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Posts Tagged ‘africa’

Nokia, still the world’s top mobile phone maker, reported a stronger-than-expected 65% rise in fourth-quarter net profit this morning. The Espoo, Finland-based company reported net profit of €948 million for the quarter or 26 eurocents a share, up from €576 million a year ago.

What caught our eye was the volume of devices the company shipped in Q4 2009: the total mobile device volumes of Devices & Services were 126.9 million units, representing an increase of 12% year on year.

The overall industry mobile device volumes for the same period were 329 million units (based on Nokia’s estimate), representing an increase of 8% year on year.

Broken down by region, Nokia shipped most of these phones and mobile computers to Europe and Asia-Pacific (68% of the total units shipped, combined). North America only accounted for 3.8 million units, while emerging markets like Middle East & Africa bought 24.3 million units.

Nokia estimates that its mobile device market share for the fourth quarter 2009 was 39%, compared with 37% in the fourth quarter 2008. The company says the increase was driven by higher market share in all regions with the exception of the United States and Canada, where market share remained flat.

Nokia shares are up a solid 12% in pre-market trading.

I think we can agree that helping charities is a great thing. Browse For A Cause is extending the giving through the web browser. Browse For A Cause is a browser add-on that collects affiliate revenue (usually 3-5%) from sites like Amazon to help charities. For example, if you buy a $20 DVD, the affiliate revenue equates to about $1 which is donated to the charity of your choice. You can support as many charities as you’d like, and revenue will be split between them.

Currently, Browse For A Cause is only a Firefox plugin, with a Chrome extension in the works as well. The group also currently has a white label solution for charities to create a branded add-on, so they can feature a custom version of Browse For A Cause to people on their own site.

For example, college students spend a lot of money on textbooks per year. Browse For A Cause Founder Eric Kerr spent $400 on textbooks last quarter alone – all through Amazon. If Browse For A Cause existed when he was buying those textbooks, he would have generated $20 for charity, just like that. The average student spends $900 per year on textbooks, according to reports, and if they bought these books on Amazon through Browse For A Cause, each student would generate $45 for their favorite charity.

One charity, Malaria No More (Ashton Kutcher promoted this awhile ago) provides bed nets to people in Africa to help end Malaria. Each net costs a mere $10, so each person in the above textbook scenario would generate 4 bed nets.

These are all great examples of how Browse For A Cause can be helpful in the real world, and how you can help as well.

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Early this morning we wrote about what appears to be a blatant rip off of Plurk by Microsoft China. Microsoft’s Juku product looks almost exactly like Plurk, and the code appears to almost identical.

Now, more than twelve hours later, Microsoft still has no real response to the situation. It was the middle of the night in China when the story broke, and Microsoft says that they are just now working with their team there to “track down the information.” In the meantime, Juku is being taken down:

Earlier today, questions arose over a feature developed by a third-party vendor for our MSN China joint venture. We are working with our MSN China joint venture to investigate the situation.

Unfortunately, when these questions first arose, it was the middle of the night in China. Now that the day has begun in China, our teams are working hard to track down the information.

Here’s what we know at this point. Our MSN China joint venture contracted with an independent vendor to create a feature called MSN Juku that allowed MSN users to find friends via microblogging and online games. This MSN Juku feature was made available to MSN China users in November and is still in beta.

Because questions have been raised about the code base comprising the service, MSN China will be suspending access to the Juku beta feature temporarily while we investigate the matter fully.

We will provide additional information as we learn more.

Only two things are really clear right now. First, Microsoft is standing around with their pants around their ankles looking pretty ridiculous right now. And second, this is the best thing to happen to Plurk, ever.

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A lot has been said recently about Facebook’s decision to re-write its privacy rulebook to encourage users to be more open about what they share. Privacy implications aside, at least it appears that Facebook is eating its own dogfood. First CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a bunch of person images, and now comes a big new feature that everyone should appreciate: Posting individual status updates to Twitter.

Yes, at some point this week, Facebook will roll out the ability to send your status updates to its rival, Twitter, we’ve confirmed. This will be built-in directly to its UI and not through some separate app you have to install, we’re told. It will be similar to the functionality it rolled out for its Pages feature in August, but this will be available on all profiles.

And you can see in the screenshots below, some Facebook employees are already testing it out. The status messages are sent to Twitter using the new fb.me URL shortener that Facebook launched today. Now the launch of fb.me makes a little more sense, Facebook is clearly getting on board with using Twitter as a platform to drive more traffic back to Facebook. Or having users simply use Facebook as their preferred third-party Twitter updater. But unlike MySpace, which also recently linked up with Twitter, this data exchange won’t be two-way. If you want to publish your tweets to your Facebook status, you’re still going to have to use a third-party app, like the Twitter one.

Is this a brave new world for Facebook, or a trap for their rival? Again, this feature will hit later this week.

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The short gloves are off. Earlier today, both Google and Facebook got into the URL shortening game with goo.gl and fb.me. Google’s move in particular is a direct challenge to bit.ly, the rising independent standard among link shortening services. Bit.ly’s response is in effect to ask publishers and consumers who they trust with all their data: Google or the rest of the Web?

To that effect, it is rolling out a new service called bit.ly Pro, which allows Web publishers to bit.ly to send out short links with their own branded (short) domain names such as nyti.ms, 4sq.com, mee.bo, or tcrn.ch. Publishers in the beta include AOL, Bing, foursquare, Hot Potato, the Huffington Post, Meebo, MSN, the New York Times, the Onion, TechCrunch, and the Wall Street Journal. What bit.ly is offering these publishers (us included) is a way to use a branded, trusted short URL which is powered by bit.ly. Publishers also get an analytics dashboard which shows realtime stats like the total number of clicks, and their distribution by geography and referring sites. Pro accounts is where all the money is, although bit.ly is not yet charging.

We’ve used our branded short domain tcrn.ch before with awe.sm for our story links we push out to Twitter, but switched to bit.ly because it was fast becoming the standard. In November, the bit.ly service shortened 2.1 billion links, up from 11.8 million the year before, and it currently accounts for about three quarters of all short links on Twitter.

As realtime streams increasingly become the communications bus of the Internet, the need for short links and their popularity will increase. The data surrounding those links—who passed them, which are the most popular, which are rising, which are falling—is potentially very valuable. To the extent that publishers and consumers don’t mind all of their data flowing through Google, they might just go with goo.gl and not worry about it. Bit.ly is betting they would rather control their own short links.

The appeal for publishers to use their own branded short URLs is that it acts like a verified link. Consumers who are familiar with the brand can learn to trust those links. In contrast, anything can be behind the generic short URLs, although bit.ly is taking steps to fight spam and malware abuse. Facebook with fb.me appears to be doing no more than just creating its own trusted short link for Facebook pages. Google, on the other hand, could easily expand goo.gl into a generic URL shortening service. Goo.gl launched only for Feedburner and Google Toolbar, but it is being used to shorten links from any and all domains.

Google was rumored to be sniffing around bit.ly earlier this year, but no acquisition ever materialized. Maybe it was just doing its homework.

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It’s no secret that most people use the same password over and over again for most of the services they sign up for. While it’s obviously convenient, this becomes a major problem if one of those services is compromised. And that looks to be the case with RockYou, the social network app maker.

Over the weekend, the security firm Imperva issued a warning to RockYou that there was a serious SQL Injection flaw in their database. Such a flaw could grant hackers access to the the service’s entire list of user names and passwords in the database, they warned. Imperva said that after it notified RockYou about the flaw, it was apparently fixed over the weekend. But that’s not before at least one hacker gained access to what they claim is all of the 32 million accounts. 32,603,388 to be exact. The best part? The database included a full list of unprotected plain text passwords. And email addresses. Wow.

The hacker has posted a sample of what they found. They have blanked out the passwords for now, but warns, “Don’t lie to your customers, or i will publish everything.” As far as we can tell, RockYou hasn’t issued a warning about this to its users yet. We’ve reached out to the company, but have yet to hear back.

RockYou has a history of stupidity. See here, here, and here. This may take the cake.

Update: Here’s the statement we were given by RockYou on the situation:

“On December 4, RockYou’s IT team was alerted that the user database on RockYou.com had been compromised, potentially revealing some personal identification data for approximately 30M registered users on RockYou.com. RockYou immediately brought down the site and kept it down until a security patch was in place. RockYou confirms that no application accounts on Facebook were impacted by this hack and that most of the accounts affected were for earlier applications (including slideshow, glitter text, fun notes) that are no longer formally supported by the company. RockYou has secured the site and is in the process of informing all registered users that the hack took place.”

They also say that they plan to issue the following email to users in the next 24 hours:

Dear RockYou user,

As you know, RockYou takes our users privacy very seriously.  We take

a lot of effort to protect user data from security breaches and attacks.

Unfortunately, RockYou has very recently learned that it encountered a security breach.  As part of this breach, it is possible that someone may have accessed at least your email address and password for the RockYou system.  We felt it was important to notify you of this immediately so that you could take any action you feel necessary to protect your privacy.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact security@rockyou.com.  We are sorry for any problems this has caused you.

The RockYou team

Hmm “we felt it was important to notify you immediately” … 10 days later? And what’s the excuse for the plain-text passwords? FAIL.

[thanks ES]

[photo: flickr/naughty architect]

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Legislation is going to be drafted and considered in the first months of 2010 by the EU that would limit the volume levels on personal media players to 85dB (they now peak around 120).

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EU considering limiting media player output to 85dB

Executives from Tudou—one of two companies left fighting it out to be the YouTube of China—were in San Francisco earlier this week to meet with investors and do a little schmoozing.

I met up with CEO Gary Wang and COO Sam Lai, who already raised some $85 million from Granite Global Ventures and General Catalyst Partners, and they swore they weren’t here trying to raise more cash. That’s a bit of a shock. Last we wrote about Tudou and its arch-competitor YouKu, they were burning through hundreds of millions between them trying to find what YouTube still hasn’t: A way for online advertising to pay for video’s outrageous broadband costs.

But more on Tudou’s financial prospects in a moment. One of the more interesting things we talked about was the company’s new push into mobile. Last week, Tudou won a deal to be the online video channel for China Mobile. Other than one-upping YouKu, who Wang says lost the deal, this doesn’t mean a huge amount yet. So far video can only run on high-end phones and much of China can’t even get 2G access, let alone 3G. And those who can have to pony up a pricey 150 RMB a year. While many game companies have reached massive new audiences via mobile, the people watching Tudou’s videos on their cell phones are likely the same affluent audience the company is already reaching.

But Tudou sees that changing in a few years for four reasons. One, China Mobile is investing some 58 billion RMB to build out 3G capacity in the country this year and will match that investment next year, hoping to catch up to other countries soon.

Two, phones are changing. Taiwan chip company MTK is developing chipsets that allow very low-end phones the ability to download and upload video. Low-cost MTK chips already supplies chips for roughly one-third of the Chinese handset market, Wang says.

Three, concurrent with the connectivity roll out and the dramatic step- up in what a crappy feature phone can do, data plans are plummeting in price. Lai says China Mobile is planning video-subscription plans that offer unlimited uploading and downloading of video for the equivalent of 75 cents a month. That’ll break user generated video in China wide open.

And lastly, in China people are replacing their handsets roughly every nine months. That means all of these changes could ripple out faster than if they required, day, a PC upgrade cycle to complete.

Forget YouTube running on an iPhone as the model—if Tudou’s plan plays out this could mean huge things for video in China, India, Africa and any other emerging market where basic mobile handset adoption and access is widespread but laptop-Internet usage lags. User generated video, gonzo journalism, and self-expression on this kind of scale will make Tweeting about the Iranian election (even if the merit of that can be debatable) look like a prehistoric version of social media-helping-social-good.

And of course, in many countries monetizing over mobile is easier than monetizing over the Web, because mobile minutes—whether pre-paid or subscription based—are essentially becoming currency for people without credit cards.

Tudou sees mobile video starting to take off in 2010, growing rapidly in 2011, and in 2012 generating enough actual revenues to equal what it makes in traditional online advertising.

So, what about those online ads? Wang had vowed when we last talked that the company would prove profitability without raising more money. There are two ways to do this: Sell more ads and clamp down on broadband. To stay alive Tudou, and some of its competitors, have had to do something most Valley companies would find unimaginable: Restrict how many people can view their site. By just making its broadband pipe bigger, Tudou, YouKu or a new competitor could double views in short order—but it’d be bled dry financially in the process. Proof? Since we last talked, Wang says he’s doubled bandwidth and was at capacity again in two weeks.

To add to the costs, Wang is running around Asia doing content deals to add professionally produced, non-pirated content to the 30 million pieces of video inventory Tudou has already. In fact, next year, he expects to spend more on content deals than on broadband. He says these deals are small compared to what gets done between the Valley and Hollywood. A hot new show (think an “Entourage” of Asia) may cost the equivalent of $200,000 US dollars for a two-year run, while a popular, but older show (think a “Friends” of Asia) would cost just $200 in US dollars for a two-year run.

Meanwhile, Tudou is producing a ton of original content including a TMZ-style entertainment news show and a “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” style reality show it co-produced with Nokia. Reality TV is a natural for producing lean content for a mostly TV-entertainment-starved nation. The Nokia show cost some $500,000 in US dollars to produce and thirty million uniques tuned in for the six live shows, where contestants could use friends or search engines on their Nokia N97s to help get the answers. A 20-year old girl won 1 million RMB at the end. In fact, it’s original content like that that helped Tudou win the China Mobile deal over competitors, Wang says. (No one wants to get dragged into a copyright war who doesn’t have to.)

It may seem a lot for one company to take on, but that’s the Internet business in China. Since so much of what we’d consider “old” media is developing at the same time, it’s a total land-grab free-for-all when it comes to content and information.

That’s the cost side. Wang said that revenues are increasing 40% per quarter, but admitted it was a small base. Total advertising revenues in China are small for the market: about $15 billion-$20 billion in US dollars. Half of that goes to TV, and a tiny 6% or so goes to online, Wang says. It’s at most $100 million in US dollars the country is carving up. (This could explain why sales of virtual goods are such a hot market.) He’s hoping to break even next year.

To put it mildly, between broadband costs, content deals, pioneering a new advertising segment in a young ad market, and now moving video to mobile, this is not an easy business. There’s a reason that out of thousands of YouTube copy cats, YouKu and Tudou are the only big ones that have survived, by most people’s estimations.

But unlike when I wrote my post last May, there seems enough traction that someone can survive in China’s online video business—whether it’s Tudou, YouKu, or a competing site launched by an existing Chinese Internet giant like Tencent or Sina. And that’s good news for the country’s 200 million Internet users.

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Windows 7 to bring more happy says latest ad South Africa’s data network owned by pigeon with 4GB drive attached FOLD-E! Clothes-folding robot demoed at SIGGRAPH We talked to the Pirate Party of the United States: Here’s what it’s all about Flashlight Speed Holster: Sure, why the hell not?

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Daily Crunch: Pigeon’s Delivery Service Edition

As an online free mapping service, Google Maps is a great product. But it’s lacking in certain parts of the world. And rather than pay people to go get information about those places, Google has smartly been using a service called Map Maker, which lets locals and people knowledgeable about the area edit it themselves. And this week, Google has added a couple important areas to the list: Mexico and Eastern Europe.

“These two launches have doubled the number of users who can map their country on Map Maker,” Google notes today. That’s impressive, but even more impressive is the full list of countries that can now use Map Maker to improve local maps. And while Map Maker doesn’t work in places like the U.S. and other well mapped-out areas of the world, you can edit things on U.S. maps such as place locations. It seems clear that Google Maps is a wiki of sorts now, meaning the community is responsible for a lot of the data on it.

Now, Google still looks over this new country data, and then allows certain portions to “graduate” to actual Google Maps. But still, it’s a great idea to get more information in your system for free. I wonder how long it will be until Google lets users in the rest of the world in on the fun to edit roads and other features that are incorrect or not listed? Maybe you’ll be able to put in information when you know a road is under construction for a set period of time, for example. That data is out there for large projects, but it would be very useful on a day to day basis for small jobs when I’m trying to get somewhere on time.

Below find an impressive before and after picture of Lahore, Pakistan, after Google Map Maker did its thing.

Update: Google has reached out to me with another piece of information about the Map Maker initiative. Earlier this week, they announced that the Map Maker data set in Africa would be available for non-profits and NGOs to download to further promote mapping the areas. More information on that is here.

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