Ruby, PHP and Python are compared in an infographic by Udemy. This and more in today's Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

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The Shift From Watching TV to Experiencing TV

Udemy says that Python is the "most-discussed" language, but if you are looking for a job, PHP is the language to know. The percentages vary across the different job channels, but PHP seems to be more popular among job listings and job titles.

More Must Read Stories:

Microsoft Will Pay Nokia "Billions" To Use Windows Phone

Microsoft paid Nokia $250 million in the fourth quarter to adopt the Windows Phone operating system, according to Nokia's fourth-quarter earnings report released Thursday.

That was the first in a series of so-called "platform support" payments believed to eventually total billions of dollars. To date, Microsoft and Nokia have been quiet about the deal's specifics, perhaps because it appears as if Microsoft is paying Nokia significantly less than its paying other cellphone manufacturers. (more)

SoundCloud Goes HTML5, Makes Non-Flash Audio Player Its Default

SoundCloud, the up-and-coming social audio publishing platform, is endorsing HTML5's role in the future of the Web. Today, the Berlin-based startup is officially rolling out its HTML5 audio player as the service's default, knocking the original, Flash-based player from that esteemed position. (more)

AT&T CEO Randall Stevenson Blasts FCC, Hints At Higher Prices and Data Restrictions

AT&T has a bone to pick with the Federal Communications Commission. In the mobile operator's quarterly earnings call this morning, CEO Randall Stevenson blasted the FCC over its leadership in making additional spectrum available to carriers to handle the explosion of mobile data flowing through the operators' pipes. Stevenson and AT&T are bitter after the FCC blew up its proposed acquisition of T-Mobile. Stevenson said that because of AT&T's spectrum crunch it will be forced to raise prices and take additional actions against the highest data users. (more)

Why Does the Next Xbox Need Discs At All?

If the next generation of Microsoft's Xbox gaming system will be designed to bring us well beyond 2020, why would it still rely on last century's technology, spinning discs, for games?

Videogame blog Kotaku reported yesterday that the next Xbox - still not yet announced by Microsoft - will support Blu-ray discs, and may incorporate some sort of technology that prevents users from playing used games. (more)

Google+ Is Now Open To Teens, Offers New Safety Features

Google VP of Product Bradley Horowitz announced today that Google+ will now be available to teens. Previously, the social network was exclusively for adults over 18, but now anyone with a Google Account can use it (13+ in most countries). (more)

All of Planet Earth Is Now on Google+

Google Earth released version 6.2 today. It patches up some of the choppy textures it used to have, so it now looks like a smooth, realistic surface - no more "quilt effect." The texture improvements are now in all versions of Google Earth, including the mobile versions. This update also adds Google+ integration. Screenshots from Google Earth can be shared with Google+ circles with a new "share" button. (more)

Twitter Will Censor Certain Tweets In Certain Countries

Twitter will censor tweets in certain countries while still publishing them throughout the rest of the world, the company said Thursday on its blog.

"As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there," the company said. "Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content." (more)

Legal Analysis: How the Megaupload Defense Could Proceed

There will be two battles fought simultaneously in defense of Megaupload, the cyberlocker site accused by the U.S. of hosting and publicizing illicit copyrighted material. One is in the public arena, where we can expect the defendant to portray itself as Robin Hood, not so much stealing content from the rich as repurposing it for the poor, the meek, the 99%. It may even get some traction in that arena, but those same tactics may not play so well to a jury. That will be a separate battle whose defense strategy may not be so populist. (more)

Buying a Donut Earns You Facebook Credits

Plink has just announced a Facebook Credits loyalty program in partnership with fast-food chains Dunkin' Donuts, Quiznos, Red Robin and Taco Bell. Users earn Facebook Credits by joining Plink and logging on with their Facebook credentials and credit or debit cards. Like any loyalty program, the more people purchase, the more Facebook Credits they'll rack up. (more)

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Discuss

Forget the random pictures of babies and puppies, alarming status updates from family members and political rants. On My-ArtMap, you will be immersed in art. It's as simple as that. The site, which is targeted at an international audience, is available in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Chinese. You can create a username and password for the site, or login using Facebook Connect. It is also available as an iPhone app.

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My-ArtMap is a social network exclusively for the art and art market. Like the Art World, it is populated by art professionals, including auction houses, galleries, museums and art collectors. The site just exited beta, shortly after acquiring many new members from Spain, Italy and Germany. It is heavily focused on Europe, at least for the time being.

"Facebook is a great project, but the international art market is very closed and the requirements especially for this market are really different in comparison to other markets," says ArtMap CEO Stefan Sebk. "Facebook and Google are too big and not specialized enough for the art market!"

The site's news feed is known as the Newscafe. Much like Facebook, it surfaces stories posted by fellow users. But unlike the Facebook algorithm, My-ArtMap does not differentiate between highlighted and most recent stories.

The "Galleries" section allows users to create their own virtual art galleries around specific topics. These images can either have a certain theme, or could be a collection of artwork. For some reason, even though I set the language to English, the text in this section keeps popping up in German.

Users can also create groups around a specific topic to discuss ideas privately.

The site still has quite a few quirks. It's unclear how the Newscafe algorithm sorts stories, and sometimes the text doesn't translate. Still, this is an interesting project that seems like it could become a very useful tool for the social networked Art World.

Discuss

Argh! What was that video called? Was that on Twitter or Facebook? Where did I save that article? Who was it who made that joke about the Edsel? Do you find yourself asking these questions often? As we get wrapped up in more and more Web services, things tend to get disorganized.

We've got inboxes over here, inboxes over there, boards here, there, tweets, docs, posts and shares. It's almost too much to keep straight. Fortunately, there are little helpers out there. I've found two I love, and I'll show you how to use them. One is free, the other is in closed beta, but there are invites below! If you've got other suggestions, please feel free to share them in the comments.

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Greplin: For Finding Your Stuff

Greplin is the way I find that one online thing I'm looking for. It's a fast search engine that can index a whole bunch of common cloud services many of us use. Once it's done crawling for the first time, you don't have to wait for a second. You type in your search query, and Greplin brings back an organized list of everything in your cloud-life that matches.

It can search Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Contacts (as well as the professional Google Apps versions). It searches Dropbox, of course. It searches Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and LinkedIn. It's got Delicious and Pinboard. It has Yahoo Mail. It even searches Reddit. And these are all free. Premium users can search Evernote, Yammer, Salesforce, Basecamp, Highrise and Campfire. All of these services in one search.

Some of them you have to unlock by inviting friends. That's okay. Invite your friends. They'll thank you for it.

Here's Greplin in action:

Yes, you're reading that right. My Greplin has (at press time) 1,106,324 documents in it. Every search is instantaneous, though. I can filter the results by service (Twitter, Google Reader, whatever) as well as by type of content: events, files, links, messages, notes, people and streams. Clicking on each service on the left sidebar tells you its status and how many items are indexed.

Greplin's premium service is $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. But basically every consumer service, and even the Google Apps service, is available for free. Evernote is in premium, and that's a very tempting hook for power users. But it's amazing what the free version of Greplin can do. In addition to the Web version (which works on mobile), there's a free iPhone app, and it's killer.

What About Sensitive Stuff Like Logins & Passwords?

User names, passwords, ID and credit card numbers are hard to remember, too, and we need to use them often online. But it's not a good idea to keep those in a cloud-hosted service like the ones Greplin searches. It's best to keep those in a secure service if you're going to store them on your computer at all.

Today I found out about Dashlane, which will do just that. It's a desktop application for Mac and Windows that will remember all your sensitive info so you don't have to. It's also just a convenience; it plugs into your browsers and lets you fill in Web forms with your saved information automatically. It's like 1Password, which is available for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, but the features are a little simpler.

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I've taken it for a spin. It's easy to set up, and it's very secure. It lets you store your contact info, various forms of ID, credit cards and Web accounts. It's also good for shopping online and lets you speed through the checkout process. When you're filling out a form on any Web page, boxes that Dashlane can fill in have a little gazelle (or whatever its mascot is) icon. You click it and drop the info in. No need to remember it or even type it out.

Dashlane is not quite open to the public, but here's a link for RWW fans to get it now! I've been using it all day, and it makes everything faster.

What other services do you use to keep yourself sane online? Share them in the comments.

Discuss

On tap for today, we've got a new jQuery Mobile release, a look at Tendril Connect, and the latest BitNami Stack for Ruby on Rails.

jQuery Mobile 1.0.1 Released – The jQuery Mobile folks have pushed 1.0.1 out the door. This fixes a bunch of issues and adds Samsung's Bada platform and Dolphin browser to the "officially supported" list. See the post for a full list of supported platforms and their "grades." If you're using iOS, Android and newer BlackBerry devices you should be fine.

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Tendril courting developers for its cloud-delivered energy app platform – Tom Raftery takes a look at Tendril Connect. "The idea is to allow developers to build on Tendril's cloud platform and to deploy the developed applications on Tendril's Tendril Connect cloud platform. For developers this is an opportunity to develop applications addressing the energy challenge and have them deployed in a ready-made marketplace of up-to 70 million addressable households."

Smooth Scaling with Stackato and vSphere – Explaining how to run ActiveState's Stackato on vSphere.

Launch Relational Database Service Instances in the Virtual Private Cloud – Amazon has set it up so you can use their Relational Database Service (RDS) with their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Works in all regions, except AWS GovCloud.

New RubyStack upgraded to Rails 3.2.0 – BitNami has upgraded its RubyStack to Rails 3.2.0. It now includes Ruby 1.9.3-p0, SQLite 3.7.3, and Nginx 1.0.10.

Have a cloud news tip for me? Drop me a note at jzor to @jzb on Twitter.

Discuss

If you think the RIAA and MPPA were mad about Megaupload, you should meet one of the site's users now that it's been shut down. I don't just mean one of the many, many people who were using Megaupload and its sister sites to snag unauthorized, copyrighted content. While those people must be irked, they'll have no trouble moving on to another service.

The users who are really upset are the ones who, wisely or not, used the serve to send important, non-infringing personal and work-related files to themselves, friends and colleagues. Immediately after the shutdown of Megaupload, we saw a surge of angry tweets from people who were using the service for personal purposes and can no longer access their files. Now, there's talk of those users suing the FBI in response.

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Several international chapters of the Pirate Party are joining forces to gather the names of users who feel they've been wrongly blocked from accessing personal files. From there, the organization says it will consider filing "complaints against the US authorities in as many countries as possible."

The Pirate Parties' complaint doesn't express solidarity with Megaupload or its founders, but rather it takes issue with the far-reaching nature of the site's shutdown and the negative impact it has had on unsuspecting users who weren't necessarily using the site for anything illegal. In fact, the parties claim that the economic harm done to users by shutting off access to private data could exceed the damage done to the record and film industries by Megaupload's practices.

That's a difficult claim to prove, but then again so is the copyright lobby's assertion that Megaupload cost them $500 million in damages.

Some may find it hard to sympathize with users who were using a service like Megaupload to store files without backing them up elsewhere. While that's certainly not the smartest approach to personal file storage, it also probably wasn't conceivable to many rank-and-file users that the site they were using was suddenly going to get shut down by the FBI and Justice Department. That's not something that happens everyday, even to notably controversial websites.

Many people would use Megaupload similarly to how a service like Dropbox is used: as a convenient way to toss some files into the cloud or give somebody quick access to a project they may be collaborating on.

It's unknown how many of the files hosted on Megaupload were of the personal, non-infringing variety, and it may not be an easy thing for authorities to determine either. It's a safe bet that most of the site's traffic was attributed to piracy-related activities, but that doesn't offer much solace to those who had other purposes in mind.

How serious the Pirate Parties' threats are isn't yet known, but it's evident that they're genuinely displeased with how this whole thing went down, as are many of the site's former users.

Discuss

The rollout of Facebook Timeline forces you to take a look back at your own "Facebook past," and think about whether you want to add to it.

Today 1000memories launched the ShoeBox Facebook app, which gives you an opportunity to scan paper photos from the past and post them to Facebook. It brings back those "pre-Internet photos from the past."

"A Facebook Timeline-integrated app (such as ShoeBox) which lets you post photos into the past, represents a recreation of an autobiographical memory," says Dr. Ash Nadkarni of the Boston Medical Center's Department of Psychiatry. (She co-authored the study "Why Do People Use Facebook?") "There are several facets of this activity that could influence our perception of our memories -- specifically by triggering memory bias, a cognitive bias that enhances or impairs the recall of a memory."

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The other day, a Facebook friend of mine started posting photos from a trip she took to Cuba in the early 1980s. The photos were crisp, sharp and smartly framed. This, however, is not one of those photos. I borrowed it from a Flickr album called "Cuba 1981".

If this photo belonged to you, and you wanted to put it into the year 1981 on your Facebook Timeline, you could use ShoeBox to do that.

"It's easy to forget that Facebook is only seven years old, which means most of our photos and memories are not online yet," says 1000memories co-founder, Rudy Adler. "We built ShoeBox to finally get these photos from our past out of the closet and online where they can be enjoyed by everyone."

These photos might be enjoyed, but how will sharing them affect the memory you have of what actually happened?

"Sharing photos into your past plays on a type of memory bias called rosy retrospection, the remembering of the past as having been better than it really was," says Dr. Nadkarni. "So, as a result, a person may wind up remembering their first date as having been much better than it really was."  

Posting old photos could also trigger an egocentric bias, explains Nadkarni, which recalls the past in a self-serving manner. "When a person posts and views a picture of their college graduation--they may remember their exam grades as being better than they were."

Another bias that posting old photos could trigger is the misinformation effect. "Misinformation affects people's reports of their own memory," Nadkarni explains. "So, if a friend posts a comment to your wall about a photo of the two of you together at your high school prom as 'great party,' you're more likely to remember it as such, even if you'd actually had a so-so time."

Facebook Timeline wants us to upload those photos, regardless of any cognitive bias they could trigger.

After installing the Facebook ShoeBox app, you can connect with Facebook friends or e-mail address book contacts. You can also download the ShoeBox iPhone app to start scanning, or just upload photos directly from your computer to Facebook.

The makers of ShoeBox want to help you dig up--err, remember--your past. Because without it, how can you truly be yourself on Facebook?

Flickr image via Alan Denney.

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Google updated its privacy policy on Tuesday. It replaced more than 60 separate policies with a single one that treats Google users and their data as the same across all Google services. Reactions were shrill. "The End of 'Don't Be Evil'" was trotted out for the umpteenth time. The Washington Post quoted privacy experts saying, "There is no way anyone expected this." My, that sounds terrible!

But it's not true. Everyone watching should have seen this change coming. Google executives have maintained for so long that their new direction is one unified Google product. The new policy doesn't track any new data. It doesn't change the user's settings. Users can still export all their data and leave Google forever. All this does is change perception.

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It's Nothing New

Before, every Google service was a different website. After March 1, they'll all be treated as one. The old arrangement meant that each service had its own privacy policy. That doesn't mean it was more private. Google still tracked users. It still shared data from some of its services with others.

On March 1, the rules become much simpler: Google is all one thing. If you use it, it tracks your usage, it stores your data, and it uses your activity to personalize its services for you. Every single way in which it will do so is clearly laid out.

Today, members of Congress sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page about the policy. They said it raises questions about whether consumers can opt-out of the new data sharing system either globally or on a product-by-product basis." That is crazy talk. You opt out "globally" by not using Google. That's how privacy policies work. It's true that you can't opt out of the privacy policies for individual services anymore. You know what you can do? Stop sharing things you don't want tracked.

Reflexively Reacting

To make sure I wasn't crazy for thinking this way, I spoke to Colin Zick, a partner at Boston law firm Foley Hoag and contributor to its blog, Security, Privacy And The Law.

In his post about Google's new policy, he noted that "[t]hese changes are likely to draw FTC scrutiny, especially in light of the recent decision by Google to incorporate data from its social network, Google+, into search results, which has already resulted in a FTC antitrust investigation." I asked Zick if these concerns are warranted.

"From a legal perspective, I'm not seeing anything that's much different in what's being proposed to take effect on March 1 and what's in place right now," Zick says. "In particular, the language about sharing across services has been in [Google's policies] for a long time."

Zick points out that all the past versions of Google's privacy policies are on the website, and the last two versions offer line-by-line comparisons to the previous version. Zick expects that Google will do the same with the new policy once it's officially issued.

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"What we have is not a reaction to a change in legal language," Zick says, "but it's a change in perception. ... People are just reflexively reacting to the idea that Google is big."

Google Is Not Off The Hook Here

There are perfectly good things not to like about Google's new direction. For example, its community management strategy for Google+ is broken. Its names policy is only designed around appearances. As long as your name looks "real" to robots and engineers, you can go nuts. But you still can't use a handle, nor can you use a pseudonym unless it's "established," and you can prove it with some form of identification.

"Pseudonymity makes it possible for the most marginalized people in our community to communicate with us." - Cory Doctorow

This is a misguided policy. It doesn't protect politically active, marginalized or victimized users who still want to use Google+ but can't have it connected to their identities. You can step back even further and argue that it doesn't reflect the way human identity works at all.

"Identity is prismatic," as Chris Poole so eloquently told us at Web 2.0 last year. Google (and Facebook) want to lock users into a single identity on the Web as far as their services are concerned. There's no question that Google's new direction is to be a bigger part of its users' lives.

You Don't Have To Like It

The idea of what Google is has grown. This month, Google unveiled Search plus Your World, its integration of Google+ social results into Web search. Google+ had already been integrated into YouTube, Gmail and so many other Google services. But search was the Google we used to know. The change upset people, myself included.

Google has been accused of breaking a promise about how it should work. Its founders used to pride themselves on the fact that Google search didn't favor its own services. Google has been scrutinized for years for backpedalling on that stance, but Search+ has been treated as a last straw. For people who don't use Google+, Search plus Your World doesn't work.

But this is the new Google. You don't have to like it. If you don't like Search plus Your World, you can opt right out. You can opt out of sharing browser history by using incognito mode. You can also opt out of targeted ads. You can't opt out of Google's new privacy policy, because that's how Google's business is going to work from here on out. The data you create anywhere on Google are available to the rest of Google. Google is one big service for better or for worse. You don't have to use it.

No One Is Making You Use Google

The new privacy policy changes the way it feels to use Google, but it doesn't change the way it works. What are people afraid of Google tracking? Their name and address? Their location? The contents of their email? Their Web browsing habits? Google already tracked these things. So does Facebook. So does everybody. These are things you choose to share with Google. Who said you had to use Google? It's not the power grid. It's not the sewer system.

You have a choice. You can choose between Google's new direction, an all-in-one, twice-a-day everything-service its executives want you to use like a toothbrush, or Google's competitors. There are plucky start-up search engines out there that might remind you of classic Google. Microsoft also has a social search engine, a free email service and a suite of cloud-based office software. Oh, you don't like them as much? Boo hoo!

Google is making its move. It's changing its nature. Some changes are bad, and other changes are good. Users who like the changes will be happy, users who hate them will be sad. Google offers more tools than anybody else to give its users control over their data. As it says in the overview of its new privacy policy, users who don't like the new direction are welcome to export their data and take it elsewhere.

What do you think? Has Google gone too far? Will you take your Web activities elsewhere? Share that with us in the comments.

Discuss

Today's roundtable was co-hosted with the Jacksonville Startup Weekend. For the uninitiated, Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where entrepreneurs come together to pitch ideas, form teams, and learn best practices.

This past weekend, the Jacksonville entrepreneurship community hosted their own version of this exciting program. 150 people came together, and 17 businesses were formed. An additional 50 were on the wait-list, an evidence of the energy and enthusiasm that is bubbling in Florida right now. MJ Charmani, founder of iStart Jax, a business accelerator, and one of the key organizers of the event, introduced today's session with additional reports on last weekend's event.

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Armex Zero Suit

First, Eric Keeler with Armex Industries, Inc. pitched the Armex Zero Suit, a new kind of durable, special-purpose suit with significantly higher heat and cold resistance targeted towards racecar drivers, firefighters, and military personnel. Eric has done some technology scouting, and believes he can deliver on the specs of the product.

The problem, however, is that he is assuming that an investor would fund the product development. Investors rarely fund concepts. Even seed investors generally fund businesses that are already rolling. So, Eric will need to create a method with which to get to paying customers before any investor would invest. In addition, there is significant work to do on market sizing and go-to-market strategy. Direct selling simply is not the right solution for bringing this product to market. The price-point is too low for that to be sustainable.

pay2pitch.com

Next Perry Kaye presented pay2pitch.com, a network where entrepreneurs will come and pitch investors and mentors and pay, say, $1,000 for a twenty-minute interaction. The money, however, will be donated to the investor or mentor's favorite charity.

Perry rightly points out that a miniscule percentage of entrepreneurs get funded. We agree on the observation, and many of you have already seen our The Other 99% video. However, Perry's observation that entrepreneurs don't get funded because they can't get meetings is not entirely accurate. Most entrepreneurs don't get funded because they are simply not fundable. For a variety of different reasons that have to do with the fundamentals of their businesses, entrepreneurs, even if they CAN get meetings, don't get funded. So paying $1,000 to get a 20-minute meeting, in my opinion, is a total wastage of money. Of course, if the assumption is that this is for charity, that is different.

The second problem with the assumption here is that mentoring networks typically do not scale. You can see my video on the subject to get more color on why.

Bottomline, we get this question very often: Can 1M/1M help me get funded? So yes, tons of entrepreneurs are looking for funding, whether or not they should. Most of them are not fundable. So getting them to pay $1,000 for a 20-minute meeting that will most likely result in a rejection seems deceptive to me.

Ziffor

Then Tim LeMaster pitched Ziffor, a service for table restaurants that would like to offer promotions for non-peak times. This is a compelling idea, because many restaurants that have experimented with Groupon-like services have often been overwhelmed with unprofitable customers showing up during peak hours. Tim's idea offers a good solution to this problem.
However, there are some serious operational complexities involved to make a solution like this work at scale. Getting access to restaurant booking data won't be easy. Also, selling to restaurants is expensive, as we have seen in the massive operational expenditure and lack of profitability in the Groupon model.

I reviewed Tim's financial assumptions, and advised him to redo them with the assumption that the team would have to bootstrap the business locally, get enough validation, etc., before any investor would even consider investing.

SustanAbin

Next Rushabh Shah pitched SustainAbin, a concept that anchors on the assumption that 83 million people are searching for how to practice a green lifestyle. Rushabh wants to create a portal that harnesses this traffic, and give them meaningful content, based on which he would be able to generate high value leads for local businesses in the sustainability area such as solar, organic farming, etc.

Rushabh needs to do a lot of studying of how lead-arbitrage businesses work. To make a case of the business he proposes, he would have to, somehow, channel the search traffic from Google to his site. This is the domain of PPC and SEO, and the market is very competitive, buying extremely expensive.

On the business model side, also, some of the assumptions of monetizing with advertising are misplaced. I keep repeating this: there is way too much unmonetized ad inventory out there, driving CPMs down. Dramatically. Rushabh's analysis of the business needs to be significantly more thorough and comprehensive to even assess viability.

Bthere

Vincent Laganella then pitched Bthere, an excellent concept of analyzing 911 data feeds to extract leads for glass repair, door and window repair, and other crime-related contexts that immediately trigger needs in consumers. For example, a consumer has just had a burglar break in to the house through a glass window. The 911 call would generate a lead for a local glass repair shop instantly. And small businesses would be more than happy to pay good money for such immediately actionable leads. Very strong idea, and excellent analysis of the business fundamentals.

Overall, today's roundtable was a window into Jacksonville's efforts at drumming up additional entrepreneurship for regional economic development. The Startup Weekend programs around the world are doing this in different cities, and the organization is supported by the Kauffman Foundation. We look forward to supporting more such efforts through the 1M/1M initiative.

The Roundtable

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates starting at 8:00 a.m. PST:

Thursday, February 2, Register Here.
Thursday, February 9, Register Here.
Thursday, February 16, Register Here.
Thursday, February 23, Register Here.

If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.

Discuss

It was supposed to have been the heart of a concept called NGV - a video codec that utilized the same principles used by H.264, but produce a tighter stream by almost half. It was touted as the final "Hail Mary" pass for RealNetworks to re-enter the competitive space that was quickly being won over by Adobe, and where Microsoft and Apple still had their feet in the door. During 2008, Real's engineers were showing off potential stream size contraction of as much as 30%.

Now, the next-generation video effort that only culminated in RealVideo 11 in 2010, after much of the online world had left Real behind, is being regenerated by Intel. This morning, Intel announced the acquisition of an undisclosed number of RealNetwork patents related to next-generation video. And this afternoon, an Intel spokesperson confirmed to RWW that it will be offering employment to seven of Real's NGV engineers.

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Intel's Sumner Lemon told us his company was not in a position to reveal exactly what it's planning. What we do know is that Intel intends to continue the NGV project as part of its Software and Services Group, and hopes Real's engineers will join Intel. It is too soon to say what NGV will become, though the least likely prospect, from what we gather, is that Intel will try to build some type of media player software - the line of business which Real simply could not resurrect.

A more likely prospect is that Intel wants to get back in the video engineering game with a codec that it can license to others. Real will be granted the rights to continue to use its former codecs for its own products, according to Intel's Lemon, but not perpetually and not without limits. Real's principal product continues to be a media player, although early last year it signaled its intent to offer a kind of media synchronization service - another effort which has gone nowhere since.

With Real stepping back, Intel could conceivably license new and perfected NGV codecs for use in video recording devices, in home video consoles, and for use in certain elements of software that folks tend to use every day. Lemon was very cautious in pointing out that it's too early to say whether NGV could play a role as another embeddable format in Web browsers, both for PC and mobile devices. Although HTML5's original goal was to present a single, open, non-proprietary video codec for use by the

Lemon stated that NGV may not necessarily compete with H.264 in all of its markets - that may be for product managers to decide later. Yet it is not inconceivable that Intel could add one more bundle of letters to the online codecs mix. This as growing adoption of HTML5 by developers, and in turn by browser makers, is showing the first signs of dissolving the once-impenetrable lock on the online video market held by Adobe Flash.

In its last quarterly Form 10-Q filed last November, RealNetworks stated it earned $8.8 million in its fiscal third quarter through the sale of things such as ringtones, on-demand videos, and "inter-carrier messages" (ways for wireless users on different networks to text one another), and another $1.6 million through the sale of mobile games. It lost about $2 million during the same period from licenses for RealPlayer, which is currently on version 15.

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Hewlett-Packard yesterday announced the open source roadmap for its beleaguered mobile platform webOS. This is HP's last-ditch attempt to actually turn webOS into a viable product after it acquired Palm in April 2010. It looks like the rebuilt source code for webOS will not be ready until September as HP takes the long view of the platform. Yet, when webOS is ready for prime time again, it may be just in time to take advantage of some of the deep current flowing through the mobile ecosystem.

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The beauty of webOS is that it is the one mobile platform that takes a Web-first approach to application building. If you take a look at its application framework Enyo, it is clear that that webOS does not adhere to the principles of "native" platforms like Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone or iOS.

One of the reasons that webOS was crippled in the era of the native platform is because it did not have a robust application ecosystem outside of its reliance on Web technologies. Palm built webOS to be of the mobile Web. In this way, Palm was ahead of its time back in the mid-2000s. Even when the iPhone first came out in 2007, it was designed to be a device to access the mobile Web. That all changed when Apple released the App Store in 2008 and the native model of application development and delivery was born.

It should come as no surprise that there were major similarities to Apple's early approach to (what became) iOS and Palm's webOS. A significant portion of Apple's team at the time has spent time working on both platforms, including Andy Grignon, VP of webOS software and applications at HP (Grignon has some patents on a few of the prototype iPhones that Steve Jobs rejected).

Palm's problem was that the mobile Web was not ready for devices. We are just now starting to see the problems facing mobile Web apps being addressed through the HTML5 spec such as CSS and rendering along with caching and device access to elements like the camera and accelerometer. The native platforms have had that advantage since the beginning.

This is where webOS has a chance. It straddles the line between Web and native in a very fundamental way. Mobile Web applications will continue to evolve in 2012 as progress is made on HTML5 and the spec and ecosystem mature. The webOS open source project should be designed to take specific advantage of those mobile Web apps. Upcoming releases of Enyo will include distribution of WebKit as along with Flash and Silverlight as plug-ins. The kernel will be based on the Linux Foundation's standard kernel.

While HP has been criticized for how it has handled webOS, this new direction is exciting. Other mobile open source projects, such as Tizen, do not have the type of history and funcationality that webOS can offer. The biggest problem facing webOS when it is ready will be whether or not any of the major original equipment manufacturers will pick it up and run with it. Samsung would be a logical choice if it is starting to hedge its bets on Android reliance but HTC could make a dent in the ecosystem by differentiating itself through webOS.

What it may boil down to is this: Palm may have been ahead of its time with webOS, but it fell behind the times when the native app environment exploded. With the coming wave of HTML5 mobile Web apps, the time for webOS to shine may come again.

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Today Google+ announced that it is now open to users ages 13+ (in all countries except for Spain, South Korea and the Netherlands). Until today, Google+ had been 18+. When Facebook began in 2004, it was open to college students only, most of whom are 18+ years old. Facebook now allows any users who are 13+ to register.

A study published last year by researchers at the University of Guelph in Canada looked at how parents acted on Facebook. Their study was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. They discovered that parents revert to adolescent behavior, which suggests that there's something inherently adolescent about social media.

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"The online environment influences people of all ages," Emily Christofides, a PhD psychology student who worked on the study with doctoral student Amy Muise and psychology professor Serge Dsmarais, told Science Daily. "Both parents and teens share and show more about themselves than they might in other social settings, and the same psychological factors underpin that behavior."

The researchers found that popularity was a key factor in discerning how much information the user disclosed.

"The people who are the most popular are those whose online identity is actively participated in by others," said doctoral student Amy Muise. "So the more you share, the more others respond."

The study found that adults were less conscious of the consequences of sharing personal information on Facebook than their adolescent counterparts.

Will Teenagers Flock To Google+?

Google+ just added "favorite individuals" and organizations to the community, many of whom already have millions of fans on Facebook. Teen pop star +Selena Gomez boasts more than 26 million Facebook fans. +Teen Vogue has 1 million Facebook fans. Teen TV network +Nickelodeon has over 4 million Facebook fans. Will they migrate from Facebook to Google+, now that all their favorite stars are there?

A study from Alexander Interactive surveyed 2,000 teens ages 14-17 nationwide, and came away with some surprising results. Teens were actually interested in switching from Facebook to Google+, saying that Facebook was more news-oriented whereas Google+ actually felt more social. Teens were frustrated by the clutter of Facebook, especially the news ticker a.k.a. "scrolling stalker." They did love Timeline, however, which could keep them on Facebook.

Facebook isn't going to give up on its ultimate dream: To become a mall. And everyone knows who hangs out at the mall.

Will Google+ follow in Facebook's footsteps, becoming just another cluttered social network for the adolescent and "young at heart"? Or will those adolescent behaviors stay on Facebook where they belong?

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Twitter will censor tweets in certain countries while still publishing them throughout the rest of the world, the company said Thursday on its blog.

"As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there," the company said. "Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content."

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Twitter said it has not yet used the ability, which is outlined on its Help page, but when it does it will try to retroactively notify the sender. The company also announced an expanded agreement with Chilling Effects, a blog monitoring Internet legal activity and censorship, to increase Twitter's transparency on free expression issues.

Update: In an email, Twitter spokesperson Jodi Olson said the company was not backing off its commitment to free expression.

"Just to be clear, this is not a change in philosophy and there are still countries to which we will not go," Olson said. "We hold freedom of expression in high esteem and work hard not to remove Tweets."

The three major, U.S.-based social networks are all currently banned in China, a country analysts all agree is crucial for future growth. While Twitter's post did not specifically mention China, it clearly positions the company ahead of Facebook and Google+ in articulating a career policy for handling content that may rile Chinese government officials.

While the Great Firewall of China currently blocks most of China's 500 million Internet users from accessing the service, some tech-savvy Chinese citizens have managed to work around the firewall to access Twitter. It's not clear if Twitter's new policy will impact those users.

Twitter has previously been a stalwart in protecting free speech. In making today's announcement, Twitter even a year-old blog post in which it said it would allow tweets to continue flowing even as Arab Spring uprisings escalated in Egypt. "There are Tweets that we do remove, such as illegal Tweets and spam," the company said at the time. "However, we make efforts to keep these exceptions narrow so they may serve to prove a broader and more important rule--we strive not to remove Tweets on the basis of their content."

Update: "This launch gives us the ability, when we have to, in response to a valid legal request, withhold a Tweet in a specific country and to keep that Tweet visible for the rest of the world," Olson said Thursday. "Our policy in these cases is to 1) promptly notify the affected users, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so; 2) withhold the content in the required countries only, rather than worldwide; 3) clearly indicate to viewers that a Tweet or Account has been withheld, and 4) make available any requests to withhold content through our partnership with Chilling Effects."

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Over six years ago, I rounded up a group of analysts to elicit their opinions on what was then a startling trend: People who purchased iPods were then purchasing Macs. Was it a fluke, I asked? Some said maybe not: Buyers were learning to trust the Apple brand again. But there were too many mitigating factors at that time which could eventually derail the Mac's comeback, for which the only route to its eventual culmination appeared to be by way of the home entertainment center.

What literally no one foresaw in 2005 was the possibility that an Apple-branded device could become a future year's most successful and desirable business tool. The iPad bounced the Apple brand right back into the office; and now, results of a survey of 10,000 IT professionals worldwide by Forrester reveal that as CxOs find themselves embracing iPads, their companies end up opening their front doors to Macs.

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Among survey respondents in North America and Western Europe, an astounding 46% of the enterprises where IT professionals worked in 2011 were reported to be offering Macs as an option to employees. That does not mean half of employees are choosing them - right now, Forrester's respondents say only 7% of those respondents are personally using Mac OS X in their workplace. But that's a lot more than in previous years, and much closer to the peaks set in the late 1980s when the first Mac adopters realized they needed them for laser printers and "desktop publishing."

The iPad has become the Mac's re-launch pad in the enterprise. Even those companies that officially don't want iPads yet (they may have policies against BYOD) have employees who do. Some 27% of respondents said their enterprises presently support the iPad, with another 31% planning to, and yet another 23% actively campaigning to make them support it. That's important, because while 46% of enterprises offer Macs, only 30% of them support Macs - and that's a big difference. The hurdle for enterprises wanting to adopt, and maybe even embrace, the Apple brand is integrating them into the network.

One more factor playing into the Mac's enterprise success, astonishingly... is Android. It's a strange, backward chain of events that Forrester's research indicates begins with the inconsistency of that platform - something which the latest version 4.0.x, Ice Cream Sandwich, hopes to eradicate if only it weren't just one of the fragments in its own right.

As the Forrester report's principal author, Frank E. Gillett, writes, "Google's Android platform is selling very well with consumers for smartphones, but the wide variety of devices, features, and software support, plus inconsistency of support for OS upgrades, is fragmenting the Android ecosystem. Meanwhile, Google has yet to dent the iPad's dominant tablet position, while Amazon's popular new Android-based Kindle Fire tablet bypasses Google's app store, Android Market, altogether. In PCs, Google's Chromebook initiative to replace Windows PCs will take years to gain traction. By comparison, Apple has solid offerings in all three categories, keeps a limited but still highly desired range of models, and creates great consistency and upgradeability across the devices, characteristics that are very attractive to enterprise buyers. Forrester hears from CIOs that they feel protected by Apple's brand and app store strategy in a way that they don't with Android products."

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The Saudi prince who invested $300 million in Twitter in December said the move was not politically motivated.

"It was a pure financial investment with economic objectives," Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Chairman of Kingdom Holding Company, told CNN. "Politics has no ingredients whatsoever in that investment ... the secure economic financial investment with expected huge returns to our company Kingdom Holding."

Alwaleed, who also has a stake in Apple, said he expects the computer maker to thrive despite last year's death of Steve Jobs.

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"Politics has no ingredients whatsoever in that investment ... the secure economic financial investment with expected huge returns to our company."

"I believe that Steve Jobs' genius is by establishing a company that could outlive him and continue with his path," he said.

Initially, some analysts suggested Alwaleed was interested in obtaining a stake in Twitter because of the role it played in the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and northern Africa. Alwaleed also holds an interest in News Corp., prompting speculation he may have played a role in Rupert Murdoch's decision to start using Twitter late last year.

At the time of his acquisition, Alwaleed's investment in Twitter amounted to a 3% stake, based on a $800 million valuation of the company last August. While Alwaleed prides himself on being an early investor in Apple, Amazon and eBay, he said he did not see himself as an early investor in Twitter.

"We don't believe we came in at the early stage, but clearly we don't believe we came in at the plateau stage," he said. "We see that this company's viability and its continuity and its resilience will be there in the decades to come."

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Google Earth released version 6.2 today. It patches up some of the choppy textures it used to have, so it now looks like a smooth, realistic surface - no more "quilt effect." The texture improvements are now in all versions of Google Earth, including the mobile versions. This update also adds Google+ integration. Screenshots from Google Earth can be shared with Google+ circles with a new "share" button.

In a telling display of Google's new unified product approach, the Google Earth annoucement encourages users to "upgrade to Google+." Google wants to be considered all one service, and a Google+ "upgrade" spans across all its sites and applications.

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The Google Earth update also redesigns the search interface, enabling the same autocomplete feature Google Maps has. It expands results into multiple layers, so Google Earth searches can now show more than the top 10 results. It also adds biking, transit and walking directions. Google Earth is now an interesting 3D alternative to Maps for most purposes, including on mobile.

Download Google Earth 6.2 here.

What do you think of Google integrating all its services? Sound off in the comments.

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Legal firm Loeb & Loeb is full of thinkers. Its clients and attorneys know that the world is a fluid place and the technology sector dynamic and ever-changing. As part of its "Media MindShare" series, Loeb & Loeb has turned its attention to the digital marketplace to study what the dominant issues will be in 2012.

One of those issues is mobile commerce. That includes mobile payments and coupons as well as the security issues that inevitably will accompany the mobile commerce vertical. Are people really prepared to pay with their phones? What is holding them back? Check out the infographic from Loeb & Loeb below.

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The infographic points out data reported by eMarketer that 35.6 million mobile phone users will use mobile coupons by 2013. But not all people are comfortable with mobile coupons. Nearly 52% of consumers are "not likely to use" mobile coupons, a study from Opus Research points out. This is due to in part to security worries people have over handing a cashier their phone and in other part due to concerns over the validity of the offers. Some people are outright embarrassed.

Another problem is the notion of data breaches. We have seen it many times with credit cards. Take the restaurant example. A waiter brings you your check. Without thinking, you pop your credit card into the book and the waiter comes back to swipe it at a terminal in back. But maybe that waiter is up to no good and has his own credit card reader in his pocket. He swipes the card through the restaurant's POS terminal and then again on the reader in his pocket. He then has the card number and can do what he wants with it.

This has been a problem in Europe, though steps have been taken to eliminate the practice. As a former chef, I have seen waiter co-workers of mine get fired and arrested for the same practice. It happens.

Now, think about replacing the credit card with your smartphone. Are you really comfortable handing over a device that can contain very sensitive information over to a stranger, even if that person is standing right in front of you and not taking the device out of sight? To a certain extent, this is an irrational fear. The new era of mobile payments will likely mean that your phone never leaves your hand. POS systems set up with NFC or the ability for a cashier to scan your phone with a QR card reader means that you should never be handing your device over to anybody. Yet, the research says that people have security fears and that is a valid concern.

Check out the infographic below and let us know what your concerns are in the mobile payments space in the comments.

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Plink has just announced a Facebook Credits loyalty program in partnership with fast-food chains Dunkin' Donuts, Quiznos, Red Robin and Taco Bell. Users earn Facebook Credits by joining Plink and logging on with their Facebook credentials and credit or debit cards. Like any loyalty program, the more people purchase, the more Facebook Credits they'll rack up.

Members will be able to accumulate Facebook Credits at 25,000 locations nationwide, including Quiznos, Dunkin' Donuts and Taco Bell. They can use those Facebook Credits for Facebook virtual games, movies or music.

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There is no point-of-sale (POS) integration, which means Plink users don't have to whip out a card or their phones when they purchase items. Plink works through credit or debit cards that users have pre-registered. Restaurants and offline retailers pay Plink a percentage of the sales that come directly from those members. From what we can tell, Plink will not integrate as a frictionless sharing app, so a user's entire Facebook network will not know about the Big Mac or coffee that they snuck on lunch break.

Plink operates differently from digital customer loyalty program Belly, which depends on members swiping their mobile devices or using their Belly cards.

Facebook Credits are currently associated with buying virtual goods to advance in games like FarmVille and The Sims Social. Facebook has been edging out of that virtual territory, however, allowing people to use Facebook Credits to pay to download music, and watch movies and TV on Facebook.

Facebook is also working on social commerce, essentially making the social network into a mall. It recently launched 60 new social sharing apps, only five of which aren't super creepy.

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