The National Security Administration is secretly collecting phone record information for all calls on the Verizon network. “Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls,” reports The Guardian, which broke the story of the top-secret project after it obtained record of a court order mandating Verizon hand over the information.

The contents of the call are not recorded and it is also not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone carrier complying with the massive spying project. The court order concerns all calls to, from, and within the United States.

With this so-called “metadata,” the government knows “the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication,” explains the Guardian.

The Senate’s tech-savviest member, Ron Wyden (CrunchGov Grade: A), has been discretely warning citizens of these kinds of secretive government projects. “There is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows,” wrote Wyden and Senator Mark Udall to embattled Attorney Eric Holder.

The order apparently draws from a 2001 Bush-era provision in the Patriot Act (50 USC section 1861). The revelation dovetails similar exposes on massive government spying projects, including one project to combine federal datasets and look for patterns on anything which could be related to terrorism.

Late last year, I wrote about a few actual harms that citizens should be worried about from these types of big-data spying programs. Blackmailing citizens critical of the government seemed like a distant hypothetical, until we learned that the IRS was auditing Tea Party groups and journalists were being wiretapped. Nefarious actors inside the government like to abuse national security programs for political ends, and that should make us all (even more) suspect of government spying.

Some government secrecy is necessary for national security purposes. But it’s justified based on our trust that the information will be used with care. With every passing scandal, the justification for these types of programs becomes more and more questionable.

Either way, this is a massive PR disaster for Verizon. While it’s true that AT&T had it’s own spying scandal, misery still loves company. It’s in Verizon’s interest to somehow implicate other carriers in the spying program. If Verizon is, indeed, not the only carrier, I suspect we’ll be finding out in the near future.

[Image via Wikipedia]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth announced today that he’s leaving Twitter. In his tweet, Dodsworth noted that it’s been two years since Twitter acquired TweetDeck, and he said “now feels like a perfect time to start something new.”

Dodsworth’s departure comes as Twitter’s vision for TweetDeck does seem to be shifting. A few months ago, it shut down the iPhone, Android, and AIR versions. There are still native Windows and Mac apps, but the company has suggested that the web version will be its focus going forward.

Naturally, today’s news has prompted more speculation and handwringing about TweetDeck’s future. For example, Reuters social media editor/incoming Circa editor-in-chief Anthony De Rosa tweeted that the news made him “fear even more for @TweetDeck.” But Erica Anderson, Twitter’s manager of news, responded that TweetDeck has a new product manager, Sharath Bulusu from the Guardian (whose hiring was announced a couple of weeks ago).

“We do realize how important it is,” Anderson said.

A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment further on the news.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Few people are better equipped to imagine the future of online journalism than Emily Bell. Currently the Director of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Bell was formerly director of digital content at the Guardian newspaper where she pioneered much of what we now take for granted about online journalism. And now Bell has co-authored (with Clay Shirky and C.W. Anderson) a controversial report about the future of journalism entitled Post Industrial Journalism. As Bell told me when we talked in her New York office, she believes that online journalism has a future – both in terms of content sitting behind paywalls, ad-supported news, and content subsidized by organizations or wealthy individuals. Indeed, in what Bell calls the “disruptive stage” of online journalism, she thinks that there are now “massive opportunities” for entrepreneurs looking to reinvent journalism.

So is Bell right? Are publications like ProPublica, Quartz and even TechCrunch symbols of a golden age of post-industrial journalism? Or is it possible, as some have argued, that the Internet is actually killing the news industry and thus weakening our democracy?

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The Guardian today announced that it will remove its social reader application from Facebook.com in favor of deeper Facebook integration on its own website that will give users more control over what they share.

Some are interpreting the news as a blow to Facebook and a way for the Guardian to take back control of its content after the social network made changes that limited the reach of news apps. However, based on plans laid out by the Guardian, the media outlet seems to be continuing to invest in the Facebook platform and is working to create a better user experience, not sidestep the social network. Facebook apps do not need to run on Facebook.com. The company allows developers to integrate social features across the web, on mobile and with any Internet-connected device.

The Guardian says starting Monday it will direct Facebook users who click on its links to guardian.co.uk rather than to apps.facebook.com/theguardian. The publisher will continue to use Facebook login on its website and has plans to add features that give users more ways to give feedback on articles, which will then be shared to Facebook if they desire. This is a move toward explicit sharing rather than the “frictionless sharing” associated with social reader applications.

Facebook and its partners discovered that users were not comfortable with having articles they read automatically shared with their friends. Users were often surprised and embarrassed to see their activity appear back on Facebook. The Guardian, like other developers, is now looking at ways for users to take lightweight actions that can be shared through Facebook’s Open Graph without them feeling as though their privacy has been violated. For example, the Guardian plans to introduce polls and other questions that users can answer and share if they’re logged in with Facebook.

“The key thing is that the user will be in control and if they’re not interested in sharing it will not impact on their experience of accessing our content on guardian.co.uk,” the company wrote on its blog.

These types of integrations allow users to share their feelings, which is ultimately more meaningful than saying a person “read an article.” It also makes sense for this activity to happen on the Guardian’s website rather than within a canvas app on Facebook.com, which isn’t optimized for mobile and has other limitations when it comes to design. The media outlet can also capitalize on its existing site traffic rather than working to drive users to a property on Facebook.

As we’ve written about previously, the misperception that Facebook apps are limited to those on Facebook.com contributes to skepticism about the company’s longterm potential. But the social network continues to benefit even if the Guardian takes its integration to its own site. Facebook is still collecting data that can be used for advertising and users are generating stories that will make News Feed more engaging for their friends. Over time, Facebook can implement additional ways to monetize third-party integrations, but first it needs to get developers and companies on board to try it. The Guardian’s continued experimentation with the platform — even if it’s off-site — should be seen as an endorsement of Facebook, not a rejection of it.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Google is said to have distributed an external test version of its native maps app for iOS, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. Citing “a person with direct knowledge of the matter,” the WSJ says that Google is readying the app for submission to the App Store review and approval process, though there’s no clear timeline for when that will take place.

There have been rumors that Google was readying a native maps app for distribution via the App Store since it was revealed that Apple would be going with its own maps product as the built-in option in iOS 6, though Google CEO Eric Schmidt denied that one was already pending Apple’s approval.  WE later heard that Google Maps was indeed in development, and that Google had hoped to have it submitted to Apple by December, a timeline which would fit with the search giant initiating a limited external beta at this stage.

Of course, the decision to switch away from Google’s Maps offering caused significant user backlash, eventually prompting Apple CEO Tim Cook to issue an apology posted to Apple’s website. iOS software lead Scott Forstall reportedly refused to sign his name to the apology, which is one of a number of factors that supposedly led to his eventual ouster from Apple and its executive team.

The WSJ report says that Eddy Cue is going hands-on with the Maps team to help fix its issues, having replaced Forstall as leadership for the Apple engineers responsible for that product. He’s said to regularly attend and participate in meetings to help improve Maps, according to “a person familiar with the matter.”

Google’s app will feature turn-by-turn directions, the report adds, which would be a significant competitive advantage for Google’s product against other options on the App Store, including the forthcoming Nokia Here maps app, which doesn’t feature driving directions. Google had left turn-by-turn out of Apple’s version of its maps app in the past, reportedly due to disagreements over what Google would get in return for providing that and other features found in its own version of maps for Android.

This also backs up a report from last week from the Guardian which said Google would be aiming for a year-end delivery of Maps for iOS, but was unsure whether Apple would approve it. We’ve played this game before, with Google Voice for iOS, let’s just hope we don’t have the same kind of wait for Google Maps.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Apple Maps controversy cooled down over the last few weeks (though it got a bit of a replay when Scott Forstall’s exit/ouster from Apple was announced last week), but one question still remains: when will Google launch its native Google Maps app for iOS? According to a new report in the The Guardian, Google plans to have the app finished by the end of the year – something we also heard in September. Some at Google, however, aren’t sure if Apple will actually approve it.

The Guardian reports that some Googlers believe the new Google Maps for iOS app is now more likely to be approved without Forstall at the helm of Apple’s own mapping efforts. Others, however, are “less than enthusiastic about any increased prospects, citing industry politics and Apple’s need to save face as much as possible and ‘keep moving forward in an effort to make its obviously inferior product better.’”

One of The Guardian’s sources argues that Apple currently doesn’t feature any apps in its “Find maps for your iPhone” section that use the Google Maps API. Apps that use Google’s API, some in the company believe according to the Guardian, “were purposely left out of the new section because they promote Google and its ‘superior product.’” It’s worth noting, though, that the Navigon app, which Apple features heavily in its store, uses Google’s StreetView API, though it doesn’t rely on Google’s maps for its maps or routes.

Overall, though, it seems unlikely that Apple would just ban Google’s app from its App Store. There are, after all, plenty of other mapping and turn-by-turn navigation apps available in the store and – even though Apple doesn’t feature them – there are also lots of Google Maps-based mapping apps available. Still, it is unlikely that Apple would put Google’s app into its “New and Noteworthy” or “Amazing on iPhone 5″ sections.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Serial entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis appears to be gearing up for the launch of his next venture, which may also signify one more pivot for his information site Mahalo. And that next step also looks like a new chapter for an internet domain that itself has seen a couple of pivots.

On a tip from a reader, we visited inside.com and found this:

Clicking to subscribe, you get sent to a mailing list creator owned by Calacanis, and an email confirmation referring questions directly to him (or, at least an email address to his name). We have sent an email to that address but have yet to receive a reply.

Putting to one side that we’ve already passed September 1 there seem to be other clues that the company is moving ahead with an Inside.com venture, which seems to be either a rebranding of either all or part of Mahalo. Two recent clues of that:

1) An ad posted by Mahalo is seeking a user experience/user interface graphic designer for Inside.com. In that ad, it describes inside.com as a “knowledge community, focused on creating high-quality videos, apps, iBooks and written courses.”

“We’re well-funded by Sequoia…Newscorp, Mark Cuban, Elon Musk (Paypal) and CBS,” the post reads. If that sounds like Mahalo rebranded to you, the rest of that description, describing what sounds like an existing product, seems to clinch that: “Our library is growing rapidly as we continue to focus our efforts on joining users with expert teaching content.”

2) When Mahalo’s president, Jason Rapp, left the company at the beginning of September, AllThingsD posted a staff memo, which seemed also to give some hints that a name change was on the cards.

“The company has never had a clearer path or brighter future (plus a new name!) and for that reason it’s the perfect time for me to step back and pursue my next adventure,” he wrote, signing off, “Mahalo and see you Inside, Jason.”

Inside.com and Mahalo, in a way, are in something of a similar position, both being ships in the dot-com waters looking for a friendly dock.

Mahalo, founded by Calacanis in 2007 as a “human-powered search engine” as an alternative to Google and the rest. Perhaps because making a dent into Google’s search traffic proved to be actually very hard, it has pivoted several times since. Among them, it’s offered information in a Q&A format (tagline: “we’re here to help”). Most recently, Mahalo settled into life as a how-to video and learning site, spinning apps and other media out of the concept (new tagline: learn anything). Why is inside.com being introduced as a brand within this? Well, it is strong word, like about.com (with which it competes) and it might snag more random users than the Hawaiian word for “thank you.”

Inside.com, meanwhile, was originally a high-ambition, but ultimately-failed website covering the media industry from the first dot-com boom. The domain was eventually purchased by Rafat Ali, founder of paidContent, in 2008, with the intention of putting his different media sites (which also included mocoNews.net) under the Inside brand. That idea appeared to die after the paidContent group got bought by the Guardian, who apparently wanted to sell the name for upwards of $100,000. For a long while — nearly four years — visits to inside.com redirected to paidContent.org.

Interestingly, inside.com is still registered, as of today, to Sedo LLC, on behalf of ContentNext Media, the parent company of paidContent.org that was sold by the Guardian to Giga Omni Media in February. The ownership of inside.com was last updated on June 13 of this year.

That means that either an ownership transfer to Calacanis has not yet been recorded, or… who knows?

TC has reached out both to Jason Calacanis and Giga Omni Media for comment and we will update as we learn more.

(Disclosure: I worked for paidContent.org before joining TechCrunch.)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Hope you got your 16GB Nexus 7 already. Google is no longer taking orders for the $249 model. It’s sold out. The product page on Google Play now sports a “coming soon” message and an input field for buyers to leave their email to be notified when the 16GB model is available again. The $199 8GB is still available with a shipping estimate of 3-5 days.

Citing sources close to Google, the Guardian reports that “the search giant seriously underestimated the demand for the 16GB version of its 7in Nexus 7 tablet.” Orders placed through last week will be fulfilled, but due to insufficient stock, Google is no longer taking orders for the model. There’s no word when the model be available again.

By all accounts the Nexus 7 is an impressive tablet with an even more impressive price. It outshines the Kindle Fire in nearly every regard with a better screen, improved performance, and a better user interface. Google has a winner with the Nexus 7, which is confirmed by the short supply.

The Nexus 7 is Google’s first entry into the tablet race. While the tablet is built by Asus, it carries Google branding. In fact, as far as I can see, the Asus name is nowhere to be found on either the Nexus 7′s product page or minisite.

A so-called iPad mini is rumored to hit the market later this year. With a rumored price of $249, the smaller iPad would likely steal some of the Nexus 7′s hype. Amazon is also rumored to release a revamped 7-inch Kindle Fire alongside a larger model that will directly take on the iPad. But as it sits right now, the Nexus 7 is the hottest small tablet available — but good luck getting one.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A little bit of a song and dance today from Icann as it released the full list of businesses and other organizations that have applied for their own customized top-level domain names, the first significan expansion on the 22 TLDs in existence today. The full list is here.

In a press conference in London to mark what Icann is calling “Reveal Day,” Icann’s SVP Kurt Pritz noted that over 500 companies and organizations have paid up tens of thousands of dollars to apply for the TLDs, for nearly 2,000 TLDs. They include some interesting twists: the Charleston Road Registry has applied for “.android” and “.google”; Apple Inc. has applied for “.apple.” Two different organizations have applied for “.guardian”: the Guardian newspaper and the Guardian Life Insurance Company. Eleven different applications for “.inc” and “.home”, and Amazon wants “.news” and “.app” (among many others).

Clearly not all will leave this process happy. Icann says that it will be going through a multi-stage process now to decide who will get what.

That will include checking for whether names are too similar to each other, whether they meet technical requirements, and whether the names are geographical or not, and whether they applicants meet financial, technical and operational capabilities to run a registry. More details on the process for getting a name here.

More to come as we continue to look hrough the list and wait for Icann to resume its press conference. (Rather bizarrely it has chosen to take a 15-minute pause in the middle of proceedings, perhaps to get journalists to review the lists.)

As the BBC pointed out earlier today, U.S. organizations account for more than half of the applications are coming from U.S. companies: 883 out of 1,930 applications in total. One journalist asked today whether that is because of the cost issue: Icann set a fee of $185,000 for each TLD application. Icann defended this position and noted that it even provided some financial assistance to organizations that wanted to register for TLDs but could not meet the applications fees, and that in fact the geographical spread was wider than it expected.

“To have 17 applications from Africa is actually encouraging, it’s a significant expansion,” Icann’s CEO Rod Beckstrom said.

Icann will now begin the process of looking at these applications in batches of 500 and it estimates that it will take between nine and 12 months to do that.

Some more details on how Icann will decide who should get a TLD when more than one company is claiming it: after evaluating financial risks and other criteria, including comments from stakeholders, if two are still in contention, priority will be given to the one that is community based. The last resort is an auction.

In total, some $350 million has been collected in the new TLD application process. Icann says this will be used for processing those applications and setting aside money for the risks and other issues that may arise around the different TLDs. As for any money remaining, it would be up to the community to decide how to use it, said Beckstrom.

There have already been some organizations backing out of applications: Icann says 150 refunds have been requested totalling $3.5 million dollars.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Spotify wants to make it easier for anyone to legally soundtrack their websites, oh, and get links to its own download page plastered all over the Internet. So today it launches the embeddable Spotify Play Button for news sites that when clicked starts playing a designated song, album, or playlist in your Spotify desktop app. Rolling Stone, The Huffington Post, and the Guardian are amongst the marquee launch partners that will start featuring the button today, and Tumblr bloggers can instantly add Spotify music to their posts straight from the audio dashboard.

While Spotify tells me this is all about improving music discovery and the listening experience, the real benefit for it comes when someone without its desktop app clicks the button — they’re prompted to download Spotify (shown below). The company’s user acquisition costs are supposedly sky high, so free promotion through the Play Button could be key to making its business model hum.

The Spotify Play Button solves a big problem for publishers looking to stream music from their websites. Normally they’d have to embed a YouTube video with often crappy audio quality, host a questionably legal MP3, hotlink to another blog’s file that could get taken down, or dig around on sites like SoundCloud for a legal streaming version. Spotify’s Play Button gives them a quick, stable, reliable, high-quality, and legal way to soundtrack their site and make sure artists get paid for their work.

To configure the Play Button, publishers can right-click any song, album, or playlist in Spotify, copy its special Spotify URI, and paste it into https://embed.spotify.com/ . Then they copy the embed code for a compact button or one that shows album artwork, and paste that into their website’s code. Music can even go viral as other publishers can grab a widget’s embed code by hovering over a Play Button.

Other sites you can check it out on include ShareMyPlaylists.com, FanRx, Popdust, The Independent, Time Out Group (New York City, Paris, London), NME, Mashable, FanBridge, Wonderwall, The Fader, Chegg, ELLE , Noisey.com, Entertainment Weekly, People.com, and SPIN.com. The color and size of the button can be customized by messing with the code, and Spotify says more options will eventually be added to the configurator.

Tumblr users have it even easier. The post composer’s audio dashboard now lets you search for Spotify content, and with a click an optimized player is inserted into your post — no embed code necessary. The Play Button makes it easier for heavy Spotify users too. Instead of having to pause your current Spotify jam before clicking some other music stream on a website to avoid having two songs playing, Spotify will automatically override what’s already playing on your app.

Spotify has clearly taken a lesson from the march of Facebook’s Like Button across the web. Not only will the Play Button increase engagement and retention of existing users, and drive signups from new users, it will help make Spotify a house-hold name. AppData shows Spotify as having 17.7 million monthly users, and 7.1 million daily users, and some peg its U.S. subscriber count around 3 million, though Spotify denies this as a lowball. In any case, it needs more subscribers and ad listeners to pay for the high initial and licensing fees the record labels demand for their content.

The question now will be whether serious music bloggers will be willing to show Spotify Play Buttons instead of their old streaming sources even though they might exclude some readers who don’t want to download the app. Otherwise the unfamiliar Play Button could end up playing second fiddle to YouTube and SoundCloud streams.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch