Facebook New Updates "Ticker" , "Top Stories" "Most Recents"

Facebook is launching a series of changes to the News Feed, including the addition of a real-time “ticker.” The changes, which will begin rolling out Tuesday night, are designed to keep you always up to date on the important events in your friends’ lives, even if you haven’t logged in for a few days.“Today’s updates are about not missing important updates in News Feed,” Facebook News Feed Product Manager Keith Schacht said

The first change is designed to make it possible to see all the big events in your friends’ lives since the last time you checked your feed, regardless of whether it’s been three minutes or three weeks. “News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper,” Facebook says in a blog post.

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Millions of Indians Provided by a Massive Biometric Identiy Project

After a long wait, a slender woman, dressed in a red sari with sequins, her three children in tow, finally succeeded at the head of the line. His name is Kiran, like many poor Indians, uses only one name. She and her parents in school-age look curiously through the grill man and machine at the other side. Finally, a man without a smile on a collared shirt was left in the large open room. People crowded around tables filled with computers that do not match, printers and scanners. Leaves fixed on the windows filter the sun, but not the noise of diesel buses and bicycles out of combat. Kiran is colored posters in Hindi and English on the walls. They do not tell much, but since she can not read.

Kiran has not touched or even seen a real computer, much less an iris scanner. She thinks she's 32, but it is unclear when she was born. Kiran has no birth certificate, identity card or any type of license you have no car, no card to vote, there is nothing to document their existence. Eight years ago, left his home in a poor farming village Mongolpuri ended here, a maze full of apartment blocks and shabby huts roof sheeting where barefooted children dirty, cargo bikes, emaciated dogs, goats, cows and struggle through the narrow, rubbish-strewn streets. Kiran makes about $ 1.50 a day to qualify for the recycling of old clothes. In short, this is another vast legions of anonymous poor India.

The courtyard, just off a busy street in a poor neighborhood of New Delhi called Mongolpuri, is full of people and men in plastic sandals to discuss with the other women in saris holding babies on their hips, girl thin cheap talk on cell phones. The new arrivals take place at the end of a long line leading to the entrance of an enclosed building, under the cement. Occasionally, a worker opens the door briefly and people elbow their way into a dimly lit staircase, four or five in each stage. Gradually their way to the second floor landing where they were arrested again by a steel grille.

A well-dressed middle-aged man leading the children at a nearby table, and a healthy young woman in a green skirt is down on another Kiran. The young woman took his seat in front of a laptop Samsung wins a slim gray plastic box cluttered table, and Kiran shows how to look into the opening at one end. Kiran puts his face and a time to see anything but darkness. Then, suddenly, two circles of light erupted out into light. Kiran's eyes, blinking and uncertain, displayed on the laptop screen is increased tenfold. Click. The oversized eyes freeze on the screen. The iris of Kiran has been captured.

Now for the first time the government takes note of it. Kiran and her children have their personal data on an official database and not just a formal database, but one of the largest in the world has ever seen. They are the last among the millions of people enrolled in the unique identification project in India, also known as aadh, which means "the base" in many languages ​​of India. Its purpose is to issue identification numbers related to fingerprint and iris of each person in India.

That's more than 1.2 million people, all the villagers in the mountains of the Himalayas, the Bangalore call center workers, nomads from the desert of Rajasthan in Mumbai's streets of beggars, who speak over 300 languages and dialects. Identification number and biometric ID aadh verifiable Portable country, but all unfakable. It is by far the largest program and biometric data with more sophisticated technology ever attempted.

Aadhaar Titanic faces physical challenges and techniques: reach millions of illiterate Indians who have never seen a computer, to convince them to get their irises scanned to ensure that their information is correct, and protect the sea resulting data . India is, after all, a country known for corruption and for failing to implement major public projects. And the idea terrified lovers of civil liberty. But if the organizers are pulling Aadhaar, the initiative can improve the lives of the poorest citizens of India and the turbo on the economy already growing nationally.

Full article at Wired

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Introducing Google Wallet

In the past few thousand years, the way we pay has changed just three times—from coins, to paper money, to plastic cards.

Now we’re on the brink of the next big shift.

Introducing Google Wallet
Google Wallet is an Android app that makes your phone your wallet. It stores virtual versions of your existing plastic cards on your phone. Simply tap your phone to pay and redeem offers using near field communication, or NFC

Payments, offers, loyalty, and so much more
Google Wallet has been designed for an open commerce ecosystem. It will eventually hold many if not all of the cards you keep in your leather wallet today. And because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will be able to do more than a regular wallet ever could, like storing thousands of payment cards and Google Offers but without the bulk. Eventually your loyalty cards, gift cards, receipts, boarding passes, tickets, even your keys will be seamlessly synced to your Google Wallet. And every offer and loyalty point will be redeemed automatically with a single tap via NFC.

The future of commerce starts today
Google Wallet is coming soon. When it launches, you’ll be able to use Citi® MasterCard® cards and the Google Prepaid Card with Google Wallet. You’ll be able to tap to pay at hundreds of thousands of merchants.

At launch, Google Wallet will be compatible with Nexus S 4G by Google, available on Sprint . Over time, we plan on expanding support to more phones.

This is just the beginning, but we believe that, in time, your phone with Google Wallet will be the one thing that holds everything you need to carry.

More info about Google Wallet, visit http://www.google.com/wallet/

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Windows 8 Upgrades the Blue Screen of Death

If you are or ever were a Windows user, you’re likely familiar with the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD). The bug check screen, with its lines of error codes, has been part of Windows since version 1.0. It has represented the crashing of computers — and the frustration of users — for decades.

The BSoD was never intended to be user friendly, though. It was made for engineers who wanted to figure out why a PC crashed. For the rest of the world, it signifies the downside of owning a Windows device.

The iconic Stop Error screen is getting a facelift with Windows 8. The redesigned OS also includes speed and stability improvements, a Metro interface optimized for touchscreens and an app store.

The new BSoD doesn’t include all of the bug checks or lines of code that have defined the error screen for years. Instead, the Windows 8 BSoD includes a giant sad emoticon and a simple message that “your PC ran into a problem” and that it has to restart.

We’re fans of the new error screen — it’s much clearer and more user-friendly — though we hope there’ll be fewer chances to see it. But we want to hear your thoughts. Do you like the new Blue Screen of Death? Let us know in the comments.


Source: Mashable

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Facebook’s Navigation Bar and List Feeds

Many Facebook users (included me) noticed that the top navigation bar is now locked on top of the screen even if you scroll the page down. This behavior is new: before, the top navigation bar would scroll up with the page, and now it’s visible all the time.

List Feeds and Navigational Changes

This subtle change lets users always access some of the most important features on Facebook: friend requests, messages, notifications and search on the left side, as well as home & profile anchor buttons and account settings on the right.

For comparison, Twitter uses a similar floating design for its navigation bar, which is also always visible on top.

The folks over at Inside Facebook think this may be the first stage in a much bigger redesign, which is to be unveiled at Facebook’s F8 conference. If they’re right, Facebook is looking to lock the ads on the right side of the screen to be always visible too, which would surely increase the click-through rates but it would also make the page a bit more crowded.

Facebook also put List Feeds in order for you to custumize your feeds display.

Has the new, locked top navigation bar gone live for you? How do you like it?


Source: Mashable

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American (PIE) Reunion – First Look Ten Years From Now

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Google Acquires Zagat

Google has placed one of its biggest bets on location to date, acquiring local reviews giant Zagat.

Writing on the company’s official blog, Marissa Mayer, Google‘s vice president of Local, Maps and Location Services, wrote, “Moving forward, Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering — delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world.”

Zagat is far cry from the startups you typically talk about in the location space. The company was founded 32 years ago and started as a printed guide to restaurants, with “Zagat Ratings” becoming an industry standard.

More recently, however, Zagat has reinvented itself on the web and with mobile apps, bringing it into competition with the likes of Foursquare and Yelp.

Location has been a tough nut for Google to crack. The company acquired early location-based social networking service Dodgeball in 2005, only to eventually shut it down and see founder Dennis Crowley leave to start Foursquare. More recent attempts include Latitude, a largely forgotten Foursquare competitor, and Hotpot, a recommendation engine that’s baked into Google Places. The company also appointed Mayer, one of its most prominent executives, to lead its location efforts in late 2010.

While we don’t have a price tag on the Zagat acquisition yet, it’s safe to call the buy one of Google’s biggest to date in the content business. Here’s a look at some of Google’s largest acquisitions through the years:

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$265 Bomb, $300 Billion War: The Economics of the 9/11 Era’s Signature Weapon

The signature weapon of the 9/11 Era is lethal, easily concealable and maddeningly easy to construct. But the greatest danger from the improvised explosive device — what ensures its endurance far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan — lies in how cheap it is.

The improvised explosive device, or IED, isn’t a bomb. It’s a category of bombs, and within that category, insurgent MacGyvers construct makeshift bombs from whatever they have at hand. The Iraqi insurgency often relied on looted stockpiles of artillery shells or mines, juryrigged together and detonated from a cellphone. In Afghanistan, insurgents can’t similarly rely on abandoned weapons depots for their explosives, so they construct bombs using ammonium nitrate fertilizer, detonated by a fuse or using wooden plates that complete a hidden circuit when a soldier inadvertently steps on it. Insurgent allies in the security services of states like Iran or Pakistan add more sophisticated bomb ingredients or aid with logistics.

The common theme: all the ingredients for the bombs are inexpensive enough to remain in mass production, even when the U.S. attacks an insurgency’s revenue stream. And they’re vastly cheaper than the vehicles they destroy, the gear used to find them, and the troops they maim and kill.

Determining just how expensive they are is difficult, owing to all of the different components in the bombs. But according to the Pentagon’s bomb squad, the average cost of an IED is just a few hundred bucks, pocket change to a well-funded insurgency. Worse, over time, the average cost of the cheapo IEDs have dropped from $1,125 in 2006 to $265 in 2009. A killing machine, in other words, costs less than a 32-gig iPhone.


Dollar figures for the bombs are hard to come by — it’s not like there’s a Consumer Reports for black-market mines — but the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, known as JIEDDO, shared some estimates with Danger Room about how much Afghanistan’s bombs cost. Those estimates, publicly released for the first time, will have to serve as a proxy for the costs of the weapons worldwide.

The most plentiful types of bomb from 2009 — the most recent available figures for the myriad types of bombs — were, unsurprisingly, the cheapest. On average, a “victim-operated” bomb — one set to explode when its target or a civilian inadvertently sets it off — cost a mere $265. (That seems remarkably high for bombs that can be as simple as a bunch of fertilizer chemicals, wires and a pressure plate made out of two blocks of wood, but that’s what JIEDDO says.) Those types of bombs accounted for 57.9 percent of homemade bomb incidents in 2009. The next most plentiful category of bomb, those set off with command wires leading from the device, also cost $265 on average in 2009, accounting for another 23.8 percent of attacks.

As the bombs get more difficult to construct or operate, the costs rise. Bombs activated with a remote detonator like a cellphone cost a mere $345 and accounted for a surprisingly small — 12.6 percent — of attacks, perhaps owing to the U.S.’ hard-won ability to jam the detonator signal. (One would imagine the major cost component is the cellphone.) For insurgents to turn a car into a bomb or convince someone to kill himself during a detonation — or both — the cost shoots up into the thousands: $10,032 for a suicide bomber; $15,320 for a car bomb; nearly 19 grand to drive a car bomb. All together, those relatively expensive attack methods accounted for fewer than six percent of bomb attacks in 2009.

Most of those bombs have gotten cheaper to produce. In 2006, victim-operated IEDs cost an average of $1,125. Command-wire bombs were $1,266. Remote detonation bombs? The same. And as the costs dropped, victim-operated and command-wire detonated bombs skyrocketed. Back in 2006, they accounted for merely 21.3 percent and a piddling 1.9 percent of all bomb attacks, respectively.

But the sophisticated bombs have gotten more expensive. Car bombs cost $1,675 on average in 2006 — which seems absurdly low, given the cost of one involves acquiring and then tricking out a car. And the going rate on suicide bombers appears to have risen, from $5,966 in 2006 to nearly double that in 2009. Accordingly, both accounted for over 16 percent of IED attacks in ‘06. And JIEDDO says it has preliminary reporting indicating that suicide bombers cost $30,000 as of January.

It’s also worth mentioning that the number of IEDs in Afghanistan has mushroomed: from 1,952 in 2006 to 5,616 in 2009. All told, since the Afghanistan war began, homemade bombs have killed 719 U.S. troops and wounded 7,448.


more at Wired

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Facebook To Launch Music Platform With Spotify, MOG & Rdio

Facebook intends to launch its long-rumored music service next month with Spotify, MOG and Rdio as three of the company’s launch partners.

The music and media platform will be announced at Facebook’s f8 developer conference on Sept. 22. It will allow users to listen to music from within Facebook.com. Evidence of Facebook’s music platform first surfaced in the code of Facebook’s video chat service.

According to two sources familiar with the matter, Facebook will not directly host or stream any music or media. Instead, it will rely on partners to provide the content. This is in contrast to Apple, Google and Amazon’s strategy of hosting music content on their servers. Facebook’s plan is to become a platform for media content in the same way it is a platform for applications and games.

One of our sources specifically mentioned three music services as launch partners: Spotify, Rdio and MOG. It’s unclear whether Facebook has lined up other launch partners for its music platform or whether Facebook will open up its platform to other developers. One of our sources noted, however, that Facebook doesn’t like playing favorites, so our bet is that Facebook will open up its music platform to other third-party developers.

We’ve also heard whispers that Facebook intends for this platform to go beyond music — for example, it’s possible that Netflix could stream movies through Facebook. However, we don’t know if Facebook will go beyond the music platform announcement at f8.

Update: “There’s nothing new to announce,” a Facebook spokesperson told us. “Many of the most popular music services around the world are integrated with Facebook and we’re constantly talking to our partners about ways to improve these integrations.”

more at Mashable

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