Month: October 2010

Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers called the press to Facebook headquarters earlier today to launch sFund, a $250 million initiative to invest in entrepreneurs inventing social applications and services. Facebook, Amazon, and Zynga are major partners with Comcast, Liberty Media, and Allen & Company committing to invest in the sFund and serve as strategic partners.

“We’re at the beginning of a new era for social Internet innovators who are re-imagining and re-inventing a Web of people and places, looking beyond documents and websites. There’s never been a better time than now to start a new social venture.” — KPCB partner John Doerr

Bing Gordon, KPCB partner, former chief creative officer, longtime executive at Electronic Arts, and board director of Amazon.com and Zynga will lead sFund. Gordon believes that “social is just getting started” and there are “vast” opportunities ahead. He goes on to say that “every business, organization, and entrepreneur should have a social strategy,” which seems to echo the thoughts of many social media professionals (not just the “gurus” on Twitter).

An important piece of the puzzle is in the Amazon Web Services. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, points out that social apps grow in a unique way. Things start slowly, but the viral nature of these apps causes unexpected spikes. We saw this when Twitter really began to take off. Bezos believes that the “variable cost nature” of AWS is the perfect solution to the problem.

Over the past year, there has been unprecedented innovation in social applications. KPCB’s latest social ventures show the breadth of the social opportunity, from seed stage to scale-up, and enterprise to entertainment, including:

• Cafébots – The first company dedicated to Friend Relationship Management. By building applications that are useful, fun, and scalable, consumers will be able to extract more information from and make better use of their social graphs. KPCB led a Series A funding for the company founded by a team of Stanford PhDs.
• Flipboard – The world’s first social magazine, delivering a beautiful, personalized experience of the news, images, and information being shared by your friends across social network feeds on your iPad.
• Jive – Jive’s social software leverages innovations in social to radically change the way work gets done in the enterprise. Jive has over 3,000 customers serving 15 million users. KPCB led a growth stage funding round in July.
• Lockerz – A new social commerce company aimed at ages 13-30 creates a revolutionary new way to shop, play content, and connect. In less than a year, Lockerz has grown to more than 17 million members, offering major discounts on the best fashions, electronics, music, and more.

While everyone seems to be on the same page that social is the future, there is some disagreement about how we can get there. During the meeting, Zuckerberg and others stressed that social is not something you can add later. They say that the successful social applications will be those built from the ground up as social, while those who try add it as a layer on top will fail. I know of at least one huge tech company who may disagree with that assessment.

via KPCB News, TechCrunch

Google has used their latest Doodle to commemorate the birth of jazz icon Dizzy Gillespie. 93 years ago, a man by the name of John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie was born. The youngest of nine children, Dizzy was born to James and Lottie Gillespie in South Carolina. His dad, James, was the leader of a band, which gave Dizzy access to all types of musical instruments. By age 12, Dizzy was able to play both the trombone and the trumpet.

Dizzy is considered a pioneer in bebop and jazz music. He’s credited with influencing such greats as Miles Davis and Fats Navarro. Besides being a musical legend, Dizzy is known by two characteristics: his cheeks and his horn. Google has captured both of these in their Doodle, making his cheeks bright yellow and circular and giving his horn an upward bend. From Wikipedia:

According to Gillespie’s autobiography, this was originally the result of accidental damage caused by someone sitting on it during a job on January 6, 1953, but the constriction caused by the bending altered the tone of the instrument, and Gillespie liked the effect. Gillespie’s biographer Alyn Shipton writes that Gillespie likely got the idea when he saw a similar instrument in 1937 in Manchester, England while on tour with the Teddy Hill Orchestra. An English trumpeter was using such an instrument because his vision was poor and the horn made reading music easier. According to this account (from British journalist Pat Brand) Gillespie was able to try out the horn and the experience led him, much later, to commission a similar horn for himself.

It’s interesting what events in our history Google chooses to commemorate with their Doodles. Personally, I prefer the fancy HTML5 animated Doodles that slow older computers to a crawl, but that’s probably because I rarely visit the Google home page.

Gillespie took the basic horn and literally bent it to his will to achieve something new and unique. This seems to be the same path that Google has taken with the web. They’ve used their influence and knowledge to revolutionize the web browser with Chrome, stir up the mobile market with Android, and even to invade your living room with Google TV. Their end goal may be to find more places to paste ads, but it still looks like a win for the web in general.

The aptly named Back to the Mac event that Apple did today brings everything full circle. Mac OS X, Apple desktops, and laptops influenced the development of iOS, iPhones, iPods, and iPads. They took what they already had and parlayed their technology into a successful mobile business. Now, Apple is taking what they learned in developing these amazing mobile devices and cramming it back into their desktop and laptop machines.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same path that Google is following with Android. The main difference is that Google didn’t start with a successful desktop platform first. Not sure who had the idea first, but it could be a big win for users, especially if Microsoft figures it out as well.

Mac OS X Lion

iLife ‘11 actually gives us a glimpse of the new paradigm of modal computing Apple is heading toward. Instead of having windows and tabs scattered all across your screen, the OS allows you to focus on one thing at a time. This is the type of user interface you’re used to on your iPhone, Android, or iPad. Many apps will take over your entire screen just as they do on your mobile device.

Launchpad shows you all the applications installed on your computer. These apps are managed by the App Store just as they are on your mobile. Using gestures, you can page through what you have installed to find the app you need. Mission Control takes Exposé to a different level, showing you all your open windows grouped by application. It also integrates your dock and dashboard.

Mac App Store

Yes, the App Store is coming to your desktop and laptop. You’ll get access to the new store in Snow Leopard in 90 days. For developers, submissions will run through the month of November. While it is already dead simple to install things on a Mac, having an App Store will make it easier to find and install things for the average user. The main question on your mind right now is probably whether you’ll be able to play Angry Birds. I haven’t heard anything on that yet.

Facetime for Desktops and Laptops

iPad and Macbook Have a Baby

via Gizmodo, SlashGear

iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand all saw upgrades today at Apple’s Back to the Mac event. They’ve added some advanced features that make handling, creating, and sharing your media more efficient and easier to deal with. iPhoto takes more advantage of full-screen and easily shares photos on Facebook. iMovie makes creating trailers and adding effects a breeze. GarageBand ‘11 adds more effects and a nifty “How Did I Play” feature.

iPhoto ‘11, in addition to taking full advantage of full-screen mode, integrates with Facebook to make sharing and engaging easier. Browsing through your thumbnails is much easier and iPhoto ‘11 now does smart things like grouping similar photos based on their content. Sharing photos on Facebook is easy and you can see comments made on your FB photos right inside the app.

iMovie ‘11 adds more advanced audio controls. You won’t need a degree in audio engineering to make simple edits to your soundtrack and vocals. The visual waveform gives you immediate feedback about changes you’ve made. Adding advanced digital effects and transitions is as simple as selecting where you want it and clicking away. The most interesting feature comes in creating trailers using a wizard-like format. You pick the type of trailer, iMovie ‘11 tells you which types of clips to put where, and you can even pick original background music recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra.

GarageBand ‘11 brings more guitar and amp effects and a feature called Groove Matching. Apple’s Xander Soren say “it’s like an automatic spellchecker for bad rhythm.” For you music folks out there, it sounds like it quantizes your notes. For everyone else, I’d look at it like auto-tune, but it keeps your notes on beat instead of in tune. “How Did I Play” is an interesting mix of Rock Band and music class. It visually shows you which notes you hit correctly and which you missed as you play. Flex Time “lets you move, stretch or shorten individual notes by clicking on just the part of the audio waveform you want to change.”

You can get iLife ‘11 immediately for $49 from apple.com, your local Apple Store, or an authorized Apple retailer.

via Engadget

On Apple’s recent Q4 earnings call, Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance and finally snapped. He hasn’t really said much about Android up until this point and he really went in. For a full five minutes, Jobs talked about how “open” doesn’t always win. He touched on the fact that activation numbers for Android seem to be inaccurate. He laughs off the idea that the iPad will have any competition. One of the most interesting points he makes is on the fragmentation of the Android Operating System, using Tweetdeck as an example:

“Twitter client, Twitter Deck [sic], recently launched their app for Android. They reported that they had to contend with more than 100 different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations present developers with a daunting challenge.”

Tweetdeck recently appeared in the Marketplace after a beta period. The free application is a pleasure to use and I definitely recommend giving it a shot, but I digress. Jobs references a post by Tweetdeck on their experience with the Android ecosystem, but takes it completely out of context. The original post says:

As we bring our initial Android TweetDeck beta period to a close, we wanted to quickly reflect on the Android ecosystem and what might be considered extreme fragmentation. To date we’ve had 36,427 active beta testers and below you can see the massive variety of phones and Android OS versions everyone is running. We were really shocked to see the number of custom roms, crazy phones and general level of customization/hackalicious nature of Android. From our perspective it’s pretty cool to have our app work on such a wide variety of devices and Android OS variations.

Then, they go on to detail the huge number of different Android flavors that their app works on. At no point do they say it was a challenge or difficult to develop for this environment. Tweetdeck founder Iain Dodsworth took it upon himself to respond to Jobs in a tweet, saying:

“Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn’t. It wasn’t.”

What is curious is that Jobs is even speaking on Android. His words say that he isn’t worried about competition for the iPad. He says that the fragmentation and “open” nature of Android isn’t the best thing for customers and Apple’s integrated approach is. So, why is he even talking about the competition if he doesn’t think they’re competition?

via TechCrunch, SAI

According to the WSJ, a number of Facebook applications have been sharing information about users that they should not have. Many apps on Facebook, some quite popular, have been “transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies.” According to WSJ, “Tens of millions of Facebook app users” appear to be at risk, even those who have chosen the absolute strictest privacy settings.

Facebook has responded by saying that the problem is being blown out of proportion. What’s happening is that the UID’s of users accessing Facebook apps have been passed on to 3rd parties by some applications. This UID is just a number that uniquely identifies your profile on Facebook. Knowing the ID itself doesn’t actually get you access to anything special. As Facebook puts it:

Recently, it has come to our attention that several applications built on Facebook Platform were passing the User ID (UID), an identifier that we use within our APIs, in a manner that violated this policy. In most cases, developers did not intend to pass this information, but did so because of the technical details of how browsers work.

The main issue with passing around this UID is that it can later be combined with other data floating around the Internet about you. RapLeaf, a company that compiles data about web users and sells it, was able to connect these UID’s with data they already had. This allowed them to form a better picture of the individuals they were tracking. This data collection is really where the privacy issue lies.

Facebook already had policies in place against sharing UID’s and many of the apps in violation were disabled. LOLApps went offline briefly because of this issue, but has since been restored. According to their blog, they unintentionally shared information (which is pretty easy to do because of how browsers work). Apparently, when they found out what had happened, someone got fired:

When we were informed of the issue the relationship that put us into this category was immediately dissolved. Since Lolapps was founded in 2008, we have always been committed to Facebook’s platform policies and will continue to be as we grow.

While some of the most popular apps on Facebook (Farmville, Frontierville, Texas HoldEm Poker) were affected, it doesn’t appear that they were disabled. The 12 companies that did receive user information from RapLeaf say they did not use or store the information and RapLeaf says the data was shared unintentionally. So, as the privacy ball bounces out of bounds, it looks like everyone involved has thrown up their hands.

That’s to be expected, but this may not be the end for Facebook. This latest episode in the Facebook privacy saga will certainly be drug out as long as possible. Those aware of the breach will find ways to exploit it and frighten Facebook users. At this point, I’m not so sure it’s worth closing up the farm or shutting down the cafe over.

According to Clearwire, 4G is coming to 3 more cities by the end of this year. 4G Mobile broadband will be coming to New York City by November 1st through a joint effort between Clearwire, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable. Clearwire, Comcast, and Sprint will bring 4G connectivity to San Francisco in late December. 4G will come to Los Angeles via Clearwire and Sprint on December 1st.

WiMAX is the technology powering the new 4G networks, which boast speeds somewhere from 5 to 7Mbps download, with a 1.2Mbps upload (according to Engadget). To put that in perspective, 6Mbps is what you might get from a basic broadband connection from your local cable company. It’s not the fastest connection ever, but it’s quite capable of doing just about anything you’d ever want to do online. We already have 4G here in Atlanta and I can’t really tell the difference between 4G and my wireless connection at home. It’s very nice.

It’s not a surprise that 4G is launching in these cities, but it is definitely an important milestone in the development of the next generation of mobile connectivity. These are cities where there are a huge volume of professionals and tech enthusiasts sporting the fanciest mobile devices. Success in these cities will hinge on the experiences of these customers. Apple and AT&T have taken a lot of heat because of poor performance and data connectivity in these locations.

An interesting point about this launch is the internal conflict between Sprint and Clearwire. Sprint owns 55 percent of Clearwire and is launching 4G using space on Clearwire’s network. At the same time, Sprint and Clearwire are competing for the same customers as Clearwire works to expand its network. Three top Sprint executives recently resigned from Clearwire’s board because of this tension.

Another point to note is that Sprint+Clearwire is not the only game in town. Verizon is launching its own high-speed mobile network. It’s set to cover 38 cities and 110 million people by the end of the year. Clearwire has promised 120 million people in the same time frame. Verizon is the number one mobile provider in the US followed by Sprint at number four.

The more networks we have offering high-speed mobile connectivity, the easier it will be for the average person to get a decent Internet connection. People in the black community may not have computers or even cable TV, but probably have a mobile device. High-speed connectivity in combination with the latest crop of smartphones could be a game changer.

via Reuters, Clearwire

Antennagate is Over, but is Glassgate next?

A design flaw in the new iPhone 4 could make it easy to crack the glass-backed devices. The cause? Slider cases. This is probably the reason why Apple gave out bumper cases to fix the antenna scandal. It also explains why these bumper cases not only cover the antenna, “fixing” the death-grip issue, but also make no contact with the back of the phone.

While we’ve had our own concerns over the iPhone 4’s glass back, what the iPhone engineering team discovered post-Antennagate, according to Block, is that non-bumper cases that slide onto the iPhone 4 can cause scratching when particles get between the case and the glass. Those scratches can lead to serious cracking in no time.

via Gizmodo

Google Researches Cars That Drive Themselves

The search giant, Google, is branching out in all types of directions in order to expand it’s ad revenue business. They’re on your computer, they’re on your phone, and now on your TV. These all seem to make a lot of sense from a business standpoint, but why are they trying to drive your car? This is the question many techies were asking themselves when Google announced their self-driving car. Apparently, this research has been going on for at least a year.

As ZDNet, Scoble, and Arrington point out: it really doesn’t matter why they’re doing it, we should just be happy that they are. Research and development is becoming a thing of the past as companies are pushed by investors to launch products instead of actually researching new things. No R&D means no innovation. No innovation means no artificial intelligence to eventually enslave humanity and we all know that is the ultimate goal.

MySpace Spaces Out on New Logo

Yes, the image above will be the new logo for MySpace when their redesign launches at the end of this year. According to MySpace VP of User Experience Mike Macadaan “MySpace is a platform for people to be whatever they want, so we’ve decided to give them the space to do it.” I’m assuming the “no pun intended” was cut from this quote. To be fair, the logo is supposed to be more like a Google Doodle, allowing the user to customize it to fit their personality. Looking at it from that perspective, it seems kind of cool. In any case, MySpace can do whatever they want at this point as it seems impossible for them to gather any more haters. via TechCrunch

Twitter Finally Serious About Monetizing

The running joke about Twitter is that they have the world’s attention and are not making much money from it. They don’t know how to monetize. Recent events are changing that perspective, though. They have been experimenting with promoted tweets and ads for a little while now. Apparently, these are going well. According to newly promoted CEO Dick Costolo, “We’re definitely beyond the experimentation stage. It’s working.” He later said, “We feel like we’ve cracked the code on a new form of advertising, and we feel like we’ve got a hit on our hands.” via NYT

Search advertising revenue is still Google’s dominant revenue stream. They did better than expected, with overall revenue climbing 23 percent and net income rising 32 percent. Smashing expectations from Wall Street analysts, Google’s stock price rose about 9 percent in after-hours trading. Their third-quarter results also contain some interesting numbers regarding mobile ads and display ads.

They’ve turned mobile ads into a $1 billion business worldwide (annualized based on the prior quarter.) This is only five months after Google started pushing AdMob, which it acquired late last year for $750 million. While AdMob was second in revenue last year, making less than $100 million, the acquisition puts Google at the number one spot with 21% market share.

“Clearly this is the future of search and the Internet.” — Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management at Google

“Mobile is going to be an increasing part of the strategy in terms of sales.” — Google’s head of mobile advertising, Omar Hamoui

Display ads, ads with images and video, are set to generate more than $2.5 billion in revenue in the coming year. While $3.5 billion in revenue isn’t much compared to the $30 billion Google is expected to rake in, it still means they are having some success in new areas of business.

“What matters is how much longer can Google grow at 20 percent or more, which is considered rapid growth, double the rate of Internet advertising at this point,” Mr. Rohan said. If the company can continue to grow at that rate, he said, “it would suggest that they’ve extended gracefully into display and mobile.”

Part of Google’s success has been in mobile advertising and one major factor in that success is the Android platform. It’s the fastest growing mobile platform to date. They have multiple devices on every major carrier in all shapes and sizes. They are bringing smartphones to the masses while also make it easy for developers to market and monetize Apps in their Marketplace using, of course, Google’s own advertising platform.

In addition to getting the text and display ad game in check, they’ve also introduced features like Google Voice Actions to make it easier to search. Remember, every search means money for Google. Mobile won’t be enough to really make Google some cash. They’ll have to go after TV advertising as well, which is probably the reason behind Google TV. They haven’t said how they will monetize, but they aren’t bringing the web to your living room for nothing.

via NYT, AdAge

Apple, Verizon, and AT&T have announced that the iPad will be available at over 2,000 Verizon Wireless stores nationwide and 2,200 AT&T retail locations. They will go on sale next Thursday, October 28th. While both carriers will offer the iPad, the options will be slightly different. Verizon will offer a bundle including a WiFi-capable iPad and a Verizon MiFi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot. AT&T will offer 3G pre-paid data plans for iPad, including Apple’s easy on-device activation and management. AT&T is offering all iPad data plans with no contract and including unlimited access to AT&T’s 23,000+ domestic Wi-Fi Hot Spots.

Verizon Chief Operating Officer John Stratton says this is “the perfect pairing for holiday travels” and says that “the nation’s largest and most reliable 3G data network” will make it easy for customers to “connect on the go wherever they are.”

Glenn Laurie, AT&T’s President of Emerging Devices, Resale and Partnerships, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, says that they “can’t wait to showcase the amazing features of iPad Wi-Fi + 3G in our stores across the country.” Glenn goes on to say that AT&T’s “breakthrough iPad data plans starting at just $14.99″ offer the best of both worlds combined with “access to AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots around the country at no extra cost.” Definitely a compelling argument.

Apple COO Tim Cook offers similar responses on both fronts, basically saying that Apple is happy to get the iPad into more stores in time for the holiday season. They “look forward to expanding the reach of the iPad” and “to get iPad into the hands of even more customers.” They are happy to offer iPad Wi-Fi +3G at AT&T Stores, while also offering Verizon Wireless customers an “easy way to stay connected wherever you go.”

One important point to note here is that, while AT&T is offering a 3G model, Verizon is only offering the iPad Wi-Fi. AT&T will offer iPads at the suggested retail price of $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. The $14.99 per month data plans include 250MB and $25 per month plans offer 2GB with no term contract.

Verizon will also follow the suggested retail pricing, but is throwing in a MiFi Mobile Hotspot. iPad customers can get 1GB of data for just $20 a month. Verizon Wireless will also offer all three iPad Wi-Fi models on a stand-alone basis.

This comes just after the announcement that Walmart will begin selling the iPad this Friday. Target has sold iPads for a few weeks now. Other tablet makers are also rushing to get their devices into stores for the holidays, but it might be hard to compete when Apple’s iPad is so well-known and now available just about everywhere.

via Apple, Business Wire

Rumors have been circulating for about a week now that AOL and Yahoo could merge. More recently, the talk is that AOL Inc., along with several private equity firms, is looking to buy Yahoo Inc. and merge the two companies. This latest comes from a report by WSJ:

Silver Lake Partners and Blackstone Group LP are among the firms that have expressed interest in teaming up with AOL to buy Yahoo or trying to take it private on their own, these people said. They added that at least two or three other firms could be interested in participating if a formal buyout proposal is drawn up.

Keep in mind that “people familiar with the matter” are cautioning anyone jumping to conclusions. These are simply preliminary discussions involving AOL Inc., private equity firms, and financial advisors. Yahoo hasn’t even been contacted yet. The conversations may not even lead to an official proposal to Yahoo given the complexity involved.

There are a few scenarios out there, but the general idea would be for China’s Alibaba Group to buy back Yahoo’s 40% stake in the company. This would make Yahoo Inc. more maneuverable in merging with AOL as it would lower the bar of entry for private equity firms in getting financing.

Alibaba Chief Executive Jack Ma has expressed interest in repurchasing Yahoo’s stake in his company, which analysts value at about $10 billion. A big chunk of Yahoo’s current market value comes from its Alibaba stake.

Facebook and Microsoft have actually been working together since 2006. Duing their joint event today, they’ve announced some changes to the Bing search engine that will either make your search experience more useful, or slightly more annoying. With deep integration into your Facebook social network, Bing can now tailor your search results and make them more relevant to you.

Once again, the Likes feature rears its head and shows how powerful it is for a social network to have a lightweight method for users to indicate interest in something. Originally a feature of FriendFeed (which was later acquired by Facebook), Facebook implemented Likes earlier this year. Now, instead of making some type of commitment to joining a group or subscribing to a page, you just click Like. Using information about Likes among your Facebook friends, Bing can show you more detailed and specific information about your searches.

This means that two different people searching on the same topic may not see the same results. One example used was the Toyota Prius. A search on Bing would recognize you’re looking for a car and show you more details about it in addition to your standard search results. With the new Facebook social layer, you will also see a section which shows which of your friends Liked links related to the Prius.

We’ve seen this type of social integration on Google already, with updates from your social circle (Twitter) showing up as part of your results. The difference here is that the information may be more relevant, coming from your Facebook network and being pulled only from items those in your circle actually indicate they like.

People search is another area where Facebook will come into play. Usually, a search on an individual will pull up exactly who you want, as long as you’re looking for someone popular. If you were trying to find that person you worked on that one project with back in college, you would be out of luck. Now, Bing recognizes the people you might be searching for, no matter how unknown, and will show you links to their profiles in your results.

Of course, Facebook partnering with a public search engine will probably ignite the privacy fires again. Microsoft will not be storing any persistent data about your social searches. Bing does not save any of the data it’s pulling from Facebook except to show it on your screen. For users afraid of their private lives showing up in their friends’ search results, keep in mind that they will still be restricted by your privacy settings. Still, I’d review my Facebook privacy settings if I were you. Just to be on the safe side.

via Bing

One of the biggest worries for parents in giving their young ones mobile devices is the lack of real parental controls. You can lock some phones down so that they can only contact certain numbers, but this is a far from ideal solution. Hence, Apple’s new patent for an anti-sexting system.

The official title of the patent states that it is a “text-based communication control for personal communication device.” That sounds pretty generic, but digging into the details of the patent, it’s easy to see what’s really going on here:

In one embodiment, the control application includes a parental control application. The parental control application evaluates whether or not the communication contains approved text based on, for example, objective ratings criteria or a user’s age or grade level, and, if unauthorized, prevents such text from being included in the text-based communication. If the control contains unauthorized text, the control application may alert the user, the administrator or other designated individuals of the presence of such text. The control application may require the user to replace the unauthorized text or may automatically delete the text or the entire communication.

In short, if Eric and Suzie start using colorful language in their text communications, their devices will may alert them to behave and possibly contact their parents. While this system might be useful for catching the most obvious cases, it probably won’t be able to tell what’s in that photo Eric just sent Suzie via MMS. However, it looks like the language of the patent is general enough to cover emails, IM’s, and any other text inputted into the device.

As TechCrunch points out, those interested in sexting can get pretty creative with their language to avoid detection. There is just really no way to accurately block these sentiments. A quick listen to popular music will give you an unlimited number of examples as to why.

On the flip side, it looks like this system could also be used to help people talk good:

In some embodiments, at least one of the message control conditions includes applying ratings to the message control conditions, at least one of which can correspond to the user’s designated language skill rating. The rated message control conditions can be applied to the entire message or a portion of the message according to the user’s designated language skill rating. In further embodiments, the designated language may include a required foreign language, vocabulary, spelling, grammar and/or punctuation based on the user’s designated skill level.

For those who believe texting and other short messaging services are destroying the way we communicate, this could be the solution.