Month: September 2010

Using a specialized software program called TaintDroid, researchers from Duke University, Penn State University, and Intel Labs have discovered some popular Android apps sharing private user data. TainDroid uses “dynamic taint analysis to detect and report when applications are sending potentially sensitive information to remote servers.”

Researchers chose 30 popular free Android applications at random and used TaintDroid to test them. Half of these applications sent private data information to advertising servers. This included users’ GPS location and phone numbers. Some applications were sharing GPS location as much as every 30 seconds when they weren’t even displaying any ads.

Android has measures in place for users to protect themselves. Before you can install an application, you are able to see exactly what features of your phone that app will have access to. If you don’t feel that the permissions make sense, you can always change your mind and not click Install. The problem is that many users don’t pay attention to any of these permissions, blindly trusting the developer in exchange for using the app. This is pretty much the same behavior we see with warning dialogs on computers.

The real issue is that, even if the user painstakingly screens all the permissions of every app they install, they can never tell when an app will use those permissions. For example, you would definitely want the Foursquare app to have access to your GPS coordinates, but you would expect it to only share your location when you were checking in or looking for nearby places. You wouldn’t expect it to send your location and phone number to a remote ad server when you weren’t even using the app.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any legal recourse for these applications. They have notified the user what they would access ahead of time. A partial solution would be for every application to have a clear privacy policy available before installation so that you would already know what they might do with your information beforehand, but most users still wouldn’t read them.

TaintDroid is only possible because Android is open source. Now that the issue has been pointed out, there are measures that can be taken to fixing it. What I wonder is how this is handled with Apple, a completely closed system. While they have a strict approval process, I doubt they screen each app to detect privacy breaches. According to one commenter on Ars Technica:

• Apple applications don’t notify you which services an app will have access to.
• Apps that track other apps are not allowed in the App Store.

This means that, even if iOS apps are leaking private data, users would never know about it. Not only that, but it seems there is no way for them to ever know about it.

via Ars Technica

According to Neowin, Microsoft will release the final version of Windows Live Essentials today. This comes about a month after an update to the beta on August 17th. Windows Live Essentials includes applications like Windows Live Movie Maker, Mail, Messenger, Writer, Sync, and Family Safety.

This final release offers deeper integration with Windows 7 using “jumplists” and all applications have the new ribbon UI. Windows Live Sync allows you to keep files synchronized across the web and multiple PCs. Windows Live Photo Gallery has received a few updates, including photo fusing and improved facial recognition.

Just yesterday, Microsoft and Automattic announced that WordPress.com would be taking over for Windows Live Spaces for blogging with Windows Live Essentials. It was reported that Live Spaces boasted 30 million active users and those users would be transitioned over to WordPress.com, who currently has about 14 million blogs. This would be huge for WordPress.com as they would triple their users.

However, According to internal documents acquired by betanews, it seems that 30 million number is incorrect. Many within Microsoft were concerned about moving so many blogs from a Microsoft platform to the competing Linux platform. In an effort to downplay the implications and avoid a decrease in morale with in the company, a senior Microsoft manager: “The net is: 300k sites are expected to migrate of the 30M ‘blogs’ — most are dead. WordPress is adding somewhere in the order of zero servers to handle this capacity. This was a ‘who has the best online service for blogging for our customers’ and had nothing to do with technology.”

Reaching out to both Automattic and Microsoft, Betanews learned that 50,000 users had already migrated to WordPress.com in the first 48 hours. On Microsoft’s end, they admitted that the 30 million number “includes both authors and their visitors.” The number of actual active authors is 7 million, which shaves 23 million off of their original figure.

While it’s normal for companies to overstate their numbers, this seems to be a pretty huge discrepancy and it’s doubtful that WordPress.com was aware of the “error.” In any case, WordPress.com should still see a significant bump in active users. Look for the new Windows Live Essentials around 1PM EST.

During the final day of TechCrunch Disrupt, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner announced the limited release of a new product called Signal. It’s a beta product that helps you find information and news “most relevant to you as a professional.”

Here are the primary features of Signal in the limited beta:

1. Filters – Sharpen your feed of random updates and links into something you can use to help your business. The information is there and LinkedIn now offers eight dynamic filters to help you find it.
2. Search – Find information on keywords, topics or people across your stream. Because of LinkedIn’s nature, you can quickly find relevant info about specific people and brands.
3. Real-time – You can see an auto-updating stream of the rich content posted by LinkedIn users. You don’t have to refresh the page, but you do have to click (I don’t consider that real-time, but I digress).
4. Trending Links – LinkedIn Signal mines all shared links on status updates so that you can see which are most popular in relation to your searches. Think Tweetmeme for LinkedIn updates.
5. Who’s Shared This? – In addition to seeing what links are popular, you can see who shared those links to make them popular. You can even refine this list by industry, company and region. “Imagine if you wrote a blog post on your company’s blog or were quoted in a news article, you can now see who’s shared that article and made it popular.”

Once you’ve drilled down to the specific data you’re looking for, you can save it as a real-time stream. For instance, you could use this to keep track of what your colleagues are doing or what’s going on at some company you’re interested in. Evelyn Rusli of TechCrunch outlines another interesting scenario:

Beyond a curiosity, I could see this becoming an interesting tool for researchers and professionals, especially journalists like myself. For example, if the CEO of a multi-billion dollar technology company was abruptly ousted by his board (not thinking of anyone in particular here), within seconds, I could find out what that company’s employees were saying about the CEO and what links they were pointing to.

This is an interesting move by LinkedIn in its quest to become more relevant. For most of us, it’s just a Rolodex. There isn’t much real interaction going on their and most users don’t even bother visiting the site. This also highlights how powerful it is for a service to gather information on its users. LinkedIn Signal draws most of its power from the information fed to it by about 70 million users during the past seven years.

LinkedIn Signal is available in a limited beta. They will be rolling it out to some users, but you can ask for an invite here. Are you looking for the signal in your LinkedIn noise?

via LinkedIn

According to AllThingsD, Facebook and Skype will soon announce a partnership that will closely integrate the two services. This will be a two-way deal which includes SMS, voice chat, and Facebook Connect. Skype would use Facebook Connect for deep integration into Facebook contacts, while Facebook would offer SMS, voice, and video chat via the Skype service.

This is a natural move for both parties and could also be a big win for users. According to sources close to the situation, Facebook’s goal is to bring together communications and community. Rather than build from the ground up, it makes sense for Facebook to look for strong partners in the communications area. This seems to be a running trend in the tech community with Microsoft partnering up with WordPress and Windows Live Spaces, AOL acquiring TechCrunch, and Google getting it in wherever they possibly can.

Facebook gains a powerful and proven communications system to connect its users and make the service “stickier.” Skype possibly becomes the primary mode of communication for over 500 million existing Facebook users. Another benefit comes in stretching across the world. Skype is very popular outside of the US while Facebook is more popular within US borders. By putting their heads together, Skype and Facebook can also bring their users together and increase their global influence.

These updates should come in the 5.0 release of Skype, which is now in beta. It is unknown whether this tight integration will trickle down to the mobile applications and, even if it does, Android users may still be left in the cold by Skype’s dealings with Verizon. Skype has also partnered up with other companies as it prepares itself for a public offering.

On a related note, you can still get the Vonage Facebook app, which lets you make VoIP calls to your Facebook contacts around the world for free. It seems to offer the same type of deep integration we might see from a Skype+Facebook deal, but definitely works on iPhone and Android. It doesn’t seem that Vonage has any actual partnership with Facebook, though.

via AllThingsD

Instead of reinventing the wheel, Microsoft has decided to go with WordPress.com for Windows Live Spaces customers. This means that current Live users will be able to migrate their blogs to WordPress.com and new users will get a WordPress blog. When checking out the competition, Microsoft decided that WordPress has “a host of impressive capabilities – from a scalable platform and leading spam protection, to great personalization and customization.”

The goal is to give Windows Live Spaces users the best blogging experience possible and finding a successful company to partner with instead of starting from scratch was the best option. It seems that the two companies are working hard to make sure the transition is a smooth one for current Live Spaces bloggers. They kept three key points in mind:

• Giving existing Windows Live Spaces customers an easy upgrade of their blogging experience to WordPress.com
• Letting anyone connect their WordPress.com blog to Messenger so their Messenger friends are updated when they publish a new post on WordPress.com
• Allowing Windows Live customers to easily create new blogs on WordPress.com

The 30 million people who have awaited the launch of the new blogging features on Windows Live Spaces should breathe easy. Migrating has been broken down to a few easy steps. Your content, comments , and links will all be moved over and preserved. All links will be properly redirected so that your visitors don’t get lost and you don’t lose your Google juice.

If you don’t want to move to WordPress.com for one reason or another, you can opt to download all your content, migrate later, or just delete your Space. Given these options, I’d recommend downloading your content and completing the migration process as soon as possible.

As part of making the migration as simple as possible, WordPress has created a detailed How-To which walks you through the process. In their welcome post to Windows Live Spaces bloggers, they’ve covered some basic WordPress resources for users new to the platform.

Definitely a big move by Microsoft, but it’s not as surprising these days to see them partnering with other successful companies. This is especially true in the social space. It also seems that this move is no surprised to many Windows Live Spaces users.

Are you one of the 30 million who used Live Spaces? Will you be upgrading to WordPress?

The BlackPad has been a rumor for a while now, but RIM has finally made it a reality with the announcement of the Blackberry Playbook today at Research In Motion’s annual BlackBerry Developer Conference. Just as many have speculated, it’s being specifically targeted toward business people, which will differentiate it from Apple’s iPad and make it more desirable for large organizations.

“RIM set out to engineer the best professional-grade tablet in the industry with cutting-edge hardware features and one of the world’s most robust and flexible operating systems,” said Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO at Research In Motion. “The BlackBerry PlayBook solidly hits the mark with industry leading power, true multitasking, uncompromised web browsing and high performance multimedia.”

It is somewhat surprising that the PlayBook doesn’t use Blackberry OS 6. They have opted to develop an entirely new platform specifically for tablet computing called Blackberry Tablet OS. It’s based on the recently acquired QNX and will support full OpenGL, POSIX, and web standards such as HTML5. Founder Dan Dodge says that “QNX is going to enable things that you have never seen before,” and mentions the Playbook will be “an incredible gaming platform for publishers and the players.”

The Playbook measures less than half an inch thick and weighs less than a pound. It features a 7″ high-resolution display and, according to the press release, “looks and feels great in your hand.” It supports true symmetric multiprocessing and sports a 1Ghz dual-core processor. This provides the user with a “highly responsive and fluid touch screen experience for apps and content services.”

Speaking of content services, the new tablet supports Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Mobile AIR, and HTML5. It will offer a complete and full web browsing experience while also providing another avenue for developers to create native apps. It has front and rear-facing HD cameras and can record from both at the same time. The Playbook integrates seamlessly with your existing BlackBerry device using Bluetooth and also supports Wi-Fi.

The BlackBerry Playbook should be available at retail outlets in early 2011. Are you getting a PlayBook? Take a look at the video and tell us what you think in the comments.

via Engadget, AllThingsD

Princeton professor Cornel West and broadcaster Tavis Smiley are joining forces this fall to co-host a new radio show. Both are provocative and well-known public figures and leveraging the current popularity of the Tavis Smiley Show and integrating their professional and personal relationship, they will “explore contemporary, cutting-edge issues.” The announcement came during the 23rd annual Public Radio Programming Conference in Denver, Colorado, Sunday, September 26.

“Dr. West is a long-time friend and I am honored that he has agreed to go on this journey with me. This new venture, Smiley & West, will not only set the pace for tomorrow’s news but will be a conduit for the insightful conversation that America is thirsting for. I’m excited that alongside one of America’s greatest thinkers, we will encourage, enlighten and empower the listeners together.” – Tavis Smiley

The show will be one hour long and air on a weekly basis on Public Radio International (PRI) affiliates nationwide. President and CEO Alisa Miller says that, “PRI is proud to bring the broadcast to audiences nationwide and to support Tavis as he encourages conversation about issues of importance.” According to Miller, “PRI creates and distributes content that offers different perspectives and new voices to help people live successfully in our complex, interconnected world. That’s why we’re thrilled that Tavis and Dr. West have created this forum for a robust exploration of ideas among people with different points of view.”

The first half of the show consists of Tavis and West discussing current news topics. They will focus on stories that deserve attention, but are being ignored by mainstream media outlets. They will also give listeners the opportunity to directly engage the co-hosts on issues they may disagree with on a segment called “Take ‘Em to Task.” The final 30 minutes of the show will be a conversation between Tavis, Cornel, and a special guest. The first episodes will feature New York Times columnist Frank Rich and comedian, actor and writer Garry Shandling. Future episodes will include “celebrities, politicians, intellectuals and other newsmakers.”

“Many of America’s most important discussions aren’t necessarily happening in the boardroom or between the pundits on cable television. Rather they’re happening at BBQs, cocktail parties, barbershops, and salons between real people. With this new endeavor, Smiley & West, Tavis and I hope to really tap into the concerns of everyday people.” – Cornel West

Check out www.smileyandwest.com for more details on the show and how to participate.

September 27th, marks Google’s 12th birthday. In the past, there has been some confusion on Google’s part about what day is actually the official birth/founding date, but sometime in September of 1998 is about as close as we can get. They’ve sometimes celebrated as early as September 7th and the Google.com domain was registered on September 15, 1997.

As with most special days, they’ve chosen to commemorate this day with a doodle (customized logo on the search home page). This one is a simple painting of a birthday cake with Google written out in the icing. The ‘l’ in the Google logo is replaced by a single birthday candle.

What’s interesting about this is that Google has been on a tear with their doodle’s lately, using the space for interactive experiences that have wowed many users and crashed a few browsers. The first was an interactive Pac-man game, the second was to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the buckyball, and the latest was a mysterious doodle of interactive balls launched just before the announcement of Google Instant Search.

This latest doodle is quite the opposite, just a simple painting Wayne Thiebaud, an 89-year-old Los Angeles based artist. The birthday cake doodle is part of a series of cake-related paintings Thiebaud worked on back in the 1950s and ’60s.

Speaking of people named “Wayne,” today also marks the birthday of rapper Lil Wayne. Just like Google, Wayne has a loyal following, is wildly successful, is always looking to diversify his business, and is very often misunderstood. It’s interesting that these iconic figures share the same birthday.

Unfortunately for Wayne, who turns 28 today, he won’t be celebrating very much this year because he’s still serving time in Rikers Island. His latest album, “I’m Not A Human Being” will be released today on iTunes. This version will have 10 tracks, with a 13 track version to be released in stores October 12th. Apparently, he ditched the vocoder for this one. Wayne is set to be released in 39 days for those that are counting.

As far as Google is concerned, they’re entering those awkward teenage years and it shows. While they are considered a successful company, they are often ridiculed for some of their decisions. This is especially true on their moves into social networking. Regardless of their past mistakes and general awkwardness, it’s important to note that they are just coming into their own.

via PC World, MTV

The Facebook Phone

TechCrunch reported this week that Facebook is building a phone. Facebook immediately shot back that the story was “not accurate” and that “Facebook is not building a phone.” The situation buzzed for days and Zuckerberg eventually interviewed with TC to clear the air. The Facebook CEO was very adamant that they are not attempting to build their own device and compete in the market, but are looking into deeper integration into existing handsets and mobile operating systems.

Anyone with an Android phone may find this a little odd. Facebook is integrated pretty deep into the Android experience, syncing contacts and the whole nine. Facebook may simply want a better experience as the Facebook app is still lacking. Looking into OS internals may be part of finding a solution.

Google Voice Mobile in the App Store

While many Android users were enjoying the Google Voice service, iPhone users were left in the cold as Apple decided GV wasn’t a good fit for the App store. That all changed this week with two Google Voice applications being added. The first is GV Connect and the most recent is GV Mobile +. Besides iOS users getting cool new functionality, the bigger story is that Apple seems to be softening up a bit on its App Store regulations. via BoyGeniusReport

Facebook Gaming Gets Less Annoying

Facebook has updated their gaming platform to be much more useful to those who don’t play games. Those of us who couldn’t care less about your Farm or your Cafe can finally breathe a sigh of relief as we will no longer see those updates in our feeds. Facebook has decided to show non-gamers occasional gaming updates, just to give a heads up about what your friends are playing instead of a daily deluge of mundane and esoteric stories.

For you game players, here are some other improvements:

• Full stories in News Feed so they won’t miss when a friend shares an action or needs help in a game. The more active a person is in a game, the more prominent the stories will be.
• Smarter bookmarks on the home page that will automatically appear and reorder based on the games they’re playing. They will no longer need to individually bookmark apps, and it will be easier to get to favorite apps.
• A clearer, highlighted number for pending requests or tasks alongside bookmarks.
• Requests in the Games Dashboard, where they can manage all their game activity and discover new games.

via The Facebook Blog

4Chan DDoS’s RIAA and MPAA

Following reports that the Motion Picture Association of America used cyber hitmen to take down pirates, anonymous 4Chan users mobilized to take down the MPAA. After crippling the MPAA website and the anti-BitTorrent AiPlex Software, they set their targets on the RIAA. Droves of anonymous Internet users loaded up their Low Orbit Ion Cannons (LOIC) to help in the attack. DDoS attacks are almost impossible to defend against because they originate from multiple sources simultaneously and can bring any network to its knees. Not only that, but there is no one to blame for these attacks. No one to prosecute in a court of law. Tools like LOIC allow the average person to take part in such an online protest with minimal technical knowledge. Will this serve as the blueprint for future online protests? via TorrentFreak

Netflix CEO Apologizes for Self-Absorbed Comment and Hints at Streaming Only Plan

Netflix officially launched in Canada this week and celebrated by closing down a Toronto street, attracting dozens of people. The problem is that many of these people were actors instructed to act excited about Netflix and many of these actors were mistakenly interviewed by the media. Netflix later apologized, saying that the extras were required to get a film permit for the launch and that they were not instructed to represent themselves as anything other than “promotional people.”

When Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was questioned about the price difference between the US and Canada, he replied “How much has it been your experience that Americans follow what happens in the world? It’s something we’ll monitor, but Americans are somewhat self-absorbed.” This was a statement he later apologized for, saying “My Big American Foot is in my mouth.” One interesting tidbit that came from his apology was the reason for the price discrepancy:

The pricing Netflix is offering in Canada, $7.99 per month, does not include any DVD-by-mail option, and that is why it is cheaper than our $8.99 USA plan which has both DVD-by-mail and streaming in one plan. We are looking at adding a streaming-only option for the USA over the coming months.

via 570News, GigaOM, Official Netflix Blog

Mixtape Comedy Show Looking for Your Design

The Mixtape Comedy Show with Anthony Anderson and Royale Watkins is a stand up comedy and music show that streams live on Facebook and Ustream. Every 3rd Sunday of the month, the Gotham Comedy Club in New York is routinely sold out for the show. They feature some of the biggest names in music and comedy as well as upcoming stars from both sides, creating a unique experience. To further their goal of interacting with the audience, they need a design for their home on the web. Enter your design or comment on what’s already been submitted on the 99designs contest page.

The Donation

Update: TechCrunch has an interview with Mark Zuckerberg where he explains his motivations for the Newark donation. The goal is to make Newark a symbol for other areas that positive changes can be made in the school system with a little help. Zuckerberg seems to have put some thought into this.

As we covered yesterday, Facebook is donating $100 million to help Newark schools. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will set up a foundation with $100 million in Facebook stock for improving education in America, with the focus being on Newark. This would cover 20% of the school system’s budget of $940 million. Zuckerberg will announce the donation today on Oprah, ending a week of education reform programming on the show.

The Facebook Movie

The movie “The Social Network” will be released today. This highly anticipated movie depicts Mark Zuckerberg as “an insecure jerk who screws over people and becomes a much-richer insecure jerk,” according to Media Memo. Zuckerberg is definitely the villain in the film, which is only loosely based on the reality of Facebook’s first year. Even if it’s mostly fiction, it could still be bad for Zuckerberg’s image.

The “Coincidence”

Many have speculated that these two events occuring on the same day is no coincidence. Zuckerberg donating $100 million to Newark schools on the same day that a movie damaging his reputation is released will definitely raise some eyebrows. According to sources close to Zuckerberg, he very badly wanted to delay the announcement to avoid such connections being made. These sources say that it was obviously not done on purpose because it would be such an obvious attempt to try and clean things up.

Sources close to the situation say that Newark Mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie were the ones who chose the timing. Zuckerberg pushed for a delay, but caved under pressure from Booker and Christie, who scheduled the announcement to go along with events already scheduled.

The Outage

This all comes just after Facebook had the worst outage in four years. Facebook apologized for the 2.5 hour outage and explained what happened in a post. It amounts to their database being corrupted and the systems set up to prevent that from happening becoming confused. The solution to fixing Facebook was as familiar to techies as to anyone else: they turned it off and turned it back on.

Do you think that Zuckerberg scheduled the announcement of his philanthropy in order to save face, or is this all a happy (or unhappy) coincidence?

via The Daily Beast, The Wrap

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to donate $100 million to the Newark school system. This could bring in a total donation of $200 million as Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker, has been working on raising another $100 million from private foundations and others.

Zuckerberg is setting up a foundation with $100 million in Facebook stock to be used to improve education in America, with the focus being on Newark. The potential donation would amount to over 20% of Newark’s budget of $940 million.

Newark spends about $22,000 a year on each of its 40,000 pupils, but only about half of its students graduate. Of those who do, only one-fifth go on to four-year colleges. More than 85% of the Newark students at community colleges need remedial help in math and English.

Foundations and wealthy investors have been recently donating large sums of money into education to make changes. The money usually comes in exchange for something like increased pay for teachers or measures to make sure teachers are effective.

At this time, it doesn’t seem that Zuckerberg or Facebook have an agenda, but this donation is part of a bigger plan. According to a source familiar with the situation, Booker is charged with setting up plans and rallying community support for them. According to a source close to the matter, the mayor plans to aggressively pursue plans for big changes in the school system. Booker used crime as the focus of his first term and will make education the center of his second.

This would be Zuckerberg’s largest gift to date. In 2009, Facebook was valued at about $7 billion. Now, with over 500 million users, their value has more than tripled to $23 million. Zuckerberg himself added about $5 billion to his fortune, which took him to #35 on the Forbes 400 with an estimated fortune of $6.9 billion. This puts the Facebook CEO ahead of Apple’s Steve Jobs, who sits at #42 on the Forbes 400.

#1 on the list of richest people in America is Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates. He is worth about $54 billion and his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has not only funneled around $5 billion into K-12 education, but also donated $100 million last year to overhaul how teachers are trained and evaluated in the Tampa Hillsborough County School District.

via WSJ, Forbes, SeattlePI

According to a new report from The Media Audit, African-American adults spend much more time consuming media from the Internet than any other adult group. The study consisted of more than 7,000 African-Americans, who spent 4 hours and 21 minutes per day online. This is 10% higher when compared to all US adults, who typically spend about 3 hours and 57 minutes.

A similar study done in 2005 found that African-Americans only spent about 1 hour and 9 minutes per day online. This new study shows a major shift in where African-Americans are focusing their attention and getting their information. Time spent on all media types for AA’s is 13 hours and 24 minutes per day. This includes radio, television, newspaper, outdoor billboards, and the Internet. This 4 hours and 21 minutes now spent online represents 32.5% of total daily media exposure.

Compared to the 2005 numbers, AA’s now spend about 7% less time watching TV (from 42.9% down to 35.2%) and 10% less time listening to the radio (from 31.4% down to 21.1%). This shift in attention is extremely important for advertisers and others seeking to reach African-Americans to note.

African-Americans consume more media than other groups, spending 13 hours and 24 minutes per day on all media types (the typical U.S. adult spends only 11 hours and 33 minutes per day). AA’s are not only more likely to buy what you’re selling, but the buying power of African-Americans will exceed $1 trillion by 2012.

• African-Americans are 37% more likely to be in the market for a car, van, truck or SUV.
• 48% more likely to be planning to buy audio equipment such as a CD, MP3 player or IPod.
• 59% more likely to be planning to purchase video equipment such as a camera, VCR, or DVD player.
• 31% more likely to eat fast food three or more days in a typical week.
• 38% more likely to be taking a college course in the next year.

This mean that advertisers need to diversify their approach in reaching the African-American community. Your basic media types are still relevant, but the Internet has taken a commanding role. An approach that integrates TV, Radio, and Internet will be most effective.

In Houston, for example, an automobile advertiser placing spots on KHOU Channel 11’s morning news program would achieve 27.4% reach with African American automobile buyers, however, a combination of the station’s early news program and the station’s website would yield an unduplicated net reach of nearly 40%. The unduplicated reach is established through The Media Audit’s Ad Campaign Planner program.

Internet Explorer 9 is a complete departure from earlier versions of the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser. It embraces the latest web technologies and treats web sites more like applications. It does all this using a clean, sleek interface. In the first 2 days since the beta was launched on the 15th, IE9 was downloaded over 2 million times worldwide.

This is more than double the number of downloads the Internet Explorer 8 Beta had when it launched in August 2008, receiving 1.3 million downloads over the first five days. Firefox 4 beta was only downloaded 100,000 times on its launch day.

Microsoft has worked hard to change its image and offer customers with a better more current experience. We’re used to Microsoft being pretty conservative with product launches. They don’t come often and they’re not usually that exciting. With the launch of Office 2010, Windows 7, and Windows Phone 7, they’ve done a great job of being innovative.

If two million downloads in two days sounds familiar, it should. It was just a few months ago that Microsoft announced they were selling 7 copies of Windows 7 every second. Microsoft customers are hungry for a new experience from Redmond and are chomping at the bit to get at these new products. Microsoft saw nine million visits and over 26 million page views to their Beauty of the Web site since its release last week. The site shows “how developers and designers are creating a more beautiful web using HTML5 and advancements in Internet Explorer 9.” Their developer-focused IE Test Drive Site also received four million page views since last Wednesday.

Microsoft is launching exciting products and people can’t wait to adopt them. This includes businesses, a market where the likes of Chrome and Firefox still have a hard time penetrating. 75% of companies were looking at Windows 7 for their business when it launched, so it follows that they may be just as interested in adopting the latest IE browser.

Important to note is that IE9 will absolutely not be available for XP, so the new browser will either push many customers and businesses to upgrade to Windows 7 (which they’ve already indicated they would like to do) or it will stunt the growth of IE9 once it launches.