Por que a los preadolescentes no les gusta Facebook

Some 13-Year-Olds Tell Us Why They Think Facebook Stinks

JILLIAN D'ONFRO

Last week, we learned some big news from Facebook's earnings report: Teens don't want to spend their time on Facebook anymore. 

Although Facebook CFO David Ebersman said almost all teens in the U.S. have an account, the daily engagement of younger teens has dropped.  

Why? We decided to touch base with some younger teens to find out why they personally think that Facebook stinks. 

We interviewed them separately, but both of the 13-year-olds, Lucas and Aiden, brought up the same issue almost immediately: 

"Well, a lot of the moms are getting on Facebook," Lucas says, "And that definitely has something to do with it."

"We don’t want to be in the same space as our moms," Aiden admits.  

Both also mentioned that they cut back on FB because all their friends had done the same thing. 

Aiden says that he created his Facebook account before he had a cell phone. On a computer, FB was his best choice, but now that he has a phone, he would rather check out other cooler options, like Snapchat, Vine, and Instagram.

"Facebook takes more time to create and read," he said. "And words are less important than images and videos."

Lucas says that although pretty much everyone he knows has an account, only about 25% of them still use Facebook regularly. 

He likes Vine and Instagram because you can just scroll through quickly when you're bored, looking for funny or interesting stuff but not having full conversations. He sees Facebook more for communicating personally with friends, but even then it's not his first choice. 

"You’d probably just text them, or a lot of people use Kik," he said. "You can use it with an iPod."

Kik is a messaging service like WhatsApp. It's by no means new, but both Lucas and Aiden said it's very popular with their age-group right now. (Interestingly, neither mentioned Twitter throughout our conversations.)

A recent Pew study shows that 74% of teenagers are mobile Internet users, and Lucas and Aiden both said that almost everyone they know has at least some kind of cell phone.

"I used to check Facebook a lot before I got a smartphone, and now I don’t really check it at all," Aiden said.

Lucas said that the people he sees using Facebook the most are the ones who changed schools; it's still a good way to catch up on someone's life you don't see very often. 

"I wouldn’t de-activate," Aiden said. "It’s still a way to connect, I just won't check it often."

Business Insider

Read more »

Tablet norcoreana sorprende

On North Korea’s surprisingly amazing tablet you can play Angry Birds and read Dickens

By Lily Kuo

The Samjiyon tablet isn't likely to be sold out. AP Photo/Vincent Yu

“After a few days of intensive use I can say that this is one of the few cases in my career as a consumer when I got more for my money than I had expected.” Rüdiger Frank, a professor at the University of Vienna and frequent visitor to North Korea, bought a Samjiyon SA-70, the only tablet made in North Korea, at a shop in Pyongyang last month, for €180 (about $240). He has now posted a lengthy review of the device, named after the location of a Korean-Japanese battle in 1939. And he has some remarkably nice things to say about it.

+

When we learned just over a year ago that North Korea had developed a tablet that runs on Google’s popular Android operating system, we didn’t take the device too seriously. (For one, you can’t get online with it.) But Frank found 488 pre-installed applications like Angry Birds, a Siri-esque speech-recognition program, and a library that includes foreign books like Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, Gone with the Wind, and Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet.

+

Frank said he bought the Samjiyon for €180 (about $240) in Pyongyang.38north.org

The tablet also included a Microsoft Office package, with Word, Excel and PowerPoint. According to Frank, the weakest feature of the device—which came with with 4 GB  of memory and a 1-GHz processor—was that its seven-inch screen has a resolution of only 800 by 480 pixels. Google’s Nexus 7, the same size, has 1920 by 1200 pixels.

+

The tablet’s landing page.38north.org

Frank’s account matches that of a tourist to Pyongyang who bought another version of the Samjiyon for about $200 earlier this year. The tourist, who gave his name only as Michael, said using the device to play games, take photos, or open different apps was a fairly fluid experience. “In terms of responsiveness and speed, it can almost compete against the leading tablets,” he told IDG News in July.

+

The tablet shouldn’t be taken as a sign that life has gotten dramatically better for millions of poor North Koreans. Only a small minority can afford it, mostly elite officials and others profiting from an emerging underground economy that’s allowing them to buy mobile phones or refrigerators.

+

The Samjiyon, however, is a window into the country’s development and political priorities. Frank recommends studying things like the pre-installed dictionaries and books, many of them about Kim Il Sung, for clues about the socialist country’s evolving ideology. An “IT dictionary” could demonstrate the country’s focus in terms of technology—or how far behind it is. The dictionary includes an entry for  “Anna Kournikova”—a computer virus, not the tennis player, from 12 years ago. And it includes mentions of Apple and Yahoo, but not Google.

Quartz

Read more »

Cómo Silicon Valley puede matar el emprendedorismo

How Silicon Valley can kill your startup

In the last year I have lived in San Francisco, Toronto, New York City and Vancouver, where our team currently resides.

Our team comes from a small city in Canada, called Saskatoon, where startups are few and far between. Dealflow, angel investing, strategic partners, mentors and basic startup information is scarce. The angel investing group that once was has disbanded and is just getting started again. The fabric and tools necessary to scale, be disruptive and understand the true ideology of what it takes to build a startup, dramatically pales in comparison to the ‘Valley’ and ‘Alleys’ of the world.

It was evident that if our team wanted to build a start up, grow past a regional market and compete on a world stage we would need access to a combination of mentors, capital and talent. As bright-eyed eager founders so often do, we packed our bags and headed to the riches of Silicon Valley.

The energy of the valleys ecosystem is intoxicating and energetic. The world was our oyster –– with over a million dollars in revenue in our local market, we envisioned our bootstrapped startup would be easily fundable! The first shock to the system came with the realization that our company was a “me too” product in a market full of dominators that were well funded and had, in fact, gone through multiple rounds of funding.

The sobering truth was that these people knew a lot more and our team was behind the 8 ball. They knew the processes, and the basics of how to put together a deck, executive summaries, and more. They understood importance of ESOP and how it can prevent an option pool shuffle. We felt like high school kids who were late to the dance.

We needed to learn quickly, and could not have asked for a better place in the world to get educated.  We are indebted for the time we had in the Valley: It was an environment where people genuinely want to help, educate, empower and where sharing knowledge is a pay it forward custom of life.

The lessons we learned from the Valley equipped us with a new foundation, toolset and skills required to pivot and launch a disruptive product. With this new lease of knowledge we were accepted into one the most lucrative accelerators in Canada where we built the first crowd-funding platform for events. As a result, we created further traction, acquired additional mentors, raised funds and continued to attract talent.

The Valley wonder dust has settled, and looking back, I realize that it was actually quite distracting and limiting. In fact, I would argue now that it is the the worst place in the world to run your startup.

I know what you are thinking; how can that be? Don’t misconstrue my words because I’m not slighting the Valley. I found that it’s a great place for deal flow, relationship building, founder dating and idea vetting.

However, if you are a seed stage company post-funding, take my advice and get the heck out of dodge for these reasons:

1. Talent War – You will need to hire talent, and there is a veritable talent war in Silicon Valley. You will need to compete for engineers with Facebook, Twitter, and Google, which offer heated toilet seats, lap pools, napping pods, executive chefs and of course salaries. It’s a hard sell to bring people on board when you have to court them with the luxuries of a ramen-filled diet.
2. Money Pit – A company’s burn is their oxygen, you die without it, so not spending the burn on living expenses means you live another day. The Valley and New York are very expensive and finding a decent rental space is another war!
3. Free Cash – There are a lot of startups taking full advantage of their state/home/or country incentives. If you are from a small town you may have to leave it in order to chase funding but you don’t necessarily have to relocate. In Canada we have incentives that give startups a massive competitive advantage.
4. Distractions – Top ten lists, meetups, conferences, hackathons, demo days, the list goes on and these distractions are in abundance in the Valley. The only thing that matters is staying focused, building a strong team, disruptive product, traction and going after a large market. My advice: Work on product, raise capital, build users.

Our travels taught us that the Valley and Alley are the best places and the worst places to build your company as they require a lot of burn and can be distracting.

These locations do have some of the best and brightest tech influencers of our time and provided our company the structure and foundation required to journey past  “The crash of ineptitude.”

However, after you’ve raised seed funding, you have a limited amount of chances to get product market fit and scale. Take my advice, find a cheap city that has the best of all the worlds like we did in Vancouver. Stop talking about your startup and get shit done before you run out oxygen and die.

Venture Beat

Read more »

La guerra termonuclear judicial que anticipaba Steve Jobs: Todos contra todos

Judgment day for Android: Apple, Microsoft file lawsuit against Google, Samsung

This is what Steve Jobs meant when he threatened to go nuclear against Android.

Yesterday, on Halloween, a consortium of companies including Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Ericsson, and BlackBerry filed lawsuits again Android manufacturers such as Samsung, HTC, LG, Huawei, Asustek, and ZTE, as well as other Android manufacturers. All the lawsuits target Google as well, if only indirectly, and one mentions the company by name, saying its core money-maker, Adwords, violates a 1998 patent.

Yesterday, the latest smartphone marketshare reports showed that Google’s Android mobile operating system has attained a record 81 percent share, and that Google’s app store, Google Play, now drives 25 percent more downloads than Apple’s, and is catching up in revenue.

Essentially, having failed to compete in the marketplace, Apple and Microsoft are choosing to compete in the courts.

Apparently, they haven’t learned anything from the recent past, in which Apple won a billion-dollar judgment against Samsung that has since been whittled down, reduced, appealed, and essentially stuck in legal limbo. One tremendous accomplishment of that lawsuit, however, has been that many lawyers have gotten much richer.

The lawsuit stems from over 6,000 patents acquired by Apple, Microsoft, and others from the bankrupt early mobile innovator, Nortel, for $4.5 billion in 2011, and amassed in a holding company that the companies’ executives, in an adolescent fit of testosterone overdosing, dubbed Rockstar Bidco. Google was also bidding for the patent portfolio — it was the first bidder, at $900 million —  but lost that battle.

At the time of that bidding war, there were already 45 patent lawsuits against Android in various shapes and forms. Today, there are many more. And Google, probably, knew at that moment that this day was coming.

The Google lawsuit cites United States Patent No. 6,098,065, won by Nortel originally, for “matching search terms with relevant advertising.” In other words, this is not just a fight against Android. Rockstar Bidco — and by extension Apple and Microsoft — are firing directly at the very basis of Google’s existence, its very lifeblood, and the source of all the revenue that enables it to build and give away the world’s best or second-best mobile operating system essentially for free: advertising.

It’s genius, really. Why attack your enemy’s toes when you can go straight for the heart?

And the companies say that by bidding on the Nortel patents, Google was essentially admitting that it was infringing them:

Google was aware of the patents-in-suit at the time of the auction.

Google placed an initial bid of $900,000,000 for the patents-in-suit and the rest of the Nortel portfolio. Google subsequently increased its bid multiple times, ultimately bidding as high as $4.4 billion. That price was insufficient to win the auction, as a group led by the current shareholders of Rockstar purchased the portfolio for $4.5 billion.

Despite losing in its attempt to acquire the patents-in-suit at auction, Google has infringed and continues to infringe the patents-in-suit.

That’s really going too far — the patent portfolio includes many mobile-relevant patents that any company in the space would love to have — but it may play well in court. The Adwords-relevant patent was issued in December, 1998. Google was founded in September of that year, and currently earns $50+ billion annually based on technology that, on the surface, appears to infringe the patent.

(Of course, the patent may also be obvious — at least, it is in retrospect.)

The Samsung lawsuit cites seven patents that Rockstar Bidco, and by extension, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and Ericsson, say Samsung infringes. They include U.S. Patent No. 6,765,591, on virtual private network technology, a user interface patent, and a seemingly impossibly broad U.S. Patent No. 5,838,551, which covers an “Electronic Package Carrying an Electronic Component and Assembly of Mother Board and Electronic Package.”

The lawsuit is extremely comprehensive, citing no fewer than 118 claims of infringement on Samsung’s part, and no fewer than 21 “prayers for relief,” in the somewhat archaic language of the court. Those prayers, which Apple has been offering up fervently for years now, include that Samsung be found guilty of infringement, be forced to pay damages — including triple damages for willful infringement — and either a permanent injunction or a “compulsory ongoing licensing fee.”

Products cited include the Galaxy S III, the Galaxy family of tablets, and others.

In other words, this is likely to be the definitive battle that shapes Android and the future of mobile technology in the U.S. and abroad. Google will likely strike back — every large enterprise has patents that just about every company could be conceivably infringing — and we’ll likely enter a long, protracted, messing, and boring sideshow of legal shenanigans that advance the world of technology not a single bit, but continue to enrich lawyers.

And may, eventually, result in licensing fees on Android that will make the free operating system slightly less free.

Venture Beat

Read more »

Internet, el enorme mercado donde todos vamos a estar

Here's Why 'The Internet Of Things' Will Be Huge, And Drive Tremendous Value For People And Businesses

EMILY ADLER - Business Insider

The Internet Of Things represents a major departure in the history of the Internet, as connections move beyond computing devices, and begin to power billions of everyday devices, from parking meters to home thermostats. 

Estimates for Internet of Things or IoT market value are massive, since by definition the IoT will be a diffuse layer of devices, sensors, and computing power that overlays entire consumer, business-to-business, and government industries. The IoT will account for an increasingly huge number of connections: 1.9 billion devices today, and 9 billion by 2018. That year, it will be roughly equal to the number of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, wearable computers, and PCs combined.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we look at the transition of once-inert objects into sensor-laden intelligent devices that can communicate with the other gadgets in our lives. In the consumer space, many products and services have already crossed over into the IoT, including kitchen and home appliances, lighting and heating products, and insurance company-issued car monitoring devices that allow motorists to pay insurance only for the amount of driving they do.  

Access The Full Report And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

Here are the top business-to-business and government applications:

• Connected advertising and marketing. Cisco believes that this category (think Internet-connected billboards) will be one of the top three IoT categories, along with smart factories, and telecommuting support systems.
• Intelligent traffic management systems. Machina research, in a paper prepared for the GSM Association, sees $100 billion in revenue by 2020 for applications such as toll-taking and congestion penalties. A related revenue source will be smart parking-space management, expected to drive $30 billion in revenue.
• Waste management systems. In Cincinnati, residential waste volume fell 17% and recycling volume grew by 49% through use of a “pay as you throw” program that used IoT technology to monitor those who exceed waste limits.
• Smart electricity grids that adjust rates for peak energy usage. These will represent savings of $200 billion to $500 billion per year by 2025, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.
• Smart water systems and meters. The cities of Doha, São Paulo, and Beijing have reduced leaks by 40 to 50% by putting sensors on pumps and other water infrastructure.
• Industrial uses including Internet-managed assembly lines, connected factories, and warehouses, etc

Read more »

Otra (fuerte) adquisición de una startup en la nube

CSC just acquired cloud startup ServiceMesh

CSC just acquired cloud management startup ServiceMesh for an unspecified sum.

ServiceMesh is a Santa Monica-based startup that aims to give large enterprises a bit more control over the cloud. The company raised $15 million in venture capital from Ignition Partners in 2011 to compete with giants like IBM and HP. It was founded in 2009.

CSC has not revealed the amount it paid for ServiceMesh, although we hear from several sources familiar with the matter that it’s in the $325 million range.

The press release announcing the acquisition is filled with someincomprehensible jargon. Simply put, the buy-up will help an IT infrastructure giant like CSC work with clients who are running applications on different clouds. Increasingly, we’re seeing companies adopt a flexible, hybrid cloud approach.

In August, CSC bought data management startup InfoChimps, which suggests that the company is ramping up its M&A and is keeping a close eye on fast-growing enterprise startups.

This is the second business software acquisition announced in the past 30 minutes. Neustar just revealed that it has acquired Aggregate Knowledge for $119 in cash consideration.

Venture Beat

Read more »

La campaña de emails de LinkedIn tuvo su efecto de red

LinkedIn’s annoying emails appear to be working
By John McDuling




The numbers: LinkedIn swung to a third quarter net loss of $3.4 million, from a profit of $2.3 million last year, as the corporate social network ramped up investment in its platforms. But revenue for the third quarter surged 56% to $393 million. Together with an upbeat forecast for the next quarter, this was enough to drive shares up by 1.7% in after hours trading.
+
The takeaway: Those pesky emails from LinkedIn asking you to upgrade from free to paid service may drive you mad, but they appear to be working. Revenue from premium subscriptions jumped 61% to $79.8 million. The talent solutions division, which is mainly specialist products for recruiters, still accounts for the bulk of the business, with revenue growing by 62% to $224.7 million. Marketing solutions—mainly advertising—was up 38% to $88.5 million.
1

What’s interesting: During the quarter, LinkedIn membership climbed through the 259 million mark, an increase of 38% on last year. The gap with Twitter, which has 218 million monthly active users, has widened. But the corporate social network is still way behind Google Plus, with 540 million active monthly users, and Facebook, with a whopping 1.2 billion.

Quartz

Read more »

Composición de las ganancias de Apple

Apple’s better-than-expected, but still kind of boring quarter in three charts
By Ritchie King @RitchieSKing


Apple just released results for its fourth quarter, July through September. Revenue for those three months was $37.5 billion, beating expectations.
+

All-in-all, Q4 looked a lot like Q3, except Apple sold more iPhones and more computers. The bump in phone sales may have happened during the quarter’s final 10 days—the first week-and-a-half that the new line of iPhones were available in the United States. Apple’s fourth quarter is always strong when it comes to Mac sales, presumably because of back-to-school shopping.

Quartz

Read more »

Ganancias extraordinarias de Microsoft

Microsoft gana un 17,4% más y logra una facturación récord


Oficina de Microsoft en Bucarest. Reuters
Europa PressRedmond (EEUU)




La compañía tecnológica estadounidense Microsoft logró en el primer trimestre de su ejercicio fiscal un beneficio neto de 5.244 millones de dólares (3.800 millones de euros), lo que supone una mejora del 17,4% respecto al mismo periodo del ejercicio anterior, informó la multinacional.

Asimismo, la propietaria de Windows indicó que su facturación entre julio y septiembre alcanzó los 18.529 millones de dólares (13.247 millones de euros), un 15,7% más que el año anterior y la cifra más alta en los tres primeros meses de un ejercicio fiscal en la historia de la compañía de Redmond.

En concreto, Microsoft destacó que su negocio de licencias dirigidas al consumidor facturó un 7,1% menos, mientras que el de licencias comerciales incrementó un 7,2% sus ingresos. A su vez, el área de 'hardware' aumentó un 37% sus ventas.

Amy Hoo, directora financiera de la compañía, destacó que Microsoft fue capaz de generar una facturación "récord" en el primer trimestre fiscal a pesar del periodo de transición que atraviesa la multinacional, que reemplazará a su consejero delegado, Steve Ballmer, a lo largo de 2014.

El Mundo

Read more »

Como salvar a Blackberry

A Way To Save BlackBerry

Editor’s note: Andrew Auernheimer, aka Weev, a hacker who was convicted of hacking AT&T’s iPad customer information service and sentenced to 41 months in prison. Since June, he has sent TechCrunch two other essays from prison, “The Tiger And The Cicada” and “State Machinery For State Machines.”

The first smartphone I owned was a Nokia Communicator, which I chose because the C++ dev kit gave me the most freedom. When the iPhone appeared I did not switch, because mandatory App Store signing to execute code seemed like a major step in the war on general computation. Eventually I rid myself of Nokia and got an Android acting upon a moral imperative.

Many hackers adhere to the ideology of Richard Stallman. We believe that the use of free software (that is software whose source can be viewed, altered and distributed by all of its users) is morally advantageous. We subject ourselves to “inferior” platforms in exchange for more liberty. Android is not free software, but has many free software components, so it is the most free for the time being.

BlackBerry is a flickering candle about to be snuffed, but hope yet lies in the baptismal flame of liberty.

Stallman himself refuses to carry a cellphone because none of them are free software and they have government back doors. His ascetic devotion to our cause is noble, but not realistic for those of us who find mobile devices irreplaceable tools for improving our incomes and sex lives. We less devout followers of the Church of Emacs settle for the most free platform in lieu of true freedom.

I hate Android’s UI/UX cesspool and Google’s growing surveillance state. There are vast numbers of us sharing that sentiment, and all of us could be happy BlackBerry users. BlackBerry would merely have to perform a single revolutionary act: the liberation of mobile users and developers. Release every line of source under the GPLv3. Open up the specs for every hardware component and let the community build their own devices without NSA or corporate backdoors. Our gratitude and fealty will show themselves in BlackBerry’s quarterly earnings reports.

BlackBerry is a flickering candle about to be snuffed, but hope yet lies in the baptismal flame of liberty. With nothing left to lose, perhaps BlackBerry will have the courage to disrupt its competitors and world governments.

[Image: Flickr / Brian Gautreau]

TechCrunch

Read more »