its user interface. The first year of the iPhone was humbling for the company, in a certain way, as it realized just how much it had to learn about this strange new mobile world. But it was also affirming in that users, critics, and competitors have all acknowledged the changes in mobile computing created by the iPhone’s software.

That’s amazing progress in a year from a company that had never participated in this market before. Phones and computers are finally coming together, after years of promises of convergence. And Apple will definitely play a leading role in the definition of that market over the next several years, having earned the right during the first year of the iPhone.

The other main difference that will play out during the second year of the iPhone will be official third-party applications, combined with a faster networking pipe and GPS on the iPhone 3G. Business-oriented smartphone users will now also be enticed to take a look at the iPhone with the addition of support for Microsoft Exchange e-mail and security for those conservative IT types.

In just a year, the
iPhone has had a clear impact on the way smartphones and mobile software in general are now designed, and has raised consumer interest–especially in the U.S.–in the concept of truly mobile access to the Internet. But Apple has struggled to find the right price for the iPhone, manage its supply chain, and limit the ability of hackers to get total control over the iPhone.

Click on the image above to see a gallery of highs and lows from the iPhone's first year.

One year after Apple’s iPhone made its debut in a frenzy of consumer lust, much of the hubbub may have died down but the story is just getting interesting.

It’s now mass-market time for the iPhone. If I may make a sweeping generalization, the early buyers of the iPhone seemed to reflect two types of people. One, the hardcore gadget-lovers who had been waiting for an Apple-designed phone for years to replace their Palm, Windows Mobile, or BlackBerry smartphone and didn’t care that the iPhone ran on the slow EDGE network with stock applications. The other? Normal, everyday people who had never seen the need for a smartphone until they saw the iPhone merely say “Hello,” in the first commercials run during the 2007 Oscars, and had no idea what they were missing running on the slow EDGE network with stock applications.

Around the same time, Apple finally addressed the pleas of the developer community for a chance to get their hands on the iPhone. In mid-October, CEO Steve Jobs announced that Apple would release a software developer’s kit in February that would allow third-party developers to create software for the iPhone. The SDK will be a little late, but Apple and other companies have shown what types of applications are possible using the unique touch-screen user interface on the iPhone, and the fruits of that labor are expected to arrive in early July.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Starting with iPhone Day on June 29, 2007, iPhone sales have followed a bit of a bell curve pattern, peaking at 2.35 million shipments in the fourth calendar quarter of 2007 before retreating this year. That spike was driven by what was a smart move in retrospect but perhaps Apple’s biggest public-relations blunder in its first year of the iPhone: the infamous price cut.

As a result, Apple has realized that it will have to embrace the business model used by the rest of the mobile phone industry, and has made significant changes to the way iPhones will be sold in the second year of their existence. While the mobile industry might have forced Apple to bend to its will in certain ways, the iPhone’s breakthrough user interface and Internet browsing prowess clearly caught the attention of the mobile industry, and we’ll probably find out by this time next year whether any of them have learned their lessons.

Just 10 weeks or so after thousands lined up to be the first to purchase an iPhone for $599, Apple cut the price to $399, angering some of its most loyal customers. The company moved to mollify the early adopters with a $100 store credit, which seemed to douse the flames.

While that process was going on, however, a vibrant developer community had already sprung into action, creating hundreds of unauthorized applications for those willing to “jailbreak” their iPhones. These developers found a relatively easy way to bypass Apple’s lock on the handset, which also allowed a thriving “gray market” for unlocked iPhones to emerge all over the world. Executives at carriers who had signed exclusive revenue-sharing deals with Apple were likely not amused.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News.com)

Apple will face a different environment in its second year. Research In Motion is dramatically expanding its efforts to attract regular people, not just businesspeople, to the BlackBerry. Windows Mobile and Palm are expected to have new versions of their operating systems out next year. And while I think Google’s Android software is aimed more at midlevel “feature” phones than the iPhone, the buzz around that eventual launch should be intense.

It's hard to believe, but it's been a year since hopeful iPhone owners crowded Stockton Street in San Francisco, hoping to get their hands on Apple's first mobile phone. For more photos from year one of the iPhone, click on the image.

I’ve seen this phenomenon several times over the past year, with co-workers, family, and friends–people who I never thought would be interested in a smartphone–amazed at how the iPhone has changed their life. I’m sure that’s also happened to BlackBerry owners, Windows Mobile users, and the Europeans who probably look across the pond at us with bemused looks from behind their Symbian smartphones, but in the last 12 months, it has been the iPhone users who have gone through that awakening process, and many of them have been first-time smartphone owners.

The iPhone 3G is set to arrive on July 11 with a faster networking chip and support for third-party applications, and could dramatically increase sales.

Apple has sold around 6 million iPhones so far, in its first year in the mobile phone market.

What’s next for the iPhone?
So as we look forward into the second year of the iPhone’s life on this planet, we can already see that some things will be very different. For one, it looks like Apple has finally settled on a price for the iPhone: $199 for the 8GB model and $299 for the 16GB model. It will get down to that price thanks to hefty subsidies from AT&T and other carrier partners around the world, which means the end of the revenue-sharing agreement that Apple signed with its initial carrier partners.

(Credit:
Apple)

It’s still just a research project. Microsoft has released some of the underlying technology into the public domain. Fitzgibbon also hopes to put a user interface on top of the technology and make it available somehow to the public, though he declined to offer a timetable on that.

The effect Microsoft demoed (see video here) is sort of like taking a Woolly Willy to a real person in a moving video. It’s applications, of course, could be much broader than adding facial hair (though I have some friends that would probably pay good money just for that particular effect).

The research technology, dubbed Unwrap Mosaic, was shown to do things like adding a mustache and rosy cheeks onto a person in a video. It works by sort of unwrapping a 3D object into a flat image that contains the whole object, in this case a face.

Microsoft showed off a technology on Tuesday that could one day allow people to edit artifacts into video as easily as they do with digital photographs today.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Microsoft demonstrated a video editing technology Tuesday that lets artifacts be edited into video, in this case facial hair, by adding them to a flattened three-dimensional image.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

“What we’ve done is built away of patterning the essence of a video in a single pattern,” said Andrew Fitzgibbon, who presented the technology Tuesday at the SIGGRAPH trade show in Los Angeles. The key to that technique is that unwrapped or flattened image.”

In the movies, it’s done by using a model of the face. But Fitzgibbon’s team was looking to create a single tool that would work on multiple types of 3D objects.

While there are plenty of techniques out there for changing colors in a video or other special effects, adding a full mustache, though, is tricky because although it exists in one place–the face–different parts of the face are visible at different times.

Here's the original unwrapped image, pre-facial hair.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

And this is a still of what the mustached man looks like in the edited video.

Fitzgibbon’s paper is just one of several papers Microsoft is presenting at the show. Another, is a follow-up to Microsoft’sPhotoSynth technology, which creates three-dimensional views of an attraction by using lots and lots of still photographs. In the new paper, done by the creators of PhotoSynth, Microsoft talks about how to navigate in a 3D environment constructed from such photos.

For example, one could use the technology to see what the Pantheon looks like from the outside, then zoom in to go through the door, walk down a hall, move up close to see a certain sculpture, turn around, etc. Although this can be done with publicly available photos, say from Flickr, Microsoft said one can also add in personal photos to the mix.

In fact, a surprisingly optimistic author Steven Johnson said Friday during his talk, “The Ecosystem of News,” at the South by Southwest Interactive festival (SXSWi), there’s actually a bright future for news and the best hope for a vibrant, effective, and worthwhile news-gathering community is to look back at the model set over the last decade or so in technology journalism.

And while all of those outlets still existed during the 2008 election (except “Crossfire”), someone sticking to them last fall would have been hopelessly out of the loop compared to the millions of people who were obsessively glued to the Internet, which was delivering an unbelievable amount of coverage of all kinds about the election.

Johnson talked about how blogs like TalkingPointsMemo.com, HuffingtonPost.com, FiveThirtyEight.com, DailyKos, and Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish–one could determine his political bent by the sites he mentioned–served up a steady flow of breaking news and in-depth analysis never before possible during a presidential election. Add that to the fact that he could watch the debates with “a thousand virtual friends Twittering away with me” and the fact that as many as 8 million people watched President Obama’s famous race speech on YouTube, and it’s obvious that the political news ecosystem, like that of technology, has found a way to move past the antiquated models of just a few years ago.

And then along came the Web, and sites like MacInTouch.com, Apple’s first site, rumor blogs, and fan sites, Johnson said, which made it finally possible to get the latest
Mac news in near real-time. “Now the lag is seconds,” Johnson said, “thanks to people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Steve Jobs speech.”

And where many see these signs pessimistically as proof that the news business as we know it is dead, Johnson, whose books include “The Invention of Air” and “Emergence,” sees the same fate as a good thing. After all, he suggested, why cling to failed systems when new ones that are rising to meet the needs of the future are emerging all on their own?

Back in those days, he said, the best way to get the most recent news about what Apple was up to was to read periodicals like Macworld. Yet, with the long lead times of monthly magazines, that latest news was always several months late, Johnson said. Later, when things like CompuServe came along, he was able to compress the timeframe for getting the most up-to-date Apple news to a few days by downloading the most recent issue of Macweek.

The problem is that what should have been a 10-year ecosystem evolution for the news business has been forced into a much more compressed timeframe by today’s financial exigencies. And this sense of panic has caused us, as a society, to lose sight of what, in Johnson’s view, is a very positive long-term change.

“Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half-mile of my house,” Johnson said, “and I don’t get an e-mail alert about it within half an hour, it’ll be a sign that something is broken.”

“The Web…just has a tendency to cover technology first,” Johnson said, “because the first people to use the Web were much more interested in technology than” things like school board meetings.

And just because the impressive advances in newsgathering on the Web were seen first in technology journalism doesn’t mean they won’t spread to more mainstream–read: important–topics like local government, crime, and so forth.

Johnson began his talk by framing what he called “old growth media,” the traditional combination of newspapers, magazines, and television news. He recalled how, when he was in college in the late 1980s, he used to stalk his local bookstore around the same time every month, eager for the latest issue of Macworld.

Local news, once the lifeblood of newspapers, is unlikely to be so in the future. Papers like The New York Times can no longer afford to cover neighborhood stories that interest a small subsection of a much larger readership. Yet, it’s those very issues that are of most interest to the people in those neighborhoods, Johnson said.

“Most of what we care about in our local lives is in the long tail,” he said, referring to the ability of the Web to bring news about the smallest events to those who want it. And, of course, even the Times itself is now starting to cover neighborhoods with blogs.

“We need to remind ourselves that there’s a lot of value” in this ecosystem and what it will become in the future,” Johnson said. But “it’s tough to live through transformations.”

These days, there’s no shortage of signs that the news business is collapsing in on itself, unable to develop a modern business model, and confused by how to tackle the threats posed by online classified sites like Craigslist and amateur bloggers posting news items obsessively and continuously.

“What’s happening with technology and politics is happening elsewhere as well,” Johnson said, “just on a different timetable.”

Steven Johnson

He said that the first campaign he followed closely was in 1992. His main sources for the most up-to-date news were TV shows like CNN’s “Crossfire” and magazines like Newsweek, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. At the same time, he said he watched each of that year’s debates religiously and stayed up late to devour the post-game analysis on networks like CNN.

And as more and more of this long tail-type of news is covered by those other than professional journalists, Johnson argued, it might well free up those professionals to work on the very kinds of stories that people worry they won’t be able to do in the future: war coverage, investigations, and the like.

In the end, however, it will be the entire ecosystem of news that will bring the full value to news consumers. It will be social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, which can serve as link circulators, as well as large group filters like Digg and, yes, professional journalists and editors. All together, the news will get covered, Johnson said.

The key, then, will be for the traditional publications to serve the role of public gatekeepers, or filterers of the flood of information coming in from the amateur Web. And that, Johnson suggested, would be a natural task for the editors of institutions known for their authority: newspapers and TV news networks. And while the readership of physical newspapers has plummeted, the numbers for those publications’ online sites has risen dramatically, proving that the audience is still there.

AUSTIN, Texas–The future of news is not breadlines for journalists, a lack of reporting on politicians’ scandals, and a dearth of coverage of what’s really going on behind the lines of wars around the world.

Today, he said, many people are panicking as newspapers fail left and right, and as they see the likelihood that as a result, the crucial newsgathering role played by professional journalists will disappear with their dying employers. Yet the example set in technology journalism should give such pessimists something to feel good about, Johnson said.

The point? That the model is established, and that for consumers of news, the example set in technology news should be cause for optimism, even if not for the health of the traditional news business. And the proof? Johnson pointed to politics, and the coverage of presidential campaigns.

Blog site DataBreaches.net has been tracking the reports here and here.

The breach appears to have affected fewer account holders than were affected by a breach reported by Heartland Payment Systems last month, but represents a “significant number nonetheless,” the statement said. “According to VISA officials, the breach affected all card brands. Evidence indicates that the account number, PAN and expiration dates were stolen.”

Community Bankers Association said in a statement on its site two weeks ago that Visa announced that an unnamed processor reported a data breach and that the name of the processor was being withheld pending completing of a forensic investigation.

Another U.S. payment processor has suffered a database breach that exposed credit card and debit card information, according to several credit unions. The name of the payment processor has not been released and it is unclear how many consumers are affected.

The incident is the latest in a string of breaches at payment processors, including one at RBS WorldPay last year that enabled scammers to clone cards and withdraw millions of dollars from bank accounts.

The Pennsylvania Credit Union Association also issued a statement, as did the Alabama Credit Union, which said it was limiting Visa ATM and debit card purchases to $99 per day as a result of the breach.

Credit card and debit card users are encouraged to monitor their statements carefully.

The Tuscaloosa Virginia Credit Union posted a statement on its site that said malicious software was placed on the processor’s system but there is no evidence that accounts were viewed or data taken by hackers.

Today, Chrome is simply a technology demonstration - and I can’t see
Firefox users with their carefully-cultivated selection of add-ons, or Opera users, making the jump any time soon. But Chrome is a Trojan Horse for bundling Google’s Gears onto your PC - and in the hope that manufacturers look to Google services for new Eee-type lightweight PCs, perhaps running something like gOS, the Ubuntu-derivative.

But Google is about to crank up its Microsoft-killer strategy a notch. Adding a retail component–built on top Ubuntu, most likely–would be the finishing touch. But long before Google takes that road, it needs to get application developers in its corner. Enter Chrome.

commentary

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

It’s an interesting play, and certainly one worth watching as the juggernaut of the desktop (Microsoft) dukes it out with the juggernaut of the Web (Google). Fun times.

No one thought this was just about building a better browser. In that department, Firefox is and will remain the hands-down favorite for anyone not shackled to Internet Explorer (and Firefox is much faster for most applications). Indeed, I suspect that Firefox still has a big hand to play on its own as the standard platform for Web applications.

Gears is simply designed to make Google’s online services more attractive, and makes it looks like Google’s is setting the standard: leading where everyone else follows.

There’s a lot of great commentary out there on Google’s new Chrome browser, but the most insightful and incisive review I’ve seen thus far is Andrew Orlowski’s piece for The Register, wherein he calls out Chrome as a “Trojan Horse for…Google Gears.”

Dell has traditionally derived the majority of its business here in the U.S., but for the first time ever its international business ticked above 50 percent of the company’s total last quarter.

As promised, Dell unveiled several new computers Wednesday made specifically for emerging PC markets like China and India.

The notebooks are available in 14.1-inch and 15.6-inch sizes, and come with Intel Celeron or Core2Duo processors, and Ubuntu Linux or
Windows Vista. The desktops come with Intel Atom, Celeron, or Pentium processors, and Ubuntu or Vista.

New Vostro notebooks from Dell made for emerging markets.

Dell says there will be more Vostro products for these markets released in the next few months.

There are four new models in all under the Vostro line–two laptops and two desktops. The notebooks will start at $475, and the desktops at $440, and will be available in more than 20 countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe.

We’ll see Thursday how effective the retail push into Asia has been for Dell, when it’s due to report its second-quarter earnings.

This looks to be the beginning of the company’s promised push into two of the fastest-growing PC markets in the world. After establishing a retail presence in both China and India in the last year, Michael Dell said in March that while growth in the U.S. market for PCs would be “OK,” Asian markets would grow more.

But looking abroad for a boost is a strategy that Dell’s not alone in pursuing. Chief rival Hewlett-Packard has been doing a bang-up business for a while now in China, which is the home turf of another PC heavyweight, Lenovo.

(Credit:
Dell)