This collection documents the events in Northern Africa and the Middle East starting in January 2011. Content includes blogs, social media and news sites about Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Sudan and other countries. Countries separated by site groups (scroll down the page to see all of them). Archived content is in Arabic, English, and French.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20110926040935/http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/
Saturday marks what would have been the 75th birthday of Jim Henson, the puppet pioneer and beloved conductor of many a fuzzy childhood friend, from Big Bird to the Cookie Monster. In his honor, today’s Google Doodle, which represents the company logo on the search engine’s home page, is an interactive puppet show, designed by Google and the Jim Henson Company.
Here’s a video from those two companies describing their collaboration on the doodle, as well as the prolific puppeteer’s creative process.
Yahoo’s co-founders and its chairman have acknowledged that it would take “months, not weeks” to complete a strategic review of company’s business, implying that any decision about reviving or selling the Web portal could take some time.
The message, from the co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, along with Roy Bostock, Yahoo’s chairman, came in an e-mail to employees on Friday that was intended to dispel a myriad of reports in the media about Yahoo’s future. Yahoo has been buffeted in recent weeks by the firing of its chief executive, Carol A. Bartz, after a rocky two and a half year tenure during which she failed to turn around the struggling company.
“While we will move with a sense of urgency, this process will take time,” the memo said.
“Months, not weeks. We know that’s a lot of potential distraction, but we believe it will be worth the wait.” The memo also made a vague reference about Yahoo’s investment bank, Allen & Company, “fielding inquiries from multiple parties that have already expressed interest in a number of potential options.” Presumably, that includes talking to private equity companies like Silver Lake Partners and other companies like Microsoft about potentially selling Yahoo in parts or in its entirety.
“There will be plenty of rumors and speculation as different parties try to advance their agendas in the media – but it is important that we not be distracted by the rumors and speculation,” the memo said.
On Friday, Amazon sent an e-mail to technology bloggers and journalists announcing a press conference to be held in New York on Wednesday.
Although the invite was typically cryptic, simply saying: “Please join us for an Amazon press conference,” it’s possible the company is finally ready to announce its long-awaited color tablet.
At the very least, it will be about a Kindle. First, Amazon press conferences in recent years have been the venue to announce a new Kindle. In addition, Amazon sent its press release to several gadget bloggers, including Engadget and Boy Genius Report.
I have to figure they are not corralling the troops to announce a new online store for air conditioners. Read more…
The phrase “if this, then that” is a bit of programming-speak: you tell the computer that if this happens, it should perform this action.
Now, a simple new Web service called ifttt — pronounced like “lift” without the l — aims to take that concept to the mainstream. It provides a way for people to easily automate interactions between Web services, like Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist and Tumblr.
The types of commands that can be created on ifttt range from practical to pure entertainment. For example, the service lets you program a task that will call you if the weather forecast is predicting rain. Or, you could rig a script that will send you a text every time someone tags you in a picture on Facebook. Or you could create a task that automatically saves all pictures you’ve posted on Instagram to your storage on DropBox. You could have the service e-mail you when your favorite band is coming to town.
Linden Tibbets, one of the creators of the service, said he hoped that the tool would generate creative and interesting interactions among the Web services that most people use on a daily basis, but not necessarily in conjunction with one another. Read more…
Kimihiro Hoshino/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe amount of data that people worldwide are sharing on Facebook is growing at blinding speed.
One of the most telling moments of Mark Zuckerberg’s presentation Thursday morning in San Francisco was a reference to a technology company he said he deeply admired. It wasn’t Apple, though his turn on stage seemed to lift several pages from the Steve Jobs playbook. It wasn’t Google, from which he has plucked some of his key lieutenants.
Rather, it was Intel, the world’s biggest microprocessor maker. Its co-founder, Gordon E. Moore, is credited with the observation that computer processing power doubles every 18 months. We now know that it doubles even faster. We know too that the logic he so astutely articulated fueled inexorable changes in technology, commerce and life as we know it.
“They understood the social impact they were having,” Mr. Zuckerberg said of Intel’s executives toward the end of his keynote speech at F8, the company’s annual conference for developers. “Facebook shares a pretty similar approach.”
He stopped short of calling it Mark’s Law. Mr. Zuckerberg knows better than to fully articulate the grandeur of his ambitions.
But the phenomenon he was pointing to has far-reaching repercussions. The amount of data that people worldwide are sharing on Facebook — voluntarily sharing, it should be said — is growing at blinding speed. Read more…
As much as any damage caused by Léo Apotheker’s inability to successfully communicate or execute his decisions during his 11-month tenure atop Hewlett-Packard, new chief executive Meg Whitman is concerned about what has happened to H.P.’s competitive environment.
Mike Nelson/European Pressphoto AgencyMeg Whitman said weaknesses in the sales of printer cartridges is a concern.
“The pace of change has accelerated” around H.P., Ms. Whitman said in an interview Thursday evening. “We have to anticipate, and anticipate and anticipate the trends.” These include the shift from PCs to tablets like the AppleiPad and the rise of low-cost corporate computing through Internet-based rentals of computing power like Amazon Web Services, she said.
“We have to look at our whole go-to-market approach,” she said, referring to the way products are marketed. Whatever she chooses to do, she indicated it will be led by hardware sales and not Mr. Apotheker’s software-led philosophy.
During a call with Wall Street analysts, Ms. Whitman talked about the need for H.P. to temporarily slow its investments and share repurchases, to rebuild the company’s damaged balance sheet.
She may need the money for more than that however. In a later conversation with The New York Times, the newly reminted chief executive identified weaknesses in the sales of its usually lucrative printer cartridges. “Printing is a 50 percent consumer business,” she said. “The consumer is pulling back, mostly in Europe, but to be honest here too.” Read more…
A new service introduced on Thursday will let users see and share which Yahoo news articles they and their Facebook friends have read.
By showing what are essentially recommendations, Yahoo is hoping that people will click on more articles. Friends are more likely to have common interests and would therefore have similar reading tastes, the theory goes.
“You’ll be able to discover content through the lens of your friends,” said Blake Irving, who leads Yahoo’s products.
The new service was timed to Facebook’s F8 conference in San Francisco on Thursday, where Facebook unveiled its latest enhancements. Read more…
Nick Bilton/The New York TimesAndy Samberg, a comedian who plays Mark Zuckerberg on Saturday Night Live, opened the Facebook F8 conference.
1:56 p.m. | Updated Adding more announcements from conference.
4:12 p.m. | Updated Yet more updates at end.
At Facebook’s F8 annual developer conference, the company announced that it was teaming up with media companies like Netflix and Spotify to let users update their feeds with information about what they are listening to, watching and reading.
The conference didn’t open with any new company announcements but rather with Andy Samberg, a comedian on “Saturday Night Live” who often plays Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder. After he spent several minutes poking fun at Facebook, the real Mark Zuckerberg appeared on stage.
Mr. Zuckerberg soon jumped into discussing new features on Facebook. He touted the growth of Facebook in recent years, noting that the company reached a milestone last week “when half a billion people used Facebook in a single day.”
Mr. Zuckerberg said one of the problems with Facebook is the profile page. Over the years, he said, the profile page has become difficult to navigate, and it is hard to find older posts. To solve this problem, Facebook is releasing a product called Timeline. Mr. Zuckerberg said Timeline “has three pieces: all your stories, all your life and a new way to express who you are.”
Timeline offers a highly visual view of a user’s Facebook profile and organizes content into photos, events and apps, all based on a timeline view that stretches back to the beginning of a user’s time on Facebook. Read more…
Back in March, a splashy start-up called Color Labs introduced a cellphone app that let people share pictures with friends and strangers nearby. The service seemed to have everything going for it: an accomplished serial entrepreneur at its helm and $41 million in the bank from noted investors like Bain and Sequoia Capital.
There was just one thing missing: users.
The new version of Color is built on top of Facebook.
Although 1 million people downloaded the original app, barely 10 percent are still using it, said Bill Nguyen, the perennially chipper chief executive and co-founder of Color. “And that’s if I’m lucky.”
But on Thursday, during f8, Facebook’s developer conference in San Francisco, Mr. Nguyen is introducing a fully revamped version of Color. It will retain the same name, but instead of relying on its members to generate pictures to share, it will pull in all of their photos from Facebook and arrange them in a easily browsable format. And as on Facebook, people can “like” and comment on photographs, as well as share them on the app and to the Web site through Color’s mobile application. The application will also let users create, edit and share group photo albums — a functionality that Facebook has not yet offered. Read more…
Warby Parker has surprised skeptics by building a business that sells stylish prescription eyeglasses online.
Now it has raised $12 million in venture capital, bringing its total to $13.5 million, to help it expand and manage the demand for the glasses. The money came from Tiger Global, the Menlo Talent Fund and existing investors including Lerer Ventures, Thrive Capital and First Round Capital.
The start-up, which is based in New York and opened last year, taps into two trends in e-commerce. It eliminates the middleman in order to sell glasses for $95, much less than the typical retail price of several hundred dollars, and offers attentive customer service. Anyone can return glasses at no charge, for instance.
But it has faced brutal inventory problems. The glasses sold out early on, and loaner pairs — glasses without prescription lenses that the company will send free to customers who want to try them on — are often back-ordered. Read more…
Corporate I.T. departments once passed judgment on every kind of technology used in the workplace. Employees had little choice of laptops and mobile phones. But today, because of a gradual loosening in company policies, employees have far greater say.
A survey published on Thursday by Forrester Research shed more light on the phenomenon by showing, for example, that 48 percent of information workers buy smartphones for work without considering what their I.T. department supports.
“It’s great for information workers, who buy a device based on their individual working style,” said Matt Brown, a vice president and research director at Forrester Research. “It’s a big challenge for I.T. departments.”
In many cases, employers reimburse employees for their phones as part of what are known as “Bring your own device” programs. In others, employees absorb the cost themselves.
Whatever the case, employee choice is shifting the kinds of technology used in the workplace to more consumer-oriented products. A number of companies that once emphasized selling to I.T. departments are now under siege. Read more…
Smartphones and tablets have changed the way people get information from the Web, but not everyone has, wants or can afford an expensive mobile device. But what if you could use a basic feature available on almost every cellphone to get information from Web sites just by sending simple text messages? Stefan Gromoll, a former astrophysicist and now a co-founder of the company Dotgo, explains just how to do that with the technology he helped develop.
While hacktivist collectives like Anonymous seem to be getting the most attention, regular old black-hat hackers continue to quietly steal money and take over computers around the world. David Perry, the global director of education at Trend Micro, reveals details of the recent exploits of a Russian hacker with the handle Soldier who managed to steal $3 million over the past six months from the unsuspecting owners of infected computers. And perhaps as an even bigger threat, some of these infected PCs may have spread malicious software to the corporate networks of several large companies.
In his Tech Talk Term of the Week, Pedro Rafael Rosado explores the practice of “deep linking.”
This week’s technology headlines include Google Wallet making its limited debut in New York and San Francisco; Google Plus invites the world to join; Netflix splits off the DVD-rental side of its business into a new company called Qwikster; and gamers quickly solve an enzyme riddle that has stumped scientists for years.
For those who never have time to read long Web articles right away, the Tip of the Week explains how to use the new Reading List feature built into Apple’s Safari browser to save those stories for later.
To find out more about the show and links to topics that were discussed, go to the Tech Talk page.
I personally like the Facebook updates — although some do feel a little too much like Twitter or Google+. The subscribe button finally offers people a way to stay in touch with others without having to be friends. I’m also willing to take any added clarity to Facebook’s privacy settings, which have been notoriously confusing in the past.
More important than my thoughts, there are 749,999,999 other people who have opinions about the site’s changes too. I asked people on Twitter and Facebook to share their thoughts about the latest site updates. Here’s what they had to say. Read more…
Prosecutors are throwing the book at Full Tilt Poker. A lawyer for the embattled online poker company is throwing a book back: the dictionary.
On Tuesday, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York filed a civil complaint against Full Tilt Poker and, in a press release, called it a “Ponzi scheme.” On Wednesday, a lawyer for Full Tilt called the label not just unfair, but harmful to the government’s cause because of its hyperbolic language.
Barry Boss, who represents a collection of companies that are part of Full Tilt Poker, noted that “Ponzi scheme” refers to an inherently illegitimate business model. According to Merriam-Webster, a Ponzi scheme is “an investment swindle in which some early investors are paid off with money put up by later ones in order to encourage more and bigger risks.”
In the case of Full Tilt, players put money in accounts with the company and used that money to bet against other players. In a civil complaint, prosecutors charge that Full Tilt management was tapping into those accounts to line their own pockets — to the tune of $440 million since 2007. Read more…
In the subway tube the other morning, my car whooshed past a billboard with a veiled threat: something bad is happening to my eyes.
The billboard showing a video game player wearing fashionable, wraparound glasses. “Stay Focused, Play Longer, Protect Your Eyes,” it said, for Gunnar Optiks.
Compared with normal humans, journalists have a professional advantage or, rather, duty: when something raises a question, we are both permitted and obliged to find an answer. And I wanted to find out if playing video games, or sitting in front of a computer screen, was doing damage to my eyes. Do they need protection? Will playing endless hours of Gears of War cause eye strain or something worse (in addition to unattended hunger and video game-related PBS — Pressured Bladder Syndrome)?
A few years ago, my colleague David Pogue — the arbiter of all things that work — wrote about Gunnar and found that the “high-performance eyewear” wasn’t a particular improvement on the naked eye. To find out what science has to say on the matter, I called Gunilla Haegerstrom-Portnoy, professor of optometry and vision science at the University of California, Berkeley school of optometry. Her short answer was no, computers are not putting my eyes at risk. Read more…
A few American companies are using ingenious robotic systems to squeeze out almost all of the harmful coolant in refrigerators that are headed for the landfill.
Social media has become a necessity in Mexico, with a mission far different from that of the Arab revolutions — here, it is deployed for local survival.
To watch streaming content from Netflix - as well as reach other sites - while in foreign lands, it can help to make your PC look like it's in the United States. A virtual private network can do just that.
The second-day ratings for Fox's much-anticipated singing competition, "The X-Factor," showed that most viewers from the first night liked what they saw and came back for more.
After the victim called out to divert the bear from attacking his fellow hunter, it turned toward him instead, the survivor has said. Then the survivor fired and killed his fellow hunter, an autopsy shows.
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Nick Bilton
Lead Bits blogger, San Francisco
Technology and society, Internet, futurism, video games, business technology
