MediaFile

Tech wrap: Is Google’s Android operating system safe?

A mobile security expert says he has discovered serious security flaws in Google’s Android operating system.

Riley Hassell, who caused a stir when he called off an appearance at a hacker’s conference last week, told Reuters he and colleague Shane Macaulay decided not to lay out their research at the gathering for fear that criminals would use it attack Android phones.

Felix Salmon explains why the so called porous NYT paywall is working so well, due in large part to their emphasis on the “pay” rather than on the “wall”.

China’s microblog sites, which claim 195 million users and allow people to shoot out short bursts of often strongly worded opinion, have put China’s Communist rulers in a difficult spot. Fearing an uproar if they block the sites outright, the censors struggle to keep ahead of the rapid-fire messages that often spread news and opinion the government would like to contain.

Disney’s dodgy boyfriend problem

For the second time in just over a year another boyfriend of a Disney staffer has been accused of insider trading.

Yesterday, hedge fund manager Toby G Scammell (seriously, that’s his name, you couldn’t make this stuff up) was sued by Federal regulators who alleged he used secret information obtained from his girlfriend to make $192,000 off the Walt Disney Co’s $4 billion acquisition of Marvel Entertainment in 2009.

Scammell’s girlfriend of two years was an intern in Disney’s corporate strategy department and worked for six months on the deal.

Last year an executive assistant to Disney’s corporate communications head Zenia Mucha  got caught up in a similar pile of insider mess. Bonnie Hoxie and her  boyfriend Yonni Sebbag were sentenced earlier this year after sending emails and form letters to some 33 investment firms offering to sell inside information from Disney’s quarterly earnings and tips about plans to sell its ABC TV network to private equity firms.

Why Spotify will be the hit of 2011

By Peter Sims The opinions expressed are his own.

I’m going to take a risk here, so bear with me and I will appreciate your views and reactions, but I think Spotify, the digital music and sharing service is going to be the product of the year and here’s why.

Let’s start with where online users find value.  I agree with David Pogue’s assessment of Google+ in the New York Times: that the most promising and innovative aspect of the offering is Circles (we should also add the chat functions).  While Google is (understandably) not releasing detailed Google+ usage stats, early anecdotal evidence would suggest that users aren’t really using, or valuing Circles – not yet at least.

But if there’s a golden opportunity in social networking, where the greatest user experience value gets generated, it’s to create more intimate connections between people.  This helps explain why Facebook users raved about being able to connect with long-lost friends or acquaintances from high school or college when they first logged in, as well as why Facebook’s growth jumped to an entirely new level after enabling photo tagging in 2006.  As David Kirkpatrick reported in the Facebook Effect, 70% of users began coming back to Facebook every day, while 85% started coming back weekly.

Tech wrap: Clash of tech titans looming?

Apple Inc’s increasingly effective patent war against rivals like Samsung Electronics may mask its real target: arch-foe Google Inc. Poornima Gupta writes: “Recent success in blocking sales of Samsung’s latest Galaxy tablet in most of Europe and Apple’s challenges to the Korean giant in Australia reflect an aggressive effort to defend its top position in the red-hot mobile market from the runaway success of Android.”

AOL said on Thursday it would buy back $250 million of its stock, a move presumably intended to boost confidence in the shares, which fell 32 percent in two days. AOL has been in a turnaround mode since it was spun off from Time Warner in December 2009 after one of the most disastrous mergers in recent times.

Zynga, which has filed for an initial public offering of up to $1 billion, revealed it draws fewer paid players than expected in a regulatory filing on Thursday.

Most communication experts say that politicians, businesses and governments need to learn to use social media to shape the narrative themselves. And they need to learn fast, reports Peter Apps.

Tech wrap: Cisco beats “low bar”

Cisco Systems Inc’s quarterly results edged past Wall Street’s scaled-back expectations as IT spending held up despite fears of a severe pullback, buoying its shares in extended trading. The world’s largest networking equipment maker reported sales of $11.2 billion in the fiscal fourth quarter, surpassing expectations for under $11 billion.

“They beat a low bar. A lot of it is coming from cost cutting, which we anticipated. In that sense it’s a relief,” Joanna Makris of Mizuho Securities USA told Reuters.

Groupon Inc’s plans for an initial public offering have been dented by the stock market slump and new financial disclosures that suggest the daily deal company’s business is slowing in North America, analysts said on Wednesday.

Facebook has begun closing the accounts of California prison inmates after a convicted child molester viewed the pages of his victim from behind bars, authorities and the social networking site said.

Facebook creates mobile messaging app

Facebook has yet to release an app for use on Apple’s iPad tablet.

But the social networking giant gave users of Apple’s iPhone and Android smartphones a new app on Tuesday.

Dubbed Messenger, the new app lets Facebook users quickly shoot messages to their friends’ cell phones.

Yes, you could already do this using the existing Facebook mobile app, but that required navigating through various screens and layers every time you want to read and compose a message. The Messenger app is a one-trick pony that’s strictly for communicating, making the process much quicker.  And Messenger lets you communicate with friends that aren’t on Facebook, with the app sending SMS text messages directly to their phone numbers.

Tech wrap: A trillion-dollar Apple?

Apple Inc briefly edged past Exxon Mobil Corp to become the most valuable company in the United States. Looking ahead, Beakingviews columnist Robert Cyran asks: Could Apple be the first $1 trillion company?

Three initial public offerings were postponed on Tuesday, the latest casualties of volatile market conditions. Nearly half of the dozen IPOs planned this week have now been called off and Fortune.com’s Dan Primack says it “wouldn’t be surprising if none of them get out.” Primack added that Boston-based Carbonite is the best bet to stay the course: “A source familiar with the offering puts its chances of pricing this week at around 70 percent, so long as we don’t experience another major swoon.”

AOL reported a surprise second-quarter loss, citing weaker-than-expected advertising growth. The news sent shares of the company plummeting as much as 20 percent.

A lawmaker called for BlackBerry’s instant messaging service to be suspended after rioters used it to mobilize in London and other British cities. Wired.com’s New York bureau chief, John C. Abell, was quick to respond in a post on Reuters.com: “We need to start ignoring the smokescreen that is the entire subject of how tech is responsible for bad or undesired behavior. That is the stuff of Fahrenheit 451-esque oppressive regimes.”

Please — let’s not call these the ‘BlackBerry riots’

Here we go again: Young people, rioting in the streets, railing against leadership, using their mobile phones to outsmart law enforcement caught off guard by the nimbleness of cool kids in what would be a B-movie script if it wasn’t unfolding in real time.

But this time it isn’t happening in some far off, ambiguously backward Middle Eastern place. No, this is happening in the homeland of Sir Thomas Moore, Winston Churchill and Kate Middleton.

And, for a pleasant change, the technology being blamed/credited for fueling the fire is neither Facebook nor Twitter, but BlackBerry Message Service — one of the oldest means of mobile-to-mobile text communication, better known among aficionados simply as BBM.

Will Piers Morgan help or hurt Murdoch’s case?

By Nicholas Wapshott All opinions expressed are their own.

If Rupert Murdoch manages to keep control of his media empire he might have to thank one of his former employees, Piers Morgan, CNN’s soft spoken, underarm pitching successor to Larry King. The cherub-faced Morgan is at the center of a media storm in Britain right now about whether phone hacking and illegal skullduggery was confined to Murdoch’s papers or rife throughout Fleet Street. If Morgan can successfully out-run the accusations about his complicity in hacking, his old boss Murdoch will remain public enemy number one. If Morgan becomes entangled in the mire, his old boss may feel he’s been let off the hook.

Little is known of Morgan’s tabloid background in the U.S., where he is better known as a judge on America’s Got Talent and as the laid-back host of his celebrity chat show on CNN. The Brits, however, remember him quite differently. He was first the pop music columnist of Murdoch’s Sun who so impressed the top brass that he was elevated at the tender age of 28 to the editorship of the now disgraced and defunct News of the World. Eager to please his master, Morgan pushed the limits of an already crass genre, reaching the height of poor taste when he pictured Countess Spencer, the wife of Princess Diana’s brother, leaving a drug rehab clinic. Even the inured Murdoch was appalled and publicly reprimanded his wayward wunderkind, describing him as “a young man” who “went over the top.”

The incident convinced Morgan he would not attain his ultimate ambition, the editorship of The Sun, Murdoch’s flagship tab selling 4 million copies and reaching 10 million readers daily. So he jumped ship to The Sun’s arch-rival, The Daily Mirror, where as editor he set about trying to prove to his old mentor that he had been seriously underestimated and that the Sun king had made a terrible mistake. The fierce competition between Murdoch’s Sun and the Mirror suddenly became personal, with Morgan each morning trying to out-Murdoch Murdoch in a race to the bottom.

Tech wrap: Is Groupon’s IPO window closing?

As the Nasdaq Composite index continued its week-long tailspin, tech investors and analysts are wondering what the stock plunge could mean for the pending IPOs of companies like Groupon and Zynga.

The coming week, which has about a dozen IPOs scheduled to price, will be a good test of the severity of the selloff, according to Nick Einhorn, an analyst at Connecticut-based IPO research house Renaissance Capital. “Less mature, less profitable companies could have a tougher time going public,” Einhorn told Reuters.

If there was to be another recession, writes Investor Place’s Tom Taulli, “the IPO market will freeze up. It will mostly be only standout companies – such as Zynga and Facebook – that will get traction. A company like Groupon, which has substantial losses, may have to delay its offering or cut the valuation.”

Groupon, which more than doubled subscribers this year to 115 million, plans to abandon the use of a controversial financial measure it once touted as a good indicator of performance, two sources with knowledge of the situation said.