Things I've seen that are encouraging. Bruce Schneier in Q&A: Q: We've also seen Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) come under attack, and some experts are saying it is useless. Do you agree? A: I'm not convinced that SSL has a problem. After all, you don't have to use it. If I log-on to Amazon without SSL the company will still take my money. The problem SSL solves is the man-in-the-middle attack with someone eavesdropping on the line. But I'm not convinced that's the most serious problem. If someone wants your financial data they'll hack the server holding it, rather than deal with SSL. Right. The essence is that SSL solves the "easy" part of the problem, and leaves open the biggest part. Before the proponents of SSL say, "not our problem," remember that AADS did solve it, as did SOX and a whole bunch of other things. It's called end-to-end, and is well known as being the only worthwhile security. Indeed, I'd say it was simply responsible engineering, except for the fact that it isn't widely practiced. OK, so this is old news, from around March, but it is worth declaring sanity: Q: But doesn't SSL give consumers confidence to shop online, and thus spur e-commerce? A: Well up to a point, but if you wanted to give consumers confidence you could just put a big red button on the site saying 'You're safe'. SSL doesn't matter. It's all in the database. We've got the threat the wrong way round. It's not someone eavesdropping on Eve that's the problem, it's someone hacking Eve's endpoint. Which is to say, if you are going to do anything to fix the problem, you have to look at the end-points. The only time you should look at the protocol, and the certificates, is how well they are protecting the end-points. Meanwhile, the SSL field continues to be one for security researchers to make headlines over. It's BlackHat time again: "The point is that SSL just doesn't do what people think it does," says Hansen, an security researcher with SecTheory who often goes by the name RSnake. Hansen split his dumptruck of Web-browsing bugs into three categories of severity: About half are low-level threats, 10 or so are medium, and two are critical. One example... Many observers in the security world have known this for a while, and everyone else has felt increasingly frustrated and despondent about the promise: There has been speculation that an organization with sufficient power would be able to get a valid certificate from one of the 170+ certificate authorities (CAs) that are installed by default in the typical browser and could then avoid this alert .... But how many CAs does the average Internet user actually need? Fourteen! Let me explain. For the past two weeks I have been using Firefox on Windows with a reduced set of CAs. I disabled ALL of them in the browser and re-enabled them one by one as necessary during my normal usage.... On the one hand, SSL is the brand of security. On the other hand, it isn't the delivery of security; it simply isn't deployed in secure browsing to provide the user security that was advertised: you are on the site you think you are on. Only as we moved from a benign world to a fraud world, around 2003-2005, this has this been shown to matter. Bruce goes on: Q: So is encryption the wrong approach to take? A: This kind of issue isn't an authentication problem, it's a data problem. People are recognising this now, and seeing that encryption may not be the answer. We took a World War II mindset to the internet and it doesn't work that well. We thought encryption would be the answer, but it wasn't. It doesn't solve the problem of someone looking over your shoulder to steal your data. Indeed. Note that comment about the World War II mindset. It is the case that the entire 1990s generation of security engineers were taught from the military text book. The military assumes its nodes -- its soldiers, its computers -- are safe. And, it so happens, that when armies fight armies, they do real-life active MITMs against each other to gain local advantage. There are cases of this happening, and oddly enough, they'll even do it to civilians if they think they can (ask Greenpeace). And the economics is sane, sensible stuff, if we bothered to think about it: in war, the wire is the threat, the nodes are safe. However, adopting "the wire" as the weakness and Mallory as the Man-In-The-Middle, and Eve as the Eavesdropper as "the threat" in the Internet was a mistake. Even in the early 1990s, we knew that the node was the problem. Firstly, ever since the PC, nodes in commercial computing are controlled by (dumb) users not professional (soldiers). Who download shit from the net, not operate trusted military assets. Secondly, observation of known threats told us where the problems lay: floppy viruses were very popular, and phone-line attacks were about spoofing and gaining entry to an end-point. Nobody was bothering with "the wire," nobody was talking about snooping and spying and listening [*]. The military model was the precise reverse of the Internet's reality. To conclude. There is no doubt about this in security circles: the SSL threat model was all wrong, and consequently the product was deployed badly. Where the doubt lies is how long it will take the software providers to realise that their world is upside down? It can probably only happen when everyone with credibility stands up and says it is so. For this, the posts shown here are very welcome. Let's hear more!...

Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman deserves credit for trying to play nice with Google, even appearing onstage at the Social Currency CrunchUp with John Hanke, a Google VP of Product Management. As expected the tension was palpable, as Hanke and Stoppelman discussed Google Places and the goliath’s heavy reliance on Yelp’s content.

As an increasingly robust aggregator of local reviews, Google Places is turning into a formidable opponent. Several years ago, Google paid Yelp for access to their huge database of reviews; however, eventually Yelp terminated the deal. All was well until Google started crawling Yelp’s pages for unlicensed content to populate Google Places. Adding insult to injury, Google often pushes Yelp’s data to the bottom of its review areas, favoring instead licensed partners like Zagat. Oh, what a tangled web of reviews we weave.

Beyond the professional veneer, there’s no question that Stoppelman feels burned.

The recent developments, he says, were unexpected:

“Well I think we were surprised because we hadn’t participated in Place Pages over the years. Like we were in sort of the precursor to Place Pages back in something like 2006 and then we left because we weren’t really happy in the direction it was going and we thought OK we’ll just show up in organic results and everybody is still happy. And then yeah, we found our content was showing up there and it is ranked dead last right now. I don’t think that’s sort of a permanent situation from what we gather from talking to Google, they are sort of  headed in a new direction that which hopefully will be more positive.”

Yelp, of course, is not always the victim. The site has been criticized for ripping Foursquare’s techniques, with this year’s introduction of check-ins, leader boards, badges and the not-so-subtle “dukedom” honor. Now, Yelp is tiptoeing near Groupon’s turf, as it tests limited deals in cities like Sacramento. During our post-panel video interview, we got a chance to talk to Stoppelman about Google Places and Yelp’s budding rivalries with Foursquare and Groupon. See full video above— below are a couple key highlights:

On Check-Ins
-Android has been a particularly strong platform— the number of Yelp downloads grew 40% week over week for about a month. Now, its growing 15% week over week.

On Limited Sales
-Yelp will eventually roll out a product that will capitalize on its strength as a destination for time sensitive searches. “We have all this traffic, we have 35 million monthly visiting the site and so what could we do for people that are actually looking for a massage right now versus you know alerting them hey there’s this deal is available. So are there some interesting twists on just the Groupon model that we can apply because we’re Yelp.”

CrunchBase InformationYelpJeremy StoppelmanJohn HankeGoogleFoursquareGrouponInformation provided by CrunchBase

Well this is interesting. One of the key points at Apple’s recent press conference to discuss the iPhone 4′s antenna, was that the problem (called “attenuation”) is not unique to the iPhone 4. To highlight this, Apple showed videos of the problem on smartphones by rival companies. Those videos were then posted to a special antenna page on Apple’s website. Those videos are now gone.

As you can see on this page, the videos are nowhere to be found. Instead, the page now only shows the overview of the antenna design and test labs. A search of Apple’s website brings up a few of the landing pages where the videos used to be — here’s the Droid X one, for example — but now those just redirect to the antenna design page as well. Odd.

Here’s what else is interesting: the original page with these videos still does reside on the Canadian version of Apple’s website. Here’s you’ll find the videos for the BlackBerry Bold 9700, the HTC Droid Eris, the Motorola Droid X, the Nokia N97 Mini, the Samsung Omnia II, the iPhone 3GS, and the iPhone 4. However, the Asian version of Apple’s site has the videos removed as well.

The videos are still up on Apple’s official YouTube channel, but they are no longer featured, and are a little bit trickier to find.

We’ve reached out to Apple for an official response as to why they removed them from the website. Obviously, they caused quite a bit of controversy – with some rivals, like RIM (makers of the BlackBerry), even responding. Has the threat of lawsuits from rivals forced Apple to take them down? Or did they take them down due to some of the negative backlash they were receiving? Or perhaps Apple is simply trying to move on from the situation — but again, the antenna design and test lab page is still there (though it doesn’t call out rivals specifically).

At the top of this post, find what the /antenna site currently looks like in the U.S. Below, find what it used to look like — and still does for the Canadian version of the site.

[thanks Noah]

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Let’s call this a single source rumor. But the source is Paul Carr’s camera, so we feel pretty good about it. The picture was taken last night at the TechCrunch summer party at August Capital.

Tello, says our source (the camera), has raised $100,000 from angel investor Dave McClure, who’s checks appear to have an imprint of the Twitter fail whale in the background. This is one of his first investments from his shiny new 500 Startups fund.

What’s Tello? We don’t actually know. Founder and CEO Joe Beninato was previously the CEO of Presto. We had a lot of fun with that one. Cofounder and CTO John Cwikla has experience at GameLayers, Doostang, Xoom and other startups.

The total size of this round is around $1 million, we hear.

Does a picture say a thousand words? I dunno. Someone please count them. More details as they come in.

CrunchBase InformationTelloInformation provided by CrunchBase

The Magic Trackpad (if I must call it that) has generated some controversy on the TC network. MG thinks it signals the end of the mouse era. I think it’s a great tool but is being lauded by a group of people unfamiliar with decent mice (read: Mac users). I happen to love both Apple’s trackpads and great mice at the same time, but it seems to me that we’re overlooking the real conflict here. And as it turns out, mice and trackpads (magic or otherwise) are on the same side.

The next generation of input is already here; chances are you have it in your pocket. Yet, advanced as it is, there are fundamental shortcomings that will prevent it from completely supplanting the interfaces we’ve grown up with.

Continue reading…

You Americans have all the good stuff. Stuff like BP pumping oil in the Ocean and guns, lots of guns. And then you have Netflix and we people outside the U.S. are wondering what could it feel like to have a service like that. Now I know.

Earlier this month, I attended OpenWebAsia – South East Asia in Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia, a two-day tech and web industry event that attracted over 350 international attendees. The event shined a spotlight on a market that’s still largely overlooked: a whopping 600 million people live in South East Asia, which boasts a rapidly growing web and mobile population.

What follows is a short summary of just a few presentations, panel discussions, and startup demos I witnessed at OpenWebAsia (those with a focus on Asia only). I will update this article with more material once it becomes available (find the agendas for day one and two here and here).

Growing Digital In Asia – An Overview (panel discussion)

The event kicked off with a panel discussion between Mohan Belani (Co-founder at mobile gaming company Mobret and former Director at startup community e27), Michael F. Smith Jr. (Director of Global Initiatives at Yahoo!), Googler and OpenWebAsia co-founder Chang Kim, and myself.

Moderator Preetam Rai had us cover a lot of ground during the 60 minutes, including how:

• Japan is obsessed with the mobile web (mailing, social networking, mobile gaming etc.)
• Japan’s mobile web is still growing
• Korea is starting to embrace web services from overseas
• Koreans love communicating in groups
• Smartphones conquer Korea, as opposed to Indonesia where feature phones still rule (and take two SIM cards)
• South East Asia is positioned in the global web market
• the region is seeing an explosion in cell phone usage
• most South East Asian startups are locked up in their home markets
• those startups can boost their chances of “going global” (use English, adopt UI/UX, focus on making money etc.)

Please click here to watch a video of the discussion, which is provided by Satoo.tv (embedding didn’t work, sorry).

What’s Happening In China? (presentation)

Shanghai-based entrepreneur and blogger Dr. Gang Lu shared some insights on what’s going on in one of the world’s “hottest” web markets right now, namely China (which now has over 420 million web users and 786 million mobile subscribers).

Lu’s presentation touches upon a range of peculiarities and current trends in China’s web and mobile market. It’s embedded below:

This Week In Asia (panel discussion)

Podcast series This Week In Asia (iTunes link) recorded its 58th episode live on stage at Open Web Asia. Guests included again Michael F. Smith Jr., Dr. Bernhard Leong (co-founder at mobile startup Chlkboard and This Week In Asia producer), Brian Wong (ex-Digg business development manager and founder at mobile ad startup Kiip), Daniel Cerventus (web producer and organizer of the event), and again myself (moderated by Kay Chew Lin).

Topics discussed include:

• India-based mobile ad network Inmobi‘s global landgrab
• mobile web usage in Japan
• Open Web Asia as a very early web industry event in the region
• pitching and delivery as still underdeveloped skills among South East Asian entrepreneurs

Again, please head over to Satoo.tv for a video of the discussion (but you can also listen to it over at This Week In Asia’s homepage in podcast format).

Current Challenges In South East Asia’s Tech Scene

It’s still very early in the game, it’s already a huge market, and there’s room for massive future growth in South East Asia’s web and mobile industry. But there are still some significant hurdles to overcome, especially if you regard South East Asia as one region.

Some hurdles I personally see in South East Asia’s web and mobile market (and on the way to a possible integration) are the:

• still relatively undeveloped tech ecosystem and its “chicken and egg” problem
  (depending on the country: big number of copycats, relatively low number of startups, few to almost no VCs firms/angel investors, low salaries for engineers, low propensity of skilled employees to work for startups, fewer people with an entrepreneurial mindset etc.)
• historically, culturally, and economically diverse markets
• much lower online spend than in North America or Europe
• weak exit environment (IPOs, trade sales)
• political and legal problems in some South East Asian countries
  (IP protection, bureaucracy for startups, general political instability)
• massive “brain drain”
• still low Internet penetration (examples: Indonesia has 12.5% Internet penetration, Vietnam has 25.7%, the Philippines just 24.5%)
• fragmented mobile landscape
• underdeveloped online and mobile payment infrastructure (if any)

Many of these problems, for example the low Internet penetration, will probably solve themselves in the future. And in fact, local startups, partly financed by local venture capital firms (which do exist), are starting to crop up all over the place.

Selection Of Malaysia-Based Web And Mobile Startups

Here are some startups that are based in Malaysia, mostly in Kuala Lumpur:

• Cravecast, an online music startup (their first product, Cravecharts, is a music streaming service)
• MobileApps.com, which is planned to become a “global cross-platform mobile app store” in fall this year
• Cikgu2U, an e-learning site that allows groups of students to study together online (in Malay)
• Guppers, a mobile business solution provider with offices in Kuala Lumpur and the US
• Offgamers, a game payment solution provider with over 300,000 customers worldwide
• Terato Tech, a mobile startup that develops for iPhone and Android
• LTT Global, which focuses on the mobile learning and edutainment fields

If you want to know more about Malaysia’s web scene, head over to the Entrepreneurs.my blog or follow the Twitter account of Kuala Lumpur-based mover and shaker Daniel Cerventus. For more South East Asia-related information, have a look at the e27 and SGEntrepreneurs blogs or download the This Week In Asia tech podcasts.

Credit for the photo on top: Ben Israel

One thing you can say about the Flickr team – there’s some fight in ‘em. They apparently were not super pleased with our coverage of their annual (and unofficial) Grant-Pattishall Award given each year to the Yahoo engineer who “who breaks Flickr in the most spectacular way.” I’m not sure why, I think the award is fun.

So now they have a new award, called the Bogan-Martin Award: “The Bogan-Martin Award is given yearly to the Flickr staff member who inadvertently generates the most spectacular media overreaction to a personal comment or inside joke.”

So who won? Daniel Bogan this year, who was also this year’s winner of the other award. And last year was Chris Martin. Both winners names link to previous posts we’ve done. Suggesting that we’re the media that is engaging in the spectacular overreaction.

Ok, Flickr. You won this round.

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With more than 200 deals since 2005, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham knows how to size up a young team of entrepreneurs. However, he didn’t get it right from day one.

On Friday, we got a chance to talk to Graham after his morning panel with SV Angel’s Ron Conway. He discussed how his strategy has evolved over the past five years and why the balance of power is shifting in Silicon Valley. See videos ahead.

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Grammy award winning artist Chamillionaire (a.k.a Hakeem Seriki) has become a regular at tech conferences, perhaps because the hustle and flow culture of the rap business and the hustle and flow culture of the tech business are surprisingly similar. His stories of struggles between artists and music labels are resonant to anyone who’s experienced the relationship intricacies of startups and VCs.

Chamillionare got his first taste of the magic of the Internet in 2004, with the launch of his first website Chamillionaire.com. The community around the site’s message boards exploded unexpectedly, “at the time it was really creative and really cool,” he told Mike Arrington at today’s Social Currency CrunchUp.

Other highlights from the interview include Mike Arrington calling the hip hop artist’s entourage “goofy,” asking, “What kind of rims are cool now?” and ending with the memorable,”You guys know how to manipulate the tech industry to get what you want, but you have the lamest phones …”

In retort, Chamillionaire insisted that he carries around his 3 phones, a Blackberry Curve 8700, an iPhone 3Gs, and a Sidekick XL, for “simplicity” and joked that he checks in as “Mike Arrington” when he stays at hotels. On why he attends tech conferences, “I just want to get a business card from each of you.”

Curious, we caught up with the artist after the panel and asked him what exactly he thought the tech community had to offer?

“Everything. Access to people through social networks. We don’t build these social networks, we don’t blog on TechCrunch. People here are like what would a rapper care about TechCrunch for? It’s crazy, it’s about distribution of information. It’s just getting information to people, that’s just what major labels are. They’ve got companies that distribute for us now so it’s like cutting the record labels out – I’m doing you a favor, you’re doing me a favor and I’m getting to where I need to get to. “

On his future plans? “I just want to innovate.” He said, insisting that he couldn’t reveal any more information.

Video of his onstage interview, below:

Perhaps you’ve heard: social games maker Playdom was acquired by Disney a few days ago for a deal potentially worth north of $750 million. Playdom CEO John Pleasants took the stage today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, to talk a bit about the deal and the future.

Pleasants says that he’s not exactly sure what his title at Disney will be yet, but he thinks he’ll be the General Manager of Playdom. He’s also not sure if Tapulous (another gaming company just acquired by Disney) will be under his department, but he doesn’t think so. And he made sure to clarify that the deal was for $563.2 million plus an earn-out of up to $200 million — so he’s not super super super rich, he’s just super super rich.

But the most interesting thing Pleasants noted was that he recently heard (from his own source, apparently) that half of all users on Facebook now play social games. More impressively, 40% of total usage time on the service is spent on these games. That’s meaningful, of course, because “a huge amount the Internet is on Facebook,” Pleasants stated.

When moderator Michael Arrington asked about changes Facebook has made recently to slow the viral spread of these types of games, Pleasants acknowledged they’ve all taken a hit. But he says they’re working with Facbeook on new ways to drive growth. But he made sure to say they had to do it without spamming.

When talking about what’s next, Pleasants notes that they’ve released two new games in the past week alone. When Mike suggested that most of the games are just a combination of blindly pushing buttons, Pleasants noted that things were evolving, and that games were about to get more social.

The biggest issue going forward though? “The lack of credit cards with children,” Pleasants half-joked.

Smart window startup Soladigm announced today its plans to build a factory in Olive Branch, Mississippi. The Khosla Ventures and Sigma Partners backed company makes dynamic glass windows that can be tinted on demand to block excess light and heat.

Founded in 2007, Soladigm had been operating in “stealth mode.” The company employs about 50 people in its Milpitas, California headquarters, and plans to hire about 300 employees over the next few years for the Mississippi plant.

A $40 million loan and another $4 million in incentives from the state influenced Soladigm’s decision to locate operations in Mississippi. Soladigm pledged to invest $130 million by 2016 in its business there in order to receive the state’s full incentive package.

The new Soladigm plant’s proximity to Memphis transportation connections will also help the company quickly ship its glass panels.

According to the company, its tinted windows can eliminate the need for blinds and reduce building heating and cooling costs by up to 25%.

CrunchBase InformationSoladigmKhosla VenturesSigma PartnersInformation provided by CrunchBase

Criticising Valleywag in 2010 is something of a pointless exercise, like offering diplomatic counsel to the Ottoman Empire ten years after the Treaty of Lausanne. More pointless still, attacking the site’s titular editor Ryan Tate is like appealing to the guy responsible for writing parking tickets in Constantinople.

I mean, I get that.

And yet despite the irrelevance of Gawker’s saddest sub-domain and the tragic impotence of its editor, the influence of its parent means that when a Valleywag story oozes its way on to the front page of Gawker.com, it’s important to take notice. And to mop it up so that no-one slips.

Here goes then.

Background:

Some time on Tuesday afternoon, Ryan Tate woke up and padded over to his laptop to check his email. Amidst the tips from disgruntled Friendster employees and pep-talk advice mails from Owen Thomas, there was an email from Nick Stern, a photographer who had spent a few days stalking Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The images were so entirely un-newsworthy – photos of Zuckerberg’s modest house, photos of his “unremarkable” tennis shoes, photos of Zuckerberg’s entirely unfamous girlfriend – that no other news organisation wanted them. Could Gawker spare any change?

Pausing just long enough to wipe the resulting sticky goo from his keyboard, Tate hit reply. “Oh God, YES! We’d love them. It’ll be a Gawker exclusive!”

Of course, much of the above is bullshit speculation, but the result is the same: on Wednesday, under a “Gawker Exclusive” banner, and the headline, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Age of Privacy Is Over” Tate published twenty candid photos, clearly identifying Zuckerberg’s home, his girlfriend, his friends and his regular haunts. In “justification”, Tate wrote…

“If it feels a little naughty to take such a close look into Zuckerberg’s life, remember that this is the executive who pushed the private information of Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users progressively further into the public sphere.”

Hmmm, Ryan.

No, not “hmmm”. That other thing.

GO FUCK YOURSELF. I mean, seriously, Ryan, how did you even write those words without slitting your wrists and bleeding out pure shame onto your copy of Pageviews For Dummies? Even if you accept that Facebook’s handling of user privacy was a misstep (which I don’t entirely), to argue that it’s analogous to following someone around with a camera all week and publicising his home address on the Internet just defies belief. Especially when that person is a billionaire who is more of a target than most for the assorted freaks and lunatics who slosh about online.

But of course Tate had no choice but to cling to his “tit for tat” public interest justification. After all, the photos had no inherent news value (“the most interesting thing about Zuckerberg’s life may well be how ordinary it is,” says Tate in his post) and nor is there an obvious “public figure” justification. Facebook is a private company, Zuckerberg (especially compared to other billionaire CEOs) doesn’t court personal publicity outside of the business press – and his girlfriend certainly doesn’t. All the publication of these pictures achieves is a hundred thousand or so page views, at a cost that includes the personal safety of a 26 year old who, despite his modest home and shoes, is worth, let’s not forget, some $4 billion. If I were his girlfriend, or anyone else close to him, I’d be terrified right now.

What Happened Next:

After reading the story, I tweeted to Tate…

More than anything, I wanted to know if he was proud of his work; whether reading it back he thought to himself “yes, I have done a good thing today.” But at worst I wanted him to defend it. In fact he did neither, instead he replied…

Then, as if to underline his point – that the justification for posting the photos was that he’d done it before – he emailed me the links, with the heading “BREAKING! Valleywag runs unauthorized pictures of people’s homes and girlfriends!!!11!”

After some back and forth over the irrelevant question of whether Tate commissioned the photos himself or whether they landed on his desk as a fait accompli, I got back to the point…

From: Paul Carr
To: Ryan Tate

You’re neatly dodging the question though: do you stand by the posting of the photos as news? Are you suggesting a public interest justification for publicizing where a billionaire lives? “We’ve done it before” is not a justification; as any serial killer will tell you.

His answer? An email containing nothing but the contact details of Editor-in-Chief Remy Stern and Founder Nick Denton. The subtext: “I can’t justify my own work; you’ll have to talk to My Two Dads.”

And so I did. I particularly wanted to understand Denton’s take on the misadventures of his underling. For a start, it’s generally accepted that there is only one period in Valleywag’s history that the site was any good, and that was when Denton was running it himself. Also, for all of Valleywag’s prying into the lives of Silicon Valley “celebrities”, Denton held on to at least one basic principle: decreeing that the lives of their non-famous girlfriends, boyfriends, wives and husbands – “civillians” as he called them – should remain off-limits.

So what gives? Has Denton changed his policy or, like in so many other situations, did Tate simply not get the memo?

His reply deserves to be published in full (with his permission, for which I’m grateful).

Hey, Paul –

Thanks for your note.

Facebook is anything but a private company; it has 500m stakeholders. And as Silicon Valley has grown in importance, tech executives have become celebrities. Mark Zuckerberg generates more interest among our readers than most Hollywood stars.

Now you can argue that he doesn’t trade on his celebrity in the same way. But that’s not entirely true. He poses for photos for magazine covers and shows up at conferences. It’s not like he’s a complete recluse.

As for the address… Well, first of all, no, we didn’t publish it. But you can deduce it. And? With online databases such as Nexis Public Records, most people’s addresses are now easily available. You can find all mine there, for instance.

Or here.

I think you’re trapped in a previous era — one in which journalists had special access to information and dispensed it sparingly and “responsibly.” Now there’s much less distinction to the profession: everybody has access to formerly privileged information and anybody can publish it. We’d all better adjust.

Your final point: that even if Zuckerberg was fair game, the girlfriend wasn’t. I have most sympathy for this. But, again, apply the Hollywood model. If an unknown was having an affair with Angelina Jolie, they would no longer be an unknown.

Zuckerberg is the Angelina Jolie of the internet. The media interest in him is undeniable. His lovers, friends and acquaintances — like those of any other celebrity — are caught up in the vortex. He has to make a choice; and they have to make a choice. And none of the choices — retreat from the public eye, abandonment of friendship — are palatable.

Feel free to publish any of this reply.

Regards

Nick

Conclusion:

Reading that note, two things screamed out from the page. One: how conflicted Denton sounds in writing it – speaking of his “sympathy” for my point about Zuckerberg’s girlfriend and acknowledging that the choices that his kind of reporting forces those close to tech “celebrities” to make are “unpalatable”. It can’t be easy to know your editors are doing bad things, but that those bad things are the only way they’ll ever attract page views.

And two: the fact that it was only Denton, and not Tate, who had the wit and intelligence to attempt to justify Gawker’s decision to publish. (In fact, while Denton was accounting for the behaviour of his boy, Tate was publishing a follow up story containing photos of Zuckerberg at an employee’s wedding in India, desperately arguing that his interest in them “underlines Zuckerberg’s growing global celebrity”. Just stop digging, Ryan.)

And it’s for that second reason – his inability to stand by his grubby work – that Ryan Tate, if he has an ounce of pride left in his body, needs to resign. And if he won’t do that – which he won’t, because he hasn’t, and because he knows that the position of village idiot has already been filled – then it’s for that reason that Denton needs to fire him and either go back to running Valleywag himself, or close it down once and for all.

In the meantime, to anyone with a cameraphone or a Flipcam who spots Ryan Tate out and about in the Bay Area: you know what to do. Follow him. Follow him everywhere. Take hundreds of photos. Bug the living shit out of him. Make him understand how unpleasant it is to be followed to your front door by a stranger with a camera.

And once you’re done stalking? Again: you know what to do. Delete the footage. Don’t even think about uploading it anywhere. Yes, there’d be a delicious irony in “Ending Ryan Tate’s Age Of Privacy” because he’s done it to someone else. But, as much as he’d love to feel that his life passes a public interest test, it doesn’t. And just because Ryan Tate has done something hideous and unjustified to someone else, doesn’t mean you should do it to him.

You’re better than that.

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Online monetization platform gWallet, which offers social gaming developers a variety of ways to monetize their apps and boost engagement, is looking to put its money where its mouth is: the company is launching a $20,000 cash guarantee to any social gaming publishers that don’t generate more revenue when they switch from their current monetization platform to gWallet.

To participate, publishers are being asked to implement a simultaneous, head-to-head test over the span of thirty days (you can sign up starting today, with the 30 day window beginning August 1). At the end of that time period, if your revenues from gWallet aren’t higher than they are on you original implementation, then the service will pay out the guarantee. But you’ll have to be a pretty sizable game to participate: to qualify, gWallet says that publishers need to be new to the platform, and need to have at least 250,000 daily active users. That said, it sounds like the the company is willing to discuss a guarantee to apps with a smaller user base if you email their partner@gwallet.com address.

gWallet launched late last year, positioning itself as a more trusted alternative to other ‘Offers’ companies in the wake of Scamville.  One of the company’s more popular products is the video offer, which can reward an app user virtual currency in return for watching a video ad (they also have more traditional offers).

This is a highly competitive and tough space; major Offers company OfferPal recently had to downsize in the wake of Facebook deciding that TrialPay would be its preferred Offers provider.  Still, there’s plenty of room to innovate (and give developers a bigger slice of the revenue) — if gWallet can prove that it earns devs more money than its competitors, it will likely do just fine regardless.

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Tomorrow night, July 31, Twitter has announced they are having some planned downtime. Beginning at 11 PM PT, Twitter will likely be down on and off for up to 5 hours, Twitter warns.

The reason for the downtime? NTT America, Twitter’s hosting provider is upgrading a part of the internal network. This is interesting because Twitter is in the process of opening their own data center in Utah later this year. Despite the new tweet digs, they’ve said they’ll keep working with NTT America, so this maintenance is clearly necessary.

If you see the picture above tomorrow night, you’ll know what’s up. There will be a link on it to the Status Blog where you can get status updates on the work.

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It’s takes a certain type of person to get excited about a work productivity tool. Mark Nielsen and Patrick Carmitchel, unsatisfied with 37Signals‘ Basecamp, have decided to disrupt the productivity software industry (see their incredibly twee video above).

Says Nielsen “We decided we’d rather not see the light of day for awhile than have to live with knowing that with just a little bit of creative, a pinch of logic and a dash of sexy, we could revive the productivity software world with a tool that would even make Apple cry.”

Previously unknown to the blogosphere, Nielsen and Carmitchel emailed us at 2am last night and emphasized that they were out for 37Signals’ blood (we’ll get more into why we actually listened in a later post). When reminded that the formidable former Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz was also in the collaboration tool space, joining the likes of Salesforce, Zoho, and Atlassian with his stealth startup Asana, they replied “We’d like to see how [Dustin Moskovitz's] deep pockets stand up against moxie and energy.”

The RULE.fm product itself looks like what would happen if Apple got serious about productivity software, with much emphasis on design aesthetics.  Right now its basic function is a ramped up contact list manager with real time updates from your contacts pushed to you, a Yammer-like discussion area, a place for tasks, and a communal file sharing functionality. Nielsen describes it as  “a place to know and understand everything that’s going on with in your organization” and hopes the company will eventually expand into wikis, customer retention management and accounting tools.

For those curious, the tour is live on the RULE.fm site right now, and the platform itself will go live on Tuesday August 3rd, making the productivity software industry just a little bit more badass.

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Today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, CA, James Lamberti, VP of Global Research and Marketing for InMobi, sat down with our Michael Arrington to tell us a bit about mobile advertising.

InMobi is the largest independent mobile ad network in the world. Overall, they’re number two behind Google’s AdMob. That earned them an $8 million investment from Kleiner Perkins and Sherpalo Ventures a couple weeks ago. But what’s particularly interesting about InMobi is how well they’re doing outside the U.S.

Out of inMobi’s 16.9 billion mobile ad impressions globally, 2.6 billion are in Africa, more than the US’s 2 billion. 10 billion are in Asia, no surprise considering inMobi was founded in India and had more time to develop reach, while Europe follows Africa with 1.6 billion and the Middle East .5 billion. InMobi’s mobile eCPM development is highest in Europe at 29%, with North American coming in a close second at 24%.

When inMobi’s development rankings, are stack ranked by country, Australia comes in first due to its high adoption of the iPhone and Malaysia performs at number two. Not surprisingly the iPhone platform dominates inMobi’s marketshare the US, being responsible for 38.2% of all mobile ad impressions. Globally Nokia trumps other platforms serving inMobi ads, at 22.2% of the market.

Lamberti says that InMobi’s biggest growth markets are in the US, Japan, and South America and the US, partially because of the benefits from Google Ad Mob changes on the iPhone. While 60% of all mobile iPhone impressions are still in the US, inMobi is now poised to to monetize the 40% that aren’t.

Video and slides from their presentation below.

Today during our Social Currency CrunchUp, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and John Hanke, a Google VP of Product Management, took the stage. Given that the two companies seem to be at odds with one another recently (following a failed acquisition), it was a little tense.

Specifically, Google’s strong moves into local with their new Places push seem to be going right at Yelp’s core. Sure’s it’s potentially about more than just local venue reviews, but that’s a huge part of it. And that’s what Yelp is all about.

Moreover, Google is using Yelp data to bulk up their Places offering. Yelp can’t like that too much. In fact, we’ve heard they’re particularly unhappy because they used to have a deal with Google for this data, but they pulled out of that deal a couple years ago. But Google decided to use Yelp’s data anyway simply by crawling it. Yelp can’t stop them from doing that unless they want to delist themselves from Google — a move which could kill them.

On stage, Stoppelman acknowledged that Yelp used to have such a deal with Google. When moderator Erick Schonfeld asked if Google was now getting that data by crawling the pages, Hanke responded with “Look…” This drew some laughs from the audience.

But Hanke continued by saying that “there have to be Yelps in the world.” What he means is that Google needs these type of services to be able to point users to them. Of course, Stoppelman argues that while Google used to point users to services like his, they’re moving towards showing that data on their own pages. He believes that Google no longer likes sending large amounts of data to huge sites.

Hanke said that statement wasn’t fair. “We look at what people want,” he said. Google is trying to understand Places better — if Yelp has the best content, we’ll show that, he said. He asked if Google knows what information a user is trying to get at, shouldn’t they show it? “Should we pretend we don’t know what they’re really looking for?“

Stoppelman’s said he understands that argument but believes that if Yelp does have the best content, Google should give people a way to get there as fast as possible.

Basically, agree to disagree.

When Schonfeld asked about the failed acquisition, Stoppelman coyly noted “It’s complicated.” The audience liked that. He caught himself though, “…whatever may have happened.“

Hanke acknowledged the tension between the two companies. But again, he said it’s all about doing what’s best for the users.

Yeah, expect that tension to continue.

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Social gaming company Zynga is growing at a rapid clip. More importantly, their revenue is growing at a rapid clip. And they need a big gun to handle that. They believe they’ve just got him: Dave Wehner, formerly a managing director at Allen & Company LLC.

Wehner is stepping in for current CFO Mark Vranesh, who is becoming chief accountant of Zynga. While they obviously won’t say it, it should be fairly clear what this shuffling is all about: it’s not CFO, it’s another three-letter acronym, IPO. While Zynga is still undoubtedly a ways away from such a move, they have to get their finances in order now. Especially since they’re growing so quickly.

At Allen & Co. Wehner was in charge of a number of key investments, including Pandora, Quantcast, and StubHub. He led the corporate finance teams responsible for capital raises and M&A in Silicon Valley.

This move follows moves by LinkedIn, who is also position itself for an IPO run. Interestingly enough, it was just reported that a Facebook IPO was just pushed from a possible 2011 timeframe, to 2012 — well, probably.

Facebook is obviously a key to Zynga, as most of their users come from the giant social network. But a new investment by Google in Zynga points to the search giant getting into the social gaming realm as well.