Beshr Kayali

Python 2.7.5 has been released.

You can only name new species after the discoverer of the species so many times before it gets boring. The University of British Columbia (UBC) must’ve realized this notion, and when they discovered…

Recently, Bitcoin has surged back into the forefront of the news cycle, due in large part to the value of a single BTC rising to never-before-reached heights. As of just one week ago,…

iOS is one of the most popular ways to use the Facebook app on mobile devices. Facebook sharing is also integrated into iOS and OS X. Apple and Facebook have a good thing going together. However, things may not be quite as cozy as they seem; the relationship could even be on the rocks if you read between the lines of what Mark Zuckerberg had to say on Thursday.

Thursday was Facebook’s big day: the rollout of Facebook Home, the first piece of the company’s attempt to be a primary interface for mobile devices. Notably, it’s a launcher for Android phones only. Still, Apple came up a fair amount during the discussion around the unveiling of Facebook’s latest mobile ambitions. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t say anything directly negative about Apple, the iPhone and their partnership, but the two seem to be drifting further apart philosophically.

Here’s what he said in two interviews published Thursday:

Zuckerberg may really want Facebook Home to be on the iPhone, but it’s likely never going to happen, and he knows it. Here’s how he avoided saying that in an interview with Fortune:

We’d love to offer this on iPhone, and we just can’t today, and we will work with Apple to do the best experience that we can within what they want, but I think that a lot of people who really like Facebook — and just judging from the numbers, people are spending a fifth of their time in phones on Facebook, that’s a lot of people. This could really tip things in that direction. We’ll have to see how it plays out.

He admits that philosophically the team down in Cupertino is pretty different than the hackers in Palo Alto. As he told Wired:

There are a bunch of companies that try to make every release perfect, and Apple is the best at that. That’s wonderful, but there’s another way of doing things that’s potentially even better over the long term—allow yourself room to experiment and don’t try to make each individual release as polished as possible.

While Google and Facebook are very much direct competitors, Facebook is actually far more similar to Google. From the same Wired interview:

We have a pretty good partnership with Apple, but they want to own the whole experience themselves. There aren’t a lot of bridges between us and Google, but we are aligned with their open philosophy.

Facebook and Apple are friends now but they haven’t always been. It’s pretty easy to see that if Facebook does try to morph this Android launcher into a version of a Facebook mobile operating system some day, it may find itself on a similar trajectory as Apple frenemy-in-chief, Google: once integral iOS partner to just another appmaker on the App Store.

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Wondering what Facebook plans to unveil at its April 4th event? Wonder no more, as the upcoming Facebook Home app has been prematurely outed thanks to a leaked system dump of the so-called…

April Fools' Day provides the springboard for companies to make some unbelievable announcements, but for Google and Microsoft, it serves as the perfect time to poke fun at eachothers' shortcomings. With Gmail Blue, Google is teasing Redmond over a product that doesn't officially exist yet, while Microsoft goes back to basics to poke fun at its rival's "vanilla" search engine.

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Seeing natural synergies with its bookselling business, Amazon on Thursday said it was buying recommendation site Goodreads.

“Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books and, with Kindle, Amazon has helped expand reading around the world,” Amazon VP Russ Grandinetti said in a statement. “Together we intend to build many new ways to delight readers and authors alike.”

Amazon didn’t disclose the terms of the deal, but said it should close in the second quarter. Goodreads will keep its San Francisco offices, Amazon said.

It’s not the first time Amazon has bought a social book site. Back in 2008, the company acquired Shelfari.

Sometimes, Google seems like a wanton withholder of things that are good and useful (see: Google Reader). Sometimes, the company seems to be chasing the competition (see: Google Shopping Express). But here’s something totally fanciful and weird that Google is devoting substantial resources to: A mobile augmented reality game called Ingress.

Since launching in November, Ingress has developed a passionate following that begs on Google+ for invites, trades intelligence on Reddit and meets to go on real-world quests together.

“It’s like the real-world socializing of Foursquare merged with World of Warcraft,” explained Ingress creator John Hanke in a recent interview.

John Hanke

Hanke and his team — an internal division of Google called Niantic Labs — clearly have a lot of very geeky fun. They’ve devised an alternate reality where players divide themselves into two teams and then work to connect together virtual portals situated on actual local landmarks. Hack a portal and connect it to two other ones, and your team gets control of the land area within that triangle.

Ingress players wander around with their Android phones running the app, making plays for portals and coordinating their attacks. They look for clues and codes from videos and other content put out by Niantic.

Hanke said Ingress was pitched to Google CEO Larry Page as “a bet to invent experiences for mobile devices today and the future.”

He said that — for the time being — Niantic’s efforts to explore the future of location-based gaming are exempt from efforts to focus the company.

Hanke explained, “With things like Android and Glass, all these technologies are sitting around Google. There’s a lot of latent capability. We’re like kids in a candy store.”

Thomas Hofmann/Google+ Ingress fan art

Ingress isn’t a success yet, though it has had promising growth. The app has been downloaded more than 500,000 times and players are evenly split between the U.S. and the rest of the world, said a Google spokeswoman. The team building the technology, gameplay and content consists of “a couple dozen people,” she said.

What Niantic Labs didn’t anticipate was the appetite that people would have to socialize with each other while playing Ingress, Hanke said.

Ingress players were going on “all-night playing binges together and finishing up with breakfast,” and working together on coordinated efforts for the competing “Enlightened” and “Resistance” teams to take control of very large portions of entire countries like Norway and Egypt. So the Googlers were inspired to dream up more ways to bring people together.

Niantic started by distributing physical clues that players could find on their own, like a puzzle that led to artwork left at Jim Morrison’s grave about the game’s backstory, with a clue that, once decrypted, unlocked extra tools and energy for the game.

More recently, Niantic drew 100 people to the monument to William Wallace in Scotland to play what Hanke described as a “complicated tactical game to enclose a portal in a field.” He said some players even showed up in Braveheart paint with Nexus 7 tablets to play.

Earlier this month, the game makers devised another multi-stage event that ended in Wisconsin, where hundreds of players came to battle and the Enlightened emerged victorious. The gameplay was explained to have generated enough energy for one of the fictional characters to teleport herself out of captivity and appear live in person at the event — literally bringing the virtual world to life.

So here’s where you might be thinking, hmm, Google is known for its strength at algorithms, its skill in convincing us to hand over increasing amounts of personal data and its ability to collect gazillions in revenue. It’s pretty bizarre to think of a team of game makers in Mountain View pulling the strings in something so delightfully and geekily fun.

Sure, this is a side project in the grand scheme of things — and perhaps Niantic will evolve into a larger platform for location-based gaming — but isn’t it a little odd that Google is staging these relatively small events and weaving this web of stories?

Yes. What’s perhaps more troubling is people hanging around portals at weird hours looking at their phone have been questioned by police, and a trio of players in South Africa said they were mugged at gunpoint for their phones.

“Knock on wood, there hasn’t been anything super serious that I’m aware of,” Hanke said.

Mike Wissinger/Google+ The Enlightened take control during a staged Ingress event in Wisconsin.

Since players do get so deeply involved in the game, Hanke’s team is actually working to make the world even more immersive. A couple weeks ago Niantic began enlisting users’ help to build out the world further by nominating new portals.

This week the team launched a weekly video show on YouTube that combines a fictional news anchor, in-game characters and real fan reports to try to combat the evil forces of the fictionalized version of Niantic Labs.

The “Ingress Report” news show is all very tongue-in-cheek — since the content obviously comes from Google — but it’s a fun concept to buy into, and it might make the game at least a little bit more accessible.

In the first installment (which is embedded above), anchor “Susanna Moyer” says as she invites fans to combat censorship by Niantic Labs, ”If you support an unbiased news source in the world of Ingress, share your reports with us.”

A fan named Alex Ander commented on the episode, “I love Ingress and everything, but I can’t deny this is one of the geekiest things I’ve ever seen.”

He added, “I don’t mean that in a bad way, I’m just saying … it’s really really geeky!”

It's been a long road for the Oculus Rift — the virtual reality headset's Kickstarter began back in August, and was supposed to ship by the end of the year. However, things were delayed till March of 2013, but the company just announced it has made it in under the gun: Oculus Rift developer kits started shipping out to buyers earlier this week. These shipments should cover those who backed the project on Kickstarter as well as those who have purchased the headset directly from the Oculus website. When we visited the Oculus headquarters a few weeks ago, we learned there were about 10,000 headsets ready to ship, but when we caught up with Oculus at the Game Developers Conference this week, we heard there were about 13,000 orders so far....

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The Internet is ever evolving. It is no longer just a series of pages that are linked together. It is no longer a place where we “surf the web.” It’s rich, dynamic, and engaging. Today, we’re using applications. The same applications that could be installed via CD-ROM on your desktop, are made available through your browser and mobile phone.

This shift in how we use the Internet has made me realize over the past few years that page views are becoming less relevant. The most innovative companies in the world have realized that building interactive and engaging experiences for their customers are going to make them more loyal. So why are some companies measuring views of a page?

Page views have long bamboozled people in and out of the tech industry. After all, advertisers just care about eyeballs right? What easier way to convince advertisers of those eyeballs and how often people come to your website than marketing the sheer number of page views you generate. If revenue is the ultimate key metric, then by comparison page views are the ultimate bullshit metric.

So what is the new, useful metric the industry can hang on to but is also characteristic of how companies are building their products? Engagement. It is the actions people take in these applications that are also far more relevant and specific to their businesses.

Just think about your email today. If you use Gmail, you don’t click on an email and wait for your browser to load a full new page. The email just immediately pops-up, right in front of you like you would expect. If you delete, archive, or star an email, it just happens and you move on. It feels like an application.

Facebook similarly feels this way when you’re looking at someone’s photos. When you’re trying to see the next photo, you don’t find yourself waiting 10-20 seconds for the next photo to load on a new page, it just loads immediately. Everybody wins: you get to see the next photo faster and Facebook gets to keep you more engaged.

Another great example is Pandora. Your experience on Pandora is essentially on a single page. You search, play, and skip songs from the same place without a new page loading. It feels like iTunes on your desktop.

Even media is beginning to be transformed from their historical page-to-page experience like on the New York Times' website. This is especially due to mobile. Flipboard has really made reading content more social and provided a unique way to scan or read that content faster than browsing a website. Apple has started to transform that with iBooks where you can buy or download magazines through their store. The ability to highlight sentences, share, and personalize content make these media experiences incredibly engaging compared to their flat page-to-page counterparts.

Surprisingly, enterprise companies are even becoming more app-like. Box, who is transforming how people share and access content from anywhere, has built iPhone and Android applications to make it even easier. Even their website feels more like an application than a website.

Even the Internet has moved beyond page views on desktop computers and into things like TVs, cars, and mobile phones where it’s not even possible to track anything but engagement! Take a page-to-page website like eBay, for example, and see how its business is being transformed by mobile as people list 100M items on their service items on their phone. Understanding how users engage is critical to learning how you can make the applications that reside in those mediums better.

Engagement has even become an important component in advertising. Facebook and Twitter are good examples of companies who make the ads feel like they’re a part of the experience by learning from how their customers engage with content. The more engagement these companies see, the more value advertisers can potentially receive. Slowly, but surely page views are becoming less relevant to marketers in charge of huge advertising budgets.

There are challenges in understanding and learning about engagement. Every product is different which means companies must track engagement specific to them. This can make it hard to directly compare two companies as they can measure engagement differently. Just look at Twitter and Facebook–two very dominate social communities with different engagement metrics. While we lose the ability to compare companies easily in the media, those companies gain the ability to focus on a specific metric that highly correlates to how their business is doing.

So how do you figure out what kinds of engagement you should measure? Applications are highly interactive and give customers many ways to engage with them. Picking the right set of engagement metrics for your company requires meaningful thought since you’ll eventually bet your company around them. But odds are you know the right engagement metric for your business.

Lastly, once you have figured out the right metrics, how do you know if you’re even doing well? Even if you measure how often someone comes back and engages with your application again, do you even meet the bar? As more companies adopt measuring engagement, businesses will become more comfortable sharing their baselines just as they do with page views today.

None of these challenges are insurmountable and as products move into this engagement era of the Internet, comparing, benchmarking, and standardizing a set of metrics for each type of company is going to get much easier over time. It’s going to be important to be more open and critical about the things we measure.

Page views may have made sense nearly a decade ago when the Internet first started. Today, it has evolved. Businesses that do not create engaging experiences for their customers will be disrupted by companies with better products. Advertisers who continue to cling on to ads that maximize impressions will find worse returns and fatigued mediums. It’s time to retire page views and measure engagement instead.

Dropbox, that fast-growing Silicon Valley company with a product that regular people actually pay money to use, has made another big hire. Rasmus Andersson joins the company’s design and engineering teams from Facebook, where he spent two years after being the chief designer at Spotify.

Ubuntu maker Canonical has signed a deal with the Chinese government to create a new version of Ubuntu. For China, this is widely seen as an attempt "to wean its IT sector off Western software in favour of more home-grown alternatives," the BBC reported.

In other words, it's an attempt to move from Windows to Linux. According to NetMarketshare statistics, Windows has 91.62 percent market share on the desktop in China, compared to 1.21 percent for Linux. The other 7.17 percent is OS X.

China is developing a new reference architecture for operating systems, based on Ubuntu. The Chinese version of Ubuntu—called Ubuntu Kylin—will be released next month in conjunction with Ubuntu's regular release cycle.

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In January, a French court ruled that Twitter must hand over the details of people who had tweeted racist and anti-semitic remarks, and set up a system that would alert the police to any further such posts as they happen. Twitter has ignored that ruling, and now the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF) is suing it for €38.5 million ($49.96 million) for its failure.

The case revolves around a hashtag—#unbonjuif ("a good Jew")—which became the third-most popular on the site in October 2012. The UEJF took Twitter to court, demanding that those who had tweeted anti-semitic remarks using the hashtag be named by Twitter so the police could prosecute them for hate speech.

Twitter refused, arguing it was based in the United States and thus protected by the First Amendment's freedom of speech guarantees. A Parisian circuit court ruled against the social network, giving it two weeks to comply or face a fine of up to €1,000 ($1,298) for each day it doesn't. The UEJF want considerably more than that, says its president, Jonathan Hayoun, because the site "is making itself an accomplice and offering a highway for racists and anti-Semites".

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To celebrate the birthday of one William Shatner, Hulu is running a pretty good promotion — every episode of every Star Trek season is available to stream over the service from now until the end of March. The original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise are all available on demand — nearly 700 episodes in all. This applies whether or not you're subscribed to Hulu Plus, though those who aren't will obviously be limited to watching these shows on their computers. Nonetheless, it's hard to argue with the price — if you want to overload on Star Trek prior to the May 17th release of Into Darkness, now's your chance.

Update: As has been pointed out on Twitter, Hulu doesn't currently offer Star Trek: The...

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Earlier today Apple took down its iForgot page after we reported that it was possible to reset a user password with nothing more than an email address and date of birth. Apple has now brought the site back online after fixing the problem. iMore first reported that the exploit, which involved manipulating a URL, was no longer active. We have been able to confirm this in our own testing.

Apple confirmed the problem earlier today and said it was working on a fix. However, even after the company took down the iForgot page it was still possible to access the page via other means. The only way for a user to protect themselves from the exploit was to activate Apple's two-step authentication. Unfortunately, some users found themselves stuck in...

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