Now that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has decided to retire within the year, the big question is, who on earth is qualified to run Microsoft and turn it around?
The answer is obvious: Bill Gates, says Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO and a visionary in his own right.
"There is no clear candidate with the visionary skills to turn the company around other than Bill Gates," Benioff told CNET. "He wouldn't just be a magnet for a new vision, but for a talent pool of leadership."
Benioff is really suggesting that Gates step up as an interim CEO, for no more than three years, leaving the reigns of his charitable foundation to his wife Melinda.
Benioff makes a good point. Gates probably is the best guy on the planet to do the job. You couldn't find another man on the planet that knows more about technology, healthcare issues, poverty, or education. And he's the kind of star power Microsoft needs.
But the official word from Microsoft it that Gates is saying, "no way." If he was willing, he likely would have agreed to step in as interim CEO on the day that Ballmer announced his retirement.
The general consensus among betting people is that Bill Gates is only slightly more likely to take the job than Apple CEO Tim Cook. U.K. betting pool site Ladbrokes places the odds that Gates comes back at 50-1, beat only by the odds that Cook takes the job, at 100-1.

The Baffling Decision That Sealed the Fate of Nokia's Smartphone Business

At a 2011 briefing annoucning Nokia's parternship with Microsoft, then-Nokia CEO Stephen Elop (left) presciently indicates which way his company's global smartphone market share is headed

In a famous 2011 memo, then-Nokia CEO Stephen Elop compared the company’s situation to that of a man standing on a burning oil platform. In Elop’s story, the man decided to plunge 30 meters into the freezing North Sea waters rather than remain on the platform and be consumed by flames. The oil rig was, of course, a metaphor for Nokia’s Symbian mobile operating system, which was getting burned by Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. And so, under Elop, Nokia made a leap, ditching Symbian to focus on hardware.

But when Elop jumped, he wasn’t diving into a blue ocean. Rather, he was faced with a choice between two other mobile operating platforms: Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone. One of the platforms, Android, was more crowded, because it was already on a successful course. The other, Windows Phone, was lonely and adrift, but Elop had a good feeling about the crew. He had, after all, left Microsoft for Nokia just a few months earlier.

Now that Microsoft is buying what’s left of Nokia’s handset business, it’s worth revisiting that fateful decision—especially with Elop being touted as “the Microsoft CEO candidate to beat.” The decision to go with Windows Phone, Elop said, came down to one concept: differentiation. “The biggest question for us,” he said at AllThingsD’s D9 conference in July 2011, “was what degree of influence could we have over Android to ensure differentiation. … We felt the opportunity for that was better with Windows Phone.”

In other words, Elop worried that Nokia would be just one among many interchangeable smartphone makers on the Android operating system—or, worse, that it would get squeezed out by a giant like Samsung. Partnering with Microsoft, on the other hand, would position Nokia’s smartphones as a true alternative to those on Apple and Google’s systems. About that, he was right. The problem: That differentiation turned out to be a negative rather than a positive. As Quartz’s Kevin Delaney points out, Nokia’s global smartphone share has plummeted from 34 percent in 2010 to a mere 3 percent in the first half of 2013.

As a platform, meanwhile, Windows Phone has remained a distant third to iOS and Android, with the latter amassing nearly an 80 percent share of the global market. Acquiring Nokia’s smartphone business could help it gain a little ground, but as Google’s Vic Gundotra famously tweeted back in 2011, “two turkeys do not make an eagle.” Or, to put the metaphor in Elop’s terms: Nokia may have jumped from a burning platform onto a burning platform. Now, two years later, Nokia has been forced to jump again, while Elop is headed back to the mother ship, where some hope he can put out the fire. If not—look out below.

Bonus footage: Watch Elop try to explain why he had confidence in the Windows Phone platform when it seemed clear to everyone else that Apple and Google were miles ahead and pulling away. (Short answer: because he was buddies with "Terry and Andy and Joe and Henry and others" at Microsoft.)

Two Important Things Microsoft Gets From Nokia Besides Smartphones

Microsoft's $7.2 purchase of Nokia's devices business, paid for entirely out of Microsoft's stockpile of offshore cash, is probably the no-brainer acquisition of the year.
In addition to shoring up Microsoft's most important smartphone partner, it places into Microsoft's hands two important technologies besides smartphones:
1. Nokia Here, a GPS mapping tech that came from Nokia's $8.1 billion purchase of Navteq in 2007. Navteq provides GPS apps to a lot of cars made by Volkswagen, Mercedes, Hyundai, and Toyota. Plus Navitek is used in all kinds of other devices, too.
Nokia didn't just throw this tech to the agreement. Microsoft agreed to make extra payments over four years for it.
GPS devices collect location data. They know where all of the cars and devices are. Microsoft plans to use this data with Bing and make it available to software developers via its cloud service, Windows Azure.
Now add this into the rumored investment Microsoft may make in Foursquare and you can see Microsoft's plans shape up.
Microsoft "needs an effective alternative to Google," it said in a PowerPoint presentation shared with Business Insider. There needs to be "more than one digital map of the world."
Microsoft also sees this as a chance to bring GPS tech or data to other apps like Office, Skype and Xbox Live.
2. A massive collection of intellectual property from Nokia. Remember a big chunk of the money Microsoft is paying to Nokia is to license Nokia's patents for at least 10 years: That accounts for €1.65 billion or about $2.2 billion of this $7.2 billion agreement.
Microsoft is gaining access to over 30,000 patents from "one of the two most valuable portfolios" in the wireless industry, Microsoft says. The other important patent portfolio Microsoft refers to belongs to chip maker Qualcomm.
For instance, Motorola Mobility, now owned by Google, pays fees to Nokia to license wireless patents.  It will now have to pay those fees to Microsoft.
This is significant for Microsoft because a good chunk of its mobile revenue is actually coming from the patents it collects, mostly from Android device makers, instead of the phones it sells.
The more patents it owns, the more it can go after Android (and maybe Apple), and the more it makes from other companies' smartphones.
None of this solves Microsoft's ultimate problem: making consumers and businesses want Windows Phones. But it helps Microsoft generate more revenue from mobile while it tries to figure that out.

R.I.P. Windows

By purchasing Nokia’s smartphone division, Microsoft has killed its signature strategy.

Stephen Elop is stepping down as Nokia president and CEO as Microsoft purchases the Finnish phone-maker. By integrating the hardware and software sides of the Windows Phone, Microsoft is inverting—and thus killing— the Windows business model.

 

Windows is dead. Let’s all salute it—pour out a glass for it, burn a CD for it, reboot your PC one last time. Windows had a good run. For a time, it powered the world. But that era is over. It was killed by the unlikeliest of collaborations—Microsoft’s ancient enemies working over decades, in concert: Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, and most of all, two guys named Larry and Sergey.

Late on Monday, Microsoft announced its unsurprising, $7.2 billion plan to buy Nokia’s smartphone division. Nokia is the world’s largest manufacturer of phones that run Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system (which is a bit like pointing out that, at 5-foot-6, I’m the tallest member of my immediate family). Microsoft is buying Nokia in order to control both the hardware and software in its devices; this move, Microsoft promises, will improve the phones themselves and make them easier to sell.

But this is the antithesis of the company’s Windows strategy. Though Microsoft insists otherwise, when this deal is done, the thing sold as Windows won’t be what it’s always been—it won’t be software that that runs on lots of companies’ hardware, a platform to unite disparate manufacturers’ devices. Instead, Windows will be much like Apple’s operating systems, iOS and Mac OS. Windows will be proprietary software attached to proprietary hardware—Microsoft’s code running on Microsoft’s devices.

In a document that lays out the “strategic rationale” for the deal, Microsoft makes a stirring case for vertical integration: for a single company that makes both mobile software and hardware together. By purchasing Nokia, Microsoft says it will be able to create better phones by reducing “friction” between hardware and software teams that now reside in separate companies. Combining the companies also improves marketing “efficiency” and “clarity”—Microsoft can sell a single Microsoft device that bakes in the best services from both firms (Skype, Office, Nokia’s mapping systems).

Finally, vertical integration helps Microsoft’s bottom line. Today, for every Windows-powered phone that Nokia sells, Microsoft gets less than $10 in software licensing fees. When it owns Nokia, Microsoft will be able to book profits on hardware, too. Rather than make less than $10 per phone, it will make more than $40.

Steve Jobs long pushed against Bill Gates’ idea that hardware and software should be made by different firms. And back in the PC era, Gates was right. Gates recognized that most computer users didn’t understand hardware. We couldn’t tell the difference—and didn’t really care much about—the processors, drives, displays, and other physical components that made up one PC versus another. As a result, making PC hardware was destined to be a bruising commodity business, with low brand recognition, constant price battles, and dwindling profits.

But software, Gates saw, was a different story. Software had a face. Software imprinted itself on users—once you learned one Windows PC, you understood every Windows PC. Unlike hardware, software enabled network effects: The more people who used Windows, the more attractive it became to developers, which meant more apps to make Windows computers more useful, which led to more users, and on and on. Finally, software was wildly, almost unimaginably profitable. After writing code once, you could copy it endlessly, at no marginal cost, for years to come—and make money on every single copy you sold.

But mobile devices altered that calculation. Today, hardware matters. Unlike in a PC that you kept hidden under your desk, the design of your mobile device affects its usefulness. Things like your phone’s weight or the way your tablet feels in your hand are all important considerations when you’re buying a device; you won’t choose a phone based on software alone, and you might pay a premium for a device that’s particularly well-designed. In the mobile world, as Apple has proved, hardware can command just as much of a profit as software.

You might argue that once the basic design of a good phone or tablet becomes well-known, lots of companies will copy it, and that hardware will again become a commodity. That’s the tide Apple is now battling against. At some point mobile components will become good enough and cheap enough that a $50 phone might function just as well as a $100 or $200 phone. When that happens, people will again start choosing devices by price, and hardware profits will dwindle to nothing. And, as happened with PCs, software, not hardware, will become the industry’s dominant business.

All that may well occur. (The fear of commoditized hardware explains Apple’s languishing share price.) But if mobile hardware does become a commodity and software once again becomes the determining factor in your choice of phone, we won’t see Microsoft profit from the shift. That’s because, in the last five years, a brutal, profit-destroying force has emerged in the tech world: Android.

Google’s mobile operating system—which is based on Linux, the open-source OS whose fans had long dreamed would destroy Windows—is free. Any mobile phone manufacturer can use and alter Android however it pleases. This accounts for Android’s stunning market share—close to 80 percent, according to IDC—and that market share gives Android the benefit of the network effects that once worked so well for Microsoft. Nokia was paying Microsoft $10 for every phone it sold, and in return it got an OS that can’t even run Instagram. Microsoft says that it wants to keep licensing Windows Phone to other manufacturers even after it purchases Nokia, but because they can always choose Android (which runs Instagram and everything else), few phone-makers are likely to take it up on that deal.

That’s why the Nokia purchase signals the end of Windows as a standalone business. There are now only two ways to sell software. Like Apple, you can make devices that integrate software and hardware together and hope to sell a single, unified, highly profitable product. Or, like Google, you can make software that you give away in the hopes of creating a huge platform from which you can make money in some other way (through ads, in Google’s case).

But you can’t do what Windows did—you can’t make profitable software on other companies’ commodity hardware. Thanks to Android, code is now a commodity, and Windows is dead.

 

Windows Is Dead, Google Killed It

Microsoft founder Bill Gates speaks during a news conference in New Delhi in 2008.

Windows is dead. Let’s all salute it—pour out a glass for it, burn a CD for it, reboot your PC one last time. Windows had a good run. For a time, it powered the world. But that era is over. It was killed by the unlikeliest of collaborations—Microsoft’s ancient enemies working over decades, in concert: Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, and most of all, two guys named Larry and Sergey.
Late on Monday, Microsoft announced its unsurprising, $7.2 billion plan to buy Nokia’s smartphone division. Nokia is the world’s largest manufacturer of phones that run Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system (which is a bit like pointing out that, at 5-foot-6, I’m the tallest member of my immediate family). Microsoft is buying Nokia in order to control both the hardware and software in its devices; this move, Microsoft promises, will improve the phones themselves and make them easier to sell.
But this is the antithesis of the company’s Windows strategy. Though Microsoft insists otherwise, when this deal is done, the thing sold as Windows won’t be what it’s always been—it won’t be software that that runs on lots of companies’ hardware, a platform to unite disparate manufacturers’ devices. Instead, Windows will be much like Apple’s operating systems, iOS and Mac OS. Windows will be proprietary software attached to proprietary hardware—Microsoft’s code running on Microsoft’s devices.
In a document that lays out the “strategic rationale” for the deal, Microsoft makes a stirring case for vertical integration: for a single company that makes both mobile software and hardware together. By purchasing Nokia, Microsoft says it will be able to create better phones by reducing “friction” between hardware and software teams that now reside in separate companies. Combining the companies also improves marketing “efficiency” and “clarity”—Microsoft can sell a single Microsoft device that bakes in the best services from both firms (Skype, Office, Nokia’s mapping systems).
Finally, vertical integration helps Microsoft’s bottom line. Today, for every Windows-powered phone that Nokia sells, Microsoft gets less than $10 in software licensing fees. When it owns Nokia, Microsoft will be able to book profits on hardware, too. Rather than make less than $10 per phone, it will make more than $40.
Steve Jobs long pushed against Bill Gates’ idea that hardware and software should be made by different firms. And back in the PC era, Gates was right. Gates recognized that most computer users didn’t understand hardware. We couldn’t tell the difference—and didn’t really care much about—the processors, drives, displays, and other physical components that made up one PC versus another. As a result, making PC hardware was destined to be a bruising commodity business, with low brand recognition, constant price battles, and dwindling profits.
But software, Gates saw, was a different story. Software had a face. Software imprinted itself on users—once you learned one Windows PC, you understood every Windows PC. Unlike hardware, software enabled network effects: The more people who used Windows, the more attractive it became to developers, which meant more apps to make Windows computers more useful, which led to more users, and on and on. Finally, software was wildly, almost unimaginably profitable. After writing code once, you could copy it endlessly, at no marginal cost, for years to come—and make money on every single copy you sold.
But mobile devices altered that calculation. Today, hardware matters. Unlike in a PC that you kept hidden under your desk, the design of your mobile device affects its usefulness. Things like your phone’s weight or the way your tablet feels in your hand are all important considerations when you’re buying a device; you won’t choose a phone based on software alone, and you might pay a premium for a device that’s particularly well-designed. In the mobile world, as Apple has proved, hardware can command just as much of a profit as software.
You might argue that once the basic design of a good phone or tablet becomes well-known, lots of companies will copy it, and that hardware will again become a commodity. That’s the tide Apple is now battling against. At some point mobile components will become good enough and cheap enough that a $50 phone might function just as well as a $100 or $200 phone. When that happens, people will again start choosing devices by price, and hardware profits will dwindle to nothing. And, as happened with PCs, software, not hardware, will become the industry’s dominant business.
All that may well occur. (The fear of commoditized hardware explains Apple’s languishing share price.) But if mobile hardware does become a commodity and software once again becomes the determining factor in your choice of phone, we won’t see Microsoft profit from the shift. That’s because, in the last five years, a brutal, profit-destroying force has emerged in the tech world: Android.
Google’s mobile operating system—which is based on Linux, the open-source OS whose fans had long dreamed would destroy Windows—is free. Any mobile phone manufacturer can use and alter Android however it pleases. This accounts for Android’s stunning market share—close to 80 percent, according to IDC—and that market share gives Android the benefit of the network effects that once worked so well for Microsoft. Nokia was paying Microsoft $10 for every phone it sold, and in return it got an OS that can’t even run Instagram. Microsoft says that it wants to keep licensing Windows Phone to other manufacturers even after it purchases Nokia, but because they can always choose Android (which runs Instagram and everything else), few phone-makers are likely to take it up on that deal.
That’s why the Nokia purchase signals the end of Windows as a standalone business. There are now only two ways to sell software. Like Apple, you can make devices that integrate software and hardware together and hope to sell a single, unified, highly profitable product. Or, like Google, you can make software that you give away in the hopes of creating a huge platform from which you can make money in some other way (through ads, in Google’s case).
But you can’t do what Windows did—you can’t make profitable software on other companies’ commodity hardware. Thanks to Android, code is now a commodity, and Windows is dead.

Samsung's Galaxy Gear Coming Sept. 4

Samsung will launch its smart watch, the Galaxy Gear, on Sept. 4 ahead of the IFA consumer electronics trade show in Berlin, Germany.
Lee Young-hee, VP of Samsung's mobile business, confirmed the date and some details about the device in an interview with The Korea Times.

See also: Samsung's Smart Watch Rumored to Come in Five Colors

“We will be introducing a new wearable concept device called Galaxy Gear at our own event in Berlin on Sept. 4," Lee said. He added that the Gear will not have a flexible display. "We are confident that the Gear will add meaningful momentum to the mobile industry."
Lee also confirmed Samsung's official launch of the Galaxy Note 3 at IFA, but he did not reveal any details about that device.

Are you excited about Galaxy Gear? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Optimizing Your Social Media Indiscretions at Job Interviews

Interviewing for a job is stressful enough without worrying about how your youthful indiscretions factor into the picture.
At least your parents had plausible deniability. You? You have the Internet.

Social media has been busy documenting every single one of your little misadventures. They’re all there for your new prospective employer to find. If you didn't have time to scrub that social media profile, here's one way of handling it.

DEA Has Access to Billions of AT&T Phone Call Records

The United States Drug Enforcement Agency's (DEA) efforts to stay ahead of drug dealers has, according to a New York Times report, apparently helped launch one of the most unusual and wide-ranging phone-record access programs seen yet.
According to an bombshell report in the Sunday Times, the Hemisphere Program was launched in 2007 and with it, the DEA gains access to 26-years’ worth of phone records that include every single number passing through the AT&T network, including numbers from other carriers and call locations. Not only do the records have billions of data points, the Times story notes that billions more are added every day. The scale and scope of the project could, The Times says, be larger than the NSA's phone call logging efforts.
Those records remain in AT&T's control, but in one of the more unusual twists, trained AT&T employees sit alongside DEA agents (at the DEA agent's offices) to help facilitate access to the phone records upon request. The request and records can, ultimately, be useful in the DEA's efforts to track down drug traffickers who often use hard-to-trace "burner" cellphones.
The DEA's efforts to monitor various networks and slow down the drug trade is nothing new. Plus, on the technology front, its efforts are not always successful. Earlier this year, documents revealed it could not tap into Apple's iMessage network.
Much of the New York Times details on Hemisphere come from a 27-slide PowerPoint presentation, which they obtained from peace activist Drew Hendricks. According to the report "He said he had received the PowerPoint presentation, which is unclassified but marked 'Law enforcement sensitive,' in response to a series of public information requests to West Coast police agencies."
Neither the DEA nor the Obama administration, however, are denying Hemisphere's existence. AT&T did not respond to the Time's detailed question, but did give them this statement via email. "While we cannot comment on any particular matter, we, like all other companies, must respond to valid subpoenas issued by law enforcement.”

The New York Times report also notes that the presentation outlines a number of Hemisphere success stories in capturing those involved in the drug-trafficking trade.
As for how wide-spread the program is, other service providers wouldn't comment to The Times on their story, though the report notes that officials call Hemisphere a "singular" project.

How to Reinvent Your Career

There are so many reasons why you may need to reinvent your career. Maybe you’re looking to reenter the workforce after staying home raising your kids. Or you might have lost your job after twenty years with the same company. Or perhaps the thought of going into your job just one more day makes you want to do a Jerry Maguire. No matter what your age or motivation, it’s not as impossible as it may seem to reinvent your career. Here’s how.
Decide what you want to do. Now more than ever is the time to really, truly figure out what you’d like to do in your professional life. Just because you’ve toiled away as an ad exec doesn’t mean that you’ll continue on that career path until retirement. If you’re clueless as to what the next phase in your career will be, simply look to your hobbies. Discover what gives you joy in life, then determine a way to find work in that field.
Establish a timeframe. Once you decide which direction you want to take your career in, you’ll want to get there — now. But you’ll need to take the time as you carefully lay down the foundation for your career. Do some research to learn of potential jobs in your area of interest and to also get an idea of how long it might take before you can start working in your new profession. Depending on where you are in life, you may need to find a remote job or one that offers flex. So be sure to look for these job characteristics when job hunting.
Get guidance. If you’re lucky, you’ll already know people who can help you as you begin your new career. If all of your contacts are from your former industry, you’ll need to find a potential mentor for your new career. A great way to gain new connections is to request informational interviews with companies that align with your new career goals. Not only will you get an in-depth look into this potential job field, but you’ll also get to meet industry heavy-hitters who, if you form a connection with, can possibly mentor you along the way.
Build new skills. It may seem impossible to marry your old professional life with your new one, but there’s a great chance that you already possess some of the skills you’ll need in order to make your new career a smashing success. So take a look at your previous work experience and write down all of the skills you’ve utilized in those jobs. Then assess the skills you’ll need in order to get work in your new career. Redesign your resume to highlight those skills, and see if you can take a class or attend webinars in order to build skills that can help you moving forward.
Be flexible. Starting out in a new field may mean that you’ll start out in a lower position than you’ve previously held. It may also equal taking a financial hit by earning a lower salary than you’re used to. Just keep in mind that these are all just mere milestones as you work towards gaining footing in your new career — and a happier, healthier work life balance.
Reinvention at any age can be scary but it can also be an exciting time as you challenge yourself to find a position — and a career — that you truly love.

Turn Mobile Messages into Meetings with Klamr

Klamr, a new multi-task messaging app for iOS and Android debuts on the App Store Friday. It's a Swiss Army knife type of service combining some of the most beloved social functions: messaging, social planning, location search, reviews, chat, and photo sharing.

To get started, sign in with your phone number. You then search for friends by their digits, and choose who to include in a meal, activity or event, specifying time and location. Reviews from Yelp, Foursquare and Facebook, and in-app suggestions of nearby venues and locations, help as a guide. Once you select who you want to meet up with and where, the app sends an SMS message with details and a URL to your companion (you can invite non-users to events).

Messages are private, so only you and your friends are in on the date (there is no simultaneous Facebook or Twitter posting). The point is to simplify a rendezvous down to a few clicks, explains founder and CEO Bryan Pelz.
"There needs to be a way to make it easier to go out with friends," he says, calling Klamr a solution for people who don't want to go out to the same places over and over, or cut and paste info from other apps. "We're just trying to scratch that one itch."
Right now Klamr is free, and there are no in-app ads. Pelz says he's more worried about user acquisition than monetization. Data will not be sold to third parties. Future revenue sources will come from brands interacting directly with users, but he won't say exactly how that will work.
In order to gain traction, his app will have to do everything it advertises as good or better than what's already on the market. That's because every functionality Klamr accomplishes treads into crowded territory.
Messaging is dominated by WhatsApp's 300 million active monthly users. Geolocation apps are burning hot right now; among the review sites, Yelp gobbles up more than 100 million users a month.
Pelz says he doesn't expect to replace these top services. Instead, he sees his app as a bridge merging the best features of each. Building a better mouse trap is the way to get user adoption, he says. But doing a little bit of everything has some competitors scratching their heads.
"Klamr needs something way more compelling as the core feature than social, messaging, and networking to enter today's mobile consumer market," says Spencer Chen, an executive at the mobile analytics site Mixpanel.
Chen points out that top social apps like Vine, the private networking service Circle, and Twitter and Facebook are all single-function. Offering buffet, instead of a la carte options, runs "counter to the usage patterns and the goals of mobile users," he says. Plus it's going to be tough to convince people to abandon their favorite apps.
Hunter Gray, the CEO and c0-founder of the mobile calendar app Atlas agrees that too many features can confuse users.
"The 'Swiss Army' thing doesn't usually seem to work," Gray says.
Heather Meeker, the co-founder of the communications firm MeekerQuinn, and former vice-president at the free messaging service textPlus, says she understands Klamr is trying to streamline the user experience by providing feature options. But she agrees with Chen and Gray that it's a challenge to be all things to all people.
"The way for multiple-function apps to win is to provide an experience that is relevant, intuitive and elegant," she says. "Not cluttered."
Klamr's Pelz acknowledges that it is an ambitious play. But he's looking beyond the U.S. market for success. He's spent the last 13 years split between San Francisco and Vietnam, and says that experience taught him that the Asian market is ripe for a service like this. He says Asian mobile users could be his ace in the hole.
"People there are very comfortable having multiple messaging apps," he says.

LG's New G Pad 8.3 Tablet Will Fit in Your Pocket

Ahead of the IFA 2013 trade show in Berlin this week, LG announced that the pocket-sized G Pad 8.3 tablet will be joining its lineup of mobile devices. The device will be the first 8-inch tablet with a full HD display on the market.
Although the G Pad 8.3 will officially debut at the conference next week, the company unveiled details about the device this weekend. It also created some fanfare last week with a trailer video posted to YouTube. The clip placed great emphasis on tablet size, and how more people would use the devices if they fit in their pocket.

Available in both black and white, the sleek tablet weighs less than a pound, and runs on Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean). It comes with 16 GB of memory, 2 GB of RAM, a 5.0 MP rear-facing camera and 1.3 MP camera in the front. The device weighs in at 338 grams — the weight of a newspaper, according to LG — and boasts a 1.7 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor.
LG didn't elaborate on the price, or exactly when the G Pad 8.3 tablet will hit stores, but said it will roll out in international markets — including North America, Europe and Asia — starting in the fourth quarter of 2013.
This is the first time in a year that LG is launching a new tablet. In a statement, the company said the G Pad 8.3 complements its recently launchedG2 smartphone, which aims to compete with the Samsung Galaxy S4.
What do you think of the G Pad 8.3 tablet? Tell us in the comments, below.

Google's Ad Campaign for Moto X Touts Customization

When Google introduced its first ads for the Moto X at the beginning of the month, we were told they were not part of the "real" Moto X ad campaign that was coming later.
This ad may be the first component of that campaign. Unlike the previous executions, which showcased features like the Quick Capture camera and Always Ready voice control, these are a less specific branding pitch for the phones. As a techno tune plays, the visuals display the multiple color choices for the back, front and accents on the phone plus the case. It also underscores the phone's "Assembled in the U.S.A." boast, which may cost an extra $5 per phone.
While Apple is going head to head with the Moto X on the latter claim, Google is wise to play up customization since it is a unique selling proposition vs. Apple's iPhone, which has much less wiggle room for self expression. With Apple's next iPhone release likely coming in a few weeks, though, we'll soon see how well the message resonates with consumers.
Update: A Moto rep says the ad above is "not new," and is an "informational video from a few weeks ago."

Your Facebook Antics Outshine Your Resume

So you've just graduated with a Ph.D. in neuroscience from an Ivy League university, bought yourself an expensive suit and have polished up that resume so it shines like the sun. You are clearly ready to conquer the job market.
Oh wait, you forgot to change your Facebook privacy settings. Epic fail.

In this comic, Manu Cornet of Bonkers World reveals what matters to employers these days — a squeaky clean social networking presence.

The Governments That Want Facebook and Twitter to Hand Over Data

 
Facebook, for the first time, has detailed how many user data requests it receives from each country. And since Twitter does the same thing, we can compare the two rivals by a curious but revealing metric: how much governments want their data.
Overall, data about Facebook users are much more coveted: The social network received at least 25,607 government requests in the first half of this year, compared with 1,113 for Twitter. That makes sense since Facebook is bigger, and Twitter stores less sensitive information about its users. There are simply more secrets hiding on Facebook.com.
But the comparison gets more interesting when you look at specific countries and think of government data requests as an indicator of the social network’s perceived importance. For instance, Japan requested data from Twitter 87 times in the first six months of 2013; the country asked Facebook for data only once in the same period. Japan is one of the only developed economies where Facebook adoption is weak, while residents regularly set new records on Twitter.
The United States requests more user data from each company than any other country — by far (43–45% of requests to Facebook and 78% of Twitter’s). The same is true for Google, which has published data on such requests for a while.
Putting the U.S. aside, here are the top 10 countries requesting information from Twitter, by percentage of requests, and the corresponding figures for Facebook. In addition to Japan, Mexico stands out for Twitter:

​​ And here’s the same thing for Facebook, still excluding the U.S. India is the second-most frequent requestor of the company’s data, but the country barely registers for Twitter:

​

Facebook Fan Pages Spam Is a $200 Million Business

Spreading spam on Facebook Pages is a booming business of at least $200 million a year. And a single post that contains a spam link is worth from $13 to $58, depending on how many likes the Facebook page has, according to researchers.
Independent researchers found 30,000 Facebook Pages (which used to be called "Fan Pages") advertised on underground spam forums. Then they analyzed the Pages, looking for posts that contained keywords like "click here," "free," "wow," or "join," followed by shortened links.

In two days in July, using two servers, the group of Italian researchers, led by Andrea Stroppa, Carlo De Micheli, and Danny Di Stefano, went through almost 700,000 posts and found out that almost 37,000 of those were spam.
"We've seen that every day there are at least 20,000 posts of wild spam pointing to e-commerce, fake news, affiliations, porn and often scams," Stroppa told.
The six researchers, who months ago shined a light on the fake Twitter followers business, studied various underground spam forums and found that for Facebook Pages with less than 30,000 likes, spam posts can be sold for as much as $20 and as low as $8 (the average is the aforementioned $13). For pages with more than 100,000 Likes, posts can cost as much as $100 dollars, and in some instances, for pages with millions of fans, the price is more than $200.
Facebook bans Pages administrators from posting advertisements. In fact, according to Facebook's Pages terms of service, "third-party advertisements on Pages are prohibited without our prior permission."
Facebook spam, while not as pervasive as email spam, is a growing problem, according to experts. Facebook said in 2012 that only 4% of the content shared on its network is spam, according to The Wall Street Journal, while more than 70% of email is spam.
"Social media spam isn't yet quite seen on the same level as email spam." said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior security researcher at Kaspersky Labs. "The problem will continue on growing until there's a bigger crackdown on businesses that are offering services to spam Facebook."
If spam keeps spreading on the social network, it could eventually hurt its business, not only because there are people that effectively advertise on Facebook without paying the company, but because users might be annoyed by spam and leave the network.
"There's a financial incentive for Facebook to address the spam problem. For one, people may stop using the service if the spam problem is too severe," explained Schouwenberg. "Secondly, as Facebook is looking into further ways to better monetize the platform they'll want to have the least amount of spam possible. Otherwise users will start grouping the legitimate ads together with the spammed ads, which will reduce the value of the legitimate ads."
Stroppa and the other researchers included a statement from a Facebook spammer they spoke to on Skype who explained how he's benefited from Facebook spam without ever being caught. (Stroppa declined to identify the spammer.)
"Facebook doesn’t ban us simply because we generate the content on Facebook itself. Everyday I materialize funny and interesting content full of phrases and so forth that is shared and liked by thousands of users," he or she reportedly said, according to the researchers. "Without the Fan Pages Facebook would be an empty place. Tell me, how many links do you see shared by your friends on your timeline everyday? You see? The answer is simple."
According to Stroppa, though, Facebook isn't doing enough in fighting this problem and might actually be turning a blind eye to it because, in the end, it might not bother them that much.
"Facebook doesn't have a couple of 100 Euro servers like the ones we have, and can monitor in real time. Facebook could fight these if it wanted," he said.
Facebook declined to comment on the research, simply sending the following statement:

"Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam is a top priority for us. We have developed a number of systems to identify spam and stop it from spreading, and we have mechanisms in place to quickly shut down Pages, accounts, and applications that are found to be in violation of our terms of service. We also offer tools for people to report Pages and posts that might be spam. We will continue to improve our spam-fighting systems so we can to ensure that the overall level of spam on Facebook remains low."

Facebook Introduces More Business-Friendly Promotions Policy

Facebook unveiled a new promotions policy on Tuesday, updating guidelines for businesses that run contests and sweepstakes.
The update is designed to help business create and manage promotions on Facebook. Among the amendments: The social-network giant no longer requires promotions to be exclusively administered through apps; now, they're allowed to be administered on Pages, as well.

In an official blog post, Facebook explains that businesses can collect contest entries by having users message the Page, post on the Page or like and comment on a Page post."
What's more, if a small business wants to launch a contest based on the number of likes a post receives, it can do so directly on its Page, without requiring a third-party app.
A Facebook representative told that its new promotions policy "makes it even easier for smaller businesses to help build awareness for a new product, promote the opening of a new location, sell inventory or advance other business objectives."
Facebook's update also includes stricter regulations on tagging.
"Our Pages Terms now prohibit Pages from tagging or encouraging people to tag themselves in content that they are not actually depicted in," according to the blog post.
Businesses, what do you think of Facebook's policy update? Is it helpful, or a hindrance? Sound off in the comments, below.

'Social Fiction' Brings Characters to Life via Facebook and Twitter

A former Nickelodeon Animation storyboard artist and a Facebook employee have teamed up to create a new form of entertainment: social fiction.
Illustrator Steve Lowtwait and writer Michael Smith are telling a fictional story through social media that's centered around a protagonist called "Hawk Funn." They have set up real social profiles on Facebook and Twitter for fictional characters in the story, and they post about the characters' lives just like real people would. If you follow Hawk on Facebook and on Twitter, you can track the plot and learn about his life as a suburban dad in Colorado and his fear of the indoors.

This social fiction story gives anyone a chance to interact with the plot and characters in real time.
"When someone interacts and comments, the characters will comment back," Lowtwait told Mashable, adding that he and Smith — a California-based Facebook employee — are currently writing the characters' posts.

Instead of yelling at the television screen when your favorite TV character makes a silly mistake, you can post your feedback directly to a social fiction character. But Boulder, Colo.-based Lowtwait says even if people are screaming at Hawk to do something, some of the story drama will remain intact.
"In some sense, drama is when the characters do things you don't want them to do or you see them doing things that hurt other characters or themselves," said Lowtwait, who used to illustrate for Nickelodeon's Hey Arnold! TV show and movie.
Hawk Funn is the first project in Lowtwait and Smith's push to encourage social fiction. That's why they're trying to raise $116,000 on Kickstarter to turn this project into a viable business. With 22 days left to go in the Kickstarter campaign, backers had pledged about $3,750, as of Tuesday afternoon. Backers can vote to shape the direction of the story, receive authentic production drawings and be characters in the story.
Lowtwait said they'd eventually like to hire a social media manager to portray characters online: "That's going to involve somebody who's part community manager, part writer and being mindful of what you can say in the story while you're talking to the audience without giving anything away, but also being able to be the characters."

Social Fiction: A New Industry?

The idea for Hawk Funn was inspired by a marketing concept Lowtwait was working on for another project. He told Mashable that marketing for social fiction is innately viral, since it is told on the Internet and through social media.
"

Social fiction kind of spans the entire Internet

Social fiction kind of spans the entire Internet: It's got to have the websites and other social accounts that support the story, blending fiction and reality to create a whole world. And I think there's possibility for an industry to grow up around storytelling like that," he said. In addition to online presences for the characters, the team has created a website for Hawk's fictional business in the story. Lowtwait said they even made a Twitter account for a fictional magazine that is critical of Hawk's product in the story.
A Facebook spokesperson told in a statement that fictional pages like this do not violate the social network's rules: "As long as the Page accurately reflects [that] the content doesn’t mislead users about the voice, it’s in compliance with terms."
But since reading social media is free, how would social fiction make money to sustain itself? Lowtwait said this approach brings opportunity for brands to sponsor and tell stories about their products. In a purely hypothetical example, he said Nike could produce a story about someone who starts running and people could follow that character. The story wouldn't necessarily be an explicit ad, but could incorporate products and tell more about the active lifestyle Nike might want to promote.
Further down the line, Lowtwait said they could offshoot merchandise, characters could be franchised and fictional products from the story could even be manufactured.

Analog to Digital

When Lowtwait worked for Nickelodeon, he said the prep work for his illustrations were all hand-drawn on paper — despite the final output being digital. For his illustrations on Facebook in this new social fiction story, he is using an iPad.
"The development of it is, in a way, a lot like animation ... you have to create characters and design them," he said.
Lowtwait added he is using Facebook's Timeline dimensions as a guide for his illustrations.
Experience the story yourself by following Hawk, his wife, kids and best friend on social media.
What do you think about the future of social fiction? Share your thoughts in the comments

Facebook to Pay Users $20 Million for Sharing Personal Data in Ads

If you're one of the 614,000 Facebook members who appeared in a site ad without permission, you may have some cash coming your way.
Facebook was granted final approval on Monday for a $20 million settlement stemming from a 2011 lawsuit involving "Sponsored Stories" ads.

The ads, which were posted on both the right-hand side of the site and in news feeds, used member names, pictures and details about the brands and interests they Like on the site. Members whose details appeared in the ads will now receive $15 each.
The five people who led the lawsuit claimed to represent all user and said the company violated their privacy by highlighting personal data without permission.
"We are pleased that the settlement has received final approval," a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable in a statement.
The company did not comment on when users would receive their payout.
Although the lawsuit reached a settlement back in early 2012 — and again later in the year — both were rejected. According to a BBC report, the judge acknowledged the payout was small for users. It was not proven that Facebook "undisputedly violated the law" and that the plaintiffs could not show they were "harmed in any meaningful way," per the report.
Now, Facebook is required to update its Statement of Rights so users can retain more control over their personal data.

Facebook Consumer Marketing Head Goes to Twitter

Twitter has poached Facebook's head of consumer and mobile marketing, Kate Jhaveri, according to a report.
Jhaveri will join Twitter as senior director of consumer marketing, according to AllThingsD. Reps from Twitter and Facebook could not immediately be reached for comment. A Twitter account purported to be Jhaveri's but not verified tweeted the following Friday afternoon:
Jhaveri, pictured below, joined Facebook in August 2010 and stopped working at the company sometime this month, according to her LinkedIn profile. She had previously served as consumer and online marketing director at Microsoft.

Twitter's General Counsel Alexander Macgillivray also announced he was leaving the company. Macgillivray tweeted about his move after a story in AllThingsD appeared.

Facebook Hacker Breaks Into Zuckerberg's Timeline to Report Bug

If you're a hacker and you find a bug in Facebook, you have the chance to submit it through the company's white hat disclosure program and get a reward.
But what if you've found a bug, and Facebook ignores you?
A Palestinian hacker took the inadvisable step of posting on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's Timeline, taking advantage of the very bug he was trying to report.

 

Khalil Shreateh, a Palestinian developer and hacker, discovered that there was a way to bypass Facebook's privacy settings and post on anyone's timeline — even users who are not your friends.
He first reported the vulnerability via email to the bug bounty program. But the social network failed to recognize the vulnerability in his report, according to Shreateh's blog post.
Before reporting the bug, Shreateh successfully tested it by posting on the wall of Sarah Goodin, Zuckerberg's former college classmate. He included a link to this post in the email, but the Facebook security employee who received the email — identified only as Emrakul — couldn't see the post, since he wasn't friends with Goodin.
That's what Shreateh tried to explain in a follow up to Emrakul, warning that he could very well post to Zuckerberg's wall if he wanted. He added that he wouldn't "cause I do respect people privacy," he allegedly wrote. His second email, however, was ignored.
Shreateh then sent another official report, explaining the bug again. This time, Emrakul allegedly answered: "I am sorry this is not a bug." To which Shreateh answered: "ok, that mean [sic] I have no choice other than report this to Mark himself on Facebook."
And so he did.

  

The exploit got the attention of Ola Okelola, another Facebook security engineer. Okelola commented on the post, asking for more information on the bug. After a brief discussion, Shreateh's Facebook account got suspended "as a precaution," as another Facebook security engineer named Joshua explained to Shreateh by email.
"Unfortunately your report to our Whitehat system did not have enough technical information for us to take action on it," Joshua wrote. "We cannot respond to reports which do not contain enough detail to allow us to reproduce an issue." He added that Facebook would "unfortunately not able to pay you for this vulnerability because your actions violated our Terms of Service."
By posting on Zuckerberg's wall, Shreateh also violated Facebook's responsible disclosure policy — which prohibits people who discover bugs to take advantage of them and demonstrate the bugs on people's accounts without their permission.
"The more important issue here is with how the bug was demonstrated using the accounts of real people without their permission," explained Facebook's Matt Jones on the site Hacker News. Facebook has confirmed to Mashable that Jones is indeed an employee.
"Exploiting bugs to impact real users is not acceptable behavior for a white hat. We allow researchers to create test accounts here to help facilitate responsible research and testing. In this case, the researcher used the bug he discovered to post on the timelines of multiple users without their consent," Jones added.
Facebook declined to comment further. Besides, the bug was fixed on Thursday, according to Jones.
Shreateh won't be rewarded for his finding, because he violated the disclosure policy.