Ebay

It’s a big night for the former tech chief executives Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina. California voters gave both Republican candidates victories in the state’s primary today.

Whitman, former CEO of eBay, beat state insurance commissioner Steve Poizner for the Republican nomination for California’s next governor. She will face off against Democratic victor Jerry Brown, who is current state attorney general. Whitman, a billionaire, spent about $71 million on the race, while Poizner, who had his own riches as a pioneer in GPS technology, spent $24.7 million.

Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, beat out former congressman Tom Campbell and Tea Party favorite Chuck DeVore to win the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate. Fiorina will now face off against incumbent Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer in the fall.

It proves that there is life after running a giant technology company. If they both win in the fall, it would be fair to say that Silicon Valley’s influence in political circles will hit a high point.

Brown already took a shot at Whitman, saying, ”It’s not enough for someone rich and restless to look in the mirror one morning and decide, ‘Hey, it’s time to be governor of California.’ ” If these women are successful, you can bet there are a lot of Silicon Valley CEOs who will consider politics as an option instead of early retirement.

[photo credit: CNN]

23andMe Mixes Up Customer DNA Data —

23andMe does relatively cheap analysis of your genetic information. Google had invested in the company before, and its co-founder Anne Wojcicki is married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who previously mentioned the company in his blog (“As a customer of 23andMe, I have always been excited about the product. I have found what pieces of DNA I share with various relatives ... I explored my various gene journals”). Now, the company mixed up customer samples, sending out the wrong information to 96 people, as they say.

This error meant that some people got back the wrong gender, for instance, an error easily spotted. But one customer reports of what the mix up meant for him:

Still upset I checked family inheritance and noticed my daughter shared with me, and then I checked my son’s. He was not a match for any of us. I checked his haplogroup’s and they were different from ours. I started screaming. A month before my son was born two local hospitals had baby switches. I panicked and I checked over and over. My kid’s were sitting at the computer because we all wanted to see the results. My son laughed but he looked upset. I called my sister in tears.

23andMe in a blog post says the mix-up was caused “by human error and the incorrect placement of a single 96-well plate used in processing samples." They company claims they are “adding new procedures to prevent this from happening again.”

[Via Spiegel.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: 23andMe Mixes Up Customer DNA Data | Comments]

[Advertisement] Books about Google available on Ebay

“On Monday, a federal court of appeals in Seattle will consider whether it is legal to resell ‘promo CDs’. You’ve seen them, the CDs mailed out for free by record labels to industry insiders, reviewers, and radio stations, each bearing the label ‘promotional use only, not for resale’,” writes the EFF in an article titled “Why Your Right To Sell Promo CDs Matters.”

The case sees Universal Music Group take on an eBay seller called “Roast Beast Music”. Roast Beast Music buys promo CDs at used record stores and sells them on eBay. In 2008 Roast Beast Music won its case but Universal, undeterred, appealed the decision.

Over the pond in the UK a similar question could be answered shortly.

Earlier this year TorrentFreak learned of raids quietly carried out against members of an Internet release group, a case that is still ongoing. In the course of our investigations into this event we stumbled across another release group whose sources for new material had suddenly and coincidentally dried up. It didn’t take long to work out that both groups somehow had a connection to the same supplier.

Our investigations then led us to look closer at an eBay account which had been offering, amongst other things, promo CDs. The individual behind the ‘popculture4sale’ account clearly had access to a huge number of them and had conducted many thousands of sales through the site.

Armed with the user names of both the seller and some of the buyers we started digging deeper and asking questions, and we were surprised at what we found.

In 2006 a row blew up on an online forum over some unreleased tracks being sold on eBay. Someone interested in finding out who was behind the sales obtained the seller’s address. That address was a perfect match for the contact address provided for ex-MTV executive James Hyman on his personal website.

Hyman began his career at MTV Europe in 1988 as Press Officer but later went on to become Senior Producer, Director and Programmer. His achievements there were impressive.

“From 1988 to 2000, Hyman steered MTV through the emerging UK dance music scene, from its inception (the acid house explosion) right through to its current global multi-million dollar culture. Hyman’s MTV shows featured over 500 in-depth interviews with all the major players, many unknown at time of interview: The Prodigy, Goldie, Moby, David Holmes, Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Paul Oakenfold, Aphex Twin etc,” reads information from Hyman’s personal website.

“Hyman, involved in all aspects of MTV’s playlist strategy & programme production was also responsible for producing, directing and editing over 250 pop videos, including clips for Fatboy Slim, New Order, Mike Oldfield, Moby, Prince & Michael Jackson,” it adds.

The row about promo sales played out on the NuSkoolBreaks forum. However, it seems that Hyman, who had left MTV at the time of the transactions and had joined London’s XFM as a DJ, took exception to having his real name, address and associated eBay account linked in public. Hyman went on to threaten the forum’s administrator with legal action, should he not take down the information. The multi-page thread in question was edited, but not enough to obscure who the discussion was about.

So here we are back in 2010 and it seems that despite the probability that Hyman obtained said promos 100% legitimately and probably had little or zero idea the music would turn up on the Internet, he appears to be in considerable trouble. A source close to Hyman confirmed to TorrentFreak that he became a suspect in the case several months ago and has been answering bail.

In the weeks prior to posting this article TorrentFreak contacted Hyman via his current company website twice and gave him an outline of what we know along with an opportunity to contribute and comment, but we have received no responses.

According to his site, Hyman has a personal media library which includes over one million magazines, in excess of 50,000 vinyl records and more than 50,000 CDs. That’s several lifetimes worth of viewing and listening. Clearing some of them out on eBay seems to make perfect sense – how much music can one person listen to?

But that said, this situation provides much food for thought. If someone legitimately and freely gives a another person an item, should they then be entitled to do with it as they please? With just about any other item on this planet that would be fine. With promo copies of music, it seems to be a different story.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Few will dispute Amazon’s role as current king of the e-commerce space, but this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference raised an interesting question: Did Amazon miss the boat on social commerce?

At the conference last week in New York, John Caplan, CEO, OpenSky; Rob Kalin, CEO, Etsy; Susan Lyne, CEO, Gilt Groupe and Dan Porter, CEO, OMGPOP sat down to discuss the idea of social commerce and where the marketplace is going in the future in terms of both monetization and socialization. All of the panelists seemed to agree that Amazon will continue to reign supreme in “commodity commerce” but will not be able to lead social commerce. Kalin stated, “I think Amazon is doing a good job monopolizing boring way of shopping.” Caplan agreed, saying that “Amazon will own commodity commerce. They won’t lead the way to relationship commerce and more and more people are craving relationships in shopping.”

These relationships have captured the attention of millions of paying customers, and in turn, the interest of marquee investors from around the globe. Groupon recently raised a massive round valuing the company at $1.35 billion. Meanwhile, Gilt Groupe is expected to triple revenues this year, and fellow flash sale site Vente-Privee itself is on target to €650m in turnover globally this year.

Other industry giants are thinking through ways to horizontally integrate into the social commerce space. eBay, for example, is aggressively targeting the flash sales market, having recently launched the Fashion Vault, a flash sales site that offers deep discounts on designer items.

Meanwhile Amazon’s interest in blending commerce with social dynamics seems flirtatious at best. It dipped its toes into the group- buying dynamics with a lightening deals feature, which allows a limited number of discounts in a given day for users. But the feature is hard to find, and Amazon doesn’t seem to be taking steps to make it more discoverable. Perhaps they are testing the viability of the product, but the industry is moving too fast to take an overly measured approach.

It was also rumored that Amazon was sniffing around Vente-Privee last Fall. Amazon, along with eBay and even Gilt, considered spending $1.5 billion to $4 billion in exchange for a rapid move into the space.

And while an acquisition may make perfect sense for a cash-rich company like Amazon (they have $5 billion in cash and securities), some will argue that they should continue to focus on scaling traditional online retail business. After all, revenue continues to rise as they continue to sell ridiculous numbers of Kindles, and other products. And the executive team hasn’t exactly been complacent, particularly with the recent $1.2 billion acquisition of Zappos.

And yet a dogged focus on “commodity commerce” may prove to be short-sighted. For over a decade, Amazon and eBay have enjoyed the fruits of a market that required a greater focus on scale than on innovation. But the rise of Groupon, Gilt, LivingSocial, Vente Privee and other social e-commerce sites have taught us an undeniable truth that customers are ready for something different. The question is whether Amazon will disrupt its own model in order to preserve its reign as the king.

Photo Credit/Flickr/Frialove

Disclosure: My husband is an employee of Groupon.

Filed under: Tesla

Diving into an extremely competitive and capital-intensive business in which customers generally don't appreciate having access to beta products is not a good way to enhance your personal fortune. In fact, if Elon Musk is being honest in the latest court filings related to his divorce proceedings, it looks like a great way to vaporize a fortune.

After selling Paypal to eBay in 2002, Musk and his partners netted $1.5 billion. An unknown portion of that went to Musk, who promptly turned around and invested several hundred million into not one, but three enterprises: Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity. Neither Tesla nor SpaceX are generating enough revenue yet to be self-sustaining. The last we heard from someone inside Tesla, the company was selling about 20-30 Roadsters a month for likely revenue of under $4 million, plus whatever it's getting from Daimler for Smart ED battery packs.

Apparently Musk isn't personally self-sustaining either, claiming that he has $200,000 per month in expenses and $8,255 in income, presumably from his CEO salaries at Tesla and SpaceX. Musk's filings also list only $650,000 in liquid assets. Given that disparity, it seems like there might be at least a bit of leeway to cut back a bit. At any rate, Musk claims that he has had to start taking personal loans from friends to make ends meet.

Needless to say, Musk's estranged wife Justine sees the family finances a bit differently, and the reality is likely somewhere in between. If Musk's financial position is, in fact, as strained as he says, he'll want to complete the Tesla IPO as soon as possible just so that he can cash out some of his position.

[Source: CNN Money, Forbes]

Tesla's Elon Musk says he's broke originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 30 May 2010 09:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Note: Full-res shots of the amazingness HERE and HERE. Remember Jesse Starr? The man who drew the incredible Bic pen-only portrait of Christopher Walken (not to mention yours truly riding a dinosaur battling a volcano)? Well he's back at it, this time with an Optimus Prime portrait created using nothing but black, red and blue Bics.

This auction is for an original ball-point pen drawn portrait of Optimus Prime. It was skillfully created with the use of black, blue and red Bic Ball Point Pens only. It is impossible to appreciate the stunning mastery of the drawing through a photograph, but it is guaranteed as a piece to be cherished by collectors of all degrees. Actual art is 12"x16.5" on white Vellum artist paper (not including frame) Beautifully displayed in a modern custom frame (included) Took approximately 50 hours to create

The piece is available on eBay now and a limited edition of $45 prints are also availab-- wait -- did that say it took 50 hours to create? Jesus, I've never completed anything that's taken that long (Twilight Princess only took me 40). Good lookin', Jesse. Seriously -- you're one handsome-ass devil. eBay Auction and Prints for Sale and Official Site (plus Facebook -- he's handsome, I wasn't lying)

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Tinypay.me

Quick Pitch: Tinypay.me is the easiest way to sell virtually anything and is the world’s first socially integrated e-commerce website.

Genius Idea: If you are thinking of putting an old watch up for auction on eBay or listing your latest T-shirt design on Etsy, you may want to check out Tinypay.me first.

Tinypay.me is an e-commerce service that enables users to create quick listings for their products or services. Simply fill out the name, price and a quick description of the good or service you’d like to sell, type in a few personal details and upload a picture. You can also opt to donate the proceeds of the sale to charity, and identify your product or service’s location on a map.You can then share your listing directly with your social networks or set up your own online store on your blog or website. The whole process can take less than a minute.

The service only asks for your name and your PayPal e-mail address; you don’t even need to set up an account or share any of your bank information. You can also sync your listing with Facebook, Twitter and Google Product Search to share your listings instantaneously.

While the service is great for selling your products and services quickly and easily, it lacks many of the benefits of e-commerce sites like eBay, Etsy and Amazon Marketplace. They are destination sites for buyers and drive most of the traffic to the listings of individual sellers via marketing and excellent search and recommendation engines. And although Tinypay.me allows visitors to leave comments on a product, it has yet to implement seller and product ratings.

In other words, if you want to succeed with Tinypay.me, you’re going to have to depend entirely on your website and social networks to advertise and sell your goods.

What do you think of Tinypay.me? Have you ever sold anything online? If so, what e-commerce service did you use?

Find out more about the service in the video below.

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Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

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BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

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Reviews: Facebook, PHP, Twitter, eBay

Tags: bizspark, e-commerce, tinypay.me

It's like an API festival here at Gluecon. I tweeted that this afternoon. But it's not just Gluecon, though - they're one of the hottest topics in discussions about cloud computing.

In his presentation today at Gluecon, John Musser of Programmable Web illustrated how hot APIs have become and how they've matured.

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Perhaps most illustrative is his "API Billionaire's Club."

Members of the club include Google and Facebook with 5 billion AP calls per day. Twitter has 3 billion per day. Ebay has 8 billion per month. NPR gets 1.1 billion calls per month for its API-delivered stories. Saleforce.com gets 50% of its traffic through its API.

According to Musser, it took eight years to get to 1,000 API's but just 18 months to get to 2,000. This year, the number of API's are double what they were last year on a month-per-month basis.

Internet/platform as a service API's are now number one. That's illustrative of the increased usage of services like Amazon S3 and all its competitors. Maps are the number three API, dropping from the number one spot last year. Social API's are number two.

REST API's are far surpassing SOAP.

There's a real energy here at Gluecon around the discussions about APIs. The room was packed for the presentations on the topic.

We'll pour more into the topic in later posts.

Discuss

[Update: Jimmy Wales wrote TechCrunch to say that Fox's claim of a "shakeup" is untrue. Wales also tweeted that a report of his resignation on Gizmodo is not true. "Fox News is off their rocker," he wrote. "They don't even bother to contact me before publishing nonsense. I've not resigned, nothing is in chaos."

He has not yet contacted me, nor has the Wikimedia Foundation returned my Sunday afternoon request for clarification on whether Wales has or has not given up the administrative rights listed in quotes in the second paragraph of my post below. That's paul@venturebeat.com, Mr Wales. I'll run your response unedited. For me, it all comes down to whether or not you're still going to edit conflicted Wikipedia pages yourself, like the time you stopped grudgeful editors from deleting Cyrus Farivar's page.]

[Update #2: For my sourcing, see this discussion page at Wikimedia:

"May 11: Jimbo asked for the rights of the founder flag to be limited. The flag no longer confers the ability to delete content, hide content, perform checkusers, or change group membership for users. It also no longer confers the ability to edit protected pages."

]

Fox News reports that Jimmy Wales, cofounder of do-it-yourself encyclopedia Wikipedia and a member of its board, has given up his administrative privileges on the site in response to a Wikipedia community backlash against his removal of thousands of images deemed pornographic by Fox last month.

Wales remains a board member of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation that runs the site. But he is, according to Fox, ”no longer able to delete files, remove administrators, assign projects or edit any content” on Wikipedia itself.

In April, Fox reported that Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger, who left the project in 2002, had sent a letter to the FBI specifying his concerns that at least two categories of  the Wikimedia Commons archive — one for pedophilia and another for Japanese lolicon comics — contained dozens of images of child sexual abuse, in violation of Federal law. Wikimedia Commons is used to host images and videos displayed on Wikipedia.

There’s currently no way to selectively filter the Wikimedia Commons content, Sanger told me in an email. To paraphrase Sanger, a school library whose Internet access filters allow children to use Wikipedia would also have to allow them access to images meant for only adults to see.

The scandal could resonate throughout Silicon Valley’s power structure, to which Wales has extensive ties. Google has donated to the Wikimedia Foundation foundation. Wales’s separate, for-profit wiki startup Wikia raised money from Bessemer Venture Partners and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network. He’s a member of the board of directors of community recommendations site Hunch. Hunch is backed by Khosla Ventures, whose founding partner, Vinod Khosla, has donated to the foundation along with his wife, Neeru Khosla, who serves as an advisor on educational issues to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Sanger’s worries seemed straightforward:

“I think a lot of teachers and education technologists responsible for the filters at public schools don’t realize how much and what level of pornography there is in the system. I’m quite sure that if they knew there were pages devoted to pedophilia, it might make them think twice about giving students unrestricted access in schools.”

Fox News claimed that Wikimedia officials did not respond to reporters’ requests for comment. That may have been a bad move. The brazenly conservative news agency went after the Wikimedia Foundation’s corporate sponsors, sending links to the controversial content to Microsoft, Google, Best Buy, the Ford Foundation, Yahoo, USA Networks and dozens of other companies and organizations.

Last week, a purge of thousands of Wikpedia images still left Fox with plenty of pictures to wave around.

Now, Fox claims, it turns out that Wales had unilaterally begun deleting images and recruiting other editors to assist him, against the wishes of other editors who felt the content was acceptable. Wales, whose personal page on Wikipedia speaks of “Doing The Right Thing,” allegedly began the purge himself despite opposition from many editors.

“We were about to be smeared in all media as hosting hardcore pornography and doing nothing about it,” he wrote on one of the Wikimedia Foundation’s mailing lists. “Now, the correct storyline is that we are cleaning up. I’m proud to have made sure that storyline broke the way it did, and I’m sorry I had to step on some toes to make it happen.”

But a result of other editors’ complaints, Wales has since relinquished his rights to edit the site.

Fox’s reporting is factually spotty — they assert that Wales is president of Wikimedia, when Wikimedia’s website identifies him as a mere board member — but the gist of the story hasn’t been refuted. (Let me spell this out: From long experience, we know that if we don’t acknowledge Fox has an agenda and made a few mistakes, other people will use those to discredit Fox’s entire story, which is both factual and newsworthy.)

Wales has a history of using his status at Wikipedia to resolve content disputes on the site, especially pages about people. In 2006, he stepped in to arbitrate the contents of a page about Fox News commentator Rachel Marsden.

Now, if he can’t make authoritative changes to settle controversies, it’s unclear if Wales still wields any real power over his creation.

Companies: Wikipedia

People: Jimmy Wales

With so many Chrome extensions to choose from, exploring the extensions gallery has been like a treasure hunt for me. Over the last few months, I've spent hours checking out new extensions and discovering cool ways to keep up with the latest news or find better deals online. I'd like to share with you some useful extensions that I came across in six easy-to-use pages for web development, blogging, shopping, sports, fun and Google applications.
Posted by Koh Kim, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Using the AppStore outside the US to shop for iPad apps is useless, especially when the iPad is not yet available internationally. But, with stats showing that only 35% of the iPads sold on eBay were for US customers, that begs the ultimate question: How are iPad owners outside the United States installing apps on their iPad when Apple restricts purchases from non-US credit cards on its American store.

If you own an iPad, you know the workaround by now: Create a fake US-based account and then pay using one of the alternative methods:

1. Ask a friend in the US to buy you a prepaid iTunes vouchers to add to your store credit.
2. Ask a friend in the US to buy you a prepaid American credit card that you can use.
3. Ask a friend in the US to gift you an App (and hopefully pay them back).
4. Use an online service that charges you an extra percentage to email you a code to an American iTunes voucher.
5. Just walk up to your dodgy local store and buy a US iTunes voucher!

Apart from the need to really have good friends who will accept to do this for you, I’ve personally seen vouchers being physically sold in stores in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and have heard of vouchers being sold all around the world.

So, back to the main question. Is Apple really unaware of the amount of fake American accounts that are being created on its store, or do they simply not care? It clearly seems to be to Apple’s advantage that people are buying more iPads than it could have sold in a short period of time, and certainly more apps from its store.

Why not introduce the apps globally so that people who haven’t figured out the workaround can just buy more apps?

Are they seriously unaware? They must track IP addresses of registrations. They must know where people are downloading the apps from. The RIAA wouldn’t care about what’s sold outside of the US as long as it’s not music related, so why not just launch the apps internationally and let us just buy more apps without paying a markup to the black market or owing our friends tons of favors?

Another great move by Apple. I’m not sure how they’re not confused, because I sure am!

Two weeks of travel, Ten iPad lessons —

A while back, I tried traveling on business with nothing but the help of three smart phones. I quickly ran into the headroom of those devices and, by the time I was home, I had a huge list of tasks I needed to deal with that could only be done on a computer. I wondered how I would have fared had I carried an iPad with me instead. So over the last two weeks, I’ve done just that, carried an iPad on my travels and left the laptop at home. Here are ten lessons of the iPad I learned from two weeks on the road with it.

1. Traveling with the iPad is liberating. The TSA does not require the iPad be removed from my bag and that makes going through security that much easier. In addition, shedding five pounds of travel weight is wonderful as well. Just those two factors help to make up for some of the shortcomings.

2. The iPad on-screen keyboard still works well for me, better than I might have expected, but it’s still not the best for typing anything of length. I solved this problem by adding a small, fold-up Bluetooth keyboard made by Think Outside. It paired perfectly with the iPad and works amazingly well for getting large amounts of texts. Sadly, this keyboard isn’t made anymore but I have seen several for sale on eBay. If you use an iPad for travel, it’s a must-have for maximum efficiency and portability.

3. iPad battery life is amazing. I have no problem getting across country, listening to music, reading books, watching videos or working and I still have plenty of battery life left. On average, I need to charge the device every other day on the road. That’s far better than any laptop. In the hotel, I have access to the ABC TV app as well as Netflix; as a work/play combination, the iPad works very well.

4. Apple’s iWork leaves much to be desired. Basic features such as word count don’t exist in Pages. Keynote often mangles complex PowerPoint and there’s no way to export to native Microsoft Office formats from Numbers or Keynote. I found that keeping presentations simple was key and Pages is suitable for banging out text but I’m waiting for QuickOffice to get their app on the iPad soon. Tomorrow would not be fast enough for me.

5. The iPads method for dealing with document management leaves much to be desired. Attempting to manage files from the increasingly ill named iTunes is a mess. Worse, there’s just flat file storage for iWork which makes it frustrating if you have more than a few documents. To get around this, I use SugarSync to access every file stored on any of my computers. If I need to work on a file, SugarSync allows me to mail it to myself, where once viewed I can work in iWork to edit or mail to someone else. It’s not perfect and keeping documents in sync takes more work than I’d prefer but it is workable for periods of about a week at a time.
6. The iPad’s screen has really nasty glare when viewed from the wrong angle. It’s easy enough to adjust but it makes it harder to use in certain places. Of course, the glossy screen on my MacBook has the same issue.

7. A case is a must. Not for durability. The iPad seems pretty solid and most stress tests show the glass is rock solid. Rather, a case is needed to get the iPad into a workable angle when using a desk or tray table. Without it, the curved back tends to wobble and looking down on the screen is good for a cramped neck after just a short time.

8. iPads attract attention. If you travel with one, get used to giving demos to those around you. It’s par for the course for early adopters. I expect that the novelty will wear off sometime by the start of fall.

9. I’ve had no issues with WiFi as others have reported but there’s times when WiFi just isn’t available. I’ve been using a MiFi for connectivity and it works well. If you’re only looking to connect the iPad, I’d recommend the 3G model given the attractive pricing being offered by Apple and ATT.

10. Downloading movies in hotel rooms can take forever, stock up on your content before you leave home.

Overall, I’ve been pleased with the experience and find that there’s enough functionality to make the iPad useful for not only content consumption but content creation. So why not just use a netbook? Easy, while netbooks offer much of the functionality I lack on the iPad, it comes at too high a price. Lower screen resolutions, slower than my laptop performance and cramped keyboards are too many tradeoffs for me. The instant on capabilities, fast performance combined with a full XGA screen make the iPad experience unique, not quite a laptop but certainly more than just a large iPod touch. For me, it’s now a valuable travel companion.

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Over at the Kickstarter blog, I interviewed R.U. Sirius about his project to create a collective memory project about Mondo 2000, culminating in a website, book, and possible film project directed by Mondo art director Bart Nagel.

Aside from the Kickstarter project, we also talked about the history of Mondo and its long-term impact, their rivalry with Wired, and the long-lost unpublished issue. He also reveals that Joi Ito bought the $750 reward to fictionally write yourself into Mondo's history, which is funny because Joi was actually on the masthead.

The full transcript is on the Kickstarter blog, or you can download it or listen below.

Back in 1999, my first job out of college was at Gettingit.com, a San Francisco-based webzine edited by R.U. Sirius. I was a total Mondo/Wired/bOING bOING fanboy in the early '90s, so the opportunity to go work with R.U. was incredibly exciting to me. In a disappointing turn, he was an incredibly nice and normal guy, instead of the hyperactive cyberhippy on mescaline that I was expecting.

I recommend reading Patrick Farley's The Guy I Almost Was, a classic webcomic that nicely characterizes my impressions of the early '90s cyberculture scene. (Patrick Farley just ran a successful Kickstarter project to revive Electric Sheep, and R.U. backed it.)

Random trivia: In July 1999, we tried to sell R.U.'s soul on eBay. Here's the image I made for the auction:

 

New research from Kaspersky Lab shows that the number of phishing attacks on social networks has increased in the first quarter of 2010, especially at Facebook, the fourth most popular online target.

The primary target is PayPal, the victim of more than half (52.2%) of all phishing attacks. eBay is the second most targeted organization at 13.3% and HSBC rounds out the top three with a 7.8% share. The report also revealed that links to phishing sites appear in 0.57% of all mail traffic.

Facebook’s presence on the top 10 list — it is the target of 5.7% of attacks — comes as no surprise given the string of widely publicized phishing attacks in recent months. Most recently, board member Jim Breyer saw his account compromised in a phishing attack that was perpetuated via a misleading Facebook event invitation.

What’s even more remarkable, however, is that Facebook is a more popular target than Google and the IRS. Google ranks fifth on the list of organizations, accounting for 3.1% of the phishing pie, while the IRS attracts 2.2% of attacks.

The full report looks at both phishing attacks and spam. There’s good news on the spam front, as the volume of spam has stabilized. “The saturation of the spam market has led to a halt in the growth of the volume of unwanted emails in mail traffic, having stabilized at around 85.2% in the first quarter of 2010,” the report said.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Antagain

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Tags: facebook, facebook phishing, phishing, stats

Got Game? Does Your Startup Need to Think About Game Mechanics? —

Offering incentives, goals, and prizes to users through game mechanics is hardly new. Most of us have long been accumulating points towards rewards with various frequent flyer plans, for example.

But perhaps due to the success of companies like Foursquare and Gowalla, it certainly does seem as though every new site, service, and application now includes some sort of game feature in order to encourage adoption and use. In a recent blog post, Mojopages CEO Jon Carder calls game mechanics "the new black" and argues that game mechanics will become more and more ubiquitous as companies realize that customers are drawn to sites that make interaction "fun, rewarding, and even addictive."

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So, will incorporating game mechanics into the design of a new product, service, or application become a requirement for startups?

Although game researchers and designers have more intricate definitions, when most people refer to game mechanics, they mean some sort of rule-based system for scoring, setting goals, and allocating rewards. Rewards and goals can include points or collectibles or bragging rights, but the idea of implementation is often the same -- games are a way to engage and excite users.

According to oneforty Operations Lead Sachin Agarwal, "When most people talk about game mechanics in web applications, they generally are talking about one of two things: karma (which rewards quality engagement, see eBay, Kongregate, or Reddit) and virality (which comes from incentivizing user-to-user referrals, see FarmVille or any other Zynga game).

Agarwal argues that good game mechanics can do four things for your service - four crucial things when trying to attract and retain new users:

1. Retention: Games provide a "hook" so that users want to return to a site to keep playing and to reach rewards.

2. Referral: Users want to be able to play the games with their friends and will invite others users to the site or service in order to do so.

3. Education: Game mechanics can incentivize new customers to complete their profiles and to learn how to use the service and rewards them for doing so.

4. Engagement: Game mechanics provide ways in which users can participate and interact with a site or service.

Agarwal argues that it is important to design your service and the game mechanics in parallel, so that badges and stickers and the like do not seem like an afterthought. However, it's worth noting that the time you spend developing the game mechanics is time not spent on the product itself.

And despite the popularity of game mechanics right now, it remains to be seen if these games are sufficient motivation to keep people "playing," or if, as Dave McClure suggests, the emphasis really needs to be on the reward, not on the "game" itself.

Discuss

Yahoo plans to spend $80 million on the next leg of its big ad campaign. If that sounds like a lot, that's because it is. It's almost double the amount Yahoo spent on advertising last year and 40 times what rival AOL spent on advertising in 2009.

WPP-owned Kantar Media provided us with data on tech companies' 2009 total ad spend across print, online, radio, tv, and outdoor. We also plotted the ad spend as a percentage of revenue to see which company gets the most from the least.

Yahoo spent $45 million on ads last year, second most among Internet companies. eBay's $89 million ad spend led the way, especially when shown as a percent of revenue. Of these companies, Google spent just $11 million on ads, which is the least as percent of revenue. (This makes sense, because Google rarely advertises on TV.)

Another interesting thing in the data: Apple spends half as much on ads as Microsoft, and appears to get more out them. This sort of surprised us, as it seems that iPhone ads are constantly on TV.

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See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: iPad Killed The Netbook Star
• CHART OF THE DAY: AT&T's Network Blows
• CHART OF THE DAY: Here's Why The Future Of Television Is More Television

Yahoo Japan And China’s Taobao Announce Cross-Border E-Commerce Tie-Up —

Big news from the Asian web world today. Yahoo Japan (Japan’s biggest website) and Taobao (China’s largest e-retailer) have agreed to launch a cross-border initiative under which both services will link their online shopping services starting June 1. Through the tie-up, Yahoo Japan and Taobao merchants will be able to sell products to buyers in each other’s markets.

For that purpose, Yahoo Japan will launch a so-called China Mall in its shopping section, carrying about 50 million products from China (in Japanese language) right from the beginning. Taobao plans to initially offer about 8 million products from Japan-based merchants on “TaoJapan”, a Chinese-language section on Taobao’s homepage.

Sellers and buyers are said to notice not much of a difference, as they will continue to list products, handle sales and pay for purchases just like they used to and in their native languages (product information will most likely be machine translated).

Rumors about negotiations between Yahoo Japan and Taobao first came to light early last month, and both companies sure have the power to pull this off. Yahoo Japan Shopping is the country’s second biggest e-commerce platform, while Taobao’s 190 million registered users generated a transaction volume of a whopping $29 billion last year.

And both companies already have a close, albeit indirect, relationship. Yahoo Japan’s largest shareholder, telecom giant SoftBank, happens to own a 33% stake in Alibaba Group, Taobao’s parent company. Under the e-commerce tie-up, Alibaba subsidiaries in Japan and China are expected to manage functions like cross-border shipping, payment settlement, cloud computing services etc.

E-commerce players like Amazon or eBay should be looking closely at what was established in the world’s largest and third largest Internet market today. At the news conference announcing the Yahoo Japan-Taobao partnership in Tokyo, SoftBank President Masayoshi Son said the future marketplace will be visited by some 260 million people, which – according to him – will make it the world’s largest by potential customers.

And in January, China’s leading search engine company Baidu and Japan’s biggest e-commerce platform Rakuten announced plans to invest $50 million in a giant virtual shopping mall that is scheduled to go live later this year. Expect a lot more cross-border activity in Asia’s e-commerce sector in the near future.

The iPad won't be available abroad until late May, but the British, Russians and Arabs are already scooping them up.

When we last left our hero, he had come to a settlement with eBay and the nation of Canada. We pick up the story one week later.

The instructions I received from eBay were pretty clear. The buyer was going to send the comics back to me within the week. He would also get a tracking confirmation on the package and upload that number to the eBay case file. The reason for this was so that eBay could track the package and verify when it was delivered to me. Then and only then would eBay (not me) process a refund to the buyer. Then they’d bill me and all would be said and done. Seems simple, right? I go on with my life and re-list the comics. This guy does whatever he does being a comic book nerd and all is right in the world.

Apparently not. On Wednesday (4 days into the week the buyer had to send me the comics), I get a message from said buyer. He says that eBay has told him to send the comics back with a tracking number but he’s not sending anything until he gets his full refund plus the amount for the return shipping. While I can understand where he’s coming from, that’s not what eBay (the governing body here) has instructed. I thought about not responding to this message at all, thinking that if I don’t respond, I’ll just wait out the clock and be done with this. I’m not that kind of guy though and I wanted to show that I was still being responsive and supportive throughout the process.

I responded to the buyer explaining that according to everything I received from eBay, the refund won’t be processed until the items are received. That’s why they asked for the tracking confirmation. I also pointed out that I’m not actually going to be processing the refund. eBay will be doing that. Then they bill me for it.

That was on Wednesday. I have yet to hear another peep from the buyer. I woke up this morning to find an email from eBay.

This case was automatically closed on May 07, 2010. The buyer was required to submit information regarding this case, but we didn’t hear back. The item won’t be returned to you, and the buyer won’t be issued a refund.

It seems the buyer didn’t do what was asked of him from eBay. He dropped the ball and now the whole thing is over. Although I’m sure it’s not over in the buyer’s eyes. I’m waiting to see if he’ll either send the comics anyway, expecting the refund or send me another nasty message making demands. He can do whatever he likes, but according to both me and eBay, this transaction is closed. I did everything by the book. Take that, Canada.