Tech News Today 276

Tech News Today Episode 276

Tech News Today 276: Carlos Slim Is A Great Man

Hulu messes up Facebook, Google buying Hulu? Facebook's "Awesome" announcement scoops, and more.

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Sarah Lane (@sarahlane)
  • SarahLane.com
• Jason Howell (@raygun01)
  • JasonHowell.net
• Iyaz Akhtar
  • thisoldnerd.finitecomedy.com
• Justin Robert Young
  • weirdthings.com

Top Stories

• Hulu Gets Social With Facebook Connect
• Hulu halts Facebook Connect after exposing user data
• Hulu's Addition of Facebook Connect Causes Employee Data Breach [screenshots of being logged into a Hulu employee's account by accident]
• FB Connect has been live on Hulu for months
  • Hulu attempted to launch more social features using Facebook Connect today:
    • What was supposed to happen:
      • If you link you Hulu acct to FB, you get a free month of Hulu Plus, the free month promotion is sponsored by Bing
      • Large FB connect button under videos. If you sign in, it turns into a share button so you can share clips of shows (from even user selected points within the shows) with your comments.
    • What happened:
      • User data exposed, some people tried to login and got logged into Hulu as someone else
      • When people tried to link accounts, Hulu offered linking to other people's FB accounts.
      • Hulu discontinued FB Connect for now.

• Google in talks to buy Hulu: report
  • Google is in preliminary talks to buy Hulu says LA Times citing "people familiar with the situation"
  • Hulu has also talked with MS and Yahoo
  • Acc'g to Janney Capital Markets analyst Tony Wible, Hulu is valued at around $2B
  • Hulu has already re-upped deals with Walt Disney (ABC content) and News Corp (Fox content).
  • Comcast agreed to give up NBCUniversal’s management control in the venture to get approval for its acquisition of a majority stake in the media conglomerate. Comcast is required to provide programming to Hulu on the same terms as the other owners.

• Who Won The 6,000+ Nortel Patents? Apple, RIM, Microsoft — Everyone But Google
• Google loss in Nortel patent bids undermines Android, analyst says
• Is Google the Biggest Loser After Nortel Patent Auction?
  • Nortel's patents sold for $4.5B to a consortium
  • Consortium made up of Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, RIM and Sony
  • According to Reuters, RIM contributed $770 million to the effort while Ericsson is on the hook for $340 million when the deal closes, which is expected to be in the third quarter of this year.
  • More than 6000 patents, that cover wireless and networking related to 4G
  • Google is not a part of the consortium
  • Florian Mueller (IP analyst who blogs over at fosspatents.blogspot.com) was suprised Google didn't buy the patents.
  • Google is already involved in 45 patent infringement lawsuits related to Android
  • Mueller questioned Google's commitment to Android

Discussion Stories

• Zynga Finally Files for IPO to Raise $1 Billion
• The Zynga-Facebook Codependency Becomes More Clear
• Zynga's IPO filing shows utter dependence on Facebook
• Here’s the Zynga S-1 to Play With (Get It?!?
  • Farmville maker Zynga has has filed papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission in order to take the company public.
  • Zynga wants the cash for general corporate purposes, like making games
  • Portion of the proceeds are going to charitable causes through Zynga.org
  • Zynga's underwriters include: Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Barclay's Capital and Goldman Sachs
  • IPO will make Zynga the first publicly held co that makes its revenues from mostly the sale of virtual goods" "We generate substantially all of our revenue and players through the Facebook platform and expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Facebook and other platforms have broad discretion to change their platforms, terms of service and other policies with respect to us or other developers, and those changes may be unfavorable to us." - Zynga's Filing

• RIM investors pull proposal to split CEO role
• RIM Bows to Governance Critic
• RIM staves off shareholder revolt, forms ‘independent committee’ to examine executive structure
• More letters to RIM; employees rally alongside anonymous exec
  • Background: Northwest & Ethical Investments made a push for a policy that would divide the roles of chairman and CEO.
  • RIM announced that it has reached an agreement with the investors
    • 1. Northwest & Ethical Investments withdrew its proposal
    • 2. RIM agreed to set up an independent committee to look at the necessity of having a lead director on the board versus a chairman, whether co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie need to have "significant" board-of-director-level titles, and provide guidance on whether to continue with the jointly held CEO title.
  • Committee report is due on Jan 31, 2012, RIM’s board will have 30 days to respond to its report.
  • Sidenote: BGR received a bunch of letters from former and current RIM employees:
  • Some quotes from 2 other open letters BGR published:
    • "People around the office started referring to the office politics as 'Survivor: RIM edition.'" - From someone in the legal dept.
    • "Each one of us has been handcuffed by overdone, poorly planned and every more poorly executed process. It can take weeks of time to make small changes, and months to make major ones."

• Spotify, Facebook in talks on music service
• Facebook's mysterious "awesome" thing will be announced on July 6th
• Facebook Will Launch In-Browser Video Chat Next Week In Partnership With Skype
  • Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook will "launch something awesome" next week - it's got a date now of July 6th.
  • Greg Sandoval at Cnet says FB and Spotify have an agreement according to one of his sources
  • TechCrunch says that FB will launch in-browser video chat powered by Skype and will have a desktop component.
  • Whatever it is, Reuters says it took a FB's 40-person Seattle-based office to build it. And "awesome" might be for the mobile or tablet space.
  • MG Siegler says don't expect Project Spartan though, but adds that the Seattle office is trying to build a desktop software team. One of Siegler's sources says it's "highly unlikely" that the announcement next week is the iPad app.

News Fuse

• We mentioned previously the BitCoin crash at the MTGox exchange caused by hackers. It turns out that the attack consisted of counterfeiting bitcoins, which is not supposed to be possible. In fact it is still virtually impossible to forge a BitCoin but Mt. Gox did not use the public/private key setup when conducting transactions, thus allowing for "faked" coins that were worthless, to be traded.

• DigiTimes usually has slightly more reliable Apple rumours since they come from suppliers of materials to build Apple stuff. Taiwan-based companies included in the supply chain for iPhone 5 and iPad 3 have reportedly begun to prepare materials for the production of the two devices, which would have them make their debuts in September and hit the market in October.

• Professional editors feeling burned by Apple's decision to radically redesign Final Cut Pro, Adobe feels your pain. The company has announced a "Switching Program" where users of Final Cut Pro or Avid can get Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5 Production Premium or Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 at half price. The offer runs out on September 30th, 2011.

• With the Internet around, almost nothing you do is anonymous. That means you may be held responsible for things you do in public. Like rioting. The Guardian has an in-depth report on several websites and Facebook groups exposing the identities of those who rioted in Vancouver after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup. The targets are facing harassment and public shaming that some call Internet vigilantiism.

• Who doesn't love a good patent ruling. OK, we'll make this quick. The International Trade Commission did not impose any injunctions Thursday against Apple and RIM in a complaint filed by Eastman Kodak, sending the matter back to a lower court for review. It did, however, determine one question in Kodak’s favo. 1 out of 3 ain't bad Kodak!

• Make way for the HTC Eternity! A blog called HTCInside grabbed leaked specs of this Windows Phone 7 device that will run Mango. It has some of the usual specs like a single-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm processo and dual cameras. Oh, yeah -- It has a 4.7-inch screen! That is absolutely massive, but it will only have a resolution of 800 x 480.

• Arizona Police got hit again today. A file on Pastebin appears to be a master list of over 1,200 officer's usernames, passwords, and email addresses. Additionally eight Arizona FOP Web sites were defaced and hundreds of FOP documents and emails linked, some alleged to be racist or otherwise inflammatory in nature.

• A little shakeup in the photo world, Ricoh purchasing the Pentax brand and camera business from current owner and proprietor Hoya Corporation. Hoya will hang on to the rights to manufacture and develop products for the medical field, while Ricoh is gobbling up the Pentax Imaging Systems products with a view to expanding its presence in the consumer digital camera market.

• According Business Insider, the FTC is investigating Twitter's interactions with Ubermedia. Officially, neither Twitter nor the FTC has not commented on the investigation. The FTC normally investigates companies for anticompetitive practices. In the recent past, Twitter has blocked a number of Ubermedia apps for privacy issues and trademark infringement. Also, Ubermedia was rumored to buy TweetDeck, but Twitter wound up winning that bidding war.

Randomizer

• LAPD asks Gaga, Kardashian, Kutcher, to tweet traffic news

Calendar

• Robert Morris, man who helped develop Unix, dies at 78
• GSM turns 20 today, still rocking the world, United Airlines is 80 (and looks it), The Walkman turns 32 and the FCC is 77
• the Lenovo IdeaPad K1 up for Amazon pre-order with a $500 price tag - reminder it's a Tegra 2 Android slate, 10.1-inch screen, with a microSD card reader, micro-HDMI out, and a SIM card slot
• Vizio Tablet is up for pre-order on Vizio's website for $400, will start shipping on July 18th
• AMD has announced it will start selling its new A8-3850 and A6-3650 APUs on July 3 - both feature quad-core designs and discrete graphics-level integrated GPUs, and support AMD's Catalyst driver, OpenCL & Vision Engine Control Center
• Sony's Welcome back program is entering its final weekend, giving you just two more days to download your pair of free PS3 or PSP games, along with 100 virtual items from PlayStation Home and 30 days of PlayStation Plus. Harness your PSN outage rage and get free things!

Email

"You sort of brushed off the Gigabyte Windows 7 tablet announcement in show 275. I have had a Windows 7 slate/tablet for about two months and love it. (EXOPC 11.6 inch). I do not have to buy any apps because it is Windows. I tried several android tablets and found them lacking and unable to sync well with my Windows machines. I have not tried an iPad, but I understand it will not work well if you do not have iTunes, and I do not. I was watching your netcast on my slate/tablet (synced from my desktop with Windows Live Mesh). I can also watch movies an TV with Windows Homegroup or netcasts with Homegroup. Windows 7 slates/tablets do not have to catch up, they do not need apps to work. Having everything on one Operating System is a huge bonus, no learning curve.

Sandy Oliver"

"Hi Tom, Sarah, Iyaz and Jason,

In yesterdays TNT, there was a discussion on the Google hangout and the first appearance of the video changing based on the person speaking. As a long time user, I just wanted to enlighten you on where this specific function originates.

Back in 2007, Google bought a Swedish company called Marratech. This company made a video conferencing software that was the number one choice in academia. One of the prominent features, besides excellent audio codecs for it's time, was the switch-video-on-audio function.

When using Google hangout I recognize the user experience from that software. Quite a blast from the past experience.

Now we know what these guys have done the last four years.

All the best

Tomas, the neuroscientist from Sweden"

Sponsors

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• Netflix - 2
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Production Information

• Edited by: Jason
• Notes:

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