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Al Gore says he tried to buy Twitter in 2009
Al Gore says he and a business partner tried unsuccessfully to buy the social media network Twitter.
The former vice president said Thursday in an interview with Bloomberg TV that he and partner Joel Hyatt tried buy the microblogging service while they still owned a stake in Current TV.
“They built that business into a fantastic success,” Gore said. “I’m very bullish on Twitter. It’s a global utility and it’s a great business.”
Gore did not specify how much he and Hyatt offered in 2009 for the company, which was founded in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass and launched about four months later.
Twitter, which claims 200 million users who send more than 400 million tweets per day, announced last month that it would file for an initial public offering.
The company expects to raise $1 billion in its stock market debut, although it’s never posted a profit and lost as much last quarter as it did in all of the previous year.
Watch video, courtesy of Bloomberg News, below
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How to opt out of Google's shared endorsements
Google recently announced an update to its Terms of Service, focused on displaying your profile name and photo next to advertisements and reviews. The new feature, which goes into effect on November 11, is called Shared Endorsements and will allow you…
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Angry Cleveland Browns fan posts Craigslist ad seeking new quarterback
One fed-up Browns fan thinks it's time for a change at quarterback in Cleveland, so he put a help-wanted advert on Craigslist seeking a replacement for Brandon Weeden.
"Have you played pro football? College ball? Highschool? Pee-wee?" the posting on the classified ad website asked, going on to imply that even experience with the Madden NFL video game could qualify someone for the job.
"Do you sort of kind of know some of the rules of football? If yes keep reading. If no ... well also keep reading! We will take ANYONE."
Weeden regained the starting quarterback job after Brian Hoyer, who had sparked the hard-luck Browns to their best NFL start in 12 years, tore ligaments in his right knee earlier this month.
Hoyer, who had replaced Weeden at the helm, will miss the rest of the season.
Weeden has thrown for 1,005 yards and four touchdowns this season.
The Browns are 3-3, but haven't managed the consistency fans of the perennial stragglers crave.
They led 17-7 at halftime against Detroit on Sunday, but lost as Weeden fell apart in the second half, attempting a shovel pass that was intercepted by Lions linebacker DeAndre Levy. Detroit won the game 31-17.
The Craigslist ad posted on Monday is just the latest public cry of agony from a long-suffering Browns fan.
In July, the obituary of lifelong Browns supporter Scott E. Entsminger, published in the Columbus Dispatch of Columbus, Ohio, requested six Browns players as pall bearers "so the Browns can let him down one last time".
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
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Facebook now letting teens share content publicly
Facebook began letting teenagers publicly share posts Wednesday as the social network moved to bolster appeal to youth and advertisers.
"Teens are among the savviest people using social media, and whether it comes to civic engagement, activism or their thoughts on a new movie, they want to be heard," Facebook said in a blog post.
"So, starting today, people aged 13 through 17 will also have the choice to post publicly on Facebook."
Previously, teenagers could share comments, pictures or other digital posts no further than with friends of friends on the social network.
The changes will allow users to activate a "Follow" feature that lets their public posts pop up in people's News Feeds.
"While only a small fraction of teens using Facebook might choose to post publicly, this update now gives them the choice to share more broadly, just like on other social media services," Facebook said.
"We are also looking at ways to improve the way teens use messages and connect with people they may know."
The modifications come as Facebook vies with one-to-many text message service Twitter to be the preferred venue for sharing thoughts, news and more in real time.
They would also add to the pool of public posts that Facebook might seek to incorporate into creative new advertising techniques to ramp up revenue.
The California-based online social network modified the initial setting for new accounts of teenagers to only share posts with "friends" instead of including others linked to those people at Facebook.
The setting remains in place unless account owners opt to change it.
"We take the safety of teens very seriously, so they will see an extra reminder before they can share publicly," Facebook said.
"When teens choose 'Public' in the audience selector, they?ll see a reminder that the post can be seen by anyone, not just people they know, with an option to change the post's privacy."
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
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eBay founder backs project to 'empower' journalists
eBay founder Pierre Omidyar announced plans Wednesday to back a project with investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald which "elevates and supports" journalists and "allows them to pursue the truth."
Omidyar said in a statement he is backing the new media project, details of which are still being developed, separate from his philanthropic efforts with Omidyar Network and Democracy Fund.
Omidyar made the announcement a day after Greenwald, known for breaking many stories about US surveillance programs, announced he was leaving The Guardian for an unspecified "dream" job.
Omidyar, a French-born Iranian-American, cited his "growing interest to preserve and strengthen the role journalism plays in society," and noted that he "explored purchasing The Washington Post over the summer" before Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sealed a deal for the daily.
"That process got me thinking about what kind of social impact could be created if a similar investment was made in something entirely new, built from the ground up," he said in the statement.
"Something that I would be personally and directly involved in outside of my other efforts as a philanthropist."
Omidyar said he was in "the very early stages of creating a new mass media organization. I don't yet know how or when it will be rolled out, or what it will look like."
But he added that "it will cover general interest news, with a core mission around supporting and empowering independent journalists across many sectors and beats."
"The team will build a media platform that elevates and supports these journalists and allows them to pursue the truth in their fields. This doesn't just mean investigative reporting, but all news," he said.
Omidyar said he contacted Greenwald "to find out what journalists like him need to do their jobs well" and discovered that he was set to start a project with colleagues Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill.
"We had a lot of overlap in terms of our ideas, and decided to join forces," Omidyar said.
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen said on his blog that Omidyar told him the project would be "a company not a charity" and that he was prepared to invest at least $250 million.
Rosen said Omidyar consulted him in September about launching a journalism project, and on Wednesday discussed details of the new effort.
"He said he will be putting a good deal of his time, as well as his capital, into it," Rosen said. "I asked how large a commitment he was prepared to make in dollars. For starters: the $250 million it would have taken to buy The Washington Post."
Greenwald, an American who lives in Brazil, declined Tuesday to offer details of his plans, saying they were leaked prematurely.
But Greenwald told BuzzFeed it would be "a very well-funded? very substantial new media outlet."
"My role, aside from reporting and writing for it, is to create the entire journalism unit from the ground up by recruiting the journalists and editors who share the same journalistic ethos and shaping the whole thing -- but especially the political journalism part -- in the image of the journalism I respect most," he was quoted as saying.
Omidyar ranks 47th among the world's richest individuals with a net worth of some $8.5 billion, according to a ranking by Forbes magazine.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
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The Obama administration doesn't want the Supreme Court to look at NSA spying
President Barack Obama's administration is urging the Supreme Court not to take up the first case it has received on controversial National Security Agency cybersnooping.
US government attorneys argue that the Supreme Court does not have the jurisdiction to take the case, filed in July by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
EPIC believes the NSA overstepped its authority by carrying out broad communications monitoring and surveillance worldwide, and demanded the program be stopped.
A US Supreme Court decision to take the case would be "a drastic and extraordinary remedy that is reserved for really extraordinary causes," argued Donald Verrilli, an administration lawyer, in a statement released late Tuesday.
The US administration also believes the EIPC suit cannot move forward because it argues the court lacks authority under the 2001 Patriot Act to weigh in on the legality of NSA activities.
"This court lacks jurisdiction to issue a writ of certiorari to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," the secret intelligence affairs court, Verrilli added.
In mid-August President Barack Obama pledged to overhaul US spy programs amid a debate sparked by the leaks of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, which revealed vast telephone and Internet surveillance programs.
Obama promised a new era in intelligence with more supervision, transparency and safeguards in the NSA's collection of electronic information.
His administration has however maintained a hard line against the leaking of such information, and is seeking to prosecute Snowden on espionage charges.
After the disclosures Snowden fled to Hong Kong and then to Russia, where he has been granted one year's temporary asylum despite Washington's demands that he be returned.
The National Security Agency is gathering email and instant messenger contact lists from hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens worldwide, many of them Americans, The Washington Post reported late Monday.
The US agency's data collection program harvests the data from address books and "buddy lists," the newspaper said, citing senior intelligence officials and top secret documents provided by the fugitive NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
During a single day last year, the NSA's Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, the Post said, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation.
The figures, described as a typical daily intake of the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250?million a year, according to the report, which was published on the newspaper's website.
The NSA declined to confirm the specific allegations in the Post report but defended its surveillance activities as legal and respectful of privacy rights.
[Digital surveillance image via Shutterstock]
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Snapchat admits to sharing photos with the cops
PHOTO SHARING SERVICE Snapchat, an app that allows users to take photos knowing that they will be deleted forever once they've been seen by the intended recipient, has admitted that in certain circumstances it might hand your pictures over to the authorities…
[Friends taking self-portrait through cell phone on graduation day via Shutterstock]
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Lawsuit accuses Blackberry of forecasting sales 'based on prophecy rather than fact'
BlackBerry shareholders on Tuesday launched a class-action lawsuit against the company, alleging its optimistic sales forecasts for its new smartphones cost them hundreds of millions of dollars, lawyers announced.
The lawsuit on behalf of Canadian shareholders who purchased BlackBerry stock between September 27, 2012 and September 20 of this year, alleges that senior management "knowingly or negligently" misrepresented that its BlackBerry 10 line of smartphones were being well-received by consumers and that the company was in a strong financial position.
The class action is the second launched against BlackBerry in the past week.
"For almost a full year, BlackBerry management made market statements based on prophecy rather than fact," class-action lawyer Tony Merchant said in a statement.
"Thousands of Canadians who invested in BlackBerry Limited in the past year have lost hundreds of millions of dollars."
BlackBerry unveiled its new platform in January as it sought to regain lost momentum, but its most recent numbers suggest this has been a spectacular failure.
Last month, the company announced it was laying off 4,500 staff -- or one third of its global workforce -- after losing $965 million in its last quarter as sales plummeted.
BlackBerry still has some 70 million subscribers worldwide, but most of these are using older handsets, with the newer devices on the BlackBerry 10 platform failing to gain traction.
BlackBerry's share price meanwhile has slid from a 52-week high of $17.80 in January to below $9 recently.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
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Twitter passes NASDAQ up to list on New York Stock Exchange
Twitter shares will trade on the New York Stock Exchange, documents showed Tuesday, shunning the tech-heavy Nasdaq which saw major problems in Facebook's market debut in 2012.
An update to Twitter's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said: "We intend to list the common stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol 'TWTR.'"
The update also said Twitter's monthly active users had grown to 232 million, up from 218 million as of June 30.
It said the company lost $133 million in the first nine months of 2012 on revenues of $422 million, updating its earlier figures.
Twitter also revealed a new contract with chief executive Dick Costolo worth some $11.5 million, mostly in stock. And its senior vice president for engineering, Christopher Fry, will get $10.4 million, mainly in stock awards.
Twitter first revealed its initial public offering (IPO) in a confidential filing last month, and in early October revealed it would seek to raise $1 billion for the massively popular messaging platform.
Twitter's decision to list on the NYSE came after the Nasdaq's foul-up marred the $16 billion Facebook share issue in May 2012, the most hotly awaited initial public offering on the US markets in years.
The Nasdaq exchange agreed this year to pay a $10 million penalty for trading glitches.
Nasdaq is also facing lawsuits from investors who claim the problems led to losses when they were unable to execute trades.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
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Apple sends invites to event amid rumors of updated iPad
Apple on Tuesday sent out invitations to a special event on October 22 in San Francisco, revealing little about what is expected to be a day devoted to iPad updates.
Emailed invitations bore few details other that time and place, and bore the message "We have a lot more to cover."
A colorful graphic the shape of an iPad showed the top of Apple's iconic logo under a shower of colorful leaves.
The invitations came about a week after unconfirmed reports that Apple will show off a new version of its popular iPad tablet computer that will be thinner than its predecessor and boast improved camera capabilities.
An upgraded version of the iPad mini with an improved screen is also expected.
The iPad remains the largest-selling tablet, according to surveys, but its market share is being eroded by rivals using the Google Android operating system.
Apple was also expected to discuss its computer operating system and its laptop line at the event, timed for the start of the year-end holiday shopping season.
Apple is coming off a wildly successful launch of two new iPhone models last month. The California firm said it sold a record nine million iPhones in the three days after launching two new versions of the smartphone.
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Snack maker Mondelēz readying 'smart shelves' to track and influence shopper behavior
A snack maker plans to introduce “smart” grocery store shelves to target shoppers with customized ads intended to spur impulse purchases.
Mondelēz International Inc. will set up “smart shelves” display units near checkout counters with sensor technology to identify the age and sex of shoppers to help determine which guilty pleasures most appeal to them and a video display to deliver the targeted ads.
“When people walk by, it’s a missed opportunity,” said Mondelēz chief information officer Mark Dajani. “We must know how the consumer behaves in the store.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that the smart shelves are the latest example of the “Internet of Things,” which outfits everyday objects with sensors to help businesses learn more about their customers and products.
This burgeoning field could generate $1.9 trillion by 2020, predicts Gartner Inc., and already puts sensors in cars, clothes and trash bins.
The smart shelves, which are currently in prototype with plans for a 2015 rollout, would use sensors based on Microsoft’s Kinect for Windows technology to study shoppers’ facial structure and other characteristics to determine their age and gender.
Then shoppers, if they linger long enough, might see a video advertisement targeted toward their perceived demographic.
Sensors would also track which products were picked up, and by which types of shoppers, and coupons might then be displayed to tempt shoppers.
The shelves would relay bulk data to Mondelēz for analysis, possibly using SAP AG’s Hana database, according to Dajani.
The company, whose products include Oreos, Triscits, Chiclets, Cadbury chocolates and , would then maintain vast anonymous profiles of consumer interactions with their products.
“Knowing that 500 people picked up the product helps determine if the smart shelf placement in-store is optimal to drive traffic,” Dajani said.
Dajani insisted the technology would not compromise consumer privacy, saying the shelves wouldn’t capture photos, video or other personal information.
Instead, he said, the sensors would create avatar-like models of faces to determine which demographic they fit into, and Dajani said the software would not be able to recognize individual faces at all.
[A young woman paying for grocery purchase with a mobile phone via Shutterstock]
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Surprised? Drivers would rather buy a self-driving car from Google than Ford
RESEARCH HAS FOUND that drivers would rather buy a self-driving car from Google than from a carmaker like Ford. The KPMG study "Self Driving Cars: Are We Ready?" was based on a combination of surveys and collated "web chatter" and showed that Google…
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