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Posts Tagged ‘documents’

Here’s a dilemma: The guy (”Hacker Croll”) who claims to have accessed hundreds of confidential corporate and personal documents of Twitter and Twitter employees, is releasing those documents publicly and sent them to us earlier today. The zip file contained 310 documents, ranging from executive meeting notes, partner agreements and financial projections to the meal preferences, calendars and phone logs of various Twitter employees.

We’ve spent most of the evening reading these documents. The vast majority of them are somewhat embarrassing to various individuals, but not otherwise interesting. An example - there are a number of documents showing the names of people who interviewed at Twitter for various senior level positions so publishing their names would obviously be distressing for them. Most of these people remain in their current jobs. Some documents show floorplans and security passcodes to get into the Twitter offices. We’re not going to post any of those documents.

But we are going to release some of the documents showing financial projections, product plans and notes from executive strategy meetings. We’re also going to post the original pitch document for the Twitter TV show that hit the news in May, mostly because it’s awesome.

There is clearly an ethical line here that we don’t want to cross, and the vast majority of these documents aren’t going to be published, at least by us. But a few of the documents have so much news value that we think it’s appropriate to publish them.

More posts coming soon.

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Earlier today, Valleywag ran a story about the U.S. government having access to Twitter’s “firehose” of data. The news apparently came from a source who presumably overheard a Twitter employee talking about it at lunch. To categorize that as “flimsy” would be an understatement. And so it should come as a shock to no one that Twitter is denying the allegations.

“Your characterization of this as bullshit is perfect. You could also go with laughable, libelous, and absolutely untrue,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote to us in an email this evening. I had asked if the news was “BS” and if Stone cared to comment about it on the record. Obviously, he did.

And obviously, he’s pissed off. And he should be if there’s no truth to this whatsoever. Valleywag has since updated the post with a quote from Twitter denying the allegations.

Here’s the core of what Valleywag wrote:

Whoever is seeding the restaurant gossip is being fairly specific. A source tells us that a loose-lipped Twitter staffer recently dished at a lunch that the company has allowed a federal agency to set up a tap to monitor a “firehose” of its data, including private details on users, presumably including private “direct messages,” IP addresses and account information. The Feds — the NSA would seem the most logical agency —then analyze the data to mine for information they deem of interest.

It is worth noting that Twitter did apparently talk to the U.S. government during the Iranian protests because the service was scheduled to have downtime that would have stopped the flow of communications. While Twitter did not deny talking with the government at that time, it was quick to note that it plays no role in its decision-making for the company. As Twitter is a fast growing communication platform being used around the world, obviously, that’s important.

[photo: Thewolfweb]

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Zoho Suite, a web-based software suite comprised of document, project and invoicing management tools, has launched an add-on that allows Zoho Office to integrate with Microsoft SharePoint.

Zoho users can now create new documents and save them to SharePoint in MS Office formats, view existing documents within SharePoint using Zoho apps, and edit existing documents with Zoho Apps and save them back to SharePoint. The new add-on also provides collaborative editing functionality in Zoho with the integration with SharePoint. Zoho says the add-on costs $2/user/month on an yearly subscription or $3/user/month for monthly subscription.

Zoho says that the seamless integration between Zoho and SharePoint will help businesses who want the best of both worlds: the ability to collaborate on documents on the web while still keeping data behind the firewall. If you have SharePoint installed in your intranet behind your corporate firewall, your documents in Zoho are saved back to your SharePoint server behind your corporate firewall leaving no data on Zoho Servers.

As we’ve written in the past, Zoho is an innovative document management tool, and includes easy access thanks to support for mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing across different app features. Zoho knows that it is going to have to fight an uphill battle to keep users from flocking to the web-based applications offered by companies with a vast reach (Google, Adobe, etc.) which is why these sort of integrations are helpful to the software’s success as an application suite.

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The dev team has released their latest carrier unlock, ultrasn0w, It requires a quick using redsn0w and then the installation of ultrasn0w through Cydia. If you’ve already jailbroken your iPhone 3G simply add repo666.ultrasn0w.com to your repositories list and download ultrasn0w.

What does this do? It carrier unlocks the iPhone 3G. Sadly, it doesn’t yet work on the 3G S. It is also safe to update to the latest 3.0 version.

Popular document sharing service DocStoc just launched a collections feature, which lets users package documents around a particular topic. DocStoc has already created close to 50 collections, including “Starting a Small Business,” “Advertising Online,” and “Traveling on a Budget,” and is opening up the platform to users to add to existing collections and create their own.

The feature is just another way to organize your documents online and can be a pretty useful tool to manage large amounts of documents that relate to different topics. Competitors Issuu and Scribd both have similar offerings. Scribd’s “Group” feature allows users to organize documents around a theme and tries to connect users to other people who are interested in the same reading and topics. Issuu recently launched a collaborative Groups feature, where people can collect, organize and discuss publications related to any topic. DocStoc’s feature appears to focus more on the organization of documents around a particular theme than connecting users around that theme.

DocStoc is steadily growing, with 3 million documents uploaded and 1.6 million unique visitors a month in the U.S., according to comScore. (The company’s internal Google Analytics shows 4.8 million unique visitors worldwide). Docstoc recently took off its “beta” label with a homepage redesign, open APIs, and a new revenue-sharing model called DocCash.

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The Business Insider, the blog network that includes Silicon Alley Insider and a pair of other business-focused news sites, has closed its third funding round. The company hasn’t disclosed the amount of the round, but reports peg it at around $5 million.

In a blog post annoucing the news, co-founder Henry Blodget details the new investors in the round, who include Marc Andreessen, Allen & Company LLC, Zelnick Media’s Jim Friedlich, and Matt Luckett of Balestra Capital. Other investors include Kohlberg & Company and the blog’s founders.

Blodget also notes that the Business Insider is seeing a healthy 2 million monthly unique visitors. Along with SAI, Business Insider’s other blog verticals include the Wall Street-centric Clusterstock and Green Sheet, which covers green energy and related environmental news. While the network had a false start with media site The Biz, which shut down in the last few days, we can probably expect Business Insider to expand into new verticals as the company continues to grow.

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In this day and age, with technology, no one works alone — that’s how Soonr sees it. And it’s a key part of the company’s offering: collaboration. Another is portability, and with the launch of the 3.0 version of its software, Soonr is expanding in both of those areas.

And this update comes complete with an attempt to leverage two of the hottest things out there: the iPhone and netbooks. Soonr launched its iPhone app back in January, and despite supporting some 800 phones, the company still touts that one as a key part of its business. And netbooks are a slightly newer phenomenon that the company is now mentioning as fitting in to what it’s trying to do. Sure, Soonr works on netbooks, just like it works on other computers. But buzz-worthy products aside, the key idea is that you can access your documents from a huge variety of devices, no matter where you are.

And version 3.0 offers some updates. One is called “Projects.” It allows users to better organize specific files together in the cloud. Another new feature is an admin interface so that team leaders can better oversee the collaboration going on. Another lets users send faxes from a mobile device with eFax. There is also support for video playback and a completely revamped UI. But the biggest new feature has to be the search functionality. It promises to work not only on titles of documents on your local machine/phone, but also will search text within documents across the entire network of devices attached to the files in the cloud.

For the first time with the 3.0 release, Soonr is offering a premium version of the product itself. Previously, it offered a free version, and premium versions through various partners. But apparently, it’s moving away from the white labeling idea, and trying to make money by selling the product on its own. For the premium version, prices start at $7.95 a month, but users can add a lot of options for higher fees. If you need it, you can get 2 terabytes of cloud storage for your documents.

I’m a little wary of the buzzwords, but Soonr has a solid product, that simplifies working with documents in the cloud. This looks to be a nice update to it.

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