Maxim Bange

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A couple of years ago, I revealed some internal information about Business Insider. Then, last year, I did it again.

Both times, I said that, if nothing horrible happened, I might continue to do it.

Well, nothing horrible happened!

(At least nothing I'm aware of.)

Earlier this month, the folks at DLD were kind enough to ask me to give a presentation on digital storytelling. In my deck, I included some secret BI information. On the theory that you, our readers, might also be interested, I've published the presentation below.

There are a lot of slides, but few words, so it should be an easy flip-through.

Here are some highlights:

• Business Insider is now larger than the Wall Street Journal. According to Comscore, our total U.S. readership last month, desktop and mobile, was 23 million people. The Journal's was about 20 million. Thank you very much for reading us!

• We're reaching the next generation of leaders — the digital generation. By design, we have a younger readership than most legacy business publications. Our average readers are in their mid- to high 30s, as compared to the mid-40s and up.

• Our international readership is also growing rapidly, and BI Australia, which launched 9 months ago, is already the No. 1 business site in the country. Globally, we are now read by more than 40 million unique visitors per month. We are fortunate to already have a boatload of enthusiastic readers in Europe, and we will be opening a newsroom in London later this year.  

• Our readers love both our narrative journalism and our visual and data journalism — photography, video, and data analysis. Digital is a visual medium, and great pictures really can be worth a thousand words. We have always invested heavily in photography. Now, after a couple of years of experimenting, we're investing heavily in "native" digital video production. Our investment in longer narrative journalism is also striking a chord. In the past year, we have published many major investigations and features that read and shared by millions of readers worldwide.

• Our subscription service is growing rapidly, and subscriptions are on their way to becoming another major revenue stream. We are very optimistic about the future of free ad-supported journalism: Our core business grew 80% last year, and we were profitable in the fourth quarter. Adding subscription revenue will allow us to provide even deeper reporting and analysis in some of our core coverage areas, and we're going to invest heavily in subscriptions going forward.

• Digital journalism is as different from print and TV journalism as print and TV are from each other. The key differences are in editorial approach, distribution, and economics. One big reason for our success is that we are enthusiastically embracing the ways that digital is different, instead of trying to jam square pegs in round holes. The key to success in digital, by the way, is producing great stories. There are no tricks or shortcuts. If you don't have great stories that readers love and share, nothing else matters.

• Almost half of our readership is now on mobile, both tablets and smartphones. We are the largest and fastest-growing mobile business publication in the world. The iPhone is still the dominant mobile device used by our readers, followed by the iPad and Android devices. Mobile has also extended Business Insider's readership day to "18x7": Readers who used to just read us in the office on weekdays now read us during their commutes and in bed. And they also read us over the weekend.

• Digital news organizations today are like cable news in the 1980s (scrappy upstarts, small teams, big hair).  Over the next couple of decades, today's digital news organizations will just keep getting bigger and better. We now have 70 excellent full-time journalists at BI. Imagine what we'll be able to do when we have 500!

Thank you again for reading Business Insider and for helping to make our success possible. We listen closely to what you tell us, and we will keep striving to make the site better every day.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

During his latest Google+ Hangouts session today, President Obama provided his most direct response yet to the recent court ruling that dealt a major blow to net neutrality. On the topic of net neutrality itself, Obama said, "It’s something that I’ve cared deeply about ever since I ran for office. My own campaign was empowered by a free and open internet and the ability for citizens all across this country to engage and create and find new ways and new tools to mobilize themselves." Obama said his rise to the presidency not have been possible if "there were a bunch of commercial barriers and roadblocks" between he and his supporters.

"They have authority."

But Obama carefully avoided criticizing the decision itself. "We live...

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Last week, Gmail went down, locking some people out of their inbox for nearly an hour. While users were concerned it was a hack, it turns out the issue was an internal software bug, according to Google. Despite that, it would be helpful to know when accounts are being attacked. Fortunately, Tech2's Nishtha Kanal writes that Google has installed a set of tools in its email service to ensure your account is secure.

Here's how it works.

Log on to your Gmail account on a desktop computer. Scroll all the way down to bottom of the page and click Details.

This window should appear listing the last ten times you logged into your account from the Web or an app. At the top, click sign out all other sessions if you forget to log out from another location. At the bottom, open alert preferences.

If someone else is trying open your Gmail, this part of the service will let you know. Click "Show alert for unusual activity" to be notified of any intrusion in your account. If you see a suspicious IP address, quickly change your password.

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One of the core pillars of academic research is sharing. By letting other researchers know what you do, ideas are criticized, improved upon and extended. Unfortunately it’s not always easy for academics to share their work, for a variety of reasons.

AcademicTorrents, a new torrent site by and for academics, hope to change this status quo.

The site was launched by Joseph Cohen and Henry Lo, two PhD students working at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. The torrent site aims to provide academics with a cheap and decentralized platform to share their work and data with the rest of the world.

“Sharing data is hard. Emails have size limits, and setting up servers is too much work. We’ve designed a distributed system for sharing enormous datasets – for researchers, by researchers. The result is a scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant repository for data, with blazing fast download speeds,” Cohen and Lo explain.

AcademicTorrents allows researchers to upload datasets, articles and other research material. The site runs it own tracker and supports web-seeds as well, which guarantee that files are available at all times.

One of the goals of the project is to give research back to the researchers, instead of having it locked away behind paywalls. Currently most of the top publications are being monetized by publishers, but with AcademicTorrents any journal can distribute papers for free.

“One aim of this site is to create the infrastructure to allow open access journals to operate at low cost. By facilitating file transfers, the journal can focus on it’s core mission of providing world class research. After peer review the paper can be indexed on this site and disseminated throughout our system,” the site’s founders note.

The site supports “collections” where torrents can be grouped by interest, source, author and so forth. These collections can be followed through RSS feeds, so users are automatically notified when new content is added.

Besides supporting the free availability of research, AcademicTorrents also has a more practical use. Since all files are shared by peers, it’s possible to share very large datasets at minimal cost.

“Large dataset delivery can be supported by researchers in the field that have the dataset on their machine. A popular large dataset doesn’t need to be housed centrally. Researchers can have part of the dataset they are working on and they can help host it together,” the founders explain.

Academics, or anyone else who’s interested can join the site and start sharing. NASA’s 42 gigabyte map of Mars may be a good start, and a recent copy of Wikipedia might come in handy too.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

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The US Army, along with defense contractor Lockheed Martin say they've successfully tested an autonomous vehicle convoy system that does away with human drivers in the name of safety and speed. Lockheed ran the test in Fort Hood, Texas earlier this month, and says the driverless convoys successfully navigated all sorts of "hazards and obstacles" including pedestrians, other vehicles, and basic changes in road topography.

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Some time ago, we brought you the inspiring, tear jerker story of how Google Glass helped a woman regain her confidence and go camping again. A car accident on her way to her previous camping trip left her paralyzed from the chest down.

New technology can be fun and interesting. It can also play a powerful role in the quality of life for those with serious health issues.

In honor of Super Bowl weekend, we bring you another such story, about NFL football player Steve Gleason.

Gleason only started one game in his 7-year NFL career with the New Orleans Saints. But he'll forever be known for a play that led to the Saints' first touchdown in the their first game back at the Superdome following Hurricane Katrina.

Three years after he left the NFL, he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease that hits former NFL players at a higher rate and at younger ages.

It impedes his ability to walk and talk.

Gleason uses eye-tracking technology on a Microsoft Surface tablet to type out words and the machine speaks for him. It also lets him control his electric wheel chair.

"I am hopeful for a medical cure for ALS." Gleason says in the video posted below. "Until there is one, technology is my cure."

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Sony en Lenovo voeren onderhandelingen over een samenwerkingsverband waarin de verlieslijdende pc-tak van Sony ondergebracht zou gaan worden. Dat bericht de Japanse publieke omroep. Sony zegt dat het bericht niet klopt.

The party of jailed former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko said on Saturday that the Ukrainian authorities were considering the introduction of a state of emergency in a bid to break up the protest movement against the government.

On Friday, Ukraine's SBU security service announced a criminal investigation into what it said was an opposition attempt to seize power.

"An announcement by the SBU is an element of a use-of-force scenario, planning the possible introduction of a state of emergency," a senior official with the Batkivshchyna party, Grygoriy Nemyria, told AFP.

The opposition has over the past two months been locked in a confrontation with the government of President Viktor Yanukovych.

Ukraine's most severe crisis since gaining independence in 1991 was sparked by Yanukovych's decision to scrap a pact with the European Union in November.

Over the past few weeks the protests have radicalised and turned into an all-out drive to unseat the 63-year-old leader.

The outbreak of violence in which several protesters and policemen were killed is unprecedented in a country which saw the pro-democracy Orange Revolution in 2004 peacefully overturn a rigged election.

Weighing in for the first time since the start of the protests, the military on Friday urged the president to take "urgent steps" to ease the turmoil.

Arseniy Yatsenyuk, leader of the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party, told top European dignitaries on Friday that the use of the army against the protesters was "very likely."

"This is one more element of planning the possible introduction of the state of emergency," Nemyria said on Saturday.

"The involvement of the army, this has not happened during the Orange Revolution. This is unacceptable," he added.

 

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Twenty years after nuclear bombs leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US and Soviet Union were deep in the Cold War. Tensions were high; while the Soviets had the Americans outgunned in terms of conventional arms, the US had a vastly superior store of nuclear power. However, due to President Eisenhower's "New Look" security policy, any and all forms of Soviet aggression would be met with "massive retaliation," meaning a swift nuclear response that could also mean a massive loss of live on both sides. In order to tamp down on the potential loss of life, military engineers sought after tactical nukes that could strategically destroy enemy infrastructure without killing millions.

Thus came the Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM), a...

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My phone rings.

"Where the hell are you?" someone screams at me.

Apparently I was meant to be somewhere, with my car stocked and ready to take a group of friends 70 miles out of London. I have no idea what he's on about.

"But it was on Facebook! I sent you the invite and everything!"

The penny drops. My self-prescribed absence from Facebook has bitten me in the behind, because I've realised I wasn't even aware of the stag do, let alone that I'd been nominated as a designated driver. They assumed I knew because everyone sees everything that happens on Facebook, right?

Unless you've turned off all Facebook alerts and emails...

A competition to see who has the best life

At one point I had around 300 friends on Facebook - considerably more than the average 130 for most Britons, according to social media site the Wall. Most seemed shallow connections, and the excuse for connecting was that random meetings, mutual friendships or past jobs inflated my friend count. It seemed more about networking or reminiscing with lapsed friendships.

In reality, after the initial flurry of conversation I realised I had little in common with them, which meant my network wasn't related to my real world network at all - a couple of hundred people I never talked to properly, or didn't even really know. Yet they knew when I'd been drunk at a party, or that my boss was a pig, or that my relationship was a bit “complicated”. I don't think that's normal.

Having hundreds of friends and a constant stream of conversation happening day and night looks extremely sociable. How could anyone be lonely with hundreds of Facebook friends?

In yet another academic study on Facebook from August 2013, researchers claimed that the more people used Facebook in their test group, the more unsatisfied they felt with their lives - regardless of how many friends they had amassed.

“On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it,” concluded the study.

One explanation - which rings true for my own experience - is the bias towards presenting a perfect self-image. There's an enormous pressure to appear fantastic at every occasion, and whether boasting about success at work, an amazing night out or uploading a photo, it can feel like a competition to see who had the best life.

Facebook is now the lowest common denominator for communication among my friends, largely replacing email and text with brief comments and likes.

More than anything, I started to feel that I was calling my friends less, seeing my friends less and that our friendships were being reduced to a trickle of pictures, comments and quips. I could no longer remember the last time I just called up a friend for a chat or had something genuinely new to say that someone hadn't already seen on Facebook.

ENOUGH!

I had simply had enough. The volume of messages telling me I'd been tagged, mentioned, commented on - that someone I don't even know said "totes amazeballs" on one of my posts - the pressure of being perfect, having to come up with witty one-liners and the utter disappointment when one of my posts didn't get more than five likes.

So I switched every notification off, and swore not to touch Facebook for at least three months.

Unfortunately, that happened at about the same time as one of my friends was getting married. When his best man sent an invite on Facebook, he assumed that everyone had seen it and we ended up with that panic phone call, a sprint downstairs and a mad dash (all within legal speed limits, of course) down the M3.

He hadn't even noticed my social media blockade. "Why would you want to do that?!" he said with horror when I explained.

The social penalty for being off-Facebook

Facebook's pervasiveness means that it reaches most people’s lives, including mine. Leaving the service seems straightforward, but notice that your account is deactivated, rather than deleted, and they do keep your data.

However... there is a social penalty for being out of the Facebook loop - as I found out. Opt out, and you opt out of the phone book of our age. It might mean you miss out on casual but important invitations and news. There is a currency, however superficial, in the ambience of a Facebook friendship, the holiday photos, the baby photos, the shared interest in a news story. It's not essential, but it keeps a trickle of communication open between someone you might otherwise not hear from.

Facebook is the identity key for thousands of sites

From your fitness tracker to your music service, Facebook Login is used to sign into thousands of sites and services, as well as those who require a login before you can comment.

Spotify is a good example, where sharing music with friends, seeing what people listen to and discovering new music through a shared listening experience is very much driven by Facebook. It is possible to follow people without connecting to Facebook, but it’s much harder and with nowhere near as many features.

Leaving Facebook, then, creates a whole new set of problems.

A friend cull

So my solution was a halfway house, a compromise that involved an enormous friend cull. I went through my 300-odd friend list and removed everyone I wasn't actually friends with. I removed all my work colleagues and anyone who I hadn't spoken to in three months, leaving just a 50 people that included all my actual friends and a few family members – I couldn't quite bring myself to tell my Mum that she couldn't be my friend any more.

That changed the way I used Facebook. It is no longer a competition to see who has the best life. It also meant that I wasn't bombarded with notifications, because I had dialled down my notification settings so that I only received updates about the most important things form the most important people.

It means I use Facebook a lot less than I used to, but I still get the invites and the photos from the events that I do actually want to receive.

In fact, Facebook works quite well as a communication platform once you've ditched the chaff, so perhaps it wasn't the site that was the problem but the people. Maybe it's time to find some new friends.

• Who were the first 10 people on Facebook?

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

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The digital currency that started as a joke is now one of the biggest digital currencies in the world.

Dogecoin — which is like Bitcoin but inspired by the absurdist Doge meme — now has a "market cap" of $62 million according to CoinMarketCap.com. When Rob Wile told the story of how Dogecoin came together back in December, the value of all extant Dogecoins were just $8 million.

And it's not hard to see why Dogecoin is taking off. The community has done cool things, like help send the Jamaican Bobsled team to the Olympics. The community is also helping send athletes from India to the Sochi games.

Meanwhile, the community is incredibly motivated and evangelical, but not in an annoying way.

After I tweeted yesterday about the surging value of Doge, a bunch of its fans instantly offered to tip me a bunch (give me some of theirs):

@tipdoge tip @TheStalwart 10 #Dogecoin #ToTheMoon

— JD Raimer (@jdraimer) January 31, 2014

@tipdoge tip @TheStalwart 50 doges, thats how we got there buddy

— Enigmatic (@ThatDudeMatic) January 31, 2014

@tipdoge tip @TheStalwart 8.0085 doge

— Adjam (@JollyJap3s) February 1, 2014

@tipdoge tip @TheStalwart 20 doge

— Lord Matt of Sealand (@_DragonFiesta) February 1, 2014

When I've written about cryptocurrencies in the past, I've argued that an important facet of them is as a social network. A social network as you think about it (like Twitter or Facebook) only has value because lots of other people you know are using them. The technology itself can easily be copied. It's the same with digital currencies. It's the social aspect and network affects that creates the value, since the actual code is easily replicated.

The Doge community isn't likely to become a "mass" thing, but it seems to attract fun people that are into doing cool things. It's not that weird to see why it's taken off so much.

SEE ALSO: Why Bitcoins have value

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A new rumor states that Sundar Pichai could be in the running to be the next Microsoft CEO.

It seems as though Microsoft hasn’t really been hunting for a new CEO as actively as they should be. But according to SiliconANGLE, they have their eyes on someone who would really do well in the company.

Sundar Pichai is Google’s senior vice president of Chrome, Apps, and Android. So when it comes to desktop and mobile software, he really shines. Not only that, but he has had his hands in development of Google Drive, Gmail, and Maps.

“Microsoft could really move the ball down the field with Sundar Pichai in creating a new open operating system model for cloud, mobile, and social” according to Dave Vellante, chief analyst at Wikibon. “The market has been looking for a CEO who can balance the role of leading the enterprise transformation while keeping that consumer momentum with xBox and reboot mobile.  Pichai is the total package of technology leadership and business acumen.”

In the past few years, he’s done amazing things for Google, and most notably, Android. It would be very surprising if he decided to leave, however this isn’t the first time we’ve head rumors of him taking off. When Pichai was offered an exec position at Twitter, Google supposedly paid him $50 million to stay.

We know that wherever Pachai decides to stay, he will do amazing things. No one knows if his decision will be about the quality of work or about the money involved. Google has some amazing times ahead of them, so hopefully Pachai realizes that and decides to stick around.

Source: SiliconANGLE (Via: Android Authority)

Image: Android Headlines

The post Microsoft eyeing Sundar Pichai as next CEO appeared first on AndroidGuys.

The post Microsoft eyeing Sundar Pichai as next CEO appeared first on AIVAnet.

When Quentin Tarantino found out that copies of the script of his new movie ‘The Hateful Eight’ were circulating online, he decided to cancel the movie.

Then, on Monday after Gawker published links to copies of the 146-page screenplay, things took a turn for the worse. The filmmaker was outraged by Gawker’s move and filed a lawsuit claiming that the blog was facilitating copyright infringement.

“Their headline boasts ‘Here Is the Leaked Quentin Tarantino Hateful Eight Script’ – ‘Here,’ not someplace else, but ‘Here’ on the Gawker website,” the complaint states.

“The article then contains multiple direct links for downloading the entire screenplay through a conveniently anonymous URL by simply clicking button links on the Gawker page, and brazenly encourages Gawker visitors to read the Screenplay illegally with the invitation to ‘Enjoy!’ it.”

In addition to filing a lawsuit, Tarantino also took steps to remove links to numerous copies and references to the leaked script from Google.

Several DMCA notices were sent to Google on behalf of the director, targeting the Gawker article as well as several other forum posts and news articles. Tarantino claims that the URLs in question are infringing on his copyrights, but Google sees things differently.

Of the 29 URLs Tarantino wants to have removed, Google took action for only a handful. The links that were disabled include copies of the leaked script on torrent sites and the file-hosting site Anonfiles.

The news articles, blog posts and forum threads, however, remained online.

The Gawker article Tarantino sued over, for example, is still listed in the search results. Google’s Transparency Report also points out that “no action” was taken to remove the URL in question.

Google’s “no action” in response to Tarantino

TF asked Google to explain why the Gawker page hasn’t been removed, but we have yet to hear back from them. It is worth pointing out that the copies of the screenplay that are linked from article have since been removed from Scribd and Anonfiles, so the article isn’t “infringing” anymore.

That said, Google also refused to remove links to other articles, which still have excerpts and screenshots of the leaked Hateful Eight script.

It is safe to say that the search engine is clearly taking a stand here, perhaps in part to protect their own interests. If the case against Gawker goes ahead, it is likely that Google will get involved to prevent a damaging precedent.

After all, the search engine is linking to millions of infringing files itself. Unlike Gawker, Google’s links are added to the search engine automatically, but a ruling on the issue is likely to have a broader effect.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

Microsoft still hasn’t announced who will succeed Steve Ballmer as CEO, but Bloomberg News is reporting that the company is on the verge of naming a replacement. Satya Nadella, the current enterprise chief, will reportedly take over the chief executive job; additionally, Microsoft is considering replacing Bill Gates as chairman, according to Bloomberg‘s sources.

If true, the report would end speculation that Microsoft was leaning toward a chief executive with more consumer-facing experience (ex-Nokia chief Stephen Elop and Ford CEO Alan Mulally were once said to be on the short list). Indeed, Nadella has spent his 22 years at Microsoft focused on the company’s core business customers: before taking over the company’s enterprise and cloud business, he ran the servers and tools unit and was vice president of the Microsoft Business Division. While it might be fun to speculate what Microsoft’s future will be if it ends up being led by a seasoned enterprise vet, it’s probably still worth waiting for an official announcement: Bloomberg adds that although Microsoft is preparing to name Nadella as CEO, “the plans aren’t finished.”

Image credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Filed under: Microsoft

Comments

Source: Bloomberg

The post Microsoft will reportedly name enterprise chief Satya Nadella as CEO appeared first on AIVAnet.

"I love you" might be one of the most important combinations of three words in the English language. It's the signal that a romantic relationship is serious, an indication of closeness for a sibling, parent, or child, and a constant refrain for pop songs.

In Mandarin, "I love you" translates as “我爱你” (Wo ai ni), but the way it's used in China might be a little different, and Chinese state media is wondering why.

The Global Times reports that two online videos showing children telling their parents "I love you" have gone viral in China. The first, filmed by an Anhui TV station, shows a number of college students telling their parents they love them. The response are mixed. "Are you drunk?" asked one parent. In another similar video, shot by a Shanxi TV station, a father responded even more bluntly — "I am going to a meeting, so cut the crap."

Even the positive reactions make it clear that the words are expressed rarely: "I am so happy you called to say that, it is the happiest thing that happened to me in 2014," one parent answered.

Why don't Chinese families use those words? Theories revolve around the nature of Confucian teaching, or the remnants of 20th Century Communism. "The parents' responses show that many Chinese are not good at expressing positive emotions," Xia Xueluan, a Sociologist from Peking University, told the Global Times. "They are used to educating children with negative language."

This isn't the first time that China has done some soul-searching about familial love — last year China Daily asked a cross-section of people if they said 'I love you' to their parents, spouses, and children. "I have never said 'I love you' to my family, and I don't think I will in the future," one 56-year-old told the paper. "Saying it aloud is embarrassing for me."

Still, that doesn't mean that love can't be expressed. In a separate article, China Daily spoke to Zhao Mengmeng, a 31-year-old woman who said she had never told her father she loved him face-to-face ("I find it a bit odd"). Sometimes actions speak louder than words, however — Zhao gave her father, a single parent, a photo album featuring photographs of them together on almost every one of her birthdays in June 2012. The pictures went viral online, being forwarded hundreds of thousands of times on Weibo.

"I didn't sleep the night I heard about it," her father told China Daily after the story attracted mainstream attention. "I have now memorized some of the comments on the collection of pictures."

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DEN HAAG - Defensie doet onderzoek naar mogelijke geluidsproblemen voor piloten van de nieuwe NH-90 helikopter. Aanleiding zijn klachten van bemanningsleden over ruis of pieptonen in het gehoor nadat ze hadden gevlogen. Bij een van hen is recentelijk bij een medische keuring een "dip in het gehoor'' vastgesteld.

We’ve just signed an agreement to sell Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. As this is an important move for Android users everywhere, I wanted to explain why in detail.

We acquired Motorola in 2012 to help supercharge the Android ecosystem by creating a stronger patent portfolio for Google and great smartphones for users. Over the past 19 months, Dennis Woodside and the Motorola team have done a tremendous job reinventing the company. They’ve focused on building a smaller number of great (and great value) smartphones that consumers love. Both the Moto G and the Moto X are doing really well, and I’m very excited about the smartphone lineup for 2014. And on the intellectual property side, Motorola’s patents have helped create a level playing field, which is good news for all Android’s users and partners.

But the smartphone market is super competitive, and to thrive it helps to be all-in when it comes to making mobile devices. It’s why we believe that Motorola will be better served by Lenovo—which has a rapidly growing smartphone business and is the largest (and fastest-growing) PC manufacturer in the world. This move will enable Google to devote our energy to driving innovation across the Android ecosystem, for the benefit of smartphone users everywhere. As a side note, this does not signal a larger shift for our other hardware efforts. The dynamics and maturity of the wearable and home markets, for example, are very different from that of the mobile industry. We’re excited by the opportunities to build amazing new products for users within these emerging ecosystems.

Lenovo has the expertise and track record to scale Motorola into a major player within the Android ecosystem. They have a lot of experience in hardware, and they have global reach. In addition, Lenovo intends to keep Motorola’s distinct brand identity—just as they did when they acquired ThinkPad from IBM in 2005. Google will retain the vast majority of Motorola’s patents, which we will continue to use to defend the entire Android ecosystem.

The deal has yet to be approved in the U.S. or China, and this usually takes time. So until then, it’s business as usual. I’m phenomenally impressed with everything the Motorola team has achieved and confident that with Lenovo as a partner, Motorola will build more and more great products for people everywhere.

Posted by Larry Page, CEO

In alle grote steden wordt in drukke winkelstraten via wifi en bluetooth gemeten hoeveel publiek er komt. Winkeliers gebruiken de informatie om te kijken hoe ze meer mensen in hun zaak kunnen krijgen. Dat heeft het bedrijf Citytraffic gezegd dat de metingen verricht.

Volgens het Amsterdamse bedrijf wordt het winkelend publiek in alle steden met meer dan 100.000 inwoners geteld en alleen in drukke winkelstraten zoals de Kalverstraat in Amsterdam.

Tellen

Citytraffic benadrukt dat de metingen via wifi en bluetooth niet in strijd zijn met de wet. "Apparaten zoals smartphones en bluetooth koptelefoons zenden altijd een signaal uit en dat wordt in de winkelstraat geregistreerd en geteld. Die signalen zijn niet gekoppeld aan een persoon."

Na bijvoorbeeld een week of een maand wordt de optelsom doorgegeven aan de winkelier die op basis daarvan conclusies kan trekken. Dat gebeurt al jaren, zegt Citytraffic.

Volgens het bedrijf gebruiken ook overheden en bouwkundigen de diensten, om hun beleid aan te passen of bouwkundige plannen te veranderen.

Wifi

Bijna een week geleden werd bekend dat Dixons, Mycom en iCentre het zogeheten wifi-tracking gebruiken om te weten te komen hoeveel klanten er binnen zijn en bij welke schappen ze stilstaan. Toen werd duidelijk dat steeds meer winkeliers het volgsysteem willen gebruiken.

Het College Bescherming Persoonsgegevens vroeg zich af of dat wel toelaatbaar is. Veel mensen reageerden verontwaardigd toen ze voor het eerst hoorden dat ze via wifi en bluetooth werden gevolgd.

A WhiteHouse.gov petition demanding that pop star Justin Bieber be deported has somehow managed to cross 100,000 signatures. That's the threshold required to earn an official response from the Obama administration. "We the people of the United States feel that we are being wrongly represented in the world of pop culture," reads the petition, which was created immediately after Bieber's recent run-in with the law. "We would like to see the dangerous, reckless, destructive, and drug abusing, Justin Bieber deported and his green card revoked."

Bieber, originally from Canada, was recently arrested in Miami for driving with an expired license, driving under the influence, and resisting arrest. (The former two charges have since been...

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Nowhere is the power of nature more starkly evident than in the wide gouge left in the mountain by a few enormous boulders in Italy.

Those boulders ended up colliding with a 300-year-old farmhouse on their way down the mountain, knocking the attached barn apart like matchsticks.

From The Daily Mail:

The property shown in the video is The Freisingerhof, which is owned by the Servite order of the Catholic church. No one was hurt in the landslide, which was reportedly caused by a rock tower in the cliff face dissolving. The area has been evacuated of residents, as geologists fear there is still the risk of further rock falls.

Philipp von Hohenbühel, who runs the estate, told South Tirol News that the slide had caused millions in damages.

One can easily see the path cut through the mountain by the approximately 4000 cubic meters of rock.

Closer up, with trees for scale. The slide was obviously gigantic.

Another huge boulder came up just short of destroying another wing of the house. Again, obvious that it had the size to demolish everything in its path.

 

Local geologists have cleared the area of people and say that around 600 cubic meters of rock is still liable to break free.

Here's the entire video of the wreckage, shot via drone:

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Bitcoin is experiencing its longest period of price stability in months, a trend that could help allay concerns that the digital currency is just too volatile to be of much mainstream use.

Starting in October, Bitcoin began experiencing almost violent price swings, driven largely by a run-up — and just as soon, a free fall — in Chinese demand. In December, the People's Bank of China banned financial firms entities from handling Bitcoin, severely restricting the ability of BTC China, the world's largest exchange, to operate.

The volatility charge has been cited even by retailers who now accept Bitcoin. Overstock.com, for instance, immediately converts its Bitcoin holdings into USD through Coinbase to avoid pricing risks.

"Until we can hedge through some kind of derivative instrument, we don't want to take that direct exposure," Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne told BI recently. 

But Bitcoin price charts show volatility has seriously deflated in January. And that's despite numerous negative opinions on the digital currency from Malaysia, Russia, and the world's largest Nordic foreign currency trader — and despite the arrest this week of a major Bitcoin player. 

Here's what prices have looked like on Mt. Gox this month. The price this morning was about $930.

The average Bitcoin price across all USD-traded exchanges is in fact $825. But the January stability can be seen here too.

This is all relative of course — Bitcoin still usually moves in increments of 1% to 2% today. And it would be foolish to predict how long this period will last. China could yet ban Bitcoin outright. There are also signs that the world's largest tech firms are inching toward implementing digital currencies into their retail units, which would cause prices to surge again.

But this month has provided evidence that there's nothing inherently unstable about Bitcoin.

SEE ALSO: Here's How New York Is Thinking About Regulating Bitcoin

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Apple stock was down 8% today following disappointing iPhone sales numbers for the final quarter of 2013. 

Even though Apple sold a record 51 million iPhones last quarter, the number was lower than Wall Street analysts were expecting. Most thought Apple would sell 55 or 56 million iPhones. Meanwhile, Carl Icahn tweeted today that he just bought another $500 million in Apple stock. That didn't help the price though. It's still down.

Here's a look at Apple's stock after the closing bell:

 

SEE ALSO: The iPhone 5C turned out to be a dud

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The Netherlands has been at the forefront of battling online piracy through the enforcement of banning orders on internet service providers, and now the country's also leading the way in admitting that the strategy is not as effective as had been hoped. As Tweakers reports, a court in The Hague has ruled that blocks on The Pirate Bay have proven ineffectual in curbing P2P traffic and permitted local ISPs XS4ALL and Ziggo to lift their ban on the file-sharing website. A spokesperson for XS4ALL has told Tweakers that the block has now been removed, though it will take some time for the DNS changes to propagate fully.

Today's judgment marks a successful appeal from the Dutch ISPs against a lower court ruling in 2012 instructing them to...

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The mobile port of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is now available on the Windows Phone Store for $6.99, according to an announcement on the TechNet blog.

As the port requires a device with a high memory capacity to run adequately, the game only currently supports Nokia Lumia (models 1520, 1320, 822, 820, 810) and the HTC 8XT smartphones. The game will add support for more smartphone models in the future. Additionally, at least 2.5GB of free storage space is necessary to download Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The mobile port was first released on iOS in mid-December, followed by a launch on Google Play for Android smartphones and the Amazon Appstore for Kindle devices earlier this month. The Android version supports controllers...

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Door NOS-techexpert Rachid Finge

De internetproviders Ziggo en XS4ALL hoeven de torrent-site The Pirate Bay niet langer te blokkeren. Dat heeft het gerechtshof in Den Haag bepaald. Volgens het hof is de blokkade niet effectief.

Ziggo, XS4ALL en andere internetproviders blokkeren The Pirate Bay sinds 2012, na een rechtszaak die was aangespannen door de stichting BREIN. Die stichting komt op voor auteurs, artiesten en producenten.

Uit onderzoek van TNO is gebleken dat het torrentverkeer onder klanten van XS4ALL sinds de blokkade van The Pirate Bay niet is afgenomen. Ook bleek dat het omzeilen van de blokkade gemakkelijk is, ook voor mensen met weinig kennis van computers.

Sony makes $18, AMD makes close to $100

Twenty-year-old Jay Machalani prefers Windows 8 over Macs or Linux, but has been frustrated by its quirks.

So he embarked on a three-month project to fix it.

"I love Windows 8 and it is my favorite OS to date, but that thing is filled with massive flaws," he wrote on his blog.

Many of the things he dislikes have been well documented by others: the two sides of Windows 8 don't talk to each other: the "desktop" mode (the side of Windows that looks like Windows 7 and runs Windows 7 apps) and "modern" mode (the touchscreen side of Windows 8). Plus, the touch commands are clunky, particularly when using a mouse, and so on.

Machalani fixed all of that and more in his redesign. He published the details of the project on his blog, first spied by Tom Warren The Verge, who notes:

Recent reports suggest Microsoft is planning to bring back the Start menu, along with improvements to its traditional desktop mode to allow new Windows 8-style applications to “float” and run in separate windows. Machalani’s concepts — which were completed long before the recent rumors — imagine how that might work in reality.

Machalani created this short video to show off his concept of a fixed Windows 8:

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