Years back, I was a Comcast cable modem subscri... (show more)

Years back, I was a Comcast cable modem subscriber. That was until they spent a whole month cutting off my service, every single day, from 10am until about 4:30pm. Each day I would call to ask what was up, and I was told it was "scheduled maintenance." I asked for said "schedule" so I could plan around it, and was told that there was no schedule -- which made for an odd form of "scheduled maintenance." I also asked if it would be happening the next day as well, and was always told that I wouldn't be able to find out until the connection disappeared again. I dropped Comcast and switched to DSL. Even though Comcast is now much faster than my DSL, that experience so soured me that I have no interest in ever going back.

While Comcast has received a lot of attention for its "Comcast Cares" initiative (the head of which recently left the company), it certainly looks like they have a few kinks to work out. Phil Anderson points us to the story of Comcast demanding the $0.00 a customer owes and threatening to turn off service if it's not received.

It's not hard to figure out how something like this happens. For whatever reason, the customer didn't owe any money that month -- perhaps a credit, or he had overpaid in a previous month, or something like that. But, Comcast's system is probably set up with the recording of "a payment" separate from the amount, such that not receiving any payment sets off a red flag, with no simple check to see if the reason is that no money is owed. You would think that this is something that Comcast would have caught a lot earlier...

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As part of its annual Financial Analyst Meeting...

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As part of its annual Financial Analyst Meeting today, Microsoft is touting its cloud momentum and announcing several new high-profile customers who've selected the company's cloud computing services: Dow Chemical, Hyatt Hotels & Resorts and the University of Georgia. Dow Chemical and Hyatt Hotels & Resorts have adopted Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite and the University of Georgia has selected Microsoft's Live@edu service.

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The 85,000 students, faculty and staff at University of Georgia join the over 11 million students and educators worldwide who have adopted Live@edu, a strong indication that despite the common concerns about privacy and security in the cloud, that many schools and universities are making the transition.

Upgrading to the Cloud

Shawn Ellis, University of Georgia's Director of Client Services and System Administration, says the university has been assessing upgrades to its calendar and messaging system for some time. Prior to the move to Live@edu, the university had a very low email storage quota, a separate calendar system, and no online collaboration software. Live@edu addresses these gaps, providing faculty and staff with a hosted Exchanged solution, 25 GB of online storage with SkyDrive, and online collaboration and document sharing via Office Web Apps.

While the University of Georgia felt pressured to upgrade its antiquated messaging and calendaring options, it was, like most educational organizations, financially constrained in doing so. The costs of building and maintaining an internal solution are cost prohibitive, says Ellis, who now envisions that IT staff and resources can be better utilized by moving the university to Live@edu.

Meeting IT Requirements, Meeting Teachers' and Students' Expectations

While Exchange hosting is by no means new, Cameron Evans, Microsoft's National and Chief Technology Officer, agrees that moving email management off-premise is still a relevant and pressing concern for many schools and universities. In addition to the pressure to save money, schools also have to address questions of security and privacy (including CIPA requirements at the K-12 level), the management and support of multiple devices - both the school's and student and faculty's, and the increasing expectation and demand that work can be undertaken collaboratively.

There's also the expectation among university students that student government play some role in these sorts of decisions.

Microsoft's announcement today follows on the heels of Google's announcement last month that Iowa and Colorado join Oregon in adopting Google Apps for Education, Google's cloud-based service for schools. And while Microsoft and Google continue to vie for contracts with school districts and universities, this growing interest from more and more educational institutions in both company's services demonstrates that the schools are recognizing the major benefits - in terms of cost, infrastructure, and pedagogy - of moving to the cloud.

Discuss

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The problem with being private is that it incre...

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The problem with being private is that it increasingly means that you have to choose to drop out of society. You would never let the government put a tracking device on you, but you may be carrying a cell phone that tracks your location. You don’t want the government monitoring your internet usage, but Google collects data on you.

Since most people find they can’t live without a cell phone or Google, they grudgingly accept that they will lose their privacy and become trackable. That doesn’t sit well with Moxie Marlinspike, a security hacker with the Institute for Disruptive Studies. He is a common speaker at security events, and he spoke at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today about how to give users more choices by allowing them to hide from both Google and cell phone carriers without losing access to their services.

Marlinspike has set up two experimental services that allow you to stay anonymous and still use the internet. One service circumvent’s Google’s data collection methods. Google itself “anonymizes” search engine data after nine months by deleting the last eight digits of Internet Protocol address data. But Google gathers a lot of data on you through Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Checkout, and Google Health. You have to be logged in to use Gmail, and so that gives Google the ability to track you for advertising purposes.

“Make no mistake,” Marlinspike said. “They are a surveillance business. Their intent is not the same as the government eavesdroppers. The effect is the same. Who knows more about citizines in their own
country, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, or Google? Why is Google not scary? Because we choose to use it.

To create anonymous access to Google, Marlinspike created an add-on for the Firefox web browser with a custom proxy server, which redirects you when you are using a Google application. If Marlinspike’s software detects a request for a Google service that does not require a login, it sends the request to the Google Sharing proxy server. That server anonymizes your identity and assigns a cookie to you that will work with the Google service. The link from you to the proxy server is encrypted using SSL technology.

You can then use the Google service without being tracked. It has been available for about six months and about 80,000 people are using it. Meanwhile, Marlinspike has also set up a way to do voice-over-internet-protocol VOIP calls on cell phones without being identified. The system, dubbed Whisper Systems, lets you make calls (via RedPhone) or send text messages (TextSecure) without being tracked. RedPhone creates encrypted phone calls so no one can listen into your conversation. TextSecure also encrypts your text messages.

The Whisper Systems service has been available for two months and has about 2,000 users. It is interesting and noble that Marlinspike wants to create a third path, which allows you to participate in society without being tracked. But the sad truth is that many people probably won’t care enough to use these services.

Tags: Black Hat

People: Michael Hayden

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This series is supported by Gillette. Learn mor...

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This series is supported by Gillette. Learn more about Gillette and its products at Gillette.com.

Video is a tricky spot for most blogs and personal sites, especially when that video is meant to represent you. While…

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With the exception of Tesla Motors? blockbuster...

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With the exception of Tesla Motors? blockbuster public sale last month, clean technology IPOs have been disappointing this year. And the trend continues today with Molycorp Minerals, miner of many of the rare metals used in green technologies, debuting at $13.25 a share — down from the anticipated range of $15 to $17.

All told, the Greenwood, Colo. company raised $394 million, pricing its shares at $14. The stock has performed weakly since this morning, dipping as low as $12.

While it?s not exactly a traditional green technology company, Molycorp does provide the raw materials for advanced batteries (for plug-in vehicles, primarily), wind turbines, and energy-efficient light bulbs. More and more demand for its products is coming from the sector — which means its success relies largely on the shaky and uncertain growth of other green technologies.

This may be a major reason its IPO followed in the footsteps of similar sales by biofuel maker Codexis and solar cell maker Jinko Solar, both of which sold for less and raised less on the public markets than expected. Cylindrical solar module maker Solyndra couldn?t even get its IPO out the door.

Investors just don?t seem to be hot on cleantech stocks. There?s a lot of risk involved in green plays, and returns sometimes don?t come for years.

Molycorp, in particular, is in a sticky spot. The company plans to use the money raised in the offering to jumpstart its mine in Mountain Pass, Calif. that has been defunct since 2002 when radioactive waste from the site contaminated a local lake. The project is more vital than ever, considering China?s growing dominance in the rare earth elements market (it owns 95 percent of global production), and Molycorp?s dependence on its own operations in China.

Geopolitical dipsutes over rare earth metals have stolen the spotlight recently, especially following the discovery of a massive pocket of lithium in Afghanistan that could be used to make millions of new batteries. Bolivia, which reportedly contains half of the world?s known lithium supply, has prohibited foreign mining and exports. If China decided to do the same — already a concern for U.S. government officials — Molycorp and companies like it might be sunk.

Seeing this possibility on the horizon, Molycorp seems to be rushing to beat the clock. Not only is it working to get its California mine up and running by the end of the year (in order to hit full capacity by 2012), it?s applying for a $280 million loan guarantee through the U.S. Department of Energy to expedite development. The company hopes its IPO will buoy its application. It expects to spend $511 million in the next two years alone.

Tags: rare earth elements

Companies: Molycorp Minerals

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Storwize, a company dedicated to real-time dat...

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Storwize, a company dedicated to real-time data compression (compressing data as its being accessed by users), announced today that it has been acquired by IBM.

The company’s “Random Access Compression Engine” (RACE) technology can help clients reduce storage requirements by up to 80 percent, and can compress a variety of files — including databases, virtualization images — that clients are using in real-time. Most other compression companies can’t touch data that’s in use, and are limited to compressing backups.

The acquisition is expected to finalize in the third quarter of 2010. No financial details were disclosed, but we previously reported that IBM was looking to spend $140 million for the company.

Storwize offers two appliances, the STN-2100 and STN-6000, and it says they can be transparently deployed within a client’s network, with no visible impact to users or IT processes. It supports common network storage (NAS) protocols like CIFS and NFS, and will work with IBM NAS systems like its N Series and SONAS, as well as solutions from other companies like HP and NetApp.

Based in Marlborough, MA, and founded in 2004, Storwize has thus far collected $40 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital, Tamares Group and Tokyo Electron Device.

Check out a video of Doug Balog, vice president of IBM storage, discussing the acquisition below:

Tags: compression, storage

Companies: IBM, Storwize

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Given that Quora is filled with a ton of great ... (show more)

Given that Quora is filled with a ton of great content and practically every other online publication is quoting the answers on the site, I figured that it would be a good idea to start posting Quora questions of the day, focused specifically on Facebook. Today’s question relates to the tension between Facebook and [...]
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Microsoft Research demonstrated a new street-le...

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Microsoft Research demonstrated a new street-level image viewing option that knocks the socks off of Google Maps Street View this week at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. Called Street Slide, the technology allows users to zoom out from the fish-eye pannable photos you see on standard street view options and instead see a series of flat panoramic photos stitched together like a timeline.

It's a little hard to describe, but check out the video below. In addition to being less disorienting than zooming around inside Street View, the open space opened up for annotation in Street Slide is very nice.

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Doesn't that just make you feel like a whole new world of possibilities are opened up? There's no word whether or when this feature will be added to Bing, but if it is - I'm going to try to train myself to use Bing Maps instead of Google Maps.

Blogger Keir Clarke hacked together some proof of concept demos similar to this yesterday, using Google Maps, photoshop and jQuery. They're not bad for a few hours of work!

From these sorts of experiments to the work of Open Heat Map and Tableau that we've highlighted here, it's exciting to think about where all this malleability of maps could lead.

Discuss

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Mark Zuckerberg along with two other Facebook e...

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Mark Zuckerberg along with two other Facebook executives have gone to Washington D.C. this week to explain the company’s stance on privacy as momentum builds for online consumer privacy legislation.

The company’s chief technology officer Bret Taylor (pictured below) testified at a Senate hearing on online consumer privacy while chief security officer Joe Sullivan spoke before a House subcommittee earlier this week.

The company’s moves come after House representatives Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) and Rick Boucher (D-Va.) each introduced draft legislation earlier this year that would regulate how online services can collect personal data and advertise to users. Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) has also pledged to introduce similar legislation into the Senate.

Rush’s bill places more responsibility on companies to protect consumer privacy, while Boucher’s bill places the burden of responsibility on consumers, according to the Center for Democracy and Technology.

The Federal Trade Commission is also considering a “do-not-track” list for consumers to opt out of behaviorally targeted advertising, similar to the “do not call” list.

Taylor faced a skeptical audience when he testified earlier this week. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.), who is chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation was critical of Facebook’s complex privacy controls:

“My question is — are we dividing ourselves into two classes of people? People who can understand and handle all of these instruments and those who can not. And those who cannot are paying a price for they cannot understand,” he said to Taylor.

In the face of all these efforts, Facebook has been aggressively stepping up its presence in the Capitol. It spent $60,000 on lobbying in the second quarter, according to disclosure records. It also recently hired White House economic advisor Marne Levine to help it manage relationships with governments around the world.

In telling public interview last week, David Kirkpatrick, a Fortune reporter and author of “The Facebook Effect,” asked Zuckerberg whether he was willing to step up to a role that would require more and more of his time to be spent on interfacing with government officials.

“You?re a product guy. Are you going to want to be dealing with government officials? I heard you did well with David Cameron [referring to Zuckerberg's meeting with the U.K. Prime Minister earlier this month] ? but there are a lot of misconceptions abroad in dozens of other countries about Facebook.”

Zuckerberg responded,”What I find more often than not is that all of these people are reasonable. The key thing is to engage with all of these people and have real discourse.”

Companies: Facebook

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Jesus. Maybe literally. Fox News has a long an... (show more)

Jesus. Maybe literally. Fox News has a long and illustrious history of saying some fairly outrageous things. A story today on FoxNews.com may be one of the best yet -- certainly from a tech perspective. The post entitled "For Apple Followers, It's a Matter of Faith, Academics Say" argues that while people may joke about Apple being a religion (JesusPhone, etc), to some, it may actually be a religion. Better, they wonder if Apple shouldn't pursue that path. Here's Fox News' keys as to why Apple is similar to a religion:
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You've normally got two choices in site heatmap... (show more)

You've normally got two choices in site heatmapping (figuring out where eyeballs land on your site), you can either buy costly specialized equipment ($40K) or pay a consultant to come into your office and use their own equipment, which costs upwards of 5k dollars. Y Combinator funded GazeHawk has figured out a more pared down and innovative solution: Why not use webcams? Co-founded by Brian Krausz and Joe Gershenson, newly launched GazeHawk is less expensive than most already existing eyetracking services at 1/10 the price. And heatmapping, something that required custom hardware and bringing people into a lab, now requires simple consumer hardware and proprietary software.
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An emphasis on mobile products, including a suc... (show more)

An emphasis on mobile products, including a successful wireless kiosk program in Target stores, helped drive $53 million in profits for the second quarter.


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Now that we have some idea as to how Twitter wi... (show more)

Now that we have some idea as to how Twitter will make money, we all need a new parlor game to keep ourselves entertained. Given the recent moves by Amazon with the Kindle platform, the classic question is back in vogue: just how many Kindles have been sold? Amazon itself is annoyingly coy with the numbers, saying instead that [...]
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Facebook can be a great tool for the journalist... (show more)

Facebook can be a great tool for the journalist. It will allow you to get inside news by following the correct pages. It can provide tips for a future story,keep you in touch with the news, and the world in general. One fact that is true, tracking stories in the digital age has changed the [...]
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There's been plenty of talk about whether or no... (show more)

There's been plenty of talk about whether or not software patents should be legal, and one of the "debates" we often run into in the comments is over whether or not the "software industry" really believes in patents or not. Some patent system supporters claim that most of the industry does, in fact, support patents, but it's a noisy bunch who is against them. Unfortunately for those who believe that, some new research is suggesting quite a different picture. It seems that a rather large majority of software firms don't seek patents and don't believe they're helpful or provide any real incentives: Three-quarters of the D&B firms had no patents and were not seeking them. Because the D&B firms are, we believe, typical of the population of software startup firms in the U.S., their responses may be representative of patenting rates among software startups generally. It is, in fact, possible that the overall percentage of software startup patenting is lower than this, insofar as patent holders may have been more likely than other software entrepreneurs to take time to fill out a Berkeley Patent Survey. For the most part, these firms just didn't think getting a patent was worth it. For all the talk of how patents protect companies and act as an incentive for investment in big projects, most software execs seem to disagree: One of the most striking findings of our study is that software firms ranked patents dead last among seven strategies for attaining competitive advantage identified by the survey Instead, they believe that a first mover advantage is a lot more important followed by "complementary assets," which is basically offering scarce services to complement the software.

The execs were also asked how much incentive patents provided for developing software, and the answer was about as close to none as you could expect. On a scale from 0 to 5, software execs said that patents were a 0.96 as an incentive for inventing something new and a 0.93 in commercializing a product and bringing it to market (innovating). And, before you say that this was skewed by people without patents, the report notes: the results did not change significantly even when focusing only on responses from software entrepreneurs whose firms hold at least one patent or application. Even patent-holding software entrepreneurs reported that patents provide just above a weak incentive for engaging in these innovation-related activities. The other interesting finding? If a firm is venture-backed, it's more likely to get patents, but this doesn't appear to suggest that the patents are valuable. It seems to indicate that entrepreneurs still believe the old claim that venture capitalists want to see patents, so they feel the need to get patents just to show to investors.

On the whole, it certainly appears that the vast majority of the software industry isn't interested in patents, don't find them useful or important, and certainly don't see them as creating an incentive. Even those who get patents don't see much value in them, and appear to only get them because they feel pressured to get the patents for external reasons. All in all, this is a pretty damning bit of research for those who suggest patents help the software industry.

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