Die hohe Bewertung von Facebook vor dem Börsengang beruhte auf der enormen Nutzerzahl des Unternehmens und dem mutmasslichen Potenzial für Marketing. Der Absturz des Kurses und die Kürzungen der Facebook-Etats einiger grösserer Firmen beweisen, dass die Rentabilität eines auf Userdaten basierenden Geschäftsmodells selbst für eine der User-stärksten Plattformen der Welt noch nicht erwiesen ist.
Google lässt sich vom bislang mässigen Erfolg seiner netzbasierten Chrome-Computer nicht entmutigen und legt mit neuen Modellen nach. Der Partner Samsung stellte ein neues Chromebook-Laptop vor und erstmals auch eine Desktop-Version mit dem Namen Chromebox.
Schriftstellerin Juli Zeh («Spieltrieb», «Corpus Delicti») findet E-Books zu teuer. Durch überhöhte Preise erziehe man die Verbraucher zum Klauen, sagte die 37-Jährige gegenüber der Wochenzeitung «Die Zeit».
Sunrise und Samsung eröffneten am Mittwoch in Züric gemeinsam einen Concept Store - den ersten seiner Art in der Schweiz. In exklusiver Atmosphäre können Kunden und Besucher das Gesamtangebot von Sunrise und Samsung in den Bereichen Home, Office und On the Go erleben, teilen die beiden Partner mit.
Als erste Schweizer Bank bietet die Zürcher Kantonalbank ihren Kunden das digitale Schliessfach Securesafe von DSwiss als Bestandteil ihrer E-Banking Dienstleistungen an.
Die ETH Zürich richtet eine neue Professur für Informationssicherheit ein. Swisscom unterstützt die Professur mit einer Donation von 10 Mio. Franken. Klar ist auch schon, wer die Professur übernimmt: Adrian Perrig, Professor an der Carnegie Mellon University, folgt dem Ruf an die ETH.
Der amerikanische Computer-Riese Dell vollzieht einen Strategiewechsel und will sich verstärkt an die schnelllebigen Entwicklungen am Mobilmarkt anpassen. Mit der kürzlich beschlossenen Mobility Strategy will das Management Dell von einer klassischen Hardwarefirma zu einem Infrastrukturlösungsunternehmen mit Fokus auf Anwendersoftware machen.
Der Elektronik-Konzern Apple hält sich bei seinen angeblichen Plänen für ein heiß erwartetes neues Fernsehgerät alles offen. "Das ist für uns von grossem Interesse", sagte Firmenchef Tim Cook bezugnehmend auf die von Apple bereits angebotene Set-Top-Box für den Empfang des Bezahlfernsehens.
Sony sowie Panasonic wollen einem Medienbericht zufolge den von einem Bilanzskandal erschütterten Kamera- und Medizingerätehersteller Olympus finanziell unterstützen. Beide Elektronikriesen seien bereit, sich an Olympus zu beteiligen, berichtete die Zeitung "Asahi Shimbun" am Mittwoch.
Am Dienstag hat Facebook die offizielle Erlaubnis bekommen, in den nächsten Jahren seine 2.200 Mitarbeiter umfassende Arbeitstruppe zu verdreifachen. Damit einhergehend wird der Facebook Campus im Menlo Park vergrößert.
New submitter Screen404-O writes "During radio interview, Virginia governor Bob McDonnell suggested that using unmanned drones to assist police would be 'great' and 'the right thing to do.' 'Increased safety and reduced manpower are among the reasons the U.S. military and intelligence community use drones on the battlefield, which is why it should be considered in Virginia, he says. ... McDonnell added Tuesday it will prove important to ensure the state maintains Americans' civil liberties, such as privacy, if it adds drones to its law enforcement arsenal.' Is this the next step toward militarizing our law enforcement agencies? How exactly can they ensure our privacy, when even the Air Force can't?"
Nerval's Lobster writes "In a bid to expand the reach of its cloud services, Microsoft has introduced Office 365 for Government, which features the same cloud-based productivity tools as Office 365 but stores data in a segregated community cloud. Google and Microsoft have been locked in vicious battle over the past few years to score cloud contracts for government agencies. Microsoft hopes its support of standards such as ISO 27001, SAS70 Type II, HIPAA, FERPA, and FISMA will help to give it an edge in winning those contracts."
scibri writes "Sagittarius A*, the dormant supermassive black hole that lies at the center of our galaxy, was much more active not that long ago. Astronomers using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have picked up some faint gamma-ray signals that suggest Sagittarius A* was emitting a pair of powerful gamma-ray jets like other galactic black holes as recently as 20,000 years ago (arXiv paper). If our black hole was more active in the past, it could explain why Sagittarius A* seems to be growing about 1,000 times too slowly for it to have reached its current mass of about four million solar masses since the Galaxy formed about 13.2 billion years ago."
New submitter polyphydont writes "Children of parents with low social status are less able to resist the temptations of technological entertainment, a fact that impedes their education and adds to the obstacles such children face in obtaining financial comfort later in life. As explained in the article, poor parents and their children often waste both their time and money on heavily marketed entertainment systems. Such families often accumulate PCs, gaming consoles and smart phones, but use them only for nonconstructive activities."
The Bad Astronomer writes "Next week, on June 5/6, there will be the last Venus transit across the face of the Sun until the year 2117. There are dozens of sites issuing press releases about it — online resources, watching live, viewing advice — so I've collected them into a single blog post with tons of links and my own advice on how to observe this (most likely) last-in-a-lifetime event. This complements the previous article on Slashdot from a few weeks ago."
We mentioned yesterday Jeremy Hansen's run for the Vermont Senate. There are a lot of political races currently active in the U.S.; what makes Hansen's interesting (besides his background in computer science) is his pledge to use modern communication technology to provide a taste of direct representation within a representative democracy. He makes a claim not many candidates (and probably even fewer elected officials) ever will: "A representative should be elected who would work strictly as an advisor and make all policy and voting decisions based on the will of his or her constituents, regardless of personal opinion." To that end, Hansen says that if he's elected, he'll employ "an accessible online voting platform to allow discussion and voting on bills" for his constituents. He's agreed to answer questions about how such a system could work, and the nature of democracy in today's ultra-connected world, in which distance and communication delays are much smaller than they were even 20 years ago, never mind 200. So ask Hansen whatever questions you'd like about his plans and philosophy; as always, ask as many questions as you please, but please separate them into separate posts, lest ye be modded down.
benfrog writes "Dot-word bidders are in a last-minute dash for domain names as ICANN has revealed its timetable for the controversial new TLDs. The organization will close its TLD Application System (TAS) at a minute before midnight tonight (23.59 GMT, 19.59 ET, 16.59 Pacific). The TAS was originally supposed to close on April 12, but the deadline was extended twice because of a security bug. The winners for domains will be selected (initially) by a 'widely derided mechanism' of 'digital archery' in which every bidder will be assigned a date and time and then be asked to login to a secure website and hit a submit button as close to that time as possible."
coondoggie writes "Forty-nine percent of U.S. companies are having a hard time filling what workforce management firm ManpowerGroup calls mission-critical positions within their organizations. IT staff, engineers and 'skilled trades' are among the toughest spots to fill. The group surveyed some 1,300 employers and noted that U.S. companies are struggling to find talent, despite continued high unemployment, over their global counterparts, where 34% of employers worldwide are having difficulty filling positions."
ananyo writes with information on a new scheme to help uniquely identify authors in the face of ambiguous names. From the article: "In 2011, Y. Wang was the world's most prolific author of scientific publications, with 3,926 to their name — a rate of more than 10 per day. Never heard of them? That's because they are a mixture of many different Y. Wangs, each indistinguishable in the scholarly record. The launch later this year of the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), an identifier system that will distinguish between authors who share the same name, could soon solve the problem, allowing research papers to be associated correctly with their true author. Instead of filling out personal details on countless electronic forms associated with submitting papers or applying for grants, a researcher could also simply type in his or her ORCID number. Various fields would be completed automatically by pulling in data from other authorized sources, such as databases of papers, citations, grants and contact details. ORCID does not intend to offer such services itself; the idea is that other organizations will use the open-access ORCID database to build their own services."
itwbennett writes "Softbank, Japan's third largest carrier, has teamed up with Sharp to create a radiation detector chip for the latest model in the company's popular, bare-bones Pantone line of smartphones. The chip 'can detect gamma radiation in the air at doses of between 0.05 and 9.99 microsieverts per hour,' according to an IDG News Service report. 'The phone then uses its GPS to place readings on a map. Due to go on sale in July, it runs Android 4.0 and features standard functionality for Japanese handsets, including mobile TV, touch payments and infrared transmission.'"
sl4shd0rk writes "Microsoft has adopted a brand new licensing scheme for Windows 8 which effectively removes your right to file a class-action lawsuit against them should you feel the need. '...Many of our new user agreements will require that, if we can't informally resolve the dispute, the customer bring the claim in small claims court or arbitration, but not as part of a class action lawsuit.' Class-action lawsuits are intended to help individuals stand up to corporate law-breaking but this new EULA model simply nullifies that course of action for the consumer."
Fluffeh writes "The folks that push 'Anti-Piracy' and 'Copying is Stealing' seem to often request that Google pre-screens content going up on YouTube and of course expect Google to cover the costs. No-one ever really asks the question how much it would cost, but some nicely laid out math by a curious mind points to a pretty hefty figure indeed. Starting with who to employ, their salary expectations and how many people it would take to cover the 72 hours of content uploaded every minute, the numbers start to get pretty large, pretty quickly. US$37 billion a year. Now compare that to Google's revenue for last year."