Author: Rahsheen on Black Web 2.0

MobileMe is Apple’s solution for web-based productivity. For $99 a year, you get a calendar, email, online storage, and apps. Besides the fact that it’s offered by Apple, there has never really been a clear incentive for paying $99 a year for something you can get free elsewhere. The benefit, of course, is having a tightly integrated and tailored experience that is made to work with your Apple devices. It completes the experience. The average consumer is probably just not willing to pay $99 for this experience. However, businesses might benefit from a security standpoint.

One useful security feature is Find My iPhone. In the event that your phone is lost or stolen, you can login to your MobileMe account and find the device on a map. As long as the phone has a 3G or Edge connection, the MobileMe map can estimate where it might be. This feature will also display a message on the phone and play a sound, even if the screen is locked and the device is on silent.

There have been a lot of mistakes made with company secrets and consumer privacy lately. The iPhone 4 was found in a bar and leaked to the world before the official announcement this month. One part of the story worth repeating is the phone was wiped remotely, which may have been instrumental in keeping most of the details of the phone a secret.

Remote Wipe is one of the features offered by MobileMe. If your phone falls into the wrong hands or gets lost, you can permanently erase all the data on it remotely. Your personal data is destroyed and the phone returns to factory default settings. This would be a very useful tool for businesses that loan devices to employees. The company doesn’t have to rely solely on the employee to keep their data safe.

The new MobileMe offers a fast and secure productivity solution with the ability to keep your email organized and updated, even when working remotely. These standard features, combined with the added security of Remote Wipe and Find My iPhone, may be worth $99 per month to any small business or organization.

Do you use MobileMe?

Chum.ly is a messaging platform based on Status.net and designed to do all the things that Twitter doesn’t. The Chum.ly team looked at how the Twitter ecosystem was developing. They saw an awesome messaging platform surrounded by third-party applications that served to enhance it. There are specialized applications for sharing photos, posting videos, sending long messages, and more. Chum.ly saw the opportunity to combine all of this into one easy to use application.

Chum.ly integrates with your existing social networks, allowing you to broadcast your message across all of them at once. It also integrates with these other services to help you receive your messages all in one place. Messaging is not limited to 140 characters, providing a link to the full text on services where there is a limitation. Other features include tagging posts, conversation threads, re-broadcasting messages, groups, pictures, video links, and documents.

The primary timeline looks just like Twitter, as expected. There are a few features that immediately set Chum.ly apart. Instead of using the ‘@’ symbol for mentions, you use a slash ‘/’. Chum.ly also features groups, which you can direct a message to by using the ‘!’ symbol. The posting box offers a few interesting features:

• Attach a file – this can be an Image, Audio, Audio+Image, Video, or a Document.
• Keywords – Chum.ly will recognize hashtags within your message, or you can add them using the keywords option.
• Save as draft – save your update and edit/post it later
• Make private – this will make sure your post is only visible by you and the people or groups it’s directed to.

Not only can you save and edit drafts, but you can also edit updates you’ve already posted. On each post, you can: delete, comment or reply, resend an update (think retweet), favorite, or forward an update via email. Updates can also include location information. You can access the entire conversation thread from any update by clicking “in context.” You can filter your timeline to only show Chum.ly users, excluding updates from external services. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you can also choose to see 1 post per user for the past 2 weeks.

Chum.ly is not just another Twitter/Facebook client, although you can use it as such. It is a complete messaging platform on it’s own that integrates intelligently with your other social media sites. It needs a little polish in some areas (no OAuth support for Twitter, for instance), but it’s potential is great and I will definitely be keeping an eye on this one.

You can connect with me on Chum.ly here and tell us what you think about it in the comments.

Finally, all that crotch-grabbing and spinning around in imitation of the King of Pop that most of us grew up doing will be put to good use. At the recent E3 event, Ubisoft announced the development of a video game based on Michael Jackson’s moves. The game will offer “an interactive experience that enables players to step into the shoes of Michael Jackson himself and re-live his most iconic performances through their own singing and dancing.”

“Michael always pushed every limit when it came to technology to give his fans unforgettable entertainment experiences, whether it involved his videos, his recordings or his concerts. Now, with this interactive product, we have the chance to bring Michael, the artist, into households around the world in a perfect match of Michael’s artistry and the family entertainment which he always highly valued. Kids, their parents, extended family members and friends will now have an opportunity to all come together and experience Michael’s music and dance in an innovative, exciting and fun way.” – John Branca, co-executor for The Estate of Michael Jackson

The game will support all the current motion controller technologies and systems and will be available on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 with Kinect (Project Natal), PlayStation 3 with Move support, Nintendo’s Wii, PSP, and Nintendo DS. It would be one thing to simply have a Michael Jackson video game, but to have a Michael Jackson video game that can actually be controlled by your movements takes things to another level. Given MJ’s popularity, I suspect many non-gamers are going to go out and buy a new Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 just to play this, since people who are into video games already know what they like and want, so they play video games as CSGO, and even buy items online in sites like mycsgoboosting.com/resources/buy-csgo-skins and many others.

Ubisoft has landed a whopper here, the most interesting part of the story being that the Michael Jackson estate reached out to them. According to an article on CNET, the estate reached out to a few different publishers, but ended up choosing Ubisoft, the leader in dance games.

The estate has kept a close eye on how the game was developed, staying involved and being very selective about what they authorized. The full playlist isn’t available yet, but “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” are definitely on it. Look for the game to be available just in time for the holidays.

Twitter Adds Places. Should Foursquare Care?

Twitter adds another layer of context to your tweets with the new Places feature. This allows you see where a tweet originated from, as well as what other tweets came from the same location. Places will also be pulled from Gowalla and Foursquare tweets. Location information in your tweets is also now supported in all major browsers.

Google Makes Doc Sharing Easier

Google has made some important new feature changes in Docs which give you more flexibility and more simplicity in your doc sharing. Documents can now be Private, shared only with people who have the link, or Public (indexed in search engines). See document sharing and privacy settings right in the docs list. Google has simplified the three-tab interface down to one, provides bulk changes in the docs list, and will let you reset the document’s URL if it gets into the wrong hands.

Finally, Bebo Gets Bought

First, Bebo tried to stay relevant and gain some traction by biting off FriendFeed, a move that worked great for Facebook. A year later, showing no improvement and with Facebook and Twitter taking the spotlight, AOL announced they would sell or close down Bebo. They finally found a buyer in Criterion Capital Partners, a hedge fund. If you recall, AOL bought Bebo for $850 million. Rumors say they are selling it for about $2 million, but the exact terms of the deal have not been disclosed at this time. At least they can claim the hefty loss on their taxes.

Facebook CEO Disses iPhone, Deletes Post

Mark Zuckerberg shared his frustrations with his new iPhone on Facebook, complaining that he had to buy four chargers to keep the phone charged everywhere and that he had to resort to a land line to actually make calls. He later deleted the post or possibly made it more private. Some speculated that this was actually the new iPhone 4, but later comments from Zuckerberg contradict that. In any case, Apple needs to get Zuck a longer-lasting iPhone 4 immediately before he switches to Android.

Sonicbids Acquires ArtistData and Offers Free Premium Access All Summer

Sonicbids, a service that helps artists find gigs and helps promoters find artists, has acquired ArtistData, a company that helps artists engage with fans across all social networks without wasting a lot of time. The merger seems like a match made in heaven for indie artists. Find places to play and then promote your upcoming shows all in one place. To add icing on the cake, Premium ArtistData features will be free for the entire summer until September 1st so get your account now.

I Like Your Comment

Just as Facebook’s Like button is gaining steam across the web, they’ve introduced a new feature that lets you like each comment within a thread. This is something often requested on FriendFeed and other similar services. Sometimes, a comment is more insightful or entertaining than the original post. You will be able to like comments and see which users have liked which comments. I wonder if we may see some type of comment promotion system in the near future.

WordPress 3.0 is named after Thelonious Monk, a Jazz giant whose improvisations have inspired this new version of WordPress to new heights of creativity. The first thing you will notice after taking the plunge is a lighter, less distracting dashboard theme. This will help you get down to business and focus on what’s important.

Unified Updates

The first important new feature to take note of is how WordPress now handles updates. There is one page under your Dashboard that shows you whether your plugins, themes, and WordPress installs itself are all up to date. If not, you can handle all your updates from one place automatically. WordPress puts your site into maintenance mode during your updates so you have nothing to worry about. Even if you have the latest version of WordPress installed, you can to re-install if something has gone horribly wrong.

On a related note, it now only takes a couple of clicks to upgrade all of your plugins. Rather than clicking Upgrade for each one, you can do a Bulk upgrade and have them all handled at once. This is a feature I’m sure many have been looking for, especially if you have a good amount of active plugins installed.

Default Theme

Everyone is familiar with the default WordPress theme, Kubrick. It is a hallmark of a new blog. A sign that maybe nobody is home. Definitely not all that pleasing to look at. Kubrick is replaced with 2010 as the default WordPress theme. It was specifically selected because it takes advantage of most of the new features in 3.0 including: custom menus, backgrounds, and headers.

Custom Menus

It used to be a pain to customize your menu. Even if you found a hot theme, you had to be pretty well versed in PHP and HTML to get the menu exactly how you wanted it. Now, you can customize your menu from the WordPress Dashboard. Rather than digging into the PHP/HTML code, you can create the perfect menu for your blog using simple drag-and-drop. Pick which Pages, Categories, and Custom Links you need and order them however you see fit.

Multiuser + WordPress = 3.0

WordPress MU used to be a recipe for confusion. If you wanted to run multiple blogs from the same WordPress install, you were on your own. With WordPress 3.0, this is no longer the case. Run 1 or a network of 10 million sites, all from the same installation. This is a feature that many have dreamed about.

There are a few other features in this release, including: Custom Post Types, API enhancements, and Shortlink Support using your service of choice. This release has so many updates packed into it that the next release isn’t even being touched on yet. The next coding cycle won’t be focused on coding WordPress directly, but on enriching the ecosystem that has evolved around WordPress.

Have you upgraded yet?

Skylight is as suite of web-based tools that aim to “simplify your business life.” It offers Project Management, Booking, Task Management, Simple CRM, Email and Calls, and stores files and documents for you. The goal for Skylight is to become “the best web app there is for managing business and teams using latest web technologies.”

The Skylight Dashboard gives you a bird’s-eye view of what’s going on with your business. It includes access to just about every facet of the system all in one place. From the dashboard, you can tell what projects you have, what milestones are nearby, and what tasks your team needs to complete to reach them.

Each of the items on the dashboard can be accessed from the main menu to drill down and get more details. These include:

• Projects – general items that need to be completed
• Contacts – people and companies you work with
• Resources – things like equipment and conference rooms
• Tasks – track the specifics of what you need to do and how long each will take
• Files – any related files you have uploaded (a free account gives you 2GB of storage)
• Rates – keep track of how much your spending/billing
• Accounts – includes Invoices, Quotes, and Purchase Orders
• Reports – generate reports from your data to get different perspectives on your success

Skylight integrates with your existing email account to send and receive emails. You can also integrate your Skylight tasks with your existing Google or iCal calendar. Interestingly, at a time when just about every service integrates with social media, Skylight offers no such features. You are still able to collaborate with your team and your customers/clients by giving them access to the system at specified security levels.

In addition to letting you send emails, you can make calls from Skylight via Skype. Upload and organize your files by project, contact, or resource. Storage in the cloud makes your files accessible wherever you are. Every item that you create in Skylight, including uploaded files, can be tagged to help in keeping things together.

Skylight is entering a crowded space. There are a plethora of web applications that aim to help with team collaboration and project management. Skylight may be able to stand out from these with their billing and resource management features. Business collaboration is nice, but invoicing and getting paid for your work is even better and not many applications currently offer a good mix of both.

Apple’s latest mobile device opened up for pre-ordering late last night/early this morning. You can only pre-order it in black, with no word as to when the white version will be available. That is, of course, if you can get your order to go through at all. It seems that AT&T is once again testing it’s relationship with Apple by completely breaking down and even breaching users’ privacy…again. Things have gotten so bad that Apple’s online store is also having problems and pre-orders are being done using pen and paper.

What it seems has happened is that AT&T’s servers were completely overwhelmed by pre-order requests. First, users were unable to order online, so they went into the stores. The problem there is that the stores seem to rely on the same system, so orders were taking anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours to process. Sales people at the stores just kept pressing submit on each screen until they didn’t get an error.

Other users were shocked when they went to access their accounts and found that they had full access to someone else’s information. Probably a pretty scary situation for many and I wonder how many people didn’t even notice the glitch. There are probably a number of AT&T customers out there who have just pre-ordered an iPhone and don’t even know it.

There are a couple of ways to get around the issue that seem to work. Best Buy and possibly other outlets are having no problems accepting the pre-orders. This may be because they are not processing them in real-time. You can also use the iPhone Apple Store app, but you may not get the upgrade price. You’ll be paying $699 instead of $199 (16GB) or $299 (32GB) and, hopefully, AT&T will sort things out for you later. This won’t even extend your contract as there is not connection to AT&T with this method.

At least one customer reports that he had no problem pre-ordering his phone, but it shows as being backordered by 2 or 3 weeks. This is not a good look for AT&T at all. They recently left a gaping hole in their system, allowing 114,000 iPad customer emails to be taken. Coverage for the iPhone on AT&T’s network is a spotty for most. If Apple wasn’t planning to bring the iPhone to another network already, they are probably rethinking their options.

More details at Gizmodo.

Today, June 15, Microsoft is announcing the availability of Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010, and Microsoft Project 2010. Microsoft Office has been the number one selling software product for the past 7 years, even outselling games. Almost 10 million people downloaded the Office 2010 beta, which is almost 7 times the number who participated in the Office 2007 beta.

You can now buy Office in over 35,000 retail stores around the world, through online stores like Amazon, and from Office.com. In the next year, more than 100 million PCs will ship with Office 2010 preloaded with activation being as easy as buying one of the available versions: Office Home and Student 2010, Office Home and Business 2010, or Office Professional 2010.

“Working with major retail partners and PC makers, we’ve made dramatic changes in the way we deliver Office 2010 to give consumers more buying choice, making it easier than ever to unlock the power of Office on new and existing PCs. For the first time, people can purchase a Product Key Card at retail to activate Office 2010 preloaded on new PCs. For those who want to download Office 2010 direct from Office.com for an existing PC, the new Click-to-Run technology will have them up and running in a matter of minutes.” -Stephen Elop, president, Microsoft Business Division.

Recent data shows that Office is running on more than 1 billion computers across the globe, making it the most widely used productivity suite on the planet. Office 2010 leapfrogs previous versions, tapping into the cloud and revamping the interface to provide a better experience for customers. They continued to enhance the software based on customer feedback from the beta. This brings us a suite that makes it easy to:

• Create great looking documents and presentations
• Connect and collaborate more easily by integrating with the social web
• Get things done from virtually by leveraging the cloud

A survey of Office 2010 beta users shows that about 75 percent of them plan to buy Office 2010. By making such drastic improvements in Office 2010, expanding distribution channels, and making it available to download, Microsoft expects this will be the biggest release of Office ever.

Dashboard is a complete lead-management solution. If you’re selling any type of product, you have to manage leads. The goal is to turn those leads into paying customers. The process is the same regardless of how you collect your leads. Keeping tabs on a few leads is pretty simple, but managing 100’s of leads is near impossible, especially for an individual. It’s also easier to accumulate large amounts of leads if you leverage the social web.

Many of us manage leads in our heads and don’t think much about it. You make contact with someone who might be interested in your product or services. You maintain contact one way or another, keeping the door open for a sale. Somewhere down the line, you have mostly forgotten why you know this person. You don’t remember how you came in contact with them. You may not even know what product or service applies to them anymore. You’ve left money on the table and don’t even know it.

Dashboard gives you easy lead-management tools. Keep track of enormous amounts of information about each lead. Filter your leads based on a number of factors from where you found them to when you last made contact. See, at a glance, the last activity for all your leads and close you might be to making a sale.

Managing your leads isn’t just about tracking information about potential customers. You have to act on the information you have to push things forward. Dashboard has a To-Do system which lets you see tasks related to your leads. It’s separated into three panes: Late, Today, and Upcoming. Whether you’re an individual or managing a team of sales people, you can see what your incomplete tasks are and know what needs to happen next.

While Dashboard allows you to import leads from other sources, it also makes the task of collecting new leads simple. The Form Builder allows you to create, edit, and share forms to generate leads for your business. Put the code on your blog, website, or landing page and Dashboard does the rest, dropping the information directly into your account.

Dashboard provides an elegant solution to a common problem. It costs $14.95/month/user, but you can grab a 30-day free trial to test the waters. What do you think about Dashboard? How do you stay on top of your leads?

“Project Natal” has got an official rebranding as Kinect. This highly anticipated motion controller from Microsoft allows you to play games simply by moving your body. This is similar to what you can do on the Wii or with the Playstation Move, except on a completely different level. You don’t have to actually hold anything. Your movements are tracked by a camera and translated into movement within the game.

The official announcement came at Microsoft’s pre-E3 event today, but it seems many couldn’t seem to keep Kinect under wraps until then. For instance, USA Today posted an article with details on Kinect and pulled it shortly thereafter. It was later confirmed on twitter by Xbox employee Major Nelson. The official announcement included demos that highlight a few key features. What we are not sure about is how much this thing will cost or when it will be available, although there are rumors about a November release.

According to Engadget, there are some limitations for multi-player games. You still have to take turns. This is true even for games like track and field where you are running and jumping over hurdles against your opponent. This seems odd because a demo video shows a family racing head-to-head on a split screen. An interesting point here is that you don’t have to press a bunch of buttons to add people to a game, then can literally jump in. Of course, you can also play multi-player games via Xbox Live.

Another interested display of the technology is in the Yoga game. It can tell you whether you’re doing the movements properly by tracking the motion and position of your joints. Not only will this make sure you’re doing the moves properly, but it could also be used to make sure you aren’t slacking off. Everyone doing Wii Fit and not losing any weight could benefit from this feature alone.

Kinectimals is a baby tiger pet simulator. You can virtually pet and cuddle with your very own baby tiger. You can also teach him tricks. Probably not something I would get into, but I’m sure it will become wildly popular. I hear the tiger is really cute.

Kinect also includes video chat which lets you talk to up to four people and also share photos. Probably more interesting for the geeks out there is the interface for video chat, which is based entirely on gestures of your hands. That elusive Minority Report-style interface is now a reality, but we still don’t know exactly what you will be able to control with it beyond video chat.

Microsoft has also announced the new Xbox 360. Not only does it look absolutely stunning in black, but it’s much smaller in size, has a 250GB harddrive, and built-in wireless connectivity. This comes at a price tag of $299 and could be available in stores as early as tomorrow. Your new Xbox will match your Kinect device perfectly. I suspect that Microsoft is going to sell a ridiculous amount of these.

Shufflr is an Adobe AIR application that makes it easy to watch videos from your desktop. That alone doesn’t make it special, but what sets it apart is in helping you figure out what to watch. Videos are separated into three categories:

• Recommendations – These videos have been hand-picked for you based on your tastes.
• Friends Activity – these are the videos your friends are watching. Friends email us videos all the time, but Shufflr provides a better experience for dealing with them.
• Buzz – These are all the hottest videos around the web. Stay ahead of the curve and see which videos are hot now and which are about to be.

Shufflr needs at least Adobe AIR version 1.5, but you might want to make sure you have AIR 2 since Adobe has managed to decrease resource usage by about 30%. This will make Shufflr and other AIR apps much more responsive. Before you get started with Shufflr, you will need to sign up for an account. While Facebook connect is available as an option, you will still need to provide your email and other information. It looks like Facebook connect is mostly for sharing videos and to give Shufflr a way to see what you already like.

Once you sign in, you’re presented with your home screen. This shows you 3 strips of videos separated into the Recommendations, Friends Activity, and Buzz categories. Hover over any video to see its length, rating, site of origin, and how much activity it has. To the right of each strip is a button that will let you view that category as a 3-D scrolling wall of videos.

Along the right side of the home screen, you can connect to Facebook (if you haven’t already), send feedback, and invite your friends. That last option is important in building out your network and getting access to more relevant videos and recommendations. Viewing videos will help Shufflr learn more about you, but it’s easier to figure out what you want to watch when you can see what your friends are watching.

The menu across the top has a few of the same options you’ll find elsewhere. The two that are most interest are Browse and Discover People. Browse (mouse icon) lets you pick individual video sources by Channel, Tags, or Genre. This is great if you already know what type of stuff you’re looking for. Discover People makes it easy to see who is most active, who you might already know, and who has similar tastes to yours.

Shufflr provides a simple and beautiful interface for watching videos. The social features are what may drive users to Shufflr, so they need to do a good job of integrating into other social platforms to attract users. I would also recommend that they clean up the sign-up process and others recommend Netflix integration, which would be awesome. What do you think about Shufflr?

Twitter Launches T.co

Twitter has launched T.co, their own URL shortener. They had already been using twt.tl within DM’s to protect users from phishing scams, so this is just taking things a step further. Another issue that they are looking to solve is the fact that there is no native way to shorten links, so less tech savvy users are left in the cold. The t.co domain will be used to wrap long links. It will address one of the major shortcomings of link shortening, which is obscuring the destination for the link. Twitter will also use information collected from t.co for it’s Promoted Tweets platform and an eventual premium analytics package.

New LinkedIn Inbox

LinkedIn has welcomes you to your new inbox. They’ve given it a new look and feel, separating invites and messages into two separate tabs. They’ve also added advanced functions likes Bulk Actions and Delete…wait, what year is it again? It’s good to see LinkedIn is taking some steps forward, but they are still running behind. Granted, most people just use the site for networking and not communications but, if LinkedIn keeps lagging, people may drop it altogether.

Twitter Finally Tells Us How To Tweet

Finally, after all this time of being in existence and avid users having a hard time explaining what to do with it, Twitter has finally released some How To videos for Tweeting. They are accessible from Twitter’s Support Center, but you can also watch them directly on YouTube. If you’re already well versed with Twitter and know what you’re doing, you will be bored to tears by these videos. For instance, the one on Retweets is about 3 minutes long. For everyone else, these videos will do a good job of explaining the basics.

Arrington Disses the Evo

According to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, the HTC Evo 4G is horrible on battery life. It is so bad that, if you insist on getting one, he recommends you buy a second phone to actually make calls on when the Evo dies. He starts off his rant by claiming to be a “die hard Android Fan,” then proceeds to rip into it’s battery life, HTC Sense interface, and stability. Following Arrington’s advice, you should just buy an iPhone 4 or a Nexus One if you insist on going Android. I think the Evo and iPhone 4 are pretty evenly matched, though.

Adobe AIR has been a double-edged sword since it was first created. Developers can create beautiful applications quickly and easily distribute them to users. The problem has always been performance and resource usage. With AIR 2, Adobe has decreased memory usage by about 30% across the board and boosted overall performance. This is in addition to a slew of new features:

• Native Process API
• Open documents with the user’s default application
• Microphone data access
• Mass storage device detection
• Updated, faster WebKit with enhanced support for HTML5 and CSS3
• Multi-touch and gestures
• TLS/SSL sockets
• Global error handler
• New networking support including UDP and server sockets
• Screen reader support(Windows)
• Reduced CPU usage on idle
• .rpm and .deb installer packages for the runtime on Linux
• Native installers for applications (.exe, .dmg, .rpm, .deb)

Flash Player 10.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It will also be coming to Android later in June, but you can grab the beta from the Android Market. This new version of Flash brings improved performance, power management and video. It also has multi-touch, private browsing capabilities, and a few tweaks to make it perform better on Macs.

With 10.1, Adobe focused on creating a single Flash runtime that could run efficiently across all devices. They were able to make changes that “directly translate to faster execution and reduced resource consumption.” Talking specifically about mobile devices, this ultimately results in Flash not sucking the life out of your battery. The garbage collector has also been improved, which means Flash will more efficiently release memory it is no longer using.

On desktops, Flash Player 10.1 includes hardware-based H.264 video decoding. This gives you smooth, high quality video with minimal overhead and offloads tasks from the CPU, improving video playback performance and reducing system resource usage.

Multi-touch is probably one of the more interesting new features. It supports pinch, scroll, rotate, scale, and two-finger tap. As it is trying to slim down, Flash is also becoming more mobile friendly. These changes probably won’t get Flash onto the iPad, but they are definitely a step in the right direction. As HTML5 becomes more and more popular, Adobe will need to continue to step their game up to remain relevant.

At first, I wasn’t sure what was going on. I didn’t notice anything special about the Google homepage because I never actually visit it. I search via Chrome’s location bar. Curious, I jumped over to Google.com and was greated by a very pleasing background image in place of the standard plain white. Everything faded in, probably due to some Javascript magic. I was impressed. Apparently, many others were not. Many were appalled, even. The question is, why are people so upset?

To provide you with an extra bit of inspiration, we‘ve collaborated with several well-known artists, sculptors and photographers to create a gallery of background images you can use to personalize your Google homepage. Included in the collection are photographs of the works of Dale Chihuly, Jeff Koons, Tom Otterness, Polly Apfelbaum, Kengo Kuma (???), Kwon, Ki-soo (???) and Tord Boontje, as well as some incredible photos from Yann Arthus-Bertrand and National Geographic. We’ll be featuring these images as backgrounds on the Google homepage over the next 24 hours.

Not only can you choose from a nice selection of high-quality background images provided by Google, but you can also choose images from your Picasa account or upload one from your computer. You can also choose to have no image, reverting back to the simple white that many are used to.

Many of the reactions border on the ridiculous. Some complained that Google is trying to be more like Bing. There is actually some merit to this complaint in that Google also recently updated the page to add a sidebar, much like what Bing offers. Some have said this “Bingification” of Google could hurt their business, but I think keeping things fresh on the back-end is more important.

Tweets from those associated with Microsoft indicate that they are amused and somewhat flattered that Google has gone this route. Others seem to hint at privacy concerns given that the backgrounds are opt-out instead of opt-in, much like the recent Facebook privacy debacle. Still others complain that the page seems to load slower.

In any case, I kinda like the new background options. I rarely visit google.com anyway, and the backgrounds don’t show up on the search results pages. If you have Opera or Safari, you probably have no clue what happened as they don’t show up in those browsers. Are you going to go customize your search page, or do you prefer basic white?

via Google’s New Look: Why is Everybody So Upset? – PCWorld

In what may be Apple’s worst security breach, email information from 114,000 iPad owners has been made public. This hack was discovered and exploited by a group calling themselves Goatse Security. It revolves around a simple feature that makes it easier for customers to sign up for their 3G service. By sending the ICC-ID number from the individual iPad, AT&T’s software could auto-fill the user’s email address in the form and save them from typing it. Goatse was easily able to exploit this feature and grab email addresses by guessing ICC-ID numbers. While this little feature probably saved users a few keystrokes, I doubt the benefits were worth exposing their email addresses.

Are You At Risk?

Anyone who bought an iPad 3G could potentially be at risk. While AT&T has since shut down the exploit, there is no way to tell if your specific information was shared. Gizmodo made reference to a list of 114,000 emails that they received, but they are not sharing this list. Goatse Security may have shared information with others. The only way you can really tell if your information was compromised would be if you saw an increase in spam activity.

Does This Really Matter?

In this case, only email addresses were leaked. Besides a little spam, is there anything to worry about? It’s not really about what was leaked here, but that information was leaked at all. Work email addresses from “dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians” were made public. AT&T knows much more about you than your email address. This breach could indicate deeper issues at AT&T in regards to privacy. In this case, they set up a server which held your private information and was accessible by anyone with an Internet connection. That server freely gave away your private email address in exchange for a number that is plainly on display on the outside of your iPad. Who is to say they haven’t made this same mistake elsewhere?

In an interview with Gizmodo and a statement released later, AT&T seems to want to avoid some of the blame. They try to play up how Goatse Security didn’t disclose the breach to them first and play down the fact that is was “only” email addresses that were leaked. Their statement follows.

AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC IDS. The only information that can be derived from the ICC IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device.

This issue was escalated to the highest levels of the company and was corrected by Tuesday; and we have essentially turned off the feature that provided the e-mail addresses.

The person or group who discovered this gap did not contact AT&T.

We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose e-mail addresses and ICC IDS may have been obtained.

We take customer privacy very seriously and while we have fixed this problem, we apologize to our customers who were impacted.