Blog - Poker n' Face

Have a WordPress site? A mandatory update has been released. [TNW Apps]

Happen to have a WordPress powered site that isn?t hosted on WordPress.com? You?ll want to know about this: The WordPress team has just released version 3.0.2 of the software and it has fixed some nagging issues, as well as one major problem. The full run-down looks like this ?

  • Fix moderate security issue where a malicious Author-level user could gain further access to the site.
  • Remove pingback/trackback blogroll whitelisting feature as it can easily be abused.
  • Fix canonical redirection for permalinks containing %category% with nested categories and paging.
  • Fix occasional irrelevant error messages on plugin activation.
  • Minor XSS fixes in request_filesystem_credentials() and when deleting a plugin.
  • Clarify the license in the readme
  • Multisite: Fix the delete_user meta capability
  • Multisite: Force current_user_can_for_blog() to run map_meta_cap() even for super admins
  • Multisite: Fix ms-files.php content type headers when requesting a URL with a query string
  • Multisite: Fix the usage of the SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL constant for upgraded WordPress MU installs

We?re big fans of WordPress here at TNW. Since the version 3 release of WordPress, we?re even bigger fans. The MU and WordPress merger had us pretty excited, and the simultaneous plugin updates were just icing on the cake.

If you?ve not tried WordPress before, or if it?s been a while since you?ve given it a swing, it?s time to look again.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/12/01/have-a-wordpress-site-a-mandatory-update-has-been-released/

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Rumor: first Windows Phone 7 update will be massive

Chris Walsh, the creator of the first jailbroken app and one of the developers of ChevronWP7, is making some bold claims about the first update to Windows Phone 7 via his Twitter account. Rumored to be coming January, the first update will apparently be massive (rumors suggest Bing turn-by-turn directions, custom ringer support, copy and paste, as well as multitasking support), according to Walsh.

Here are the five most important Walsh made regarding the update, in chronological order:

I'm hearing the first #wp7 update is going to be MASSIVE!
@tomhounsell Haha, they've been working on this update long before they actually shipped v1 :
@keyboardP As @tomhounsell said, MS took 3 months to do what Apple did in 3 years. ;-)
@danvy Can't disclose the sources, but can disclose the details. More to come #wp7
@adamUCF Let's just say, they could have called it Windows Phone 8 :P

The first update to Windows Phone 7 will be arguably more important than any other. First of all, it will be the first attempt by Microsoft to update its new mobile OS and test its system to do so. Microsoft has tested its mobile OS update system before, but only internally, and never on a large scale. Secondly, it will show exactly how significant Windows Phone updates will be. Is Walsh right in that the update will be massive or will it mainly include bugfixes?

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41364-rumor-first-windows-phone-7-update-will-be-massive.html

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BankSimple releases its preview site, will launch in 2011 [TNW Apps]

BankSimple, the much discussed and anticipated banking startup, has released its preview site and given the promise of fully launching sometime in 2011.

The company promises to not be just another bank, but to be ?better.? Their motto, according to the website, is to ?be a worry-free alternative to traditional personal banking,? with ?the customer service you deserve.?

We like the sound of that. The site further promises that company will ?put people first,? avoid charging anyone ?surprise fees,? and use ?real language.? Given that we are all constantly nickeld and dimed by our current banks, this pitch is compelling.

BankSimple was founded in part by famous developer Alex ?Al3x? Payne, well known for his work at Twitter where he was involved with the social startup?s API. We covered the formation of the company with some optimism, to see their progress is heartening. The company is looking for people to drop their email address and name into a form to ?save their spot.?

Do note however that BankSimple is not a bank in the traditional sense. The company will instead ?partner with chartered banks who provide FDIC-insured products, leaving us free to concentrate on designing the complete consumer banking experience, via the web and your smartphone.? What that will exactly look like in practice remains to be seen, but we are still excited nonetheless.

Update: Alex Payne weighed in on the site release saying the following: ?A site is just a site, of course, but I think the care and attention to detail that went into the new site bodes well for our product.?

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/12/01/banksimple-has-released-their-preview-site-will-launch-in-2011/

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Blog - Poker n' Face

Reeder for Mac is live. Version 1.0 is available now. [TNW Apps]

We?re just starting to dig into it, but we wanted to let you have a chance to get your hands on it as well. Reeder, one of our stars for the iPad, has finally come to the Mac. It?s version 1.0, and a Draft release at that, but things look solid so far.

Give it a download. We?re poking around to see what we can find:

Understandably, there are some missing features. According to the release notes, we don?t have feed management, search, downloads and ?possibly more?. However, for a first release, it?s looking really slick.

As we wrote about before, we?ve been really excited to see Reeder for quite some time. As it?s one of our favorite feed reading apps for both the iPhone and iPad, we?re hoping that the experience carries over for the Mac.

Stick around. We?ll be giving your our in-depth look soon enough. For now, let us know, in the comments, what you think about it.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/12/01/reeder-for-mac-is-live-version-1-0-is-available-now/

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Blog - Card Trick Leads to New Bound on Data Compression

Here's a card trick to impress your friends. Give a deck of cards to a pal and ask him or her to cut the deck, draw six cards and list their colours. You then immediately name the cards that have been drawn.

Magic? Not quite. Instead, it's the next best thing: mathematics. The key is to arrange the deck in advance so that the sequence of the card colours follows a specific pattern called a binary De Bruijn cycle. A De Bruijn sequence is a set from an alphabet in which every possible subsequence appears exactly once.

So when a deck of cards meets this criteria, it uniquely defines any sequences of six consecutive cards. All you have to do to perform the trick is memorise the sequences.

Usually these kinds of tricks come about as the result of some new development in mathematical thinking. Today, Travis Gagie from the University of Chile in Santiago turns the tables. He says that this trick has led him to a new mathematical bound on data compression

Gagie achieves this new bound by considering a related trick. Instead of pre-arranging the cards, you shuffle the pack and then ask your friend to draw seven cards. He or she then lists the cards' colours, replaces them in the pack and cuts the deck. You then examine the deck and say which cards were drawn.

This time you're relying on probability to get the right answer. "It is not hard to show that the probability of two septuples of cards having the same colours in the same order is at most 1/128," say Gagie.

He goes on to consider the probability of correctly predicting the sequence of cards pulled at random from a deck of a certain size and after a few extra steps, finds a lower bound on the probability of doing this correctly.

This turns out to be closely related to various problems of data compression and leads to a lower bound than has been found by any other means.

"We know of no previous lower bounds comparable to [this one]," he says.

That's impressive, a really neat trick in itself.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1011.4609: Bounds from a Card Trick

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=023b7ec7200686447ca34d68f025ac14

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Sandisk, Sony, Nikon propose 2TB/500MBps memory card

SanDisk, Sony, and Nikon have announced the joint development of a set of specifications for a new memory card format. The three companies have officially proposed the details to the CompactFlash Association (CFA), the international standards organization, with the intent to standardize the format.

To address the need of professional photography and High Definition video applications, the trio have outlined specifications that achieve data transfer rates of up to 500MBps (theoretical maximum interface speed) using the PCI Express interface. The current CompactFlash specification (CF6.0), released in November 2010, uses the PATA interface and only offers a maximum performance of up to 167MBps. The new memory cards would also meet the future space requirements of professional imaging applications: the proposed new format has the potential to extend theoretical maximum capacities beyond 2TB.

The faster speeds and larger capacities will enable continuous burst shooting of massive RAW images. The enhanced performance also allows users to quickly transfer storage-intensive high-resolution photos and videos from the card to a computer. Furthermore, battery life would be extended thanks to a combination of high-speed data transfer with low power consumption. All in all, the new format is looking good, at least at this stage, and the CFA seems to agree.

"This ultra high-speed media format will enable further evolution of hardware and imaging applications, and widen the memory card options available to CompactFlash users such as professional photographers," Mr. Shigeto Kanda, chairman of the CFA board, said in a statement. "This next generation format is expected to be widely adapted to various products, including those other than high-end DSLRs."

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41363-sandisk-sony-nikon-propose-2tb-500mbps-memory-card.html

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Twitter?s Best Business Model Yet [TNW Social Media]

We?ve been waiting a long time for Twitter to reveal their game plan, the real way that they were going to monetise the huge community that they have on the site. Sponsored tweets might have been it, but they have just trumped themselves and revealed their ultimate business model : their data. In a huge move, Twitter announced earlier this month that their data was now available to ?buy? through a partnership with Gnip, which provides real time social media data for organisations. At least, organisations that can afford it. So just what deal have Twitter struck with Gnip and what other data trends can we see, that could change the web as we know it?

Purchase Twitter data at a price

The product offered through Gnip allows organisations to purchase up to 50% of tweets over a year. But it?s going to cost you $360,000 per year. With prices starting at $60,000 over a year to access 5% of tweets. This opens up Twitter?s data somewhat, as up until now it was only available to large organisations that had struck individual deals, such as Yahoo and Microsoft. In theory it is now available to anyone (though Twitter will be reserving 100% access for themselves) , provided you can afford the hefty price tag. This is a pretty huge deal both for Twitter and Gnip and it shows that Twitter?s biggest trump card was the thing we were waiting for it to monetise all along ? the huge amount of tweets that they have access to. Although we?re seeing them experiment with ads, this is a much more direct route to monetisation, that allows them to strike big, one-off deals with the simple model developed by Gnip.

Monetising the social web

The move by Twitter hints at the future monetisation of the social web. While many are experimenting with new forms of advertising, it seems that ads might not be the answer after all. The huge wealth of data that social networks can access is where the real money is, which will likely leave many privacy advocates less than pleased. Of course the rather uncomfortable problem is that these services will monetise off of someone else?s data. They are providing the platform, but the data that?s created by the users within that is what will become the real currency ? and profit ? of these sites. From a business point of view it is merely adapting your model to fit social. The revenue through advertising is limited and damaging to the user experience, so social networks have to adapt and explore new models.

We?ve frequently seen how important data is to social media and also how many problems it can cause. Facebook caused a bit of a stir earlier in the year when they allowed users to download their data. They offered users the ability to access all of their own wall posts, status updates, photos, videos which could be downloaded into a zip file. While this was seen by many as a step in the right direction towards data portability, or owning your own data, the security threat was clear. Access someone else?s Facebook page and in the click of a button you could download their entire data. And of course, it still meant that your data was available on Facebook?s servers. They?ve given us access to it, but not the option to delete it or take it out of Facebook?s control. And why would they? There?s big money in data!

Who owns our data?

At the moment, whichever site you choose to give it to. This is causing a lot of problems for many of the industry, particularly Tim Berners Lee. I was luckily enough to see Berners-Lee give a talk earlier this year and he spent a lot of time talking about projects he was working on, towards the creation of open data. In a recent article, he discussed how social networks (particularly Facebook) owning data is fragmenting the web and could eventually destroy it. His argument centered around the fact that social networks are mining and hording data, which results in silos of information, with particular worry that users do not have control over their own data. This is a problem that the majority of users don?t often contemplate. While many are now getting used to controlling their information or privacy settings to avoid risks such as photos being found by your boss, the implication of who owns that data is rarely considered. And this is still relatively new territory. We still don?t know the long-term implications of a company like Facebook owning the amount of data that they do.

It?s a difficult issue. I?m a firm believer in the freedom of information. It?s what made the web so great in the first place. We all have a basic right to information and the web facilitated this like never before. But the responsibility comes from the organisations that will provide that data. As much as I advocate access to information (access to your own data should be a given), I respect and understand that social networks as a business, have a right to revenue. They are businesses, after all. And if data is the thing that they own, then shouldn?t this be part of their revenue model?

There?s no doubt that data is where the money is at. We?re an information economy and companies like Twitter are among the first to really stretch this and explore entirely new business models. Data is being circulated every second of every day online and it?s big business. Facebook realised this when they first started offering targeted advertising based on demographics. While not handing personal data over to advertisers, they opened up their data to be monetised in ways that weren?t possible before. Of course the biggest issue is that it?s one thing for Twitter to own your data, but quite another when it can be purchased by anyone who can sign the cheque.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/11/30/twitters-best-business-model-yet/

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