Author: Dr. Bill

The Internet Coupon market is huge, and getting bigger. I can remember back in 1996, the small web company I was working for thought web coupons were a great idea! (Of course, we were so far ahead of our time, no business understood what the web even was!) Sigh. Anyway, Facebook is experimenting with coupons now too!

Facebook jumps into crowded coupon market

“(Reuters) – Facebook began offering users in five U.S. cities coupons for everything from wine tastings to concert tickets on Tuesday, turning up the competitive heat in an increasingly crowded market.

The special Deals coupons, which Facebook users can purchase directly on its service, offer discounted prices or access to limited-availability goods. Facebook will take a cut of each transaction, though the company declined to say how much.

With the new service, Facebook becomes the latest Internet heavyweight to jump into the red-hot daily deals market pioneered by Groupon a few years ago. Last week, Google Inc began marketing a new daily deals service dubbed Offers to users in Portland, Oregon, with plans to expand to San Francisco and New York, and Amazon.com invested $175 million in LivingSocial in December.

‘Although the market has seen huge growth and there are big players already there, it’s not something that’s locked down, said Ray Valdes, an Internet analyst at research firm Gartner.

‘I expect to see churn among the vendors as they try one thing and it works for a while and other vendors find new ways of better meeting users’s needs,’ he said.

Facebook, the world’s No.1 social network with more than 500 million users, is betting that social interaction will help set it apart from the dozens of companies currently offering online daily deals.

The coupons available on Facebook are specifically geared toward group activities, such as a river rafting trip, rather than for individual items such as a discounted pair of jeans. Facebook users can easily recommend interesting-looking deals to their friends on the service.”

So, will you get your coupons off Facebook? Hummmmm?

See… just like I said in the last Netcast… Apple is pretty much saying “Nanna, nanna, boo, boo!” Sigh. Figures.

Your Android phone is tracking you

“While everyone is crying foul that the iPhone is tracking users, people should be aware that their Android phone has been doing the same thing.

Yes, it seems like Google’s little green robot is also collecting user data every few seconds and sending it off to Google. Data which includes GPS location, Wi-Fi hotspots the phone has encountered, and the device ID. The difference between the data that Google is harvesting versus what is going on with the iPhone is that users have to opt in for their data to be collected.”

This is just awesome!

Amazon has fought issues with their cloud platform for two days… it looks like they are finally getting it under control.

Amazon’s two-day cloud computing nightmare nears an end

“Amazon appeared to finally have the issues with its Web Services cloud platform under control, saying late Friday afternoon that all but its most ‘time consuming’ volumes had been recovered and were back online. This seems to match up with reports that those websites that depended on Amazon’s cloud were for the most part operating normally.

The partial failure which affected Amazon’s cloud servers in its Northern Virginia facility, occurred early Thursday morning. Several popular websites including Foursquare, Reddit, and Quora were down for much of Thursday, and those issues extended into Friday as well.

As of press time late Friday afternoon, all three websites appeared to be functioning normally or close to it. There could still be some hiccups over the next several hours as volumes continue to be restored, some of which may hold data necessary to use all functionality of those sites.”

Spammers are evil. And now they are trying to lure people into clicking on stupid links because of cute bunnies!

Spamvertised Easter Greetings lead to malware

“Security researchers from McAfee Labs are reporting on a currently ongoing event-based social engineering attack, aiming to trick users into clicking on a link found in a malicious email.

The spamvertised emails come using ‘Easter Greeting from Alex’ subjects, and are using an animated image including a ‘Download Animated Greeting Here’ body. Upon clicking on the link, the user is exposed to a password-stealing malware variant of PWS-ZBot.

With Easter only a few days away, cybercriminals are quickly adapting to the event-based social engineering potential presented by the holiday.

Users are advised to avoid interacting with suspicious links and email attachments found in email messages.”

Your iPhone knows where you are, and, it’s tellin’!

iPhone Software Tracks Location Of Users

“Apple’s iPhone software is storing a record of the travels of iPhone owners on their phones and on the computers used for iPhone synchronization, a practice that has renewed privacy concerns about mobile location tracking.

The data, consisting of latitude and longitude coordinates and corresponding timestamps, is stored unencrypted and, apparently, without permission or conspicuous notification. Apple did not respond to a request to explain whether any of its user agreements covers this practice.

The existence of the iPhone tracking database was disclosed on Wednesday at the Where 2.0 conference by Alasdair Allan, an iPhone programmer and a senior research fellow in Astronomy at the University of Exeter, and Pete Warden, founder of OpenHeatMap.com and a former Apple software engineer.

French blogger Paul Coubis appears to have been the first to report this issue last year, though his findings didn’t attract much attention.”

Now, this is interesting! According to the YouTube blog, YouTube is now transcoding all new uploads to WebM, whereas previously the focus was on 720p and 1080p video.

Google’s James Zern writes, “Transcoding all new video uploads into WebM is an important first step, and we’re also working to transcode our entire video catalog to WebM. Given the massive size of our catalog — nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day — this is quite the undertaking. So far we’ve already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM. We’re focusing first on the most viewed videos on the site, and we’ve made great progress here through our cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos into WebM. As we continue to transcode the remaining inventory, we’ll keep you posted on our progress.”