Bit.ly — even tinier URLs

Posted on by

From Webmonkey…

New York-based Betaworks today launched a useful–and cute–URL shortener, Bit.ly. The user-facing features, such as tracking clicks and cookie-based history of recent shortened URLs, are nice. Where Bit.ly really shines is the data it makes available via its simple API.

Without registering for an API key, developers can shorten URLs, expand previously-shortened URLs, and get data about a Bit.ly URL. The information Bit.ly makes available includes the number of clicks, the referring sources of those clicks, and three sizes of thumbnails of the resulting web page.

Bit.ly is a model platform, a great example of how to launch a service with an API.

Yep.

Daily Mail loses personal data on employees

Posted on by

Well, well. According to this report, the Voice of Middle England isn’t too careful about keeping sensitive data secure.

Northcliffe Media, owner of the Daily Mail, is the latest company to lose a laptop load of sensitive staff information.

A laptop containing names, addresses, bank accounts and sort codes of Mail and General Trust staff has been stolen, it emerged last week. The company told staff that the laptop was password protected – and so, presumably, not encrypted.

The company confirmed to The Register that the theft had occurred and that staff had been informed. Police and the Information Commissioner were also informed.

According to the letter from Northcliffe Media sent to staff, and seen by the Reg, staff were advised to contact their bank to warn them of potential problems.

The letter, signed by group finance director M J Hindley, said:

The likelihood is that this theft was carried out in an opportunistic manner by a thief who will not realise that there is any personal data on the laptop and who may just erase what is on the hard disk in order to disguise the fact that the laptop is stolen.

I can assure you that we take security of personal data very seriously and have, since this incident, which was inadvertently caused by a technical issue, already further strengthened procedures.

The company apologised for any inconvenience or annoyance caused by the theft.

I bet this won’t stop the Mail castigating the government for its casual attitude towards data security.

So how much is FaceBook ‘worth’?

Posted on by

From the Sydney Morning Herald…

THERE has been speculation recently about what is being called an internal Facebook valuation – a value the company has assigned to its own common stock that is drastically lower than the $15 billion valuation set so publicly last year by Microsoft’s investment.

According to the transcript of a June 13 case-management conference in the lawsuit settled last week between Facebook and ConnectU – one of the few documents in the case not under seal – that figure is $3.75 billion, or one-quarter of the Microsoft valuation.

ConnectU had claimed that Mark Zuckerberg, a former employee and Facebook’s founder, got his idea from ConnectU.

The relevant passage from the document, under the section titled Defendant ConnectU’s Position, said: “The term sheet and settlement agreement is also unenforceable because it was procured by Facebook’s fraud. Indeed, based on a formal valuation resolution approved by Facebook’s board of directors but concealed from ConnectU, the stock portion of the purported agreement is worth only one-quarter of its apparent value based on Facebook’s public press releases.”

The piece goes on to point out that Microsoft bought preferred stock — i.e. ones with special voting rights, so the ConnectU figure is probably too low. But it’s still not $15 billion.

Leave your 3G dongle at home

Posted on by

From today’s Register.

Another jet-setting TV addict has fallen foul of unreasonable roaming fees, this time to the tune of £31,500, just to get their TV fix – just as the EU considers how best to curtail the operators’ roaming rates.

The chap concerned was on holiday in Portugal when he decided to forgo the local sights and download an episode of the TV drama Prison Break, along with a few music tracks, and was stunned to get a bill for £31,500 on his return.

The connection was with Yes Telecom, the small-business arm of Vodafone. While we might deride someone who failed to read the small print on their contract, 30 grand does seem a high price to pay for a bit of telly.

The chap, identified by the Manchester Evening News as Iayn Dobson, 34, contested the bill and Vodafone eventually agreed to settle for £229 – the amount Mr Dobson would have had to pay to use the same quantity of data at home…

On this day…

Posted on by

… three years ago, the London tube bombers struck. Isabel Hilton wrote this striking piece…

It was a cruel contrast. On Wednesday, Londoners rejoiced at the news that the city had won its bid to host the Olympic games in 2012. Thursday’s front pages were given over to scenes of jubilation. But as those editions reached the newsstands, London was already a darker, grimmer place, as a series of coordinated explosions ripped through its transport network.

The victims are still being rescued. The dead and injured are still being counted. We can only imagine the terror experienced by the thousands who were close to the explosions, some trapped in the darkened tunnels, dazed by the shock of what had overtaken them in the course of a normal journey to work. Millions more suffered that fear that grips the heart until friends and family can be reached. The dread, the deaths, the injuries, the lives devastated – this was London’s story today, as it has been the story of many others in many places, from Baghdad to New York, Paris to Bali, Madrid to Istanbul.

London is a city of diversity and tolerance, a multicultural capital, open, crowded and dynamic. These are the qualities that give it its vitality. The transport system is an easy target. Today the city is at a standstill; emergency services struggle to reach the trapped and the wounded…

Alpha female

Posted on by

Interesting Economist profile of Diane Greene.

ALPHA male, flamboyant, brash, megalomaniacal. Profiles of leading high-tech bosses tend to be littered with these terms, signs of the traits that they seem to need to make it to the top of the computer industry and stay there. But none of them applies to Diane Greene, the chief executive of VMware. Her company, which sells software that makes data centres run more efficiently, has quietly become the world’s fourth-most-valuable publicly traded software company, with a stockmarket value of nearly $20 billion. Its public listing last August was a bit like the heady dotcom days. Since then, the old guard has started ganging up on the newcomer, which boasts quarterly sales of nearly $440m and expects to grow by 50% this year. Microsoft, in particular, has vowed to take on VMware. On June 26th the software giant released its first competing product—predictably, as a free add-on to its flagship Windows operating system. How will Ms Greene play in the rough and tumble of the big league?

Is blogging reaching a plateau?

Posted on by

This interesting graph (compiled from Technorati data) comes from a BusinessWeek piece. I came to it via this meditation on the phenomenon, which says,

Perhaps we’ve realized that blogging every day isn’t as fun as it sounds. A happened-upon red swirl of autumn leaves before a backdrop of unusually artful East Vancouver graffiti may very well be a blog-worthy topic. Life’s minor muses are perhaps what inspire the pleasure blogger to pick up a keyboard in the first place, but it actually takes work to develop new material on a regular basis. No, writing never becomes easy no matter how long you do it.

Some difficult truths have been brought to light by the personal blogging blitz of the last few years. One such revelation is that most of us aren’t as interesting as we think. Waking up every day and jotting down some deep thoughts about breakfast is a difficult way to sustain any kind of readership. A creative writing teacher once told me that everyone has lived one novel-worthy story. One being the operative word, I think.

It’s as if we’ve gone through a few generations of blogging natural selection. The ones left are the big alpha bloggers, well suited to the harsh — and fickle — web environment. Said alphas have learned how to make money from their wordslinging, transforming what was once a very grassroots medium into something much more commercial. The pleasure bloggers just didn’t have the genes, nor the capitalistic instincts, to survive.

The writer goes on to speculate that the energy which originally powered the growth of blogging may simply be dissipating into other media — microblogging (like Twitter, Jaiku), social networking (FaceBook updates), etc. He also reveals that Google has acquired Jaiku, which is something I had missed. Hmmm…