From Flipboard's announcement:

Using the new Plus “+” button found on items in Flipboard or by using the new Flipboard Bookmarket for the web, readers can fill their magazines with content that expresses a point of view, reflects personal tastes or shares ideas they find inspiring.

In other words, Flipboard has introduced a poor man's "Like" button. The service is now counting on its users to begin tagging the articles and other items they find most interesting, creating a trail of "plussed" items that Flipboard will publicly associate with their online identities by default. This might, of course, take any number of people by surprise.

Flipboard also didn't say what it hopes to gain from the new feature, although cataloguing what users like has certainly proven a financial and data-collection bonanza for the likes of Facebook. 

The new features aren't intended for readers only. Flipboard hopes existing publishers will use its new functions to promote articles and other material from their archives:

For publishers this is a new way to share archival content, publish great collections or package together stories in a totally new way on Flipboard. 

Aspects of the "Plus" feature, of course, are similar to various "Read Later" bookmarklet services such as Instapaper and Pocket. The unique thing here, though, is the way Flipboard effectively publishes its users' preferences to the world as personalized "magazines" — by default, of course:

Because magazines are public, they can grow an audience and others can like items, comment on posts, or even subscribe to other people’s magazines. When people interact with a magazine, the curator learns about it through new Flipboard Notifications.

For each item that’s flipped into a magazine, attribution back to the source is preserved, and if the content is from a social network interactions such as commenting, retweeting or liking are reflected back to the originating social network.

Flipboard also announced "Content Search," a search box at the top of every page that "lets readers find anything being shared on Flipboard." The twist here is that each set of search results effectively turns into its own Flipboard-style magazine.  

The company also announced a partnership with the "social commerce" site Etsy. Flipboard readers can review Etsy products and make purchases from within Flipboard. The company did not state if this would impact existing purchasing rules and fees in any way, such as the 30% fee that Apple charges for in-app purchases. Flipboard also did not announce any new services or metrics that would enable readers or publishers to gauge pageviews and engagement of their "magazine."  

Flipboard has continued to garner interest from news media, the investment community and tablet users. Recently, Flipboard has been touted as a replacement for the deprecated Google Reader. Earlier this month, well-known venture capitalist John Doerr joined the board. 

The company calls this "the biggest release ever." Flipboard is a free app that claims more than 50 million users across iPhone, iPad and Android. Though the Flipboard app is available on Android, the features announced today are currently available only on iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. 

Lead image screencapped from the Flipboard app

This week, The Washington Post debuted a news app that can fact check speeches, virtually in real time. It's called Truth Teller, and for countless journalists and citizens looking to determine the accuracy and legitimacy of political statements, it's a step towards toward a brighter, more truthful future. 

Cory Haik, The Post's executive producer for digital news describes the app as a "speech-to-text technology to search a database of facts and fact checks. We are effectively taking in video, converting the audio to text (the rough transcript below the video), matching that text to our database, and then displaying, in real time, what’s true and what’s false."  

Released in partnership with the Knight Foundation Prototype Fund, and still in prototype stage, the app is currently focusing on the looming debate over tax reform. But Haik thinks it can one day be applied to streaming video, or even someone "holding up a phone to record a politician in the middle of a field in Iowa."

Yuri Victor, The Post's UX (user experience) Director, and the project lead in design, says the goal is to "hold politicians accountable and squash mistruths from spreading... to push the discussion forward on what's possible with real-time fact checking."

Here's a video of how the app works: 

Washington Post Truth Teller from The Washington Post on Vimeo.

The app works by transcribing videos with Microsoft Audio Video Indexing Service (MAVIS), which uses speech recognition technology that converts audio signals into words. Extracts of audio and video are then saved as a transcript, and the facts in that document are scrutinized for errors. To make it easy to search, the program focuses on patterns instead of specific phrases. This program is called a fuzzy string search algorithm. 

Not Replacing Humans

In today's cash strapped journalism environment, fact checkers have largely gone the way of the dinosaur. While there's still a few dedicated fact checkers here and there, the role has largely merged into the job of the reporter and the editor. Some publications, like The Tampa Bay Times' Pulitzer winning PolitiFact, still do it the old-fashioned way, with human being dedciated to the task.

Does this prototype of an automated fact checker threaten their livelihoods? 

Probably not, says Mark Glaser, the executive editor of PBS Media Shift. 

"I don't think that machines will be able to do all the work on fact-checking yet, but they can be a help and aid to human fact-checkers who might not be able to fact-check everything they hear instantly," Glaser said. "My guess is that this tool will take some time before it can threaten PolitiFact. More likely it will just be another weapon in the arsenal of fact-checkers."

The Post’s national political editor Steven Ginsberg agrees. "I dont think it's going to cost anyone a job. I don't think it replaces anything. I think it expands and broadens what you can do and who you can fact check - and correct a conversation before it gets too far on the wrong path."

Speed Matters

Ginsberg characterizes fact checking as a surprisingly difficult task that only a limited number of people are able to accomplish efficiently. And even for them, the process can take anywhere from an hour to an entire day or more.

And when an error is found, it's difficult to quantify how many people see the corrected fact compared to the number who saw the original mis-statement. When the two are so separated, it can complicate the perception of of what's true and what's not.

The beauty of this innovation, he says, is that it dramatically shortens the time between the falsehood and the truth: "People would get the truth a lot quicker," Ginsberg says. But the real value of the app won't be seen until it's in peoples' hands in town and city halls across the country, where they can use it for themselves to vet the thing that they are told.

"If you're a regular citizen and you want to hear a politician talk and see if he's telling the truth or not, you need something in your hand to go on," Ginsberg said. That's the ultimate goal for the Truth Teller app.

Photo courtesy of TruthTeller.com.

Flipboard’s most literate new category will serve as a portal to Apple’s iBookstore, which is stuffed with over 1.5 million titles. Each book in Flipboard offers a synopsis and an iBook link, so readers can readily purchase a must-read for their iBooks library. 

The Books section is divided into categories including literature, biographies and memoirs and history -- and less-erudite readers can flip through cookbooks and travel guides too. The new category launched with tailor-made bookshelves for the United States, Canada, the U.K., Brazil, Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain. Naturally, it sounds like Android Flipboard users won't see the new category. 

Flipboard is a social magazine by definition, but with the iBooks integration, the app will move into catalog territory. We can only imagine that swiping through Flipboard’s intoxicatingly visual bookshelves might have some patrons lining up for their Apple-issued library cards.

China's Hard-Core Rep

The report drafted by the Committee, recommended "…[t]he United States should view with suspicion the continued penetration of the U.S. telecommunications market by Chinese telecommunications companies" as a backdrop to dealing with all Chinese firms in that sector, and specifically called out ZTE and Huawei.

"Private-sector entities in the United States are strongly encouraged to consider the long-term security risks associated with doing business with either ZTE or Huawei for equipment or services," the report stated.

Both Huawei and ZTE have been linked by U.S. investigators as having close ties to the Chinese military, and both companies were accused earlier this year of selling equipment that would relay data back to China… allegations both companies have strongly denied.

Huawei and ZTE both vehemently denied today's report's conclusions. "We have to suspect that the only purpose of such a report is to impede competition and obstruct Chinese ICT companies from entering the US market," Huawei said in a statement to the press.

Given the lengths that technology companies will go to to protect their markets in the courtroom, it is not so far-fetched to assume that some well-placed lobbyists could exert some influence on House Committee members and paint ZTE and Huawei as bad actors. And that could be what's going on here.

But where there's smoke, there's often fire, and as noted, this isn't the first time suspicions have been raised about relying too much on components from our strategic competitors. For example, a number of private and public officials have long made it a standard practice to take extreme care with their electronics when visiting mainland China to avoid having their privacy and security compromised.

The Complex Western Pacific Climate

Rocky relations with the increasingly powerful and assertice People's Republic of China in a U.S. election season further complicates an already tense trade and political situation throughout the Western Pacific. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has projected a very strong presence in that part of the world, particularly in its relationships with Japan and South Korea, and keeping a balance in trade, resource and security interests in that region of the world remains challenging.

The political complexities in a region where billions of dollars of electronics are designed and manufactured (electronics that Americans consume voraciously and that underpin much of our computing and communciations device and infrastructure), are very much a part of the reason why the U.S. is renewing its efforts to establish a presence in Western Pacific, to give all nations in East Asia a clear signal that America is not going away. While the U.S. publicly denies that it's trying to "contain" China, there is little doubt that that's exactly what it's trying to do.

Watching The Ripple Effect

Today's Committee report will most certainly cool U.S.-Chinese relations, though listening to both U.S. Presidential candidate's stump speeches would probably have the same effect. If the rhetoric continues, each side might be tempted to start a more aggressive form of conflict, such as a trade war.

If U.S. companies abide by the recommendations of the report, it will be hard to tell what the immediate effects will be. It could prompt re-examining existing agreements with Huawei, ZTE and U.S. partners and would be even more likely to affect deals still in the planning stages.

Both companies make parts used to build electric power grids and banking and finance systems, not to mention parts for consumer devices. If any of those parts were critical to the manufacture of other companies' finished products and were blocked by participation in this embargo, it could create a scarcity that would bump up prices right before the U.S. holiday shopping season.

And there's no telling what China might do in retaliation. The complexities of the Asian markets are layered with many nuances, and the chain of cause and effect can be just as complex.

One possible first volley in such a push back could be a slow-down or cancellation of Beijing-vased Lenovo's recently announced plans to build a new computer manufacturing facility in Whitsett, North Carolina . If that deal's status changes, it would be a stinging financial and political blow to that region.

There is no sign yet that the Lenovo deal, or any other recent U.S.-Chinese deal, will be altered, but it is a possibility. But even if China chooses not to respond directly, U.S. participation in this recommended embargo will undoubtedly affect the global elecronics market and put further stress on gobal economies. 

Image coutesy of Shutterstock.

With legislation on the way to clear drones for flight in U.S. airspace by 2015, surveillance, security, law-enforcement, agriculture and hobbyist markets are poised to get a new, and maybe open, view of the world

"I owe a lot of what I know about drones to hobbyists," says Matt Waite, a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the founder of Drone Journalism Lab. He says that's because FAA restrictions have forced interested civilians to do it themselves.

"Because of FAA restrictions, we've had two groups really doing interesting things: the military, which we all know about, and hobbyists and DIYers because they can fly under hobbyist rules," Waite said. 

Among DIYers, journalists are leading the pack.

Wired magazine Editor-In-Chief Chris Anderson has been a vocal proponent of DIY drones for years. In addition to launching DIY Drones to help prop up the amateur drone market with open-source info, Anderson has also founded 3D Robotics, which sells drone kits and equipment. 

Waite calls Anderson's site, which offers open-source help for ambitious creators, a haven for those who want to learn.

"You're seeing this situation, like Chris Anderson describes, where hobbyists are crowdsourcing the military-industrial complex," he explained. "Most of what I'm looking at for journalism can be accomplished with what these hobbyist-class aircraft people write about on DIY Drones. They're solving the problems I don't know I have yet, and doing it in an open way."

Matthew Schroyer, the founder of Dronejournalism.org is developing drones for educational use under a National Science Foundation grant. Schroyer has built airplanes since he was a kid, and was introduced to drones in 2011. He realized the potential for drones in gathering data during major events like the Arab Spring and Hurricane Katrina. 

Schroyer parts are getting less expensive just as longer-lived lithium polymer batteries are proliferating. Both are major factors in broadening interest in drones. He says he started by lurking on message boards and learning from programming guides.

"You get a lot of freedom that comes with" open-source development.

"People can exchange information, post aerial photos or videos and basically advance the hobby," Schroyer said, noting that he has four planes in his office in Illinois. "You can build one for about $1,000."

Do It Yourself

Drone kits make getting hooked that much easier. Assembled radio-controlled helicopter drones are available at retail stores like Brookestone for as low as $300. Some can even be controlled with smartphones and tablet. Super easy.

Schroyer says hobbyists are using drones for everything from photography, to low-cost aerial mapping and first-person videography.

"It's really as involved as you want to get," he said.

There are two types of drones: fixed-wing, or mini-airplanes, and rotary, or helicopters with one or more blades. 

Drone creation is getting even easier with 3D printing, Schroyer says.  "Micro-controllers are continuing to evolve," like the $35 raspberry pie single-board computer, Schroyer explained.

"It's basically a tiny computer with all the bits to do the processing," and you can go down to Radio Shack and buy this or an Arduino microcontroller without breaking the bank." These micocontrollers allow users to get an input from a sensor and turn that into an action or command for the device.

Schroyer suggests newbies to do a lot of research, and to fly ordinary radio-controlled, or RC, airplanes or helicopters to get used to manual flight.

"Training on an RC simulator, such as RealFlight or Flying Model Simulator, is an even better first step, because then you'll be learning the mechanics without the risk of crashing," he said.

Schroyer also suggests joining sanctioned organizations like the Academy of Model Aeronautics, which offers insurance for damages, and local RC clubs, where you can meet other enthusiasts. 

While the ethical debate of civilian drone use is still up in the air the direction of the drone environment seems to keep going up. And with the FAA soon to ease restrictions, it looks like the culture is poised to keep flying. 

Photos by Moosharella and Timescan 

The chat lasted an hour, and got so much attention that it shut the site down during his post. 

Redditers pitched softballs and hard alike, but the fact that the leader of the Free World participated in the site's chat confirms mainstream success and reach for Reddit. It also showed the President's understanding of of social media's importance in reaching young voters. 

President Obama touched on the economy, the military in Afghanistan and how hard it is for young people to find jobs. He kept it light, too, saying that his favorite basketball player is Michael Jordan, and that he's "a Bulls guy."

President Obama previously received praise for joining Twitter and hosting the first Twitter Town Hall, on July 6. 

With this move, the obvious (nonpartisan) question remains: Will Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romeny be next to take to Reddit? Political battle lines run across social media. Can it be much of a stretch to start seeing regular Reddit threads, Twitter chats and Facebook posts from politicians? 

Despite Evernote’s efforts to move people to go paperless, Moleskine’s fancy journals are still a booming business. But according to the presentation at the Evernote Trunk Conference, 60% of Moleskine owners also use digital notes. While Evernote has long had optical character recognition built in, so stored photos of printed text are searchable on your computers, there’s still a big divide between our hand-written and digital outboard brains.

See also: Evernote: A 0-to–60 MPH Guide

Today’s update to Evernote for iOS adds a new mode called Page Camera, which is optimized for bringing handwritten pages into Evernote. It fixes the contrast and shadows, so the handwriting is more visibile. That makes the notes more legible to you, but it also enables Evernote to read and search the text.

While this works for any page, the Smart Notebook from Moleskine has some enhanced features. It comes with stickers that enable Evernote’s camera to automatically tag your hand-written notes, so they end up in the right place in your digital archive. The small version of the notebook is $24.95, the large is $29.95, and they ship October 1. They’re available for preorder now, and Evernote Trunk Conference attendees received one after the announcement.

Evernote’s OCR is great at print, but it also has some of the best computer scientists in the field of handwriting recognition behind it. Some of its core team members were on the Apple Newton team and wrote the CalliGrapher handwriting recognition engine. In May, Evernote acquired Penultimate, the best digital handwriting app for iPad, so now that team gets to optimize Evernote’s OCR with data from all that digital handwriting.

To fend off concerns about privacy when storing all these personal notes, CEO Phil Libin stated explicitly that Evernote is “not a big-data company.” User information is private, and it’s only used to optimize the tools themselves. “We want Evernote to be a cognitive aid,” Libin said.

After you turn on your services at kippt.com/sync/, Kippt can automatically save links from favorited tweets and starred repositories and gists on GitHub. It can automatically clip all articles you save with Pocket or Readability to Kippt’s Read Later section. For paid Pro users, Kippt is rolling out beta access this week to allow local archiving, so Kippt will keep your saved articles in your account, which you can export at any time.

Syncing these services with your account confers a few major advantages. You’re not just saving another copy of links you liked. You’re pulling them in from a bunch of services, and now all your favorite links are searchable in one place. You don’t have to remember where you found a link anymore; you can just go to Kippt.

In addition to the services you can sync to, Kippt is launching new options for sharing out to post-scheduling service Buffer and the new user-supported social network App.net. Those join Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pocket, Readability and Instapaper on the list of services you can send to from Kippt.

Because we all have different workflows for keeping track of our digital stuff, this kind of convenience is critical. The tech scene is full of good ideas about how to make our days online incrementally better, but many of them overlap. For a tool to work its way into our lives, it has to work well with what we already have. With the new services, Kippt accomplishes that.

It's worth noting that Kippt did so proactively, rather than waiting for help from the rising integration service IFTTT. The age of seamless, plug-and-play integration of all our favorite Web services is just beginning. IFTTT's star is still rising as the hub for every service to talk to each other. Kippt has been waiting patiently to get on IFTTT’s list, but Kippt's founders decided to build their own solutions in the meantime, so Kippt users can get these benefits today.

Thanks to a Congressional bill passed earlier this year and a pair of innovations significantly extending battery life, drones are moving from the battlefields to the backyards and airspace of American cities. While the military use of targeted drone airstrikes is well-known, what’s not is their limitations: namely battery life for the small, handheld devices.

One company working on fixing that problem is aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, which is tweaking the electric version of its Stalker drone, a 10-foot-wingspan drone that can fly as high as 15,000 feet. The Stalker normally stays in the air for about two hours, but Lockheed Martin has managed to extend its endurance by wirelessly recharging it via laser power, allowing the Stalker to stay in the air up to 48 hours. This could be a huge development, but the long-term potential has yet to be proven in outdoor flights - so far it's only been demonstrated in indoor trials.

Also in the development stage is Los Angeles-based Somatis Technologies, Inc., which is working on a kinetic energy composite that turns the interaction of wind pressure and vibrations into an an electrical power energy source and could more than triple battery life for handheld and gliding drones. These small drones - which have wings span of around five feet - have an endurance of only about 45 minutes when fully loaded with munitions, compared to larger drones, which have a battery life of about 14 hours when fully loaded. The company has created an energy harvesting formula that can extend the battery life of a handheld drone to about three hours, and even recharge it in flight. The key is piezoelectric composites, a material which helps convert mechanical energy into electrical energy.

"This vibration is energy," explained Dr. Baruch Pletner, Somatis' chief executive. "It's not a better battery in fact, but it's something that will recharge your battery.

Legalization, Grants and Public Safety Programs 

In February, Congress passed the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill, requiring the FAA to ease restrictions and legalize unmanned aerial vehicles in U.S. airspace by 2015. A host of industries are poised to take advantage of this change, namely law enforcement, fire departments, surveillance, security, and even data collection and journalism.

 While Congress hashes out the details, the Department of Homeland Security has begun to prep for its Robotic Aircraft for Public Safety program. The DHS has begun testing drones, awarded grants to at least 13 police departments to buy small surveillance drones, and is working to accelerate use by inviting drone manufacturers to Ft. Sill, Okla. to conduct more intricate real-world testing scenarios this October. 

As drone producers like Lockheed Martin and Somatis move from prototype to production within the next few years, battery life will be a key component in making unmanned aerial vehicle use attractive to a range of industries. If and when they get it right, drones will likely become an inherent part of everyday life in the not-to-distant future. When that day comes, our biggest concern may be what detractors are saying now: is drone use a moral dilemma or justified?

Last Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she hoped drones could one day see through thick jungle to locate international criminals, like warlord Joseph Kony. That wish may not be far off, as long as the drones have enough battery power to get there.  

Top photo by California National Guard. Bottom photo by US Army/D. Myles Cullen.

There's plenty of reason to see Netflix as an isolated victim of its own actions, beginning with its disastrous decision to split its DVD and streaming businesses and boost prices on both. And since a price hike was clearly on the table, Netflix might have at least tried to use it keep Starz/Disney content in the network, if only as a premium tier. And their decision to move from a pure content provider to a content studio (competing with its own suppliers) has met mixed reviews.

CEO Reed hastings has made some moves that are incredibly easy to second-guess, but there's more to the story than one mercurial cowboy. For all its foibles, Netflix is the gorilla of the OTT space, accounting for 20% of peak US Internet bandwidth and the majority of the space it defined.

It didn't get there by accident, so some of the stock's fall points to endemic weaknesses in the business model. Access providers will gripe as much about and and movie studios will demand even more from any less-established upstarts looking to challenge the king.

Courtesy of Statista

So where does this leave Netflix's competition? In the same boat, with second-tier catalogs and a limited margin through which to acquire premium content. For Hulu, the Netflix plummet could cause some reshuffling. Just a month ago, analysts were eyeing a 50x earnings multiple for a Hulu valuation.

Since then, Netflix has dropped from a 49.6 price/earnings ratio to just 32.37. Unless Hulu has some magic up opts sleeve (and it may, given its cozy relationship with current co-owners NBCUniversal and The Walt Disney Company), they should lower their target to the same range. Then again, with a third of its potential value off the table, putting Hulu on the market may not make a lot of sense.

You can read more about Netflix in this week's DeathWatch.

It began with a tweet. On July 9, friend of Mule and former NYTimes.com design director Khoi Vinh tweeted a link to statistics that showed the iPad is driving healthy evening news-reading habits.

@khoi a return to evening editions?

— Jim Ray (@jimray) July 10, 2012

“A return to evening editions?” Mule developer Jim Ray replied, by way of observation.

That simple exchange put a bug in the ear of Mule design director Mike Monteiro. He mocked up a daily news site called Evening Edition, and his team built and launched it in a week.

Evening Edition brings you today’s world news without push notifications. It has no streams or feeds. It doesn’t do [BREAKING] or [UPDATING]. It’s delivered by website to your device of choice every weekday at 5 p.m., and it’s just the right amount of reading for the subway ride from office to home.

It’s edited by Anna Rascouët-Paz, online media editor at Annual Reviews. She combs the day’s political and economic news from around the world, picks out the stories she finds important, and writes a paragraph explaining the significance of each story, including links to the reporting.

“It’s not aggregation,” Monteiro makes clear. She often combines several sources into a concise summary. It draws on other people’s reporting, like just about all of what passes as news these days - but Evening Edition performs a critical journalistic function that often falls by the wayside online: It elevates the significant information above the noise.

What’s Wrong With News Sites

“People on news sites are overwhelmed by stories in process,” says Mule lead researcher Katie Gillum. The front of your typical news site is throbbing with up-to-the-second headlines, boxes jammed full of shifting links, and a never-ending conveyor belt of posts tumbling into an abyss of “next page” links. How can advertisers and sponsors reach an audience that's stressed out by the presentation itself?

“We’re all constantly awash in a torrent of news-like 'updates,'” Ray wrote in his eloquent announcement of Evening Edition. “In between fake celebrity death tweets, divorce notices on Facebook and new-puppy tumblrs. How is anyone supposed to sift through all of that to get to the important stuff?”

Although touchscreen devices have brought back evening reading, news sites aren’t doing nearly enough of that sifting. The gap has been filled by applications like Instapaper and Pocket, which people use to time-shift stories to read later, when they’re more relaxed. But those apps come from outside the news industry, and they leave out the ads. That's no way to build a sustainable journalistic enterprise.

Ray views Evening Edition as a complement to time-shifting apps. It won't give you everything you need. But it gives you a baseline for staying informed, and let’s face it, that’s about all many people have time for. Evening Edition has removed the stress and work of getting that information. There’s no huge download, no email blast, no notification, no login, nothing annoying. What’s left is a desirable daily news destination. A precious, rare thing.

You want push notifications for @EveningEdition? Is it 5pm pacific? We’ve pushed. Is it before 5pm pacific? We have not pushed. Got it?

— Mike Monteiro (@Mike_FTW) July 17, 2012

No More Nostalgia

Evening Edition is supported by sponsors, not ads. Mother Jones magazine currently supports it as a sort of experimental partnership to find an online news model that works. Evening Edition's model won’t fund a newsroom in this form. But it offers a clue to the value that news organizations are missing: packaging their work in a way that suits its readers, rather than beating them over the head.

Journalism faces a disjuncture "between the time put into the story and the value of the product,” Mule director of strategy Erika Hall says. The old ways of reporting the news are expensive, and the old ways of selling ads are diminishing in value. That’s unsustainable. News organizations know it, Hall believes. “There’s this visceral drive to the future,” she says, describing the urge in the news industry to innovate the crisis away. “But it’s held back by nostalgia.”

Evening Edition doesn’t solve the problem of the tremendous cost of news reporting. But it costs little to build and run, and it delivers tremendous value that might eventually pay for original news gathering. The value of the service is its exceedingly simple package.

“This is just a small demonstration,” Hall points out. Mule’s leading by example, and news organizations can adapt the model for their own purposes.

The Whole Package

There are no rules about how to fund media in this attention-scarce economy. So experiments have to be fast, lean and flexible. Looking at it that way, it’s no surprise that the most appealing news solution I’ve seen in a long time comes not from a sclerotic news company but from a studio that knows how to package all kinds of communication from scratch.

But as a busy studio building sites for others, Mule has another, more practical advantage over news companies. “If this thing fails,” Monteiro muses, “everybody’s coming to work tomorrow anyway.”

You can read Evening Edition at evening-edition.com on anything with a screen and a Web browser. Each new issue comes out at 5 p.m. Pacific time.

Law firm Loeb & Loeb issued an infographic that gives a good overview of the results of ICANN’s application process for new generic top-level domains, or gTLDs. The organization received more than 1,900 applications for new domains. Of those applications, 40% were redundant as companies vied for domains such as .app (13 applications), .blog (nine applications) and .art (10 applications). 

About 40% of applications were for specific brands such as .Amazon or .Volkswagen. This is a testament to two factors within the gTLD process: the need for brands to protect their high-level domain names from cybersquatters and the marketing benefits of owning a gTLD. 

Several companies applied for a significant number of domains. Google (under the name Charleston Road Registry) applied for 101 generic domains while Amazon applied for 76.

Despite some early hiccups, ICANN's review has commenced. It will be interesting to see how and why certain domains will be awarded. From a high-level perspective, what is the difference between Google or Amazon owning a particular domain? Both are huge companies that have ample funding to develop such domains.

A bigger question is, how will companies created solely for the purpose of applying to gTLDs fare? These companies, such as Donuts Inc. and Top Level Domain Holdings Limited (TLDHL), help their clients handle the work involved in applying for a gTLD. Donuts Inc. had the most applications for gTLDs with 307 (106 more than second-place Google). The company has been overlooked by people analyzing the review process because each application listing is under a different name and email address. Donuts Inc. utilizes a Colombian (.co) top-level domain and each application uses a different email address. The co-founder for Donuts Inc. is Daniel Schindler and the company operates out of Bellevue, Washington. It has raised $100 million to administer gTLDs (which it will operate through registrars like GoDaddy). Donuts Inc. spent $56.8 million in ICANN fees to lodge its 307 applications.

Beyond that, little is known about companies like Donuts Inc. or Top Level Domain Holdings Limited. In many cases, the companies are working on behalf of third parties. But with so many applications between the two (TLDHL submitted 70 applications, fourth behind Donuts, Google and Amazon), each company likely will be awarded several, perhaps dozens, of domains. It is reasonable to trust companies that are well known to administer gTLDs, such as Google and Amazon, but it is curious to see these shadowy corporations applying for so many domain names. 

Donuts, TLDHL and their ilk make many pundits think that ICANN’s new gTLDs will cause a gold-rush land grab for premium property on the Internet. It is understandable for Amazon and Google to be heavily invested in gTLDs, and there are reasonable expectations of what each company would do with its allotted share of domains. On the other hand, it is difficult to ascertain exactly what will come if the mysterious newcomers win a significant number of domains. 

Whether computer technology should be used to monitor goal lines has become an urgent question among soccer officials. During a match at the high-profile Euro 2012 tournament between Ukraine and England on June 19, a referee disallowed a Ukraine goal despite clear video evidence that the ball had crossed the goal line. Consequently, officals called a meeting in Zurich where, on July 5, they will discuss whether to adopt two systems that monitor goal lines and automatically issue an alert when the ball crosses.

Officials Have Wavered Over Goal Line Technology

Historically FIFA, which strongly influences soccer’s rules at the highest levels (including the World Cup), has opposed the use of sensor arrays to monitor goal lines. Questionable referee calls during the 2005 and 2009 seasons led the organization to test such systems, known as goal line technology (GLT). In 2010, the International Football Association Board, of which FIFA is the most powerful member, voted against goal line technology. Instead, FIFA mandated the addition of an assistant goal-line referee.  

Jerome Valcke, FIFA's general secretary, insisted at the time that automated goal sensing systems had no future in soccer. FIFA President Sepp Blatter agreed, citing cost and potential interruption of the flow of the game. He stressed that automating the referee's role would diminish the fan experience. Emotional fan responses to disputed calls, he implied, were an integral part of the sport.  

Blatter changed his mind four months later, however, when referees made two clearly erroneous calls during the 2010 World Cup. He promised to put the technology on FIFA's agenda in an upcoming meeting. It never happened. After the debacle of June 19, 2012, though, he sent out a decisive tweet: ''After last night's match GLT is no longer an alternative but a necessity."

Two Systems Under Consideration

Officials have whittled the initial pool of systems down to two. One, developed by Hawk-Eye Innovations, has been used by broadcasters to track the ball in major tennis tournaments. The Hawk-Eye system combines images from 10 high-speed cameras to triangulate the path of the ball and create a 3D virtual-reality image of the exact position where the ball bounces. 

The proposed soccer version uses six cameras and triangulation software to track the ball. It's nearly 100% reliable and accurate to 3.6 millimeters, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mirror. The referee receives notification automatically when a ball crosses the finish line. 

Hawk-Eye’s visuals are likely to please broadcasters and fans and may also provide reassurance to refs, who are trained rigorously to determine goals via sight. However, it's expensive, and the camera's view can be obscured by players. It was developed by a company now owned by Sony, an official World Cup partner, raising questions about whether it is actually the best technology. (Luke Aggas, Hawk-Eye Innovations director of operations, declined to comment pending FIFA's decision.)

Hawk-Eye's competitor is GoalRef, developed in large part by Fraunhofer, the European research lab that created the MP3 music file format. Rather than cameras, GoalRef uses a magnetic detection system that combines electronic probes built into the ball and magnetic sensors on the goalposts. The technology determines whether a ball has crossed the goal line within one-tenth of a second, sending the referee a signal via wristwatch when a goal has been scored. GoalRef doesn’t provide visual evidence, but it's much less expensive than Hawk-Eye.

Independent Testing

Hawk-Eye and GoalRef are only two of many competing systems tested by EMPA, the Swiss Federal Laboratory for Materials Science and Technology. The first round of testing began in 2011. Goal Line Technology systems had to register an accuracy of at least 90% and the ability to relay video and other information to the head referee within one second. Contenders that accomplished this were promoted to a second phase of testing. 

Phase 2, which began in March 2012, is almost certain to result in a decision to approve Hawk-Eye and GoalRef, according to the Daily Mirror. If approved, the two systems may be deployed by late 2012.

The verdict from the court rejected the software company's appeal, though it did slightly reduce the level of fines by 4% to $1.07 billion (€860 million). "The General Court reduced the penalty payment marginally to take account of the fact that although Microsoft was obliged to make interoperability information available to third parties, the [EU Competition] Commission had allowed Microsoft to await the General Court's judgment on the Commission's 2004 Decision before allowing the actual distribution of interoperable products by open source developers," the court said in a press release today.

The penalty, which could be appealed one more time by Microsoft, is a throwback from an earlier time when Microsoft dominated the enterprise and consumer markets. That Microsoft would still be feeling the repercussions of its actions eight years after the original fine - and 29 years after Novell first made the antitrust claims against the Windows operating system - is high irony, indeed.

The irony stems from the fact that three decades later, Microsoft is no longer as sure-footed within the various sectors in which Windows operates. While still dominant on the consumer desktop, very strong incursions from Linux in the server space have weakened Windows' hold in that channel. And in new sectors - most notably mobile computing, cloud computing and big data - Microsoft is struggling just to be relevant compared to its competitors.

Making this even more painful is that this fine is this large because of Microsoft's apparent stubbornness to comply with the EU Commission's original orders for the software giant to share more information with competitors. The original 2004 fines of €778 million were more than doubled in 2008 when the EU Commission tacked on the additional €860 million fine. If Microsoft does appeal, and the appeal fails, that would mean Microsoft would have to lay out a total of $2.04 billion for this antitrust suit.

Microsoft complied with the original 2004 requirements laid out by the EU Commission in 2008 when the new penalty fine was issued, but that was after the fact.

For its part, the EU Competition Commission is pleased as punch with the court's ruling.

"The judgment confirms that the imposition of such penalty payments remains an important tool at the Commission's disposal," Commission Vice President Joaquín Almunia said in a press statement. If this decision stands, look for more such fees from the EU Competition Commission.

Faced with an IT sector that's shifting out from under the traditional desktop and server room models, it is not clear if Microsoft will appeal this ruling one more time. It's a lot of money, even for the folks at Redmond, but the Microsoft of 2012, fighting to maintain a future top-level place within IT, may simply want to atone for the sins of the Microsoft of old and move on.

The weekly magazine mixes short news stories and three long-form features in each issue. It arrives on Apple's Newsstand on Friday mornings. Single issues cost $0.99, and subscriptions come at $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year. Huffington Post won't discuss the budget for the magazine, although the cost is subsidized by sponsors.

"We're really comfortable with what we're spending on this," editor Timothy O'Brien told reporters last Tuesday.

The magazine has its own editorial staff of 24, led by O'Brien, a former editor at The New York Times. The articles will be new and separate from those on the Huffington Post website, but the writing staff will draw from the same pool. There will still be features on the website, but the magazine is the premium product.

"We do a lot of beautiful features that can be lost" on the main site, O'Brien said. In Arianna Huffington's post introducing the magazine, she led off with the fact that HuffPo has "nearly 500 editors and reporters who produce between 70 and 80 original reported stories each day."

HuffPo is heavily invested in journalism, but the economics of page views aren't doing it justice. No organization has a better vantage point on digital-only news production as Huffington Post, so it's an important signal for publishers that it is breaking out its high-quality reporting from its daily blogging and aggregating.

Adding an iPad magazine to the AOL-owned outlet's "array of narrative jewels" gives Huffington Post a chance to try out clean designs, strong typography and magazine-style full-screen ads, reducing the distractions and providing "stories to be savored." Huffington calls the magazine "HuffPost's more stylish offspring."

While the magazine requires a subscription, there's a free demo issue in the App Store, and articles shared by Facebook, Twitter and email can be read on the Web.

After a video of middle school students attacking 68-year-old bus monitor went viral, a Reddit user started a campaign to raise money to send her on a "vacation of a lifetime." In only two days, the campaign is approaching $200,000.

This isn't the first time that outrage over a relatively unknown event has snowballed into a major philanthropic campaign on Reddit. Since the site's launch in 2004, Redditors have contributed more than $1.7 million to multiple causes, often involving an injustice or bullying.

Karen Klein has worked as a bus driver and bus monitor (she sits in the back of the bus with the students to make sure they behave) for the Athena Middle School in Greece, N.Y. for 23 years.

Based on the video, it appears that the students began their attack after she asked one of the kids if she could look at a yearbook. They surrounded her and spent the next 10 minutes taunting and verbally assaulting her; at one point a kid grabbed her.

"If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all," Klein told the kids. "How 'bout you shut the fuck up?" one kid replied.

"She's going to pick out which kid she's going to rape next," said another at one point. They went on and on, picking on everything from her appearance to her social class, while she tried to ignore them and occasionally defend herself.

How did these kids maintain this assault for so long? Why didn't they get bored? She gave them almost nothing in response, and they just kept at it. After two minutes of abuse, someone plaintively, quietly urges one of the kids to "shut up." It didn't work.

It's hard to believe this really happened, but you can watch it for yourself. Warning: the language is explicit.

After the video took off on Reddit, Redditor Max Sidorov started an Indiegogo fundraising campaign to send Klein on the "vacation of a lifetime."

The crowdfunding site has been amazed by the response. "Everyone at Indiegogo was so proud this morning to see Karen Klein on television talking so bravely about her experience," says Indiegogo CEO Slava Rubin.

The original fundraising goal was $5,000; by the end of the day, it had reached $49,000. As of Thursday morning, it was approaching $190,000. Maybe Klein is interested in a ticket on Virgin Galactic.

On Thursday, Klein spoke out about the incident on the Today show with Matt Lauer. She opened up about the kinds of struggles she's been through, showing that she can handle things much worse than these snotty little kids.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This year, the foundation is holding three challenges to spur journalistic innovation in different areas. The first round, focused on networks, will award $1.37 million amongst six projects built on top of existing networks like Ustream and Twitter.

At this point in the ongoing disruption of the news business, existing networks have become entrenched as the places to distribute information. Twitter, Facebook, Ustream and YouTube not only have the critical mass of users, they also have the best mechanisms for rapidly circulating new, popular and trending content, whatever it might be.

That's why the first round of the Knight News Challenge focuses on tools that support the delivery of news and critical information to those networks in engaging ways.

Here are the winners of Round One, announced today at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference:

Behavio

Award: $355,000
Winners: Nadav Aharony, Alan Gardner and Cody Sumter
Twitter: @behav_io

Behavio is building a software development kit for Android to enable applications to take fuller advantage of the blanket of real-world data created by smartphones. Behavio apps will make use of phone sensors to monitor movement, behavior and surroundings. They can track communication via the phone as well as environmental factors like sound, light and motion.

Behavio wants to leverage the existing network of Android users to allow journalists and others to notice trends in community data, as well as for anyone to explore their own personal data.

One of the founders, Nadav Aharony, is a product manager for Android at Google.

Peepol.tv

Award: $360,000
Winners: Felipe Heusser and Jeff Warren

Peepol.tv (note: website is not live yet) is building a searchable, browsable map aggregating live streaming video from around the world. The high-profile protests of the last few years have demonstrated that the tools and infrastructure for live-streamed citizen journalism are basically there, but there is a range of applications and device platforms that split up the efforts and make them hard to discover.

Peepol.tv wants to be one central place for finding live video shot by anyone. It will be curated by topic and provide integration for sharing to social networks. 

Recovers.org

Award: $340,000
Winners: Caitria O'Neill, Alvin Lang and Morgan O'Neill
Twitter: @recovers_org

Recovers.org is a hub for communities to quickly launch Web portals for recovery efforts after a disaster. A community can immediately set up a [place-name].recovers.org site as a destination for fundraising and coordinating relief work. The company licenses the software to communities that want to be prepared, but setting up a post-disaster site is free.

Signalnoi.se

Award: undisclosed
Winners: Mohamed Nanabhay and Haroon Meer

Signalnoi.se will scan social network activity in real time to find out what stories are resonating with news consumers. It doesn't just look at keywords in headlines; it will track topics and notify editors of spikes in interest. This will help newsrooms decide which stories to cover and promote, looking at chatter about their own stories as well as those of competitors.

Tor Project

Award: $320,000
Winners: Andrew Lewman and Karen Reilly
Twitter: @torproject

The Tor Project is a network that allows private, secure online communication. It was originally developed as a secure channel for the U.S. Navy, but now it's used for confidentiality by journalists, law enforcement officers, activists and others.

Tor's proposal to the Knight News Challenge was to build a tool kit for journalists, which will include its secure Web browser and upload tool, other communication tools and training videos.

Watchup

Award: undisclosed
Winners: Adriano Farano and Jonathan Lundell
Twitter: @watchup

Watchup is an iPad app for finding news videos. It speeds up discovery of important news with a curated playlist from a variety of networks. It will develop partnerships with major U.S. news organizations, and it plans to support itself with advertising.

The Next Challenge

The second round will support projects that improve the collection, visualization, understanding and usage of the vast quantities of data we produce. Applications close on June 21, and winners will be announced at the end of September. Knight hasn't yet revealed the topic of Round Three.

These countries perceive the Internet as a profit center controlled by private interests, mostly in North America and Europe, according to officials from the U.S. State Department and Federal Communications Commission. They don't yet have the resources to develop Internet technology, but they do control state-owned telephone companies. If the ITU were to make slight alterations in its definitions of certain technologies, U.S. officials told Congress, they may not even have to vote on whether the Internet comes under the ITU's regulatory jurisdiction. They could simply presume that it does - and they may not even need a majority of backers to make that presumption.

Arab Fall

"The Arab States' proposal is very troubling," testified FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, referring to one of the items slated for discussion during the next meeting of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) this December. It's a meeting designed to reconsider the rules of global telecommunications regulation, and it will literally be the first such meeting since the invention of the World Wide Web.

"[It's] a small definitional change, maybe hoping no one would notice," the Commissioner continued, "that all of a sudden swallows the Internet, that expands the ITU's jurisdiction tremendously."

In his opening statement, McDowell laid out a disturbing strategy, one whose roots lie as far back as 1988. At that time, an international treaty insulated the Internet from any governmental body's regulatory authority, both national and international. During his successful presidential campaign, Russia's Vladimir Putin made the case that such treaties were effectively coerced by Western interests. Now, many U.N. member nations are acknowledging the existence of a "phone number crisis" - the notion that the world has more telephone users than there are telephone numbers to serve them. Mr. Putin has proposed that VoIP technologies are the solution to this crisis, but has argued that member states whose phone systems are presently overflowing won't be able to extend their phone services to the Internet - and thus charge their citizens the usual service fees and taxes for using VoIP service, which Internet treaties presently prohibit - unless and until an international body takes what Putin calls "control."

"The Russian Federation has proposed that the ITU be given jurisdiction over IP addresses, to remedy the phone number shortage. What is left unsaid, however, is that potential ITU jurisdiction over IP addresses would enable it to regulate Internet services and devices with abandon," McDowell continued. "IP addresses are a fundamental and essential component to the inner workings of the Net. Taking their administration away from the bottom-up, non-governmental, multi-stakeholder model and placing it into the hands of international bureaucrats would be a grave mistake."

"Information Security"

Ambassador Philip Verveer, a U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, has more experience with telecommunications law than anyone alive, having served as the Justice Department's lead counsel in the antitrust case that led to the breakup of the Bell System, beginning in 1973. Probably America's most respected expert on international telecommunications law, Verveer warned representatives on Thursday that, should the Internet be subject to an international regulatory body, any one of that body's members could designate itself, shall we say, solely responsible for its content.

"[Russia and China] have a concept that they call 'information security,' the ambassador told Rep. Ed Markey (D - Mass.). "Their concept of information security is both what we would call 'cybersecurity' - the physical protection of their networks - but it goes beyond that to address content that they regard as unwanted. I think as much as anything else, the base motivations that Russia and China have involve regime stability, regime preservation, which for them involves preventing unwanted content from being made widely available in their countries."

While these new superpowers look out for our information security, McDowell outlined the possibility - if not the likelihood - that a newly promoted ITU would institute something called an international universal service fund. 

In response to a question from Rep. Bob Latta (R - Ohio), McDowell pointed out that the companies responsible for attracting the most traffic could end up with the most liability for contributions to that fund - companies like Google (YouTube) and Netflix. "There might be an international mandate for some sort of regulatory regime to impose these charges, and that is a concern. If companies want to enter into a contract in a competitive market, I'm all for that. But we don't need an international regulatory body distorting the marketplace to anyone's disadvantage."

"Precatory Regulation"

According to the Constitution, treaties made between the U.S. and other countries are treated as law of the land. The treaties that make the U.S. a member of the ITU have been treated as law, including current international regulations that protect the state of the Internet today. Rep. Doris Matsui (D - Calif.) asked Verveer to project a worst-case scenario. "What would happen here in this country? Would those resolutions immediately become law? What steps could the U.S. take to limit its participation in the treaty?"

"First, it is conventional, and we certainly will take a very broad reservation from whatever is agreed at the conference," responded Verveer. "Virtually every other country will do the same thing. So you will have countries agreeing that they will abide by the provisions of the treaty unless, for some reason, they won't. When I say 'typically,' the reasons will be extraordinarily broad. That's one thing. The second thing that's very important to understand is, there's no enforcement mechanism associated with this. These are precatory, as are many, many other aspects of international law. So it is not reasonable to assume that, if something really ruinous, for some reason, was to be adopted as a particular regulation, you would see countries against their interests enforcing that regulation, as only the countries would be able to enforce - there's no other way for it to be done.

"So this conference, and all of these activities, are extraordinarily important in terms of establishing norms, in terms of establishing expectations," the ambassador continued, "and in terms of trying to help with respect to both commercial activities and the free flow of information. But they're very, very different from a law that the Congress, for example, might adopt that would be subject to all the juridical enforcement mechanisms that are available."

Speaking as part of a second panel featuring stakeholders outside the U.S. government, Internet Society Senior Public Policy Manager Sally Wentworth repeated her position from last month's ReadWriteWeb interview that the treaty process is inadequate for rule making with respect to a system whose stakeholders are comprised of more than countries.

"It is not simply that the treaty negotiation process excludes non-governmental stakeholders from decision making," said Wentworth, "but that it dramatically limits the extent to which participants from industry and civil society can even be meaningfully heard. In the United States, in contrast, the administrative process contains a wide range of checks and balances, including comment periods and public meetings that collect, record and, in many cases, incorporate public opinion in the rule-making process.  The WCIT lacks any similar structure to bring in expert advice, which makes it prone to making closed-door decisions without the benefit of the widest possible range of external input."

That said, Wentworth later told Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R - Ore.) that the next WCIT conference is only the beginning of a wave of international efforts. "I do think it's important that we put the WCIT in context. The WCIT is an extremely important event in 2012. It is a treaty-making conference. But the discussion of Internet governance will not stop there. There are ongoing discussions within the United Nations framework, in the Commission for Science and Technology for Development, within the International Telecommunications Union, and within the U.N. General Assembly that seek to take on these issues of Internet governance with a great deal of specificity. All of these discussions are things that we at the Internet Society are following carefully, and we think that multi-stakeholder engagement and discussion of these issues over the next several years is going to be extremely important."

ICANN Vice President and Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf told Congress he's concerned about any number of efforts by international bodies - the ITU being just one of several - to seize control of the world's Internet policy agenda.

"The process of involvement in the United Nations has one unfortunate property: that it politicizes everything," Cerf told Walden. "All the considerations that are made, whether it's in the ITU or elsewhere, are taken and colored by national interests. As a long-standing participant in the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Engineering Task Force, where we check our guns at the door, and we have technical discussions about how best to improve the operation of the Internet, to color that with other national disputes which are not relevant to the technology, is a very dangerous precedent. That's one of the reasons I worry so much about the ITU's intervention in this space."

The online travel market is crowded and Kayak, which launched in 2004, is battling many more competitors than just other old timers, such as Expedia and Orbitz. Newcomers like Hipmunk are giving Kayak and the others headaches by offering visitors a simpler layout that makes it easier to find the cheapest flight and hotel room.

Founded in 2010, Hipmunk surpassed 1 million monthly searches after its first year in operation and was growing roughly 15% each month, according to the San Francisco-based company. The company raised more than $4 million about a year ago in a funding round headed by Ignition Partners.

As a testimony to its better user experience, Hipmunk has made gains in the market despite its similarities to Kayak. Neither company actually sells airline tickets and makes hotel bookings, like Expedia and Priceline.com. Instead, they get a cut when their visitors book travel at the sites of airlines, hotels and other travel services. Kayak also sells ads.

This doesn't mean Hipmunk hasn't hit some bumps. The company started out only searching for flights and had to add hotel rooms after it realized airlines weren't willing to pay much for having traffic directed to their sites. As a result, hotel bookings have become the bigger revenue generator, according to the company.

Besides fighting Hipmunk, Kayak is also feeling the heat from tech giants. In 2010, Google acquired travel software company ITA Software for $700 million in order to start its own flight-search service. Microsoft is also in the game with Bing Travel, which has its own twist. Rather than just selling an airline ticket, Bing can tell the traveler the probability that fares for that trip to Paris will fall over the next week.

To Kayak's credit, the company has done well over the last year, despite the competition and being a fraction of the size of its largest rivals. The company is profitable. At the end of the first quarter, it reported a profit of $4.15 million, compared to a loss of $6.91 million during the same timeframe a year ago. Revenue rose 39% to $73.3 million. The number of travel searches rose by 45% to 310 million, according to its IPO papers.

And there's no doubt that Facebook's IPO cast a shadow over Internet company IPOs in general. The world's largest social network, with more than 900 million users, went from being the biggest technology IPO on record to the worst-performing public offering in the last decade. The fall from grace has been caused by doubts about its future ad revenue growth and mistrust in the way underwriters handled the share sale. Morgan Stanley led the Facebook IPO and was hired to lead Kayak's offering.

Kayak's IPO to raise $50 million was expected as early as last week. The company, which first filed to go public in November 2010, has denied it has delayed its IPO, saying it never set a firm date. A Kayak spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal that the company is waiting for market conditions to improve.

So its unlikely Kayak will be the first post-Facebook tech offering and therefore a bellwether on investor appetite for Internet company IPOs. That honor may go to ServiceNow, an IT cloud-computing services company, or Palo Alto Networks, an Internet security company, according to financial news service Bloomberg. Both are also to be led by Morgan Stanley.

In the meantime, Kayak will have to continue to fight hard and prove the rivals nipping at its heels won't derail its growth.

The Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant, available here, assesses whether your existing operating system can be upgraded to run the new Windows 8 preview. ReadWriteWeb is testing the Upgrade Assistant's efficacy on a partition containing the previous Windows 8 Customer Preview (the second of three). We have encountered no problems so far.

So, for now, we can advise you to run the Upgrade Assistant on (or more accurately, from) a partition containing a test version of an operating system, which may be either a disposable test copy of Windows 7 or an earlier Windows 8 preview. The program checks existing applications for their relative compatibility with the upgraded system, but even though we had installed multiple test applications in the Consumer Preview, the Upgrade Assistant did not offer an installation option that would let us keep any of them. “Keep nothing” was the only choice provided.

A Microsoft spokesperson told ReadWriteWeb to expect some of the improvements that many of us have been actively campaigning for. Once we see evidence of them, we’ll photograph them and tell you more about them here. One that we’re particularly keen to see is described as “increased personalization options for the Start screen.” Although tablet users testing the Consumer Preview have been impressed with the Windows 8 Start Screen functionality, the way in which it was visually segregated from the Desktop environment, coupled with Microsoft’s decision to make switching between the Start Screen and the Desktop more obscure, has been the principal complaint among Windows veterans (including myself).

One critical discovery: The "Keep nothing" choice, which may be your only one, means that whatever was in the "My Documents" folder on your old operating system's home partition will be completely deleted. So make certain you back up any contents from that folder that you wish to keep.

More information, including screenshots, still to come.