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Clear your schedule and charge up your Android device – there is another classic Final Fantasy game out on Android. Final Fantasy VI has arrived in Google Play for the customary $15.99 asking price, but for that lofty sum you get the game you remember from 1994 with a few mobile enhancements.

The interface and controls have been tweaked to be more playable on a touchscreen, and the graphics have been carefully recreated to take advantage of the power of modern hardware without losing the classic style of Final Fantasy VI.

• [New Game] Square Enix Brings The Original Final Fantasy To Android
• [New Game] Square Enix's Final Fantasy IV Available On The Play Store, With Full 3D Graphics And The Usual High Price
• Square Enix Releases Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy Dimensions, And Demon's Score THD On The Play Store
• [New Game] Square Enix Ports Final Fantasy IV: After Years To Android, 22 Years After The Original

[New Game] Square Enix Releases Final Fantasy VI On Android was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Preorders for joint venture between Geeksphone and Silent Circle to begin at Mobile World Congress

Coming next month at Mobile World Congress, we should get a look at the "Blackphone," a joint venture between Geeksphone (you know them as being an early CyanogenMod supporter) and Silent Circle. BlackPhone aims to give a traditional Android experience that "prioritizes the user's privacy and control, without any hooks to carriers or vendors."

Specific details are slim at this point, but Blackphone promises "revolutionary communications" with secure phone calls and texts, file sharing and video chat. 

It's calling its version of Android (and we don't yet know the base platform) "PrivatOS" and is headed up by Phil Zimmermann, who created the PGP standard of encryption widely used in e-mail. Other co-founding execs include Geeksphone's Javier Aguera and Rodrigo Wilva-Ramos, PGP's Jon Callas and ex-Navy SEAL and founder and fomer CEO of SOC Mike Janke.

More: Blackphone

Google announced today that you can now star individual contacts in your Google Contacts list, just like you star important emails. Seems like an easy way to quickly identify and find the people who you message the most.

Contacts you star will be put in a new "Starred" group. If you're using Android, contacts you star on the desktop will sync with your Android Favorites group.

This feature is still rolling out, so you might not see it just yet. When it does, though, marking a contact as a VIP will be as easy as starring them in your contacts list.

A seamless experience for your Google Contacts | Google+

Don't worry, American consumers: the death of net neutrality is no big deal and it won't harm your online experience at all. That's the takeaway from the various responses U.S. Internet service providers offered up to the public following Tuesday's U.S. appeals court ruling that killed net neutrality rules. Some believe the ruling will ultimately lead to the destruction of the Internet as we know it today, giving service providers free rein to squeeze money out of companies looking to give their services an edge by allotting them additional bandwidth that standard service will not enjoy. But according to companies such as Comcast and Verizon, that won't be the case at all.

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The LA Times points out something worth repeating: net neutrality was really killed back in 2002, when the FCC Chairman Michael Powell reclassified cable modem services as "information services" rather than "telecommunications services." This effectively moved Internet service providers beyond FCC regulation and led to Tuesday's controversial decision. It created a time bomb that was bound to explode sooner or later. And now it has. Net neutrality is dead and soon ISPs will start deciding what services they will allow to run fast and what they opt to slow down — and how much sites might have to pay to move from the latter category to the former.

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It doesn't seem likely that Microsoft plans to give up on Bing anytime soon, but that doesn't mean its customers are following suit. According to a tweet from Kantar Worldreport, Windows Phone users only resorted to searching with the default engine 52% of the time in Q4 2013. The rest are "actively avoiding the integrated Bing Phone search" and instead opening their browsers to search with Google. Bing might not be a dead platform, but when users are willing to expend more energy to use another service that provides similar results, it might be time to rethink your strategy. Kantar also claims that users are "quickly switching" to Google, so before long a majority of Windows Phone users will have deserted Bing.

Google today is officially announcing the release of a data compression feature for its Chrome mobile web browser which allows you to reduce your data usage on smartphones and tablets, potentially saving you money on your monthly cell phone bill or data plan. The feature is one of several new additions coming to Chrome’s mobile browser, which also sees the inclusion of Google Translate on iOS, support for Application shortcuts for favorite websites on Android, and other fixes.

The data compression feature, however, is the highlight of this forthcoming release. When enabled, it will also include Chrome’s Safe Browsing technology to protect against malicious webpages. Google says the feature will roll out via app updates on the iTunes App Store and Google Play Store over the next few days.

You may recall that Google first began testing the then-experimental data compression feature on Android last March through the Chrome Beta for Android application, and then later expanded those tests to iOS in the fall.

The optional feature, essentially a Google proxy, routes web requests through Google’s servers where the company’s PageSpeed libraries compress and optimize the content. Meanwhile, the actual connection between the browser and Google’s servers is handled by the SPDY protocol for further optimization.

Whether you’re interested in the backend technologies or not, the savings Google claims to achieve through this configuration are notable. When switched on, Chrome’s data compression and bandwidth management feature can reduce data usage by up to 50%, Google says, on both Chrome for Android and Chrome for iOS. As noted earlier, even just using the PageSpeed libraries to transcode images to Google’s WebP format instead of JPEG or PNG makes a big difference, because 60% of all transferred bytes on the average webpage are images.

Mobile data compression is not a new idea, of course – for instance, Opera’s Turbo mode for its mobile browser offers a similar capability, as does Amazon Silk. Meanwhile, Google rival Facebook acquired Onavo this October, a mobile data analytics company offering consumer-facing apps (Onavo Extend) that help users optimize their devices to get more out of their data plans. In other words, Google is not alone in releasing the pressing need for users to get more out of their data plans, without being smacked with high usage bills. And keeping consumers online longer is Google’s overarching objective here.

Chrome Data Compression & Privacy

One thing to be aware of is that by turning this feature on – which is done by visiting “Settings” > “Bandwidth management” > “Reduce data usage” in the application – you’re agreeing to route all your HTTP traffic through Google’s proxy servers. (The feature is disabled for HTTPS and “Incognito” mode traffic, though).

This is concerning for some users, now more sensitive to potential privacy issues. But Google has said previously that while requests are logged, headers and cookies are stripped out, and the webpage content is cached, but not logged. Most importantly, Google says the logs are not associated with your Google account and the entire log entry is removed within six months. These details were noted in a Chrome privacy whitepaper last updated in November. Still, when the feature goes live, it will be worth keeping an eye on potential privacy policies changes…just in case.

Other Additions

The updated apps bring a couple of other interesting additions, too. Another feature arriving on iOS is support for Google Translate in the browser – a feature which Android and desktop users already have access to. This allows you to translate a webpage into your device’s native language.

Meanwhile, Android users will be able to save favorite websites to their homescreen more easily, thanks to a Menu option “Add to homescreen.” Some websites will open up in full-screen mode after doing so, Google also notes in the blog post announcing this release.

To access any of the above options, you’ll need to download the Chrome app, or apply the update, if already installed.

Google today launched a plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs in public beta that makes adding AdSense ads to websites easier and makes verifying a site with Webmaster Tools a single-click process.

Given that WordPress now powers more than 20% of websites, it’s no surprise that Google has decided to take WordPress very seriously. Despite its legacy as a blogging platform, WordPress is mostly used as a content management system that, thanks to its extensibility, can cater to virtually every need.

While it seems like Google is planning to add more functionality to the plugin over time, the current version is still pretty limited. Besides the Webmaster Tools verification (which saves you the usual steps of copying and pasting code snippets into your WordPress templates), it only offers the ability to easily place ads on your site.

With so many WordPress websites on the market, the company clearly wants to make sure its main source of income is available on as many of these as possible. Given the wide variety of WordPress templates, however, chances are that this won’t work with every site. Google acknowledges as much and says that it is “still fine-tuning the plugin to make sure it works well on the many WordPress sites out there.”

To get started with this tool, all users have to open the plugin and then select if they want to see a preview of their site’s homepage, or of a single page or post. Google automatically places markers on the screen for spots where ads would fit and all a user has to do is select one of these spots to start service ads there.

The service currently supports four ad formats: automatic (which chooses the most appropriate size), horizontal banner (728×90), vertical banner (160×600) and rectangle (300×250).

How much should you pay for an ebook? $9.99? $0.99? $0? And how much should you price your ebooks? I’m going to tell you what people have actually paid for their ebooks, based on some hard data from Luzme. You can set the price of your book to be anything you want; what really matters is what someone will pay for it!

Last year, Luzme captured a large amount of ebook price data and reader pricing preferences. I am analysing this data and will share any interesting results.

I do not claim that this is representative of the whole ebook industry, but I hope that some real data might contribute something useful to the debate.

So here is my analysis of the actual prices that people have paid at Amazon in 2013, when they bought via Luzme.

USA

For the US data, I have normalised it against the “standard price” of $10.

Here is the way the various prices worked in terms of units sold.

The most popular price points are at the low-end, with a local peak around the $10 mark, and then tailing off as the price increases.

This does not surprise me. But what I did not expect, is how much people will actually pay for an ebook (well over the $10 price! How much do you think the most expensive one went for? I will tell you later…)

Now look at the revenue over the same price points.

See how the $9-10 range shows a spike of revenue? I suggest this validates the industry viewpoint that there is a good market for books priced around $10.

UK

The UK market is a completely different story. Here, I have normalised the data around the £6-7 range, which is roughly $10.

By far, the largest number of units sold is £1 or less (mostly 99p). And then it tails off as the price rises. There are hardly any sales over £5 (approx $7.50)

And the revenue tells the same story; £5 or less is where the sales are.

So why the great difference?

I can understand why there are markets for both low-price ebooks and $10 ones.

From talking to my users, they fall broadly into two categories. First there is the avid readers who buy many books each week; their watchlist is so long that they are happy to buy whichever is cheap today. Then there is the reader who has a particular book in mind; they do not buy very often but when they do, they are not price-sensitive, they just want the book straightaway.

But why the difference between the US and the UK?

In the UK, there is usually a fierce price war going on between Amazon and some new entrant; currently it is Sainsburys, previously it was Sony and Nook. But there is usually someone trying to buy market share by discounting the price. Previously we had the 20p offer from Sony, now 99p seems more common.

In the USA, the current tussle appears to be between the existing ebook stores and the new startups wanting to sell you a subscription model (aka “Netflix/Spotify for ebooks”)

In Summary

10 facts you may not know about 2013 ebook sale prices, as seen at Luzme:

In the USA:

1. In the USA, ebooks sell at all prices from $1 up to $10.
2. The most popular price range was $1-2.
3. The most revenue was earned between in the $9-10 price range.
4. Specialised ebooks sell at high prices, over $100.

In the UK:

5. It’s completely different!
6. Ebooks don’t sell well above £5.
7. The most popular price range was <= £1.
8. The most revenue was earned in the <= £1 price range.
9. There is less evidence of specialised ebooks selling at high prices.

And..

10. Someone thought an ebook was worth $134.84! “Digital Signal Processing in Power System Protection and Control”, to be precise…

Rachel Willmer is the founder of Luzme, a book comparison site. This is part of a series on crowdfunding and publishing, The Mytro Project. For future posts I’m looking for more input from online analysts and other crowdfunding platforms so please email me at john@techcrunch.com.

Yummly, a veteran of the recipe discovery space — founded back in 2009, and backed by Physic Ventures, Unilever Corporate Ventures and others to the tune of $7.85 million — is kicking off its first international expansion by launching into the U.K, describing the move as the “first step” in its plan to create a “globally accessible platform for recipes, food and taste”.

The food-finding service aggregates hundreds of thousands of recipes from around the web and lets users slice and dice that data in a variety of ways to find appropriate dishes.

In its home market of the U.S. Yummly has built up a monthly active user-base in excess of 15 million. That’s a sizeable increase on the four million monthly visitors it was reporting nearly two years ago, as of March 2012. But it’s clearly hoping to grow that further by expanding into new markets overseas.

In its first foreign foray, it’s launched a U.K. specific website, Yummly.co.uk, along with a locally flavoured iOS app.

Language similarities and the ease of converting measurements were factors that played a role in Yummly choosing the U.K. as its first international market, the company said in a release.

Its British localization efforts extend to including local recipe sources, imperial units of measure, and skewing recipe suggestions to better mesh with U.K. users’ (apparent) affinity for spicy foods and group dinners on weekends. (As a Brit, I can confirm our penchant for curries.)

It has also added new browse categories and tweaked its search filters to offer such culturally specific staples as “Sunday Lunch” and “Mexican”.

U.K. Yummly users can access more than one million unique and U.K.-specific recipes which can be filtered by nutrition, season and taste preference. Recipes are sourced from “top food sites”, “niche blogs”, and also from local food brands such as Knorr and Bertolli.

Yummly.co.uk is also being served U.K.-specific ads. While the company said it optimised its iOS app due to the U.K.’s high mobile penetration.

Along with Physic and Unilever Ventures, Yummly’s other existing backers include First Round Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, and Intel Capital. Its founding angel investors and advisory board include: Jeff Jordan (partner at Andreessen Horowitz), Bill Cobb (CEO, H&R Block), Justin LaFrance (StumbleUpon), Marcia Hooper and Brad O’Neill (CEO, TechValidate).

Facebook is currently putting the finishing touches on its own mobile news reader service and could launch the product by the end of January, according to a new report from Re/code. The social network's Flipboard competitor is reportedly called Paper — not to be confused with the popular iOS drawing app — and is finally nearing completion after "years" of work. (The Wall Street Journal broke news on the effort last year.) Re/code says it's currently unclear whether Paper will be a standalone app when it reaches Facebook's users; it may instead take the form of a web app optimized for mobile devices.

Much like Flipboard, Paper will reportedly display stories from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications in a...

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Google started dropping hints about its Chrome OS-like plans for Windows 8 back in October. At the time it was merely an experiment in the developer version of Chrome, but today Google is rolling out a new user interface to all Chrome Windows users alongside a noisy tabs tracking feature. The new "Metro" mode essentially converts Chrome for Windows 8 into Chrome OS. Just like Google's full Chrome OS, you can create multiple browser windows and arrange them using a snap to the left or right of the display or full-screen modes. There's even a shelf with Chrome, Gmail, Google, Docs, and YouTube icons that can be arranged at the bottom, left, or right of the screen.

An app launcher is also available in the lower left-hand corner, providing...

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You could spend a lot of time trying to prepare for every possible job interview question (and there are a ton), but most job interviews really boil down to just five things employers want to know about you.

The Undercover Recruiter says:

The reason you will always struggle to prepare answers to every single question you are asked in an interview is that the interviewer themselves didn't prepare them. They don't really care too much about all the answers you give either. What we do know is that an interviewer has one major objective to fulfill and that is to get the answers to the five basic questions. Based on the answers, he or she will then compare the answers to that of any other interviewer's and they will then rule you in or out.

The five questions are:

• What brings you to this interview? (Why you're looking for a new job and why you're interested in this company)
• What value will you add to our company? (How your skills will be directly applicable to the job)
• Can you work well with the team?
• What is special about you?
• What's your salary and when you can start?

The interviewer might not phrase the questions as such (they'll probably phrase them like this), but when you're preparing for your interview, make sure you've got examples to cover all of these bases.

The Only 5 Interview Questions You Need to Prepare For | The Undercover Recruiter via Donna Svei

Photo by bpsusf.

A sprawling, years-in-the-making project

Similar to the way Michael Apted has been chronicling real people as they grow up in his decades-long Up project, Richard Linklater has been experimenting with a multi-year fictional film in Boyhood. Now, after 12 years of work, he’s bringing it to Sundance.

Boyhood stars Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Lori Linklater and, most especially, Ellar Coltrane, who grows up before our eyes. Working from a script written by Linklater, the director and his cast and crew reconvened every year since 2002 (when Ellar was seven) to spend a few weeks shooting the story of a family anchored around Mason (Ellar) and his sister Samantha (Lori Linklater).

It’s not Linklater’s first time chronicling characters at different times of their lives: just last year we welcomed Before Midnight, the final third of his 20-odd year trilogy about Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Celine as they confronted the realities and challenges of married life.

Even Linklater wasn’t exactly sure what he’d get from the Boyhood experiment, but he’s clearly ready for the world to see it, because the film will premiere at the film festival on Sunday January 19.

New York-based startup Oyster just announced a new funding round, according to the New York Times. New investor Highland Capital Partners is leading the round, with existing investor Founders Fund also participating.

As a reminder, Oyster is an ulimited subscription service for ebooks. For $9.99 a month, you get access to hundreds of thousands of books on your iPhone or iPad — Android support should come soon.

When it comes to media startups, content deals are very important. For now, HarperCollins is on board, but the four other big publishers have yet to be convinced (Hachette, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster, and Penguin Random House). It’s a great service to read books from indie publishers Workman Publishing, Perseus and countless of others.

One of Oyster’s partner publishers, Smashwords, told its authors how Oyster actually structures its content deals. If a subscriber reads more than 10 percent of a book, the publisher gets 60 percent of the book’s retail list price.

These deals are very publisher-friendly, but also shows that the service counts on casual subscribers. If a reader reads more than, say, 3 or 4 books a month, Oyster won’t be able to cover the costs with the $9.99 subscription.

Oyster has integrated lightweight community features to keep existing users and differentiate itself from Amazon’s lending library, such as browsing what your friends are reading or are planning to read. The company also features titles every week.

The next important step for the company is probably to get more mainstream publishers on board. The product works — the app is well-designed and it’s a joy to browse the book library. Many publishers are convinced. Now, let’s see if signing major publishing houses is a difficult feat.

If Ford built a private toll highway that only allowed Mustangs, Americans would be outraged. Infrastructure is the bloodstream of an economy; if powerful established players controlled roads, telephone lines, and Internet cables, they could favor the highest bidder at the expense of the savvy entrepreneur, choking off the meritocracy that makes market economies so innovative.

This is precisely why many in the Internet community are up in arms that a U.S. circuit court threw out the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality law, which prevented internet service providers from choosing which websites to favor with faster connection speeds.

“Most of the great innovators in the history of the Internet started out in their garages with great ideas and little capital. This is no accident. Network neutrality protections minimized control by the network owners, maximized competition and invited outsiders in to innovate,” wrote Harvard Law Professor, Lawrence Lessig.

Verizon and litigants of the the FCC’s 2010 Open Internet Order argue that the First Amendment protects their right to decide how to treat content over the Internet lines they paid to distribute. According to Verizon’s own legal defense, The Open Internet order violates the “First Amendment by stripping them of control over the transmission of speech on their networks. And it takes network owners’ property without compensation.”

Verizon has a tempting argument that appeals to America’s love of Individualism: your property, your business. And, I would be standing at Verizon’s side waving an American flag disdainfully at consumer advocates if the telecommunications company had also paid for the billions in government research that discovered the principles of peer-to-peer computer networking.

Verizon stands on the shoulders of public engineering giants, such as Google’s Vint Cerf, who toiled in Defense Department laboratories to birth the rent-free free code that Internet providers happily borrow to run their networks.

As the original architects of the Internet recall, it is a libertarian fantasy that government employees and taxpayer dollars were not the genesis of the Internet.

Democracies have always granted special legal responsibilities to infrastructure. Indeed, Adam Smith, the philosophical godfather of capitalism said it best, arguing that the government has,

“a duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain because the profit would never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.

In other words, meritocracy must be a timeless principle, allowing the scrappy new entrepreneur every bit as much opportunity as the established players once had.

Net Neutrality, like all laws, is a complicated issue. Some providers would like to treat video hogs differently on networks with limited bandwidth. Airplane WiFi may need to limit Skype for the sanity of its passengers. The nuance of neutrality is a healthy debate to have.

But, Verizon should not fool anyone into thinking that the decision is theirs to make because they dug holes in the ground for Internet fiber. They did not build the Internet alone. They do not own it. We all do and it is our decision to democratically make.

[Image Credit: Flickr User woodleywonderworks]

Comments on YouTube have always been a mess to manage, but a new tool from the company hopes to make doing so a little easier. As of today, each user will have their very own Comments page where they can check pending comments, as well as thumbs-up, remove, and flag comments that come in on videos. The tool will be particularly helpful in the wake of YouTube's new comments system which moved comment notifications from the YouTube Inbox to the inconvenient Google+ notifications box. YouTube says that it will soon add new features like inline replying and the ability to expand all replies.

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The Google Drive team said today that it is rolling out an activity stream to help you monitor changes to your files and folders. A new ⓘ button that appears at the top right corner of the screen gives you access to the stream, which notes actions taken on files and folders in your Drive, and who took them. Edits, comments, new files, changed file names and more will all now appear inside the stream.

The idea is nothing new — Dropbox and Box have offered similar activity streams for quite some time — but it will likely be welcome news to anyone who collaborates using Drive.

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A new UK startup is giving P2P lending a go. Competing most directly with Zopa, and RateSetter, London-based Lending Works has opened for business this week, matching those that have savings to grow, with those that need to borrow money.

But its claimed unique selling point is the level of protection it gives to lenders. Whereas existing P2P lenders will dip into reserve funds to repay lenders if borrowers default, Lending Works insures against default and risk, at no extra cost to customers. Or so the pitch goes.

The company has also announced that it raised £3.5 million if funding prior to launch. The lead investor in the round is David Kyte, founder of the Kyte Group in 1985 and before that, one of the founder traders of London exchange, Liffe.

Other investors include Max Ashton, who runs a number of investment companies including Meridian Equity, Alex Rogers, and Keith Saldanha, head of investment marketing at Man Group. So a decent mix of backers from the financial and fintech worlds.

Lending Works says that personal loan borrowers are selected by the company’s team of “highly experienced underwriters” using advanced underwriting techniques and electronic credit scoring. Loan terms and lending periods are both one to five years.

However, it’s the startup’s level of lending protection — ‘Lending Works Shield’ — which it reckons sets it apart from others in the UK. It includes a reserve fund, borrower default insurance and fraud and cyber crime insurance. “For the very first time, people who wish to lend via the peer-to-peer model can do so with Lending Works in the confidence that their money is protected against borrower defaults and fraud”, says Lending Works.

The company is targeting a net return to lenders of approximately 5.1% AER when their money is lent for five years.

As for why Lending Works is entering what already looks like a well-served market, including companies that use a P2P model, it points out that in actual fact peer-to-peer lenders are capturing only 1% of the UK personal loan market, which by some accounts is estimated to be worth £25 billion.

Ka-ching.

Netflix's next original series is headed to 13th-century China. Premiering late this year, the new series is based on the explorer Marco Polo and is described as having elements of action, adventure, politics, and war. It's being created by John Fusco, the writer behind Hidalgo, and will have episodes directed by Dan Minahan, who has directed several Game of Thrones episodes, and directors Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg, whose 2012 film Kon-Tiki was nominated as best foreign language film at the following year's Oscars. The series — which is still unnamed — was originally planned for Starz, but Netflix picked it up after development there was ended.

"John Fusco and his team have created a timeless tale of power, adventure,...

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Any semblance of net neutrality in the United States is as good as dead. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Tuesday struck down the Federal Communications Commission's 2010 order that imposed network neutrality regulations on wireline broadband services. The ruling is a major victory for telecom and cable companies who have fought all net neutrality restrictions vociferously for years.

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The work at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on adding DRM to HTML5 is one of the most disturbing developments in the recent history of technology. The W3C's mailing lists have been full of controversy about this ever since the decision was announced.

Most recently, a thread in the restricted media list asked about the requirements for DRM from the studios -- who have pushed for DRM, largely through their partner Netflix -- and discoverd that these requirements are secret.

It's hard to overstate how weird this is.

Standardization is the process by which all the parties in a technical subject agree on how things should be done. It starts with a gathering of requirements -- literally, "What is the standard required to do?" Without these requirements, it's hard to see how standardization can take place. If you don't know what you're standardizing for, how can you standardize at all?

DRM, by its nature, has secret requirements. That's why attempts to standardize it always end up with unworkable garbage, like the DVB's CPCM. DRM relies on me installing software on your computer that stops you from running other software. For example, you install a browser that plays video in such a way that another program on your computer can't grab the video as the browser shows it on the screen.

This is silly. It's your computer. Whatever steps the browser takes to obscure how it is playing the video back can be unpicked by you, at your leisure, so you can make a tool that gets around it.

Standards are, by their nature, public: they say, "This is what you are expected to do." But if you make DRM's workings public ("here's how we hide the keys from you"), you provide a roadmap for defeating it. Standardized DRM is an oxymoron, like a secret law.

The ensuing Hacker News thread is well worth a read on this.

Re: Watermarking [Re: Campaign for position of chair and mandate to close this community group]

(Image: Shh--Daily Image 2011--April 2, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from tinfoilraccoon's photostream)

http://tvline.com/2014/01/13/bones-season-10-renewal/

FOX's Kevin Reilly at the TCA's today indicated that the David Boreanaz/Emily Deschanel series will most likely end next season.

The Dodo, a new animal-focused news site launching today, is Isabel Lerer’s initial foray into the viral news business that her father, Ken Lerer, is well-known for, having co-founded Huffington Post and serving as Chairman of BuzzFeed and Betaworks. The company is disclosing the Lerer investment today as well, with The Dodo having raised under $2 million in a seed round led by Lerer Ventures, the fund managed by father and son team Ken and Ben Lerer, the latter also co-founder at Thrillist.

Also participating in the round, which closed last fall but had not yet been announced, are Greycroft, RRE, Softbank Capital Technology Fund, Sterling Equities and Fred Harman (partner at Oak Investment Partners). 

The Lerers, incidentally, were the focus of a timely profile over the weekend by NY Mag, which referred to the family as “a little Mafia-esque,” referencing the way they had their hands in nearly every buzzy New York area startup. This also includes NowThis News, another news site making headlines this week, thanks to an NBCUniversal News Group investment.

As for The Dodo, the site’s launch is a real family affair: It’s co-founded by daughter Izzie, invested in by Lerer Ventures, and running atop RebelMouse, a newer content management system, which is also a Lerer investment.

“It’s the first site [RebelMouse has] powered from scratch, and they’ve been building it for the last four months,” says Ken Lerer, noting that future installations will be turned around more efficiently, eventually reaching the point of becoming turnkey. RebelMouse, for those unfamiliar, is a platform focused on customizability and deeper social integrations, including the ability to integrate “calls to action” with posts, which The Dodo plans to soon include.

The service also includes several of the same investors as The Dodo (besides the Lerers), it’s worth noting.

Isabel’s passion for animal rights led her to study the impact of animal and human interactions at Columbia University, where she’s wrapping up her Ph.D studies. And she convinced father Ken to give up eating meat, too. Asked how long that would last, Mr. Lerer laughed, “you haven’t met my daughter – it’s going to last forever.”

As for The Dodo’s news coverage, it certainly has its share of feel-good stories ripe for social sharing, but more of the articles have a pro-animal rights bias to them, not surprisingly. For example, the lead today references the documentary “Blackfish,” and details the aftermath of a SeaWorld animal trainer’s death. The headline’s question, “will SeaWorld sink?” leaves no doubt as to The Dodo’s agenda.  

Though any website touting its “animal-focused stories” would compete against, say, the entire Internet, the Lerer influence can be felt at The Dodo which currently features a contribution from Arianna Huffington (disclosure: AOL owns TechCrunch and Huffington Post), on its front page. The site is also being run by former Salon.com editor-in-chief Kerry Lauerman (CEO), and has attracted known names like Popular Science associate editor Dan Nosowitz, to join its team.

At launch, there are under a dozen writers working for the site, but no advertisers as of yet. While it’s easy enough to attract advertisers around fluffier animal stories (pun somewhat intended) designed to go viral (like on BuzzFeed), The Dodo will clearly take stronger positions on topics like hunting, animals used for entertainment purposes, wearing fur, keeping exotic or wild animals as pets, and more. The hope is to soften the blow of these stories with the lighter fare like “learning to love a hard-to-love dog,” or “pug and baby battle over cookie.” (Yep, “pug and baby” is doing well, in case you’re curious.)

The plains of Africa contain some of the world's most wondrous beasts. Unfortunately, many of them have been hunted to near-extinction by poachers, which is why a permit to shoot a single black rhino can fetch as much as $350,000.

Today, the San Francisco startup Airware announced the results of a successful field trial it ran at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, home to many endangered black and white rhino. Airware partnered with the conservancy to use specialized drones which can monitor huge swaths of land to protect rhinos against poachers.

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Comic creators Marvel took some of their biggest characters to the small screen for live action drama last year in Agents of SHIELD. Now arch-rival DC Comics is planning to do the same. Deadline reports that pilots for TV shows Constantine and Gotham have been greenlit at NBC and Fox respectively.

Both shows were first revealed last September. Gotham was expected to focus on the early life of Gotham City's police commissioner Gordon, but Fox chairman Kevin Reilly said yesterday that the show would also feature "all of the classic Batman villains," including Catwoman, the Riddler, and the Penguin. The program, described as "an operatic soap with a larger than life quality," is also set to tell the story of a young Bruce Wayne. A...

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Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.

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Bills Reminder Lite

Today's roundup is presented by Bills Reminder from HandyApps.

• Google Announces Carrier Billing For Movies, Music, Books, And Apps From The Play Store On Some Carriers
• Manilla Releases Android App, Makes Bill-Paying Easier Than It Should Be
• Weather Underground Is Now Available For Google TV, Makes You Forget The Weather Channel You've Already Forgotten
• 'Weather Live' Ends Amazon Appstore Exclusivity, Now Available In The Play Store

16 Best New Android Apps From The Last 2 Weeks (12/31/13 - 1/13/14) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Moto X coming to British customers in February for £380

Five months after the device was announced for the U.S., Motorola has today unveiled the Moto X for the UK ahead of a day of events in London. The European Moto X is the same device Americans have been using since the fall — a 4.7-inch display with a hand-friendly design and Motorola's X8 mobile computing system, combining a dual-core AP with silicon for contextual processing and always-on voice commands. The UK Moto X will run Android 4.4 KitKat out of the box, and come with all the software features we've seen on the U.S. model — such as active display, touchless control and trusted Bluetooth — only with support for UK 3G and 4G LTE networks.

Motorola says the device will go on sale from February 1, and will cost £380 outright. We won't be getting any Moto Maker facilities right now, so we're limited to the black and white versions. 16GB will be the standard model available, but a 32GB Moto X can be yours from the Motorola website when it goes on sale. 

Update: Following the London event, Motorola has confirmed again the February 1 launch date, applicable to the UK and also to France and Germany. So far, only one UK carrier partner has been announced, O2, and the Moto X will be available on contract from £25 per month. In addition to buying through O2 and Motorola direct, Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4U will also both be stocking the Moto X, with the white version initially being exclusive to Phones 4U. 

In addition, Motorola confirmed to us that the 32GB version will not in fact be available in the UK at this time. 

More: Moto X review

Source: Motorola

During an NPR interview, the NSA's outgoing deputy director John C Inglis -- the top civilian official in the NSA hierarchy -- admitted that the NSA's mass surveillance program had foiled a total of one terrorist plot (an attempt to wire some money to al-Shabaab in Somalia) in its entire history. But he doesn't want to get rid of his agency's program of spying on everything every American does, because it's an "insurance policy" in case someone tries the kind of terrorist attack that it might foil.

While Inglis conceded in his NPR interview that at most one terrorist attack might have been foiled by NSA’s bulk collection of all American phone data – a case in San Diego that involved a money transfer from four men to al-Shabaab in Somalia – he described it as an “insurance policy” against future acts of terrorism.

“I'm not going to give that insurance policy up, because it's a necessary component to cover a seam that I can't otherwise cover,” Inglis said.

NSA makes final push to retain most mass surveillance powers [Spencer Ackerman/The Guardian]

iOS: Remembering random tidbits of information like a new phone number, a dictionary definition, or a quote is tough for a lot of us. Eidetic is an app that makes remembering a little easier by repeatedly sending notifications at specific intervals.

Basically, all you need to do is pick something simple you want to remember like a phone number, date, fact, or whatever else, and then Eidetic will remind you to test yourself on that data. You can use Eidetic to drill just about any piece of information you want into your head, but it's the most helpful for short bits of info that you need to remember quickly. Eidetic is free to check out for one fact, but you'll need to upgrade to the Pro version for $1.99 if you want to test yourself on more things.

Eidetic (Free) | iTunes App Store via MacStories