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Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers 8 Feb 2012 – Singapore It all started innocently enough. I was thinking of implementing a Path Mac OS X app as part of our regularly scheduled hackathon. Using the awesome mitmproxy tool which was featured on the front page of the Hacker News yesterday, I started to observe the various API calls made to Path’s servers from the iPhone app. It all seemed harmless enough until I observed a POST request to https://api.path.com/3/contacts/a...  show all text

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Brands love marketing across social media, but it is a little like TV advertising in that it is hard to measure how effective it is. Sure, you can count retweets, likes, and Klout scores, but how does that translate into real engagement with a brand or actual spending? SocialFlow is trying to answer these questions, and in the process is growing like crazy. “I don’t know who put the call out to put money into social media, but it is out there,” says CEO Frank Speiser. A year ago, Socialflow had...  show all text

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Honeywell International filed a patent infringement suit against Nest Labs this morning, claiming Nest's new Learning Thermostat infringes several Honeywell patents. The patents at issue in the case...

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The Nest thermostat (in cooling mode). Thermostat giant Honeywell has filed a lawsuit alleging patent infringement by the buzzy Silicon Valley startup Nest Labs, which makes a smart learning thermostat. Honeywell has spent decades developing thermostat technology and just last week the company told me it had developed and tested learning thermostat technology, like the kind Nest has introduced, but that it had decided not to commercialize the learning tech after weak user response. Honeywell sa...  show all text

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I’m a critic of Citizens United. I’m a supporter of an amendment to reverse it (among other things). I’m even (sort of) a supporter of an amendment to declare “corporations are not persons.” But I am not a supporter of any amendment that purports to declare “Money is not speech.” My former dean, Geof Stone, explains why in this piece in the Huffington Post. Stone’s work as a First Amendment scholar actually set the framework for the Court’s core First Amendment jurisprudence (not the Citizens U...  show all text

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Facebook has announced what will likely be the tech industry's biggest Initial Public Offering of stock ever. What do practitioners of feminism, a philosophy centered in the experiences of women, have to say about the political economy of the world's biggest social technology? They've raised a number of interesting questions so far. It seems that everyone has an opinion about Facebook's stated goal of being a force for good in the world. Feminists online have also raised questions about the com...  show all text

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Tech writer MG Siegler just noted a remarkable fact: Apple's iPhone business alone is now bigger than Microsoft. Not Windows. Not Office. Microsoft. Think about that. The iPhone did not exist five years ago. And now it's bigger than a company that, 15 years ago, was dragged into court and threatened with forcible break-up because it had amassed an unassailable and unthinkably profitable monopoly. The iPhone also appears to be considerably more profitable than Microsoft. In the December quarter,...  show all text

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Well that title removes any chance that Business Week, Inc, Forbes, etc will pick it up, and that other than Brad Feld and Mark Suster, no one will reblog/retweet/etc, so we can speak plainly. Fuck yes. (Just making sure…) The past few weeks have been really interesting at Graphicly. We have achieved product/market fit, our new product launch has been overwhelming, and there is a clear direction and focus in the company. Revenue is doubling week over week, and our internal mantra has gotten equ...  show all text

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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — trembled in the face of Facebook’s IPO and all-out war on the open Web, also known as Google. Me, I go back to Bill Gates during the DOJ deposition when he basically said we don’t need no steenkin’ breakup when Google will come along and be invented. @kevinmarks makes a good college (fitting) try of defending the open schmopen set, while none of us seem to notice Social Spring just keeps on rolling over conventional  show all text

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In San Francisco cafes and bars, even on the street, I overhear people talking about their startup ideas, business plans, and goals. And there are tons of incubators, Angels, wannabe Angels, VC firms, making investments in startups. And there's lots of money being made, especially among the Super Angels, the incubators such as Y Combinator, the micro-VCs, and people such as Jeff Clavier, Dave McClure who have made fortunes selling startups to larger companies. Sometimes startup teams can go fr...  show all text

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The Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor – are recording live at 1pm PT. Recording has concluded.

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NEW YORK—Shocked and saddened witnesses at the Huffington Post's news-aggregation facility have confirmed that employee Henry Evers, 25, died Wednesday ...

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Halfway to living up to its moniker with over 250 startups, 500 Startups held a series of demo days this week and last, where a group of 33 scrappy startups presented their wares to investors in both New York and San Francisco. As we are wont to do with these things, we visited the 500 Startups offices in Mountain View and interviewed the seven that we thought were the most interesting, from both an investor and consumer standpoint. The startups chosen spanned all sorts of market territory, from  show all text

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Facebook’s public offering will make a lot of billionaires and millionaires, some of them prominent people and others not.

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Net Promoter, a mainstay of marketing measurement, is being adapted to the social media age with a Klout-like rating system based on the ratio of pro and con opinions on Twitter and Facebook. Its new product called SparkScore was announced Thursday by Satmetrix, the company that created Net Promoter. Like Net Promoter, SparkScore will rate companies on a -100-to-100 scale and average detractors, promoters and passives. However, the methodology will be different. Net Promoter is based on a simple  show all text

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Facebook shocked no one by filing an initial public offering of its shares today. The filing was the first glimpse into the company's inner financial workings and, as expected, Facebook said it would try to raise $5 billion when the company's shares begins trading - a number that could eventually be raised to $10 billion and would ultimately value the company between $75 billion and $100 billion. Today marks the day that Mark Zuckerberg goes from being the guy who makes world-changing technology  show all text

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While many modern executives live behind a wall of communications operatives, Rupert Murdoch, the chief of News Corporation, is openly expressing his opinions on Twitter.

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A new longitudinal study at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth focusing on the online activities of the Inc. 500 has found a huge drop in the number of companies maintaining corporate blogs over the past year. The UMass researchers, under the direction of Nora Barnes, has been following this group for several years. Only 37% of those interviewed had a corporate blog last year, down from half of those interviewed in 2010. Sponsor "The use of blogging may have peaked as a primary soci...  show all text

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Editor’s Note: Bindu Reddy is the CEO of MyLikes and was formerly Group Product Manager at Google. She was the first product manager for the project that evolved to become Google+. Her Google+ profile can be found here. Larry Page recently announced that he is quite thrilled with Google+’s explosive growth — with 90 million registered accounts and 80% of the people engaging on a weekly basis across all Google properties. The problem, of course, is that very few of these 90M users are actively p...  show all text

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The New York tech scene has certainly received a lot of hype, but a lot of people are waiting for results that prove it’s more than just that. Proof that New York is really a tech ecosystem that is here to stay, no matter what may happen to Foursquare and Gilt. This letter to shareholders from Betaworks Founder and CEO John Borthwick is one of the first pieces of evidence I’ve seen that New York is for real. The letter was sent out on Friday, and leaked to us by a source. There’s some interesti...  show all text

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I know many people are upset with Twitter’s announcement that it will now be able to block tweets country by country. There has been a lot of excellent writing / reporting on the content explaining that this is not as bad as it looks. (Check out good posts by my friend Jillian York here or Alex Howard here). My initial reaction upon a cursory reading of the announcement was also that it wasn’t too bad, given the alternatives. However I’ve since looked at the policy in more detail and my conclus...  show all text

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Agencies like the Federal Trade Commission have been trying to crack down on online product reviews that do not disclose the connection between a merchant and the person doling out the praise.

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The micro-VCs are growing up. Case in point: Jeff Clavier, who started out as an angel investor backing Web 2.0 companies and then transitioned his portfolio into a more formal venture firm, SoftTech VC. Clavier just finished raising a total of $55 million for SoftTech’s third fund. SoftTech’s main focus is on three areas: mobile, next-generation e-commerce, and cloud-based services. He launched SoftTech III a year ago with $15 million, with the intention to raise a total of $35 million. When he  show all text

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A staggering manufacturing system in China has made it possible for Apple and other companies to make devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up, but for workers, it can be dangerous.

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