LEAKED: Here's What Facebook's New Phone Software Will Look Like

Facebook is reportedly set to announce new software for Android, Google's mobile software, tomorrow.

Today, @evleaks, an anonymous mobile leaker, posted photos of what it's going to look like at 9to5Google. Facebook's modification of Android appears to make the operating system simpler.

By most accounts, Facebook isn't totally taking over Android. It's just providing a "skin," or its own layer of design atop the operating system. This is widespread with Android. HTC and Samsung each have their own tweaks to Android. HTC has "Sense" and Samsung has "TouchWiz".

This is just going to be the Facebook "Home" or something like that.

Yesterday, @evleaks published a photo of the HTC First, which will be the new phone Facebook uses to demonstrate the new Android software. According to the leaked specs, it'll be a mid-range phone with relatively weak specs.

Yahoo Buys A Mobile News Startup Founded By A 15-Year-Old For $30 Million

Yahoo announced today that it has acquired Summly, a mobile news aggregation app from British entrepreneur Nick D'Aloisio.

D'Aloisio is only 17-years-old. When he started Summly, he was only 15.

Summly scans the Web for news and uses an algorithm to find the type of content you want to read. Then it summarizes it for you.

Yahoo is going to shut down Summly as a stand alone app, but it says it's going to incorporate Summly technology into its own mobile apps and sites.

Clearly, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wanted to hire D'Aloisio. She has been making a lot of small acquisitions like Summly. She wants to bring young, fresh, mobile-focused talent to Yahoo.

Humoursly, Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud storage company Box, notes on Twitter that D'Aloisio was born after Yahoo was founded.

There was no price announced with the deal. However, All Things D reporter Kara Swisher says Yahoo paid just under $30 million. The app generated no revenue.

According to Crunchbase, Summly has raised $1.53 million in venture funding from an impressive list of investors.

Summly

 Hong Kong billionaire businessman Li Ka-shing put $300,000 in the company in September of 2011. A year later, the rest of the money came from people like Brian Chesky, the CEO and founder of AirBnb, Mark Pincus, the founder and CEO of Zynga, Ashton Kutcher, Yoko Ono, Wendy Murdoch, and a few other big names in tech.

When Steve Jobs opened the iPhone's App Store, Nick D'Aloisio was only 12-years-old.

D'Aloisio taught himself how to make an app. Three years later he launched his own startup, Trimit, which truncated a news story into 140 characters for people that wanted to tweet out stories.

He realized people didn't want to truncate the news. They wanted the news truncated for them. So, he flipped the app and made Summly.

Previously it was reported Summly only had 500,000 downloads, which is not much for an app. D'Aloisio says Summly has had "90 million summaries read," whatever that metric means.

Here's the release from Yahoo announcing the deal:

Today, we’re excited to share that we’re acquiring Summly, a mobile product company founded with a vision to simplify the way we get information, making it faster, easier and more concise.

At the age of 15, Nick D’Aloisio created the Summly app at his home in London. It started with an insight -- that we live in a world of constant information and need new ways to simplify how we find the stories that are important to us, at a glance. Mobile devices are shifting our daily routines, and users have changed not only what, but how much information they consume. Yet most articles and web pages were formatted for browsing with mouse clicks. The ability to skim them on a phone or a tablet can be a real challenge -- we want easier ways to identify what’s important to us.

Summly solves this by delivering snapshots of stories, giving you a simple and elegant way to find the news you want, faster than ever before. For publishers, the Summly technology provides a new approach to drive interest in stories and reach a generation of mobile users that want information on the go.

Nick and the Summly team are joining Yahoo! in the coming weeks. While the Summly app will close, you will see the technology come to life throughout Yahoo!’s mobile experiences soon. So stay tuned!

Mobile devices are at the center of how we engage with the people, experiences and interests we love. Across Yahoo!, we’re focused on creating beautiful experiences that people are excited to use every day -- products that inspire and delight. We can’t wait to work with Nick and the Summly team to do just that.

And here's Summly's announcement:

In true Summly fashion, I will keep this short and sweet.

I am delighted to announce Summly has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo!. Our vision is to simplify how we get information and we are thrilled to continue this mission with Yahoo!'s global scale and expertise. After spending some time on campus, I discovered that Yahoo! has an inspirational goal to make people's daily routines entertaining and meaningful, and mobile will be a central part of that vision. For us, it's the perfect fit.

When I founded Summly at 15, I would have never imagined being in this position so suddenly. I'd personally like to thank Li Ka-Shing and Horizons Ventures for having the foresight to back a teenager pursuing his dream. Also to our investors, advisors and of course the fantastic team for believing in the potential of Summly. Without you all, this never would have been possible. I'd also like to thank my family, friends and school for supporting me.

Most importantly, thank you to our wonderful users who have helped contribute to us receiving Apple's Best Apps of 2012 award for Intuitive Touch! We will be removing Summly from the App Store today but expect our summarization technology will soon return to multiple Yahoo! products - see this as a ‘power nap' so to speak.

With over 90 million summaries read in just a few short months, this is just the beginning for our technology. As we move towards a more refined, liberated and intelligent mobile web, summaries will continue to help navigate through our ever expanding information universe.

Sincerely,

Nick
Founder

Here's a demo video of Summly, which helped launch it:

Summly Launch from Summly on Vimeo.

Twitter gets into April Fools' action, announces vowel-less 'Twttr' service

Who needs vowels, right? Especially if you’re on Twitter and already hate the 140-character limit on the micro-blogging site. Twitter has announced that it is going to launch a new service called Twttr that will skip the vowels and will turn the main site Twitter into a $5 a month premium service. Of course, one needs to keep in mind that it’s April Fool’s day today.

“Starting today, we are shifting to a two-tiered service: Everyone can use our basic service, Twttr, but you only get consonants. For five dollars a month, you can use our premium 'Twitter' service which also includes vowels,” the scl ntwrk wrote in a blog post.

World's most retweeted tweet on Twttr

Being very considerate, though, Twitter has letter “Y” for free. Saying that the letter “Y” will be free, “always and forever,” Twitter also said that vowels in URLs will also be free of charge. These changes will thankfully not be rolled over to Twitter users who access the website in other languages. 

Twitter is also expanding the length of tweets to 141 characters (yayy!) from the original 140, “for those moments when you need just one more character to finish your thought.” This extra character will come with a price tag, sadly. Using a bidding system, Twitter will decide the price of the extra character keeping in mind its demand at the time. You can choose to go over limit with one character, not two, said the social networking website.

So how did this genius idea come about? Michael Sippey, Twitter’s VP of Product said, “I was carpooling home after Twitter’s seventh birthday party. With my head filled with images from our past, like our early logo where we spelled it TWTTR, in neon green toothpaste. And then Prince’s song “I would die 4 U” came on the radio. I felt like there was something there, but I wasn’t sure what or how to bring it to market.

Then later that night, I was watching “Wheel of Fortune” with @adambain, and a contestant yelled out ‘I wanna buy a vowel’. Everything just sort of clicked. Adam and I turned to each other and high-fived. It was one of those product moments that just felt like magic.”

Twitter said that it has already started testing Twttr with a small group of users, and this change will be rolled out to 100 percent of them over the next few days. Very considerately Twitter has advised users to practice tweeting with merely consonants and the letter “Y”. It has made available hashtags #novwls for people on Twtter and #icanhashashtag for users on premium Twitter.

April Fools!

A website that converts your Tweets into “Twts” has also been provided. Heading to the website will write a tweet out for you to send to your followers, letting them know you’ve been April Fooled by Twitter.

Twitter joins the ranks of other companies who are pulling gags on the internet today. Google has launched a bevy of prank services including Google Nose, a website that allows you to smell products using your monitors. Google also announced that YouTube would be shutting down in order to find the best video, before the service launches again in 2023 with just the winning video.

Facebook to pay users for Facebooking; early-bird applications open

New Delhi: This is a social networking addict's dream come true. Facebook is testing a new feature that will allow a select class of users, whom Facebook calls 'Advanced Facebookers', to earn while using the social networking service. According to sources close to the programme, Facebook plans to pay the top 4 per cent of the first batch of selected users up to $1 per activity during the initial global rollout phase.

The new Advanced Facebookers (AF) feature is being currently tested amongst a small group of users in New Zealand, where Facebook usually carries out its initial trials before rolling them out globally.

The news was first leaked by Allay Floods, a Facebook user from New Zealand, who is part of Facebook's alpha test team for the new feature.

What is Advanced Facebookers?

Users will be selected programatically by Facebook and eligible users will see a notification (as shown in the image) above their Facebook News Feed. It says, "You have been selected for the Advanced Facebookers programme. Click here to know more." Clicking on the link takes the user to a page detailing the terms and conditions of the program. If a user agrees to be a participant, then he is taken to a page where he needs to enter his credit card details for verification and also bank account and other tax related information.

Facebook's terms state that it can take anywhere between 48 hours to 7 days to process an Advanced Facebookers application and also reserves the right to reject an application without citing any reason.

Floods, who is a senior anagram researcher at New Zealand Institute of Planning and Management, had posted a note on her Facebook profile detailing her Advanced Facebookers experience. But she soon deleted the post. When contacted by IBNLive, Floods said over the phone from Cape Foulwind, that Facebook executives had asked her to delete the note as it violated the agreement she had with Facebook while signing up for the alpha test.

While Floods refused to divulge further details, another participant in the alpha test shared more information via email on condition of anonymity. Advanced Facebookers are not necessarily people who are most active on Facebook or have the most number of friends or subscribers. Instead Facebook uses an algorithm to measure the authoritativeness of users on Facebook and the top 1 per cent of these power users will be the first to get invites to participate in the program once it starts rolling out.

Our source says he expects the test to go on for a few more months before it is formally unveiled at Facebook F8 conference in September this year. Asked about how much money Facebook is expected to pay to its Advanced Facebookers, "it can, for now, at best buy me a dinner at The George," he said. The George is the most exclusive hotel in Christchurch.

How much can users expect to get paid?

While how much users will be paid will vary according to how much they use Facebook and where they rank on the authoritativeness index and each Facebook activity of the Advanced Facebookers can be monetised, be it a status update or a comment or even a mere 'like'. Another source, with direct knowledge about the Advanced Facebookers payment model, confirms that during the initial global rollout phase, the top 4 per cent of the first batch of 2,013 selected users can expect an earning of up to $1 per activity.

Facebook plans to keep the payment model flexible, a like and a lengthy and interesting Facebook note will not be treated at par. How much users are paid will also depend on the virality of a particular Facebook activity. This means that if an Advanced Facebooker's activity triggers more activity amongst other Facebook users the earnings are likely to go up.

Why is Facebook doing this?

With over a billion active users, why does Facebook need to resort to paying its own users? "Competition," says Baz Bandal, head of the department of social media the Indian Institute of Internet. "Because more of what we call the power users, the people who set the agenda and have the most powerful voice online are in fact moving away from Facebook. Our research shows that Facebook use has declined among such power users and they are moving to other platforms such has Twitter and Quora."

"It is important for Facebook to retain the leaders, because of the herd mentality of online users, Facebook fears that other users might also follow suit. Therefore the money is an incentive to hold them back," explains Bandal.

Facebook's official spokesperson refused to comment when contacted but did not deny plans to pay users for using Facebook.

Dontu Seethecine, an Italian immigrant to the US, who was also one of Facebook earliest users at Harvard, thinks Mark Zuckerberg is losing the plot. "Zuck doesn't get it. This is Facebook, not Google AdSense. You have to treat users equally because when inequality steps in, it is fodder for a revolution. And revolutions bring things down."

How you too can board the Facebook gravy train

Though Facebook hasn't publicly announced the Advanced Facebookers program, it seems to be quietly inviting early-bird applications from interested users and also has put up a dedicated page for the purpose. If you too wish you be one of the Advanced Facebookers and get paid for what is otherwise a monetarily unproductive activity, click here.

Is Facebook's Advanced Facebookers program revolutionary or will it trigger a revolution that will break down the class barriers in the social network? Let us know in the comments.

source

Google announces Gmail Blue on April Fool's Day

New Delhi: Quite like on April 1 every year, Google has lined up a series of April Fool's Day hoaxes. Google released a YouTube clip declaring that the world's most popular video website will shut down till 2023 and also announced its olfactory new feature Google Nose. Google has introduced another video announcing the all new Gmail Blue e-mail client.

The Gmail Blue announcement is another April Fool's prank from Google. The video says, the compose button will turn blue while you click on it to create a new message.

Everything will appear blue from labels to body text in Gmail Blue, explains a Google executive in the video. Another Google executive tells that the company tried different colours - orange, brown before they nailed down the Blue colour - the reminiscent of nature.

Everything will appear blue from labels to body text in Gmail Blue, explains a Google executive in the video.

"Starting today, you'll get to experience the next big step for Gmail, Gmail Blue," says Google in a blog post. The company has employed efforts to make people believe that Gmail Blue is the next face of Gmail; however it fails.

Watch the video below to see Google's bogus Gmail Blue. Google had launched Gmail nine years ago on April 1, 2004.

How to use Filezilla (FTP Client)

If you don't have Filezilla install downloand and Install, Click here to download filezilla from this link you can choose the file appropriate for your platform.

Now you have filezilla installed, below are the steps on how to use filezilla

Step 1: Launch the FTP client (ie filezilla) on your PC

At this point you are not connected to any server.

Step 2:  Choose File → Site Manager to open the Site Manager.

The Site Manager opens, select My sites on the left then new site, then go to general tab on right

Step 3: Click the New Site button and name your site.   

You can give the new site a name to help you identify it. This site name can be anything you want it to be because it’s not part of the connection data that you add in the next steps.

Step 4: Enter the FTP server in the Host text field.

The host name is the same as the FTP server information provided to you when you set up the FTP account on your web server.

Step 5: Enter the FTP port in the Port text field.

In most hosting environments, FTP uses port 21, and this never changes. Just be sure to double-check your port number and enter it in the Port text field.

Step 6: Choose FTP→File Transfer Protocol from the Server Type drop-down list and then choose Normal in the Logon Type drop-down list.

The Logon Type option in the Site Manager Dialogue box displays Normal.

Step 7: Type your username in the User text field and then type your password in the Password text field.

This is the username and password given to you in the FTP settings.

Step 8: Click the Connect button.

Your computer connects to your web server. The directory of folders and files from your local computer displays on the left of the FileZilla FTP client window, and the directory of folders and files on your web server is displayed on the right.

To upload files to the server or download to your local computer simply drag and drop to the folders you want on either side. ie to upload drag files to the folders on the right side and to download drag files to the left of filezilla window.

Why Web Companies Have Trouble Making Money

Why can't some of the most popular start-ups on the Web translate users into dollars?

Selling and bringing in revenue is a challenge for any business, but parts of the tech sector seem particularly challenged on this front. As I mentioned in a recent post, many--including some of the biggest names, such as Foursquare, Pinterest, and Tumblr--have first focused on building an audience and only then on monetizing.

The theory goes that the most difficult thing to do is get people to come to your site or use your service on a regular basis. Once you've got the traffic, of course you'll be able to find a way to make money. Only, that often proves more difficult than many entrepreneurs assume.

I put some questions to Erik Gordon, managing director of the University of Michigan's Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, who examines sales, marketing, and business development for high-growth start-ups.

Why is adding on monetization after getting users so difficult?
Many users feel betrayed. They think they're the ones who made your service a success by contributing content or their presence. Now you want to charge them to participate in something they built for you.
It also is a big change in culture. It goes from being a collegial, friendly relationship to a commercial relationship. It's like inviting a friend over for dinner, asking her to bring the fish and the wine, and after she cooks it with you, asking her to pay.

Advertising is a tempting revenue strategy in these cases, yet online ad inventory keeps growing and prices keep dropping. Are ad-driven companies setting themselves up for defeat? 
Mere ad space is a cheaper commodity than dirt. Unless you can target precisely to people who are likely to attend to the ads and act, you offer little value to advertisers. Fifty million visitors who don't look at ads is worth no more than 500 visitors who don't look at ads.

Facebook has been successful to some degree in getting real income, but it's at a low rate of monetization per user compared to Yahoo, let alone Google. What should the company have done differently?
Facebook is fighting cultural and use case problems. People go to Facebook to check on friends and, at most, to get recommendations from friends, not from advertisers. People go to Google for information, not for socializing, and as long as the ads are clearly delineated as ads, they don't resent them--and they even click on them. Social is powerful but it is a constraint on how commercial you can become.

What are the pros and cons of becoming a data platform for others, like Foursquare seems to be doing?
If you want to be in the data platform business and sell your services to people who don't compete with you, it can be a great business. If you are in another business and have a data platform whose value is that it gives you a competitive advantage in that other business, once you sell your data platform services to others you reduce that advantage. If the data platform business could be bigger and more lucrative than your original business model, do it, but realize that you will become a different company, with a different business model.

How do these companies get past their original structure and find a way to sustainable revenue? Will they see the growth that investors originally expected?
I wouldn't invest in a company that doesn't have a sensible plan for monetizing its efforts. That means I miss out on a few great opportunities and pass on a lot of money-eating failures. Most companies do not succeed it pivoting from their original structure to a profitable business, so starting with a structure that builds in a path to profits is more appealing.

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3 Reasons the Experts Are Wrong About Email

Reading your email frequently will make you and your team more productive and efficient--not less.

If you've ever read any workplace advice from any time management experts (or even this website), you know they all say the same thing about email: Don't check it too often! Pick one or two times a day for email and never look at it except then! Reading your email all day makes you inefficient!

With all due respect to all these experts, they're wrong. Here are three reasons why checking your email all day long makes me more--not less--efficient.

1. Email is where a lot of my work happens.

Take one of my two jobs: being an independent writer. To do this I must pitch story ideas to editors, follow up, get assignments, contact sources to set up interviews, turn in articles, get feedback, and eventually send an invoice. What application do I use for all these things? You guessed it.

Time management experts seem to think that checking one's email is a distraction from one's actual work. But sending and reading emails is how I do much of my actual work. Isn't that true for you too?

2. Not checking my email would make my team less efficient.

Take my other job, president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. With 14 people (besides me) on the board of directors, an administrative staff of four, about 20 committees and a dozen chapters, there are large and small decisions to be made every day, all day. Yesterday morning, someone asked me who should notify this year's winner of our Career Achievement Award, a question that involved two committees and our executive director. With three quick emails back and forth, we determined the head of our Awards Committee should do it, and she delivered the good news an hour later.

If they'd had to wait till afternoon for me to weigh in, and then till the following day for my final email on the subject, it would have delayed the process and left everyone waiting for an answer for at least 24 hours. Yes, delaying an award notification would  be no big deal. But it could as easily have been a crisis that needed a quick solution. The point is, do you want to leave your team members sitting on their hands while they wait for the two times a day when you'll answer the questions they've asked you?

3. I might miss information that I need.

Recently I was working on an article when I paused to read my email, as I do when I need to take a few moments' break from what I'm writing. There was a message from my editor to all her writers telling us not to use a particular source who'd been quoted a few times too often in her magazine. I'd been about to include multiple quotes from that source in my article and it would have taken a substantial rewrite to take them all out.

In other words, pausing to read my email saved me hours of extra work. How's that for time management?