New Conceptf of Zynga IPO coming soon

Zynga is preparing for an IPO and a login can next week, to come to those who on the plans of the company know. The creator of the franchise-make presented to the public city online game, in a rapid melting of the tech IPO market.

Zynga has this in the works for many months," says Nizan Hargil, Director of research at the capital city of GreenCrest. Two other sources have confirmed that the submission of the IPO coming soon. The first review of public finances of the company provides for four years. Hargil of believes that Zynga 14.5 billion. The company had great success with FarmVille, FishVille, mafia wars and several other games on Facebook.

Zynga would apart from the other splashy tech startups that began this year. LinkedIn, which went public last month, revealed that he won 15 million in 2010. Before LinkedIn every year since its founding in the Red 2003-with the exception of a small profit in the year 2006 was.

The flow of red ink of GroupOn is even deeper. GroupOn for his introduction on the stock market on Thursday reported that 413 million dollars in the year 2010 lost and lost nearly 114 million in the first quarter of 2011. Investors seemed to these figures, with pent-up demand for tech IPOs. The website with a value of 9 billion dollars in its debut, leaving more than doubled shares of LinkedIn (LNKD). Commerce is somewhat since stabilised but actions are still well above the IPO price of $ 45 for LinkedIn.

How Zynga makes money: Zynga could more successfully, as it is "in a completely different category", Hargil said that most of his colleagues. He is of the opinion that the freedom is a whopping $ 17 million in a cash society per month. "This is one of the companies to the rapid growth in history, in all areas," says Hargil. "Zynga is not your default Internet bubble companies." No four years many companies have large margins growth and income. »

Hargil believes that Zynga 80% of the turnover of only 3% of his payment user virtual goods, such as tractors and animals for their businesses online real money receives.
0: 00/2: 34 Zynga channels SimCity

The 20% comes from unique forms of advertising, he said-as Starbucks (JPM, Fortune 500) numbers, coffee in CityVille must be a virtual memory. These users have virtual memory to visit 10 times for the construction of a Starbucks franchise in their own virtual city. "It's very clever methods that require a constant Benuztern," said Hargil. "It is much more powerful than traditional banners." "He is very intelligent."

A spammy past overcome: this "intelligent" business methods are Zynga past, where it was spammy spam and scammy tactics for new players to acquire and monetize existing.

Facebook users are so frustrated with Zynga overload their intelligence reports and dashboards, in particular on Facebook decided to prohibit the practice. "" The current users of Zynga listings found flooded shady third-party partner services try. ""

"Zynga use questionable methods, said Hargil."they are using with great success, to be a profitable company, before it triggered a dollar, unique venture. "." Zynga worked distance itself from this "dirty" about it, and they did, to attract a lot of movement to the company for IPO-including the EUR 500 million in a row earlier in this year of funding.

Facebook Ready Goes to Hollywood

Facebook is getting into online movie streaming, but it's testing the waters first with a limited deal to offer just one film: "The Dark Knight." If the social network finds the waters to be warm, though, it could mean trouble for heavies like Netflix, Amazon and iTunes. Meanwhile, Sprint flirts with T-Mobile, Samsung hints at a new tablet and HP foreshadows a webOS-heavy future.Video rental stores made it so you don't have to go all the way to a theater to watch a movie, then online video channels like Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) and iTunes made is so you don't even have to leave the house. The next step will be that you won't even have to leave the warm, squishy embrace of Facebook in order to watch movies on demand.

The social network's hooked up with Warner Bros. to provide users with streaming videos for a rental fee of three bucks. Just visit the movie's Facebook profile, pay the toll, and you get access to the film for 48 hours. Watch however many times you want until it expires.

You can't buy tickets to the show with real money, though. This system runs on the Land of Facebookia's local currency: Facebook credits. It's the equivalent of three bucks, but you have to make an exchange first.

For now, the partnership's very limited -- it's just that one studio, and it's just one movie: "The Dark Knight." But Facebook's membership list is massive, so if this picks up, it could prove to be a very big threat to every other online movie provider out there. One of those is Netflix, though its video-on-demand service isn't exactly the same -- Netflix does unlimited streaming for a flat monthly fee. Facebook's way of doing business more resembles outfits like iTunes' or Amazon's (Nasdaq: AMZN) a-la-carte rental options.

But the structure here might not scale up as easily as with iTunes, Netflix or other providers. With the other guys, a studio just supplies the movie, a blurb, maybe a trailer and some stills, and that's the way it's cataloged on that channel's servers forever more. But the way Facebook's doing it right now, each movie will have to have its own fan page with a Wall, a discussion board, a photo gallery, so forth. Sounds like a lot of upkeep and maintenance. If a studio's going to eventually let Facebook do this with the same catalog of thousands of titles that iTunes or Amazon has access to, are they going to need to take on a whole team of interns to keep the hedges trimmed?

Also, it seems that as a viewer, you have to allow the movie's page to access your basic information and let it post messages to your Wall. So it looks like Facebook isn't going to be the place to go for your guilty cinematic pleasures, whatever those might be.

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HP's Alternate Operator

Next year will be a strange time for operating systems. According to a report in Businessweek, that's the year Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) will finally come up with a version of Windows specifically made for tablets, instead of cramming a desktop OS into a mobile. Meanwhile, HP (NYSE: HPQ) will be headed in a different direction: putting a mobile OS into its desktops.

By 2012, all HP desktops and laptops will come with a preinstalled version of webOS, the operating system HP picked up when it bought Palm last year. We've seen webOS in smartphones, a tablet's on the way, and soon it'll grow into full-sized PCs as well. Those PCs will still carry the latest version of Windows, whatever that happens to be at the time, but they'll also be able to run webOS, according to CEO Leo Apotheker.

This could be a big hit among app developers, who generally haven't acted very interested in webOS so far. For example, Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iOS has more than 400,000 apps. The Android Market had about 200,000 at the end of 2010, and it's growing fast enough that it could surpass the App Store in the next year or two. But in HP's corner, webOS has only about 6,000 apps to its name. Kind of a vicious cycle -- not very many apps are out there, so nobody buys the phones, so nobody develops for the phones, and the number can't grow.

But HP does sell an incredible number of PCs, and once they all ship with webOS, suddenly developers will have a much wider customer base, if they figure out how to approach it just right.

It isn't going to be enough to just dump webOS into laptops and tell users, "here, see what you can do with this." If that's all that's going to happen, for most users it'll just be a waste of disk space. It'll need to provide an actual advantage over Windows -- perhaps make it boot faster, or let it run special webOS apps that were specifically designed for a laptop or desktop version of the OS, not the Palm Pre version.

What wouldn't be so great would be if this turned out to be useful only to people who actually own webOS phones, because despite all the effort HP has pumped into making Palm worth the 1.2 billion, those users are still few and far between.
They've Got Your Number

Sony's (NYSE: SNE) landed some major blows against hackers in its quest to prevent customers from tinkering with their PS3s too much. But it isn't stopping at just making sure a few sites here and there are taken offline. Nope, it also wants to know who those tinkerers are. It wants information about the people who, after giving Sony hundreds of dollars in exchange for a nice new video game machine to call their own, dared to visit a website that would teach them how to pop the hood and mess around with the insides a bit.

A brief history on the matter: In the beginning, Sony PlayStation 3 video game machines could run Linux with a built-in feature called "Other OS." Geeks loved it because it basically let you turn the PS3 into a Linux PC, and a pretty good one at that. Then Sony changed its mind about Other OS and nuked the feature with a firmware update. Models sold after that never got the feature to begin with.

So a hacker named George Hotz figured out a DIY procedure for unlocking PS3s to let Linux and all sorts of other functions back into the machine, and he put up a website to spread the word.

That got him into a lot of trouble with Sony's lawyers. Sony doesn't like people unlocking their systems, and it claims that by publishing the PlayStation's encryption keys, Hotz was enabling piracy. It's a lot easier to pirate games with an unlocked system, and even though Hotz's procedure lets you do lots more than just copy games, Sony wanted the site gone, and that's what it got.

But it seems it wants more. Sony also wants to know who exactly visited that site -- that would be PS3 users. Sony's own customers. A federal magistrate has granted the company subpoena power to gain access to the IP addresses of anyone who visited Hotz's site over the last two years. So now users might be on Sony's legal radar for steering their browsers toward a website. Or just clicking a link, if that's how they got there. Doesn't matter what they did there, or what they did with the information they learned. If you visited, Sony gets to see your number.

Granted, an IP address isn't a personal identity, and it's unclear whether Sony intends to do the additional digging it would take to chase an IP down to an individual account holder. It's possible that all Sony wants is a list of numbers to show the court that a lot of people visited the site, that this wasn't just a small ring of hackers, that this was a widespread problem.

Still, knowing that a major company is digging into IP addresses of people who just visited a website registers loud and clear on the creepy meter. PS3 owners, just to be safe, here's my advice: If you ever want to buy a new game or accessory for your PlayStation, or even turn it on to play a game, perhaps you should give Sony's legal department a call and run it by them first to make sure it's OK. Never hurts to ask.
Get a Room, You Two

For the last couple of years, the U.S. wireless industry has almost seemed like a two-horse race, with AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon way out in front and Sprint (NYSE: S) and T-Mobile biting at each other for third place. For a while AT&T had exclusive dibs on the iPhone, and to counter that Verizon became Team Android's champion. Now Verizon has the iPhone and AT&T's getting more serious about Android, but their status as the overall market leaders remains intact.

The other two have managed to put some good phones on the shelves too, but T-Mobile's late entrance to 3G and Sprint's chronic rep as an ogre in the customer service department relegated them to second-tier positions. First it was Sprint that was losing customers quarter after quarter -- now it's T-Mobile, but that could flip back any minute with these two.

Naturally, this constant, close-quarters sparring has created a great deal of sexual tension between Sprint and T-Mobile, inasmuch as a couple of telecom firms can experience that. Are these two going to get together or what? By themselves, they'll linger as also-rans and could risk seriously falling behind the technological upgrades their bigger rivals can afford. Getting together might give them both a better shot, and according to a Bloomberg report, a merger is exactly what Sprint and T-Mobile are discussing right now, though neither company would confirm.

Sorry to have to bring this one up again, but it's a valid question: Will it blend? That might depend on how deep and how quickly the two companies would want to integrate themselves. In the long run, they could look forward to putting together a 4G network based on the LTE standard, the same standard AT&T and Verizon are currently working on with their own networks.

But the immediate future would be a little more problematic for them. Their current 3G networks rely on two very different wireless technologies: Sprint does CDMA, just like Verizon; T-Mobile does GSM, like AT&T. Unless your phone's some kind of dual-standard freak of nature, you can't use it on the other type of network. So what would these two do?

They could sign off on the merger yet still keep both networks running for a while until they have a firm footing in 4G. But one company with two totally different wireless standards plus a brand-new one on the way sounds like a management nightmare, and at some point they'd probably need to abandon one network or the other.

What then? Refit all T-Mobile's towers with CDMA hardware and force its customers to trade in their phones? Or vice-versa with Sprint and GSM? Sounds messy. And expensive.
A 'Tweener Tab?

Now that you've had time to cool down from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the CTIA Wireless conference is just around the corner, so we'll all get the chance to look at mostly the same stuff that came out of MWC.

Actually, a few totally new products may well show up CTIA, including a few from Samsung. The company's promised a March 22 media event, and the invite it shot out to press folks contained a large chunk of rumor mill grist.

Aside from the date, time and place, it reads, "What's your Tab life?" followed by the numerals 78910. I guess that could be a huge typo, but it's probably just a bit of "Lost"-style mystery baiting meant to get people talking about a million different theories on what the hell it could possibly mean. And people are talking, but only one theory seems to have any weight behind it, and if it proves true, it means Samsung's doing something pretty unusual.

78910. A mention of the word "Tab," as in Samsung's Galaxy Tab. The seven-inch Tab is already out there. The company's already shown a 10-incher, or actually a 10.1-incher, but 10's close enough. So the thinking is that Samsung's going to more or less split the difference and deliver an 8.9-inch tablet.

Just how necessary is that? Tablets actually come in a range of sizes -- the Xoom is big, the iPad 2's a bit smaller, Samsung's original Tab is smaller than that, and Dell's (Nasdaq: DELL) Streak is right on the tablet/smartphone border. But with the same company, within the same line, will an increment of about two inches really give buyers more freedom, or would Samsung just be weighing itself down with another SKU to manufacture when two or even one would do the trick just as well?

Perhaps it's not such a bad idea. There are all sorts of different sizes of TVs, right? Vendors and consumers are still feeling each other out in the tablet market, and maybe 8.9 inches will strike some buyers as a happy compromise of portability and usablity. And it depends on what you use it for -- seven inches feels like a paperback book, so that's good as an e-reader replacement, and 10 inches feels more like a TV screen, so it's good for entertainment. Will 8.9 inches be the best of both worlds?

For some, perhaps. Not for me. Personally, I'm holding out for a 9.27-inch screen. No more, no less.

the new Ip v6 ready to change ip v4

Pv6 has been introduced, allowing a previously impossible variety of Internet addresses to be used now that the supply of useable addresses governed by the IPv4 standard has been exhausted. But what does this change mean for everyday surfers? Most computers will be able to process the new standard, but an IPv6-capable OS is needed.Many web surfers don't know it, but the introduction of new Internet address standards might change the way they get online.

Since the supply Relevant Products/Services of useable addresses governed by the IPv4 standard (Internet protocol, version 4) has been exhausted, IPv6 has now been introduced. This will allow a previously impossible variety of addresses, says Christoph Meinel, a professor at Germany's Hasso Plattner Institute.

But what does this change mean for everyday surfers? Here's an overview.

Why Are IP Addresses Necessary?

In order for Internet-capable devices to share information, they need a unique machine-readable address. These addresses are assigned based on a standard of Internet protocols.

But, since humans have a hard time remembering these strings of numbers, Web sites are also labeled with domain names, like www.google.com. When these addresses are typed into browsers, special servers translate them into IP addresses for the benefit of the computers.

What Is the Difference Between IPv4 and IPv6?

Until now, IP addresses have been assigned in blocks of four numbers with up to three numerals each: 217.79.215.248, for example. The new IPv6 standard won't convert the numbers into the decimal system Relevant Products/Services, rather a hexadecimal system, recognized by its combination of numbers and letters.

The new standard can be recognized by its eight blocks, separated by colons -- 2001:db8:0:0:0:0:1428:57ab, for example.

Will My Computer Be Able To Process the New Standard?

In most cases, yes. But an IPv6-capable operating system is a prerequisite. Those can be found in any Windows system post Vista. There are ways to install the functionality into Windows XP systems. Mac systems starting at 10.2 and Linux, in general, can support IPv6.

Will My DSL Access Support the New Standard?

In most cases, no. Contemporary routers, like the ones provided by telecommunications companies when DSL packages are ordered, are still set for the old IPv4 standard. In some cases, IPv6 can be added with a firmware update. When purchasing a new router, make sure it supports IPv6.

Should I Anticipate Problems During the Transition to the New Standard?

Generally, no. Internet use shouldn't be affected after the switch -- at least that's what providers are promising. Those providers have modified their network so that data Relevant Products/Services packets reach all users whether they are using IPv4 or IPv6 standards, a method called dual-stack application. Alternatively, software solutions, like those based on tunnel technology, can be used.

© 2011 Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) under contract with MarketWatch. All rights reserved.

Google search to reward high-quality sites

With the latest changes to its search algorithm, Google is aiming to reward Web sites that offer original, in-depth content at the same time that it penalizes those that simply borrow content from others.

Rolled out this week, the changes will help ensure that sites considered to be of "high quality" will rank higher in Google's search results, while those deemed of "low quality" will get dumped lower in the ranks, according to a blog posted yesterday by Google fellow Amit Singhal and principal engineer Matt Cutts.

Google is clearly looking to crack down on "content farms," sites that purposely tailor their pages with content that often makes little to no sense but is loaded with keywords and other information designed solely to generate a huge number of hits.

How does Google figure out which sites are high-quality and which ones aren't, especially since that sort of determination can be subjective?

Singhal and Cutts explained in general terms that sites with original information, such as research, in-depth reports, and thoughtful analysis would be looked upon more favorably, while those that offer low value-add, that copy content, or "that are just not very useful" would be in the doghouse. And the criteria used to make this determination are part of the new algorithm.

A spokesman for Google told CNET today that the company can't share the specifics of how the algorithm works because "we don't want to give bad actors a way to game our algorithms and worsen the experience for our users."

The company said that the new rankings won't rely on feedback obtained from its Personal Blocklist, a new Chrome extension that tracks which Web sites are blocked by users and then sends those results to Google. But the company said it did compare the information from the Blocklist with the sites caught by the new algorithm and found that many of them popped up in both places. Specifically, 84 percent of the top dozen domains flagged via the extension have also been caught by the tweaked algorithm.

For now, Google has deployed these changes only in the U.S. but plans to roll them out in other countries over time. The company is also promising further updates that it thinks can further improve its search results.

Facebook seeking encryption for mobile apps

In response to complaints that a recent announcement of secure connections doesn't go far enough, Facebook said today that it's planning to roll out additional changes that would shield mobile devices and all apps from eavesdropping.

Last month, Facebook began offering the ability for users to turn on HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) to encrypt all communications with the site. However, F-Secure and others have noticed that some apps require users to switch to a regular HTTP connection to use the app, but don't warn users that the switch then becomes permanent.

Asked for comment, a Facebook representative said the company is working to make it so that the switch to unencrypted communications is only temporary and that Facebook is encouraging developers to write apps that support HTTPS.

"We are pushing our third-party developers to begin supporting HTTPS as soon as possible. We've provided an easy way for third-party developers to encourage to do this, and we hope to transition to fully persistent HTTPS soon," the rep said in an e-mail. "However, we recognize that there is currently too much friction in this process and we are iterating on the flow so that the setting will only be temporarily disabled for that session. The account will then return to HTTPS on the next successful log in. We are testing this flow now and hope to launch it in the near future."

Also this week, a computer science professor at Rice University demonstrated that his Motorola Droid X running Android could be eavesdropped on with the right sniffing software. Dan Wallach ran the Wireshark network protocol analyzer and Mallory proxy in his undergraduate security class a few days ago. He found that Facebook sends data (except log-in credentials) in the clear, even though he has his Facebook account set to use HTTPS whenever possible, he wrote on the Freedom to Tinker blog.

Asked for comment, the Facebook representative said the company is working to provide Secure Sockets Layer (used in HTTPS) on mobile platforms in coming months.

"After launching SSL for the site, we are still testing across all Facebook platforms, and hope to provide it as an option for our mobile users in the coming months," the rep said in a statement. "As always, we advise people to use caution when sending or receiving information over unsecured Wi-Fi networks."

Wallach also found that Google Calendar traffic is not encrypted. In response, a Google representative said, "We plan to begin encrypting traffic to Google Calendar on Android in a future maintenance release. When possible, we recommend using encrypted Wi-Fi networks."

Lion Scopes Out Territory in Apple Ecosystem

Apple's newest iteration of OS X, Lion, includes some features inspired by iOS, the system designed specifically for the iPhone and iPad. Like iOS, Lion comes with an app store built in. One burning question is whether Apple will make an effort to corral most -- if not all -- of the software developed for OS X and make it available only through the Mac App Store, a move that would most likely be viewed as too controlling -- even for Apple.Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) may be hoping that Mac operating system release number eight becomes the eighth wonder of the technological world. The company released a developers preview of the OS, code-named "Lion," on Thursday.

However, Lion is primarily a "user interface evolution rather than a back-end functionality upgrade," according to Appitalism founder and CEO Simon Buckingham. Mac OS X Lion features Mission Control, a new Mac view; Launchpad, a new app home; full screen apps that use the entire Mac display; and of course, the new Mac App Store.

Mission Control provides a "bird's eye view of every app and window running on your Mac," said Apple representative Monica Sarkar. "Launchpad makes it easier than ever to find and launch any app. Multi-touch gestures give you a natural and intuitive way to interact, like pinching your fingers to zoom in and swiping left or right to turn a page."

Mac OS X Lion - Mission Control
Mac OS X Lion - Mission Control
iPad Inspiration

With the wild popularity of its iHandhelds -- iPad, iPhone and iPod -- it's no wonder Apple is incorporating a slew of iOS features into OS X.

"The iPad has inspired a new generation of innovative features in Lion," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing.

Those features come with a dizzying array of trademarked monikers. "Conversations" automatically groups related messages into a single timeline. "AirDrop" copies files wirelessly from one Mac to another.

"Versions" automatically saves successive versions of a document, with additional browse, edit and revert options. "Resume" brings apps back exactly as they were left on quit or restart. And "FileVault" provides disk encryption for local and external drives, along with the ability to wipe data instantaneously.

"I suspect all these new features hint at an accelerated announcement pace," Appitalism's Buckingham told MacNewsWorld. "Apple will probably move to twice yearly OS and iOS updates so that Android doesn't catch up to them."
App Store Roar

The new Lion features could hint at tighter controls over Mac software -- even more restrictive, perhaps, than those that apply to the iOS App Store.

Still, Lion and Apple iDevices are different animals, said Herbert Tsang, Ph.D., a bioinformatics researcher and instructor at the Simon Fraser University School of Computing Science.

"Through the App Store, the tight control that Apple has over their iDevices software is notorious," Tsang told MacNewsWorld. "There is no indication, however, that the [Mac] App Store will be the only way to obtain Mac software."

Mac OS X Lion - Mac App Store
Mac OS X Lion - Mac App Store

A Lion roaming in Apple's pristine ecosystem might also suggest that even higher walls are on the way. However, the act of building those walls would likely leave clues, "such as making iOS apps seamlessly available on the Mac platform, which is what I'd be looking for if I thought Lion involved issues of increasing control," Appitalism's Buckingham told TechNewsWorld. "I don't see any of that, however."

In fact, coupling the Mac App Store too tightly and seamlessly to the Mac would be a "step backward" in the progress of technology, SFU's Tsang remarked.

Simply having an app store available on a Mac, however, "is a way for individual developers to sell their software and will be a great benefit," he said. "The new integration ... in Mac OS X Lion is a way to benefit individual software developers. It is an effort to offer alternatives, rather than exclusivities.

Big Data is Big Open Source Tools

Data volumes are growing to the point where companies are being forced to scale up their infrastructure, and the proprietary license costs skyrocket along the way," said Revolution Analytics' Mike Minelli. "With open source technology, you get the job done quicker and more accurately at a fraction of the price."Enterprises are grappling with the skyrocketing amount of data they have to handle as that data proliferates into the terabyte and petabyte stage.

Datasets that large are known as "big data" to IT practitioners.

Relational databases and desktop statistics or visualization packages can't handle big data; instead, massively parallel software running on up to thousands of servers is needed to do the job.

Many businesses turn to open source tools, such as Apache's Hadoop, when working with big data. For example, Twitter sends logging messages to Hadoop and writes the data directly into HDFS, the Hadoop Distributed File System.

Hadoop can support data-intensive applications ranging up to thousands of nodes and multiple petabytes, David Hill, principal at Mesabi Group, told LinuxInsider. It has received wide acceptance.

However, the term "big data" is just a general term for many different types of applications, and Hadoop won't be suitable in every case, Hill warned.

The capture, storage and analysis of big data depends on the nature of the particular application, Hill stated. For example, scale-out network attached storage such as EMC's (NYSE: EMC) Isilon or IBM's (NYSE: IBM) SONAS (Scale Out Network Attached Storage), might be better for use with unstructured data such as photographs or videos rather than a tool such as Hadoop, he suggested.
Types of Big Data Work

Working with big data can be classified into three basic categories, Mike Minelli, executive vice president at Revolution Analytics, told LinuxInsider.

One is information management, a second is business intelligence, and the third is advanced analytics, Minelli said.

Information management captures and stores the information, BI analyzes data to see what has happened in the past, and advanced analytics is predictive, looking at what the data indicates for the future, Minelli said.

Revolution analytics offers the open source R language and Revolution R Enterprise. These provide advanced analytics for terabyte-class datasets. Revolution Analytics is developing connectors to Hadoop and capabilities for R to run jobs on Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) Map/Reduce framework, Minelli said.
Tools for working with Big Data

Proprietary big data analytic capabilities are available from AsterData; Netezza, now owned by IBM; Datameer, which builds on Apache's Hadoop but is proprietary; and Paraccel, Minelli said.

IBM's Netezza in its InfoSphere products, Oracle's (Nasdaq: ORCL) Exadata, and EMC's Greenplum are other proprietary tools for working on big data.

EMC has introduced a free community edition of its Greenplum database. This community edition is software-only, Mesabi Group's Hill remarked.

Greenplum Community Edition doesn't compete with Hadoop; instead, it's "a project whose aims are to incorporate best of breed technologies together to provide the best choice of platform," Luke Lonergan, vice president and chief technology officer of the EMC Data Computing Products Division, told LinuxInsider.

The initial release of Greenplum Community Edition includes three collaborative modules -- Greenplum DB, MADlib, and Alpine Miner, Lonergan said.

"The version of Greenplum DB included is an advanced development version that will provide rapid innovation, MADlib provides a collection of machine learning and data mining algorithms, and Alpine Miner provides a visual data mining environment that runs its algorithms directly inside Greenplum DB," Lonergan elaborated.

Open source tools for big data include Hadoop, Map/Reduce, and Jaspersoft business intelligence tools.

Jaspersoft offers business intelligence tools that provide reporting, analysis and ETL (extract, transform and load) for massively parallel analytic databases including EMC Greenplum and HP (NYSE: HPQ) Vertica. A version for IBM Netezza is in the works, Andrew Lampitt, director of business intelligence at Jaspersoft, told LinuxInsider.

Jaspersoft also provides native reporting through open source connectors for Hadoop and various types of NoSQL databases including MongoDB, Riak, CouchDB and Infinispan.

Further, Jaspersoft has an open source bridge to the R advanced analytics product from Revolution Analytics.
Open Source vs Proprietary Tools

Open source tools provide insight into the code so developers can find out what's inside when they do integration, Jaspersoft's Lampitt said.

"In almost every instance, open source analytics will be more cost-effective and more flexible than traditional proprietary solutions," Revolution Analytics' Minelli said.

"Data volumes are growing to the point where companies are being forced to scale up their infrastructure, and the proprietary license costs skyrocket along the way. With open source technology, you get the job done quicker and more accurately at a fraction of the price," he added.

Twitter's a case in point, opting for Hadoop because using proprietary tools would have just been too expensive.

Further, open source tools let enterprises create new analytic techniques to better handle unstructured data such as images and photographs, Minelli said.

"Open source analytics tools let you create innovative analytics that you can bake into your enterprise Enterprise Payment Security 2.0 Whitepaper from CyberSource. In today's ultra-competitive global economy, you just can't wait for a traditional vendor to develop a new analytic technique," Minelli added.

As in other spheres of IT, we're likely to see a mix of open source and proprietary technologies being used to work with big data.

"Short-term, open source analytics will become more and more widely used and will grow virally," Minelli opined. "Over the longer term you'll see a mix or a blend of techniques in highly competitive markets. My guess is that both will remain viable and necessary."

Map on Facebook with a few clicks

You know who your Facebook friends are, but can you visualize where they are? You might be surprised when you see "Where My Friends Be?," a Google Maps mashup with all of their locations pinpointed, showing you just how far-flung your friends really are.

We've seen other Facebook/Google Maps mashups before, but this one's different from other friend-mappers. It's fast, it takes just a few seconds to click into, and suddenly it's dropping little pins all over the globe, showing you precisely where your pals reside. Says one of its developers, Ajay Mehta:

"Surprisingly, there aren't a lot of apps like this. There were a few that were very poorly developed and eventually canceled years ago.

They weren't this visual either, most had a lame loading bar or something similar and the mapping was laggy/slow. We have friends pop onto the map in a cool, interactive way (which was the hardest part to hack together)."

Written by college freshmen Ajay Mehta, Wesley Zhao and Dan Shipper, the mashup gives you a quick way to remind yourself that you're not in Kansas anymore, and neither are your friends. Unless, of course, you all live in Kansas.

The enthusiasm of these frosh is infectious. Future Zuckerbergs?

Apple speeds up MacBook Pro

Apple on Thursday morning unveiled a new line of high-end laptop computers that's about twice as fast as the older generation, according to the company.

The MacBook Pro laptops get a speed boost from faster Intel processors, which can reach "Turbo Boost" speeds of 3.4 gigahertz. In nongeek speak, that means the computers can complete 3.4 billion calculations per second.

Apple says it's using the "fastest dual-core processor available."

The laptops also are the first computers to feature Intel and Apple's "Thunderbolt" technology, which is a new way to connect cameras, camcorders and the link to the computer -- an alternative to USB ports, which are ubiquitous today.

Apple says these new ports are much faster than existing alternatives.

"Ultrafast and ultraflexible, the Thunderbolt pipeline is more than 12 times faster than FireWire 800 and up to 20 times faster than USB 2.0, and it offers unprecedented expansion capabilities. It changes what you can do on a notebook," Apple says in its advertising materials.

The new laptops also have USB and FireWire connections.

The MacBook Pro computers -- some of the most expensive laptops on the market -- start at $1,200 for a 13-inch model and go up to $2,500 for a computer with a 17-inch screen, when measured diagonally.

The computers come with Intel's Core i5 and Core i7 dual-core processors. Their speeds range from 2.0 to 2.7 gigahertz but can jump to 3.4 gigahertz, the company says. Apple claims these processors make the new MacBook Pro twice as fast at processing data and three times as fast at rendering images.

Another new feature of the laptops -- which, from photos, look almost identical to their predecessors -- is the addition of a FaceTime video camera. This will allow MacBook Pro users to conduct video chats with people on mobile phones and iPods that support Apple's FaceTime video chat app, which is similar to Skype. Previously, iPhone 4 FaceTime users could only chat with each other -- not with people who were using laptops.

"FaceTime for Mac makes it easy to talk, smile and laugh with friends and family on their iPhone 4, iPod touch or Mac," Apple says in an ad for its FaceTime app for the Mac, which costs 99 cents.

Some Apple fans were initially disappointed by the specs of the new laptops.

"I have to say it looks like they just wanted to get this out of the way and move on to the actual main event, the iPad 2. iPad is the future," one commenter wrote on the blog Apple Insider.

Another complained that Apple updated the MacBook Pro series instead of the MacBook Air, which is a lighter laptop that boots up instantly.

"I'm sure many will be thrilled by the speed, but I'm majorly disappointed. ... My hopes for a MacBook Pro Air have been dashed.... Maybe next year ...," another commenter on that blog wrote.

Others weren't wowed by the computers' screen resolution.

"Reeeaaallly disappointed with the 1280x800 resolution? Why??" wrote a commenter on The Unofficial Apple Weblog, or TUAW.

Google declares war on content farms

Google has announced a major algorithmic change to its search engine, subtle in nature and perhaps unnoticeable to many users, but one that should dramatically improve the quality of Google's search results.

With this move, Google is targeting content farms -- a common name for low quality sites whose main goal is to attract search traffic by piling up (mostly) useless content, usually by either producing large amounts of low-quality text or by copying it from websites with original content.

Google does not go into details of the change which should impact 11.8 percent of Google's queries (currently only in the U.S., with plans to roll it out elsewhere over time), but it does say that it will affect the ranking of many sites on the web.

"This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites -- sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites -- sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on," explain Googlers Amit Singhal and Matt Cuttsin a blog post.

While the change will surely have many website owners up in arms, complaining that their website was unfairly ranked lower than before (we're sure that in some cases they will be right), it's a very welcome one.

The popularity of Google's search engine is still second to none, but Google has been plagued by black hat SEO practices and content farms for a while now, with thecomplaints from users slowly mounting over time.

If Google manages to put an end to content farms or at least significantly reduce their influence in search results, it will be an important step in regaining the trust of its millions of users.

Obama at dinner with Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg

A photo released by the White House on Friday shows Apple CEO Steve Jobs, along with other tech luminaries, raising a toast with President Barack Obama at a dinner Thursday night in San Francisco.

The photo, of a private dinner during the President's visit to California, comes as tabloid reports, some featuring alleged photos of Jobs, have questioned the Apple leader's health.

In the photo, Jobs and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg flank Obama during the toast. Wearing his trademark black mock turtleneck shirt, Jobs is photographed from behind.

Jobs was diagnosed with cancer in 2003. He took a six-month leave of absence in 2009, during which he was reported to have had a liver transplant.

He began an indefinite medical leave of absence on January 17.

This week, a supermarket tabloid and a gossip website ran unconfirmed reports suggesting that his health was declining.

Neither Apple nor Jobs, or anyone directly familiar with his health care, have commented publicly on the reason for his leave or the most recent rumors.

Jobs had kept a low profile since unveiling a new line of MacBook laptops in October.

Obama's meeting with the tech luminaries was intended to discuss innovation and spurring job growth.

Also worth noting: Zuckerberg appears to have shed his go-to hooded sweatshirt look for his dinner with the leader of the free world.

Others attending the dinner included Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

Also, Stanford University President John Hennessy, Genentech CEO Art Levinson, Steve Westly, founder of The Westly Group and John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Copia – social media meets the eReader

If we need evidence of the central role the digital world is taking in our modern lives, we need look no further than social networking. In a very short time, updating Facebook profiles and Tweet streams have become a pivotal part of everyday life for many millions of people. Even our literary preferences are beginning to lean more towards the digital, with Amazon recently announcing that the sale of digitized books had overtaken the sale of printed versions. The Copia platform brings both of these activities together in one place, offering members a new way discover, share and purchase books, newspapers and magazines.In addition to providing an online bookstore, the Copia platform allows members to annotate, highlight, make notes or otherwise draw attention to passages of particular relevance or importance in books they are reading. Those can then be shared with friends, family and colleagues via linked social networking profiles – like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – or to the wider Copia Community.

Users can comment on entries made by other users, making books that can then exist as both an original work and as an annotated, highlighted and commented shared experience. Unlike other collaborative e-Reading approaches, the Copia platform also allows anyone who prefers to read paper versions of books to join in with community discussions.
The Copia tailors the search for content towards providing a real-world experience, with members being able to search for content based on user ratings, tags, popularity, price, genre and so on. Results are displayed on a dynamic content page, which is said to offer users the chance to compare lots of titles in one place.

The layout offers toggling between list and expanded views, with the latter showing reader ratings and reviews to help users make a more informed reading choice. Members can also join or create virtual book clubs to further discuss content with those who share common interests.

Students might find the collaborative note-sharing particularly useful, giving them the chance to remotely work on a project with others, or allowing tutors to add notes and highlight relevant passages for all the class to see. The Copia also allows authors to interact directly with their readers through community discussions or by making their notes and thoughts available.

Developers can benefit from the Copia platform via an integrated software application engine which allows them to deliver content across the numerous digital media readers currently available.

The Copia device agnostic, social media and content delivery platform is available now.

Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is one of the technology bosses advising President ObamaUS President Barack Obama has met Silicon Valley bosses, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Apple's Steve Jobs and Google chief executive Eric Schmidt were also present at the private get-together in California. The president had been seeking the views of technology leaders as he works to turn around his country's ailing economy. Mr Obama has said he wants to encourage American businesses to invest more money in innovation. Among those meeting the president were the bosses of Twitter, Yahoo and Oracle.

Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs was in attendance, despite media reports that his health had taken a turn for the worse. US newspaper the National Enquirer published pictures, said to be of Mr Jobs, looking emaciated. He is currently on his third medical leave of absence from Apple since being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004. Thursday's meeting with the president was a private event, hosted by venture capitalist John Doerr.

Scareware Scam

Scammers are apparently using Google's URL shortening service, goo.gl, to distribute bogus links. The links take users to a scareware sight that purports to find malicious software on the user's computer, then offers to sell the user an AV product to solve the supposed problem. URL shorteners are commonly used in Twitter, but they can disguise a malicious link's true nature.Twitter has been hit by fast-spreading spam using Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) goo.gl URL shortening service.

The attack sends malicious links that take recipients clicking on them to a website hosting the "Security Shield" antivirus software program.

When users land on that site, they are essentially tricked into downloading and paying for the Security Shield application.

Twitter is resetting the passwords of accounts that are spreading the malicious link.
The Anatomy of the Fake AV Attack

The attackers send out tweets containing a link from the goo.gl shortened link service. This service and others like it compress long URLs into shorter ones, making them easier to fit into services like Twitter, which places a strict limit on the number of characters each tweet may contain. However, the services can also disguise the true nature of a link by hiding its actual URL.

Anyone clicking on the link is taken through two bounces to a website hosting the "Security Shield" fake antivirus program. Visitors are told they have suspicious applications running on their PCs and are urged to run a scan.

The scan shows the victim's PC is infected, and the website then asks the user to download and pay for the Security Shield application.

There's some uncertainty as to how the attacks were launched in the first place.

"It probably began by phishing of some sort," Adam Wosotowsky, principal engineer at McAfee Labs, told TechNewsWorld. "Possibly a social media worm like Koobface."

Variants of the Koobface worm have been used to attack Twitter for some time. This worm was initially targeted at Facebook, which it has attacked repeatedly over the years.

"It's not a worm," Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, told TechNewsWorld. "It's a spam campaign that points to malicious software."

The attack could have occurred because users were using the same passwords on another website that was compromised, Cluley said.
Dynamite Comes in Small Packages

This fake AV attack is the latest in a series of attacks hitting Twitter in which shortened URLs were used.

In December, a Twitter worm using the goo.gl URL shortening service hit Twitter. In that attack, victims were reportedly first redirected to the compromised website of a French furniture company before being redirected to other domains.

In February of 2010, Twitter users were flooded with short URLs prefaced with the message "This you???" that led them to a fake Twitter login page, according to Andrew Brandt, a member of Webroot's threat research team.

"Twitter almost always involves shortened URLs -- whether they be good or bad," Sophos' Cluley said. "Shortened URLs can, of course, obscure from the unwary user the eventual destination that they will be taken to."

In November, a Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC) blog post warned that hackers were substituting legitimate shortened URLs included in tweets with different ones pointing to malicious websites after scanning the Twitter homepage to pick the most trendy topics.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

It's not as if people are oblivious to the danger posed by shortened URLs.

At least as early as 2009, security Enterprise Payment Security 2.0 Whitepaper from CyberSource experts were warning about the danger of URL shortening.

In September, McAfee launched a secure short URL service.

In December, University of Tulsa computer science student Ben Schmidt created his own URL shortening service, d0z.me, which he dubbed "The Evil URL Shortener," that doubles as a weapon for issuing distributed denial-of-service attacks as a proof-of-concept project.

McAfee Labs warned in its threat predictions for 2011 that social media sites with URL-shortening services will lead all other such sites in terms of cybercriminal activity.

"Shortened URLs can be a danger sign," David Harley, an ESET senior research fellow, told TechNewsWorld. "Black hats do use them to hide the real destination in a number of contexts."

Black hats are malicious hackers.

However, it's not feasible to ban shortened URLs outright.

"Shortened URL sites are not 100 percent malicious, so blocking the domain outright can cause false positives, which researchers generally try to avoid," McAfee's Wosotowsky pointed out. "Goo.gl is an example of a site that's associated with Google, which might frown upon blocking the domain. This allows spammers to continually abuse the site."

Google makes Web search more social

Google is making Web search more social, weaving posts from the Twitter, Flickr, Blogger and other accounts of a user's friends into search results.

Google is making Web search more social, weaving posts from the Twitter, Flickr, Blogger and other accounts of a user's friends into search results. The move is an expansion of "Google Social Search," which the Internet giant introduced in 2009.

Instead of featuring at the bottom of a page of search results, relevant posts from the social media accounts of a user's friends are now integrated into the list of results themselves.

A Google search for camping, for example, may bring up a Twitter post by a friend about hiking trails or a link to campsite pictures uploaded by a friend to Flickr.

"Relevance isn't just about pages -- it's also about relationships," Google product management director Mike Cassidy and product manager Matthew Kulick said in a blog post.

"Today we’re taking another step forward -- enabling you to get even more information from the people that matter to you, whether they're publishing on YouTube, Flickr or their own blog or website," they said.

"This means you'll start seeing more from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they've shared or created," they added.

Social search will only be available to users who have a Google account.

Google account holders will also have the option of linking their social media accounts to their Google profiles.

Mindful of potential privacy concerns, Cassidy and Kulick said: "The new setting enables you to choose whether or not to show your connected accounts publicly on your Google profile."

Google said the new social search feature is only available in English for the moment.

It will also not display any input from the largest social network of them all -- Facebook -- which has previously declined to share data with Google.

Fecebook With HTTPS Connections

How important is your Facebook account? Do you consider it as important as, say, your bank account? If you happen to feel this way about Facebook, then you'll like the latest news regarding the social network service.

Earlier this week, Facebook rolled out a new feature which allows users to connect with a HTTPS connection.

What is a HTTPS connection?

Basically it's an encrypted link, which is very similar to what most banks provide their customers. The connection type will be able to curb the problems with "sidejacking". Which is the act of cracking into connections over open Wi-Fi networks.

Considering many people keep up with their social networking in public places, this could be a huge privacy move for some users. For those who travel on a consistent basis, this is a huge improvement.

This security feature is added to a long list of updates Facebook has rolled out recently. With one such featured being the "social authentication" feature. This makes it so users have to verify photos of their friends in order to verify their account status.

It's perhaps coincidence, or maybe not, that this feature has released the day after an API error was used to hack into Mark Zuckerberg's account page. The error has been patched, alongside with the release of the HTTPS feature.

The update has also released a day before the Data Privacy Day. Which is an international time to boost awareness for data privacy.

With HTTPS, Facebook continues to try and improve its security image. Many people have criticized them through the years for not protecting users' security and privacy enough. This update is certainly taking a step in the right direction to help boost their image.