National Defense Authorization Act Would Increase Funds To Fight HackersThe bill is expected to pass in coming days.

The bill is expected to pass in coming days.

 In a bill barreling towards passing both houses of Congress before the Christmas break, lawmakers are earmarking millions to make life more difficult for hackers in American cyberspace. The new National Defense Authorization Act is said to provide millions for maintaining the Department of Defense’s Cyber Command, and for research and development programs to help keep hackers at bay.

This is reportedly just the latest batch of money that would go towards cybersecurity--but because some of the funding is classified, it is unclear exactly how much the U.S. spends every year on that type of security.
While the technology world is said to mostly welcome the funding, the bill hasn't pleased everyone. Companies with defense contracts are peeved by a requirement that they report to the government if their systems are vulnerable to hackers, a requirement similar to one that was hotly contested by technology companies when it was introduced earlier this year in the 2012 cyber security act.

Will Samsung top Apple by withholding revolutionary tech?

Samsung leads the way in the technology that will drive the next big transformation in mobile devices. Could it withhold the innovation from Apple?

Samsung is drawing closer and closer to the technology that will transform the future of smartphones and tablets. The company will show off its progress in a couple of weeks at CES 2013 when it demos a 5.5-inch flexible display with a 1,280x720-pixel resolution and a 267-pixel density (an upgrade to the one pictured above from CES 2011).
While these displays are still at least a couple of years away from being used in mainstream products, they represent the next big innovation in mobile devices. They will enable much thinner, more power-efficient smartphones and tablets, and a lot more flexibility (pun intended) in product designs and form factors.
The big question is whether Samsung will share this innovation with Apple.

As you know, Apple and Samsung are still embroiled in an epic legal battle over whether Samsung has illegally mimicked Apple devices and infringed on Apple patents with its Galaxy family of smartphones and tablets.
Since Samsung is also the maker of lots of mobile-hardware components, Apple had been one of its best customers. And from Apple's point of view, Samsung was one of its most important partners for the iPhone, i Pad, and iPod lines.
However, the legal cold war between the two companies has inevitably altered the relationship. Apple has been methodically moving business away from Samsung. While some of this has been guised in the wisdom of diversifying its supply chain, it's impossible not to suspect this as retribution for Samsung's perceived improprieties.
Apple has significantly reduced its reliance on Samsung for memory chips. It is reportedly doing everything in its power to stop using Samsung to build the processors for its mobile devices. And it has moved much of its display business from Samsung to rival LG -- though it had to reportedly go back to Samsung and use it to make the Retina display for the iPad 3 because neither LG nor Sharp could meet Apple's next-generation display requirements.
Overall, the lost Apple business clearly hasn't hurt Samsung too badly. It has likely used the extra capacity to supply its own Samsung Mobile business, which saw the Galaxy S3 smartphone overtake the iPhone in 2012 as the most widely sold mobile device on the planet. The Galaxy Note has been a bigger seller as well.

Meanwhile, both Apple and Samsung continued to gobble up most of the profits in the mobile device market in 2012. As they go their separate ways, both companies are doing fine. The two will almost certainly continue to dominate the mobile market in 2013, as they introduce incremental improvements to their market-leading devices.
However, it's when we get to the next big leap forward that the divergence between Apple and Samsung could really matter.
The kind of flexible OLED displays that Samsung is showing off at CES in January are going to change the game. Because they are bendable, less breakable, lighter, thinner, and more energy-efficient, they will unleash a wave a new designs in mobile devices -- lots of things that haven't even been imagined yet, as well as designs that weren't possible until the right technologies and materials were available.
Samsung is far and away the leader in this category. According to its own executives, Samsung produces over 90 percent of the OLEDs currently sold. And it's the only company publicly showing off these types of bendable OLEDs on a large scale -- and it's been doing it for more than two years.
Other companies, like Philips, Sony, and Nokia, have talked up this concept, but none of them are as close to bringing it to the real world as Samsung is.
So, the natural question is where this would leave Apple if Samsung does end up as the clear winner in the OLED race. Would Samsung withhold the technology from its bitter rival and reserve flexible displays only for its own Samsung-branded devices?
The division that makes Samsung displays and the one that makes Samsung smartphones and tablets are two separate businesses within Samsung and each has its own profit-and-loss statements to optimize. So, it's doubtful Samsung would keep the display technology to itself -- at least not indefinitely.

But, since Samsung and Apple have such a fierce rivalry in the mobile market and now have such bad blood between them because of their legal squabbles, it's not hard to imagine Samsung giving its own devices the exclusive first implementation of flexible OLED displays.
It will eventually sell them to Apple and other device makers to make their own designs. But, since this technology represents such game-changing, corner-turning opportunity, the rest of Samsung's competitors will be a step behind and could inevitably be viewed as copycats.
What a turning of the tables that could be.
Apple certainly won't let this pass without a fight. Don't be surprised if Apple makes some quiet acquisitions to bring more display technology and expertise in-house. But, it may already be too late. Samsung could have its earliest flexible OLEDs to market before the end of 2013.

Steve Jobs' high-tech yacht impounded over bill dispute

Venus, the minimalist high-tech yacht commissioned by the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, has become embroiled in a row over a disputed bill. 

 

 French designer Philippe Starck claims Mr Jobs' heirs still owe him 3m euros of a 9m euro fee for the project, according to Dutch paper Het Financieele Dagblad.

Mr Starck called in the debt collectors and had the yacht impounded,
The Port of Amsterdam confirmed that the boat is not allowed to leave.
Jeroen Ranzijn, spokesman for the Port of Amsterdam told the BBC: "The boat is brand new but there is a 3m euro claim on it. The parties will have to fight it out."
Roelant Klaassen, a lawyer representing Mr Starck's company, Ubik, told the Reuters news agency that the boat would remain in port pending payment by lawyers representing Mr Jobs' estate.
"These guys trusted each other, so there wasn't a very detailed contract," he said.
Mr Starck was unavailable for comment.
Gerard Moussault, the lawyer representing the owners of the Venus told the BBC: "I cannot comment at all on this, sorry."
The sleek, 260ft-long (80m) aluminium super-yacht cost 105m euros ($138m; £85m) and was launched in October, at Aalsmeer, The Netherlands.
Mr Starck is known for his striking designs for the Alessi company, including an aluminium lemon squeezer that is shaped like a spaceship.

.

He collaborated with Steve Jobs for five years on the project, describing the boat as "showing the elegance of intelligence."
The vessel is minimalist in style and is named after the Roman goddess of love and its windows measure 3m (10 feet) in height.
Mr Starck has said that Venus "looks strange for a boat" but said its shape comes from design ideas he shared with Mr Jobs.
Mr Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in 2011 and never saw his boat go to sea.

Your Child's Cellphone; a Privilege or a Lifeline

Rebecca Levey is a co-founder of Kidzvuz.com, a video review site by and for tweens. She writes about technology and education at Beccarama and is a White House Champion of Change for Education. Follow her at @ Beccarama.
Despite Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on cellphones in NYC Public Schools, my 10 year-old daughters carry a cellphone to school every day. Like hundreds of thousands of other NYC students, they keep them in their backpacks turned off during the school day, and then activate them after school so they can text and call me when they arrive at their various after school activities. It’s an expectation every parent has at this point – the ability to get in touch with their child no matter where they are.
After the Sandy Hook school tragedy I began to think about how the various communication procedures in place at NYC public schools would work in an emergency situation. You’d think that after 9/11 all of this would be worked out, but 13 years ago when these plans were devised, cellphones were not common in schools, and smartphone didn't even exist. And yet, we are still operating as if cellphones and tablets are privileges, and not tools for aiding and helping in these types of situations. System wide emergency alerts are standard, but if all cellphones are shut off, or stored of campus, they are useless.

If my daughters were in an emergency situation I would want to know they had their cellphone for communication. If children were moved to a different location it would obviously be much faster for them to be able to contact their parent themselves, rather than rely on an administrator or teacher to go through a class list – if they even have access to that list where they are.
The first thing I did was put all family contact info on my daughters’ phones. For children with allergies and other medical issues, having that information accessible on a smartphone could make everything easier, and safer. We saw during Superstorm Sandy what happened when elderly people had to be evacuated, but their physical charts couldn't move with them. In this day and age that seems both unacceptable and very easy to fix.

As a parent I admit, I want to know that I can reach my child easily and not have to jump through hoops to do it – or wait for my phone to
ring. I also want to know that they will have all the info they need, or that a first responder would need to help them, right on their person if possible. And in a worse case scenario like a school shooting, I want to know they can send a text message to officials or to me, to alert them of danger or their hiding location.
I know cellphones can be a distraction, or worse a tool for cheating, but we need to have a real discussion about how these computers in the palm of our kids' hands should also be a part of any meaningful and effective emergency plan.
Does your child have a cellphone? Does your school and family have an emergency plan? Let us know how you think technology and
cellphones could help in an emergency.

Morgan Stanley Case Exposes Facebook to Similar Challenges

the world’s largest social-networking company, could be exposed to legal challenges surrounding its initial public offering similar to those faced by Morgan Stanley, according to legal experts.

In the first regulatory claims to flow from the May 17 IPO Massachusetts officials said on Dec. 17 that they fined Morgan Stanley $5 million for letting its investment bankers provide research analysts specific revenue information that was not disclosed by Faceboook to the general public. That broke a decade-old rule enacted after the dot-com crash to block bankers from influencing analysts, Massachusetts said.

 The settlement includes for the first time details of the closed-door conversations between Morgan Stanley and Facebook ahead of the IPO, including testimony from Michael Grimes, who led the deal for the bank. According to the consent order, Grimes wrote a script for Facebook’s then-treasurer to read to analysts that detailed Facebook’s lowered revenue estimates.
Grimes “did everything but make the phone calls himself,” the regulator said in a statement. Grimes was identified in the settlement only as a “senior investment banker,” though it provided biographical details that match his.
The revelation that Facebook gave specific estimates to bank analysts and not to the public revives questions about whether the company was sufficiently forthcoming ahead of the IPO, said Stephen Diamond, an associate professoor at Santa Clara University School of Law.

 

‘Denied Access’

“By providing that information to just a subset of potential investors, in essence they have denied other investors access to material information,” Diamond said. The Securities and Exchange Commission “should have pushed much harder to find out whether there was quantifiable data available or not,” he added.
Facebook has not been accused by regulators of wrongdoing. Michael Buckley, a spokesman for the Menlo Park, California- based company, declined to comment, as did John Nester, a spokesman for the SEC. New York-based Morgan Stanley did not admit or deny the Massachusetts claims in settling.
The settlement offers fresh insight into a widely anticipated IPO that turned into a debacle for the company and Morgan Stanley. Facebook shares have tumbled 27 percent since they started trading for $38 on May 18, to $27.71 as of the close yesterday. The company capitalized on its popularity among consumers by raising the price and number of shares sold to retail investors, who weren’t privy to the private conversations or revenue estimates.

 

Class Action

William Galvin, the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, said he didn’t have the authority to determine whether Facebook executives acted improperly.
“The broader issue is the fairness of the marketplace for investors,” Galvin said in an interview this week.
The details emerging from the consent order may also add ammunition to dozens of class actions, which a judge ordered to be consolidated earlier this month. The testimony disclosed by Massachusetts could be used by prosecutors attempting to make a case that Facebook and Morgan Stanley misled investors, said Erik Gordon, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business.
“The real liability for Facebook and Morgan Stanley is yet to come,” said Gordon.
If Facebook omitted material facts in its prospectus, known as an S-1, it could be found in violation of Section 11 or Section 12 of the Securities act of 1933, Diamond said.

 

‘Scariest Thing’

While it told potential investors that mobile usage could adversely affect revenue, the revelation that it gave a select group of analysts specific numbers on how that trend would affect sales over the full year could be considered a material omission, he said.
A violation of Section 11 could result in a fine or injunctive relief, or it could force the company to return proceeds of its IPO to shareholders, Diamond said.
“A material misstatement or omission in an S-1 is the scariest thing in the world,” Gordon said. “It’s going to hinge on whether the disclosures made in the S-1 were sufficient to give reasonable investors as accurate a view as reasonably possible.”
One of the earliest signs that Facebook’s growth wouldn’t reach the rosiest projections surfaced on May 7, the day the roadshow began, according to testimony cited in the settlement. That evening, Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman informed Grimes that Facebook’s second-quarter revenue would likely be lower than previously estimated

.

Less Confident

Ebersman had told analysts at an April 16 briefing at Facebook’s headquarters that sales would be $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion.
Now, Ebersman was telling Grimes that he was less confident about those numbers because user growth on mobile devices was outpacing advertising gains. Ebersman also said it was unlikely that Facebook would reach $5 billion in sales for the year, as he’d told analysts.
Grimes relayed that information to a Morgan Stanley capital markets banker, according to Massachusetts.
The next day, May 8, as the roadshow moved to New York to Boston and Baltimore, Facebook was predicting quarterly sales at the low end of its $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion range and sales 3 percent to 3.5 percent below the full-year estimate.
Grimes said in testimony that he advised Ebersman to update analysts on the numbers. To avoid the appearance of incomplete disclosure, he recommended updating the prospectus again to show investors the trend.

 

Treasurer Calls

At 8:10 p.m. that evening, Facebook’s management held a conference call with Grimes, capital markets bankers and counsel from Facebook and Morgan Stanley. Grimes testified that he was with the treasurer on the call. Facebook, with input from Morgan Stanley, decided to update the filing.
On May 9, as the roadshow moved to Philadelphia, Ebersman informed Facebook’s board by e-mail that the prospectus was being refiled. He also said the company was forecasting second- quarter revenue of $1.14 billion, while analysts were predicting $1.18 billion.
Grimes and Facebook’s then-treasurer, Cipora Herman, stayed at a Philadelphia hotel that evening to make calls to analysts. In preparation, they rehearsed the calls, with Grimes playing the role of the analyst.
After the S-1 was filed, Herman would call an analyst every fifteen minutes and read the script, which said that the social network’s second-quarter sales would be at the lower end of the $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion range.

 

Hall Sitting

Grimes said that while the analyst calls were being made, he was “far down the hall” so he wouldn’t hear anything.
“I took extra precaution to do that, and sat on the floor,” he testified.
The first call was to Morgan Stanley, followed by JPMorgan Chase and Co. (JPM) ,Goldman Sachs Group), and Citigroup Inc. Seven additional calls were made by 8:30 p.m. Grimes and the treasurer then joined the roadshow team in New York. On May 10 and May 15, the treasurer made calls to the remaining eight analysts.
Under the 2003 consent decree, Morgan Stanley had pledged to stop investment bankers from influencing analysts.
Galvin, citing the script and Grimes’ involvement, faulted Morgan Stanley for dishonesty, ethics violations and failing to supervise employees.
When asked later in testimony whether the treasurer had a script, Grimes said he didn’t remember. Yet, Facebook provided the Massachusetts securities division with a script that was handwritten by Grimes.

 

Low End

“You can decide what you want to do with your estimates,” he wrote. “Our long term conviction is unchanged, but in the near term we see these trends continuing, hence our being at the low end of the” $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion range, the script said.
Facebook filed its sixth amended prospectus at 5:03 p.m., and within minutes the treasurer called bankers at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, with Grimes in the room.
No revenue projection numbers were provided in the May 9 filing, and the company only discussed the trend for the second quarter, not the rest of the year.
After the calls, all three analysts from the lead banks reduced their estimates to the lower end of the $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion range. Morgan Stanley’s analyst lowered his to $1.11 billion from $1.18 billion.
The treasurer added to the script that the trends would remain over the next six to nine months, resulting in sales for the year of 3 percent to 3.5 percent below the $5 billion target.

Estimates Cut

Morgan Stanley’s analyst lowered his estimate by 3 percent to $4.85 billion from $5 billion.
Despite these lowered estimates, on May 15 the price range for the IPO was increased and the next day the number of shares in the offering was bolstered. On May 17, the pricing committee decided to offer shares at $38 a piece, the high end of the increased range.
Herman, who held finance roles at Facebook for five years, left the company in October to take a job as CFO of the San Francisco 49ers football team. Prior to joining Facebook, she was treasurer at Yahoo! Inc.
Bob Lange, a spoksman for the the San Francisco 49ers, declined to make Herman available for comment.
Professor Diamond said the SEC could have been more vigilant as it scrutinized Facebook’s IPO prospectus.

SEC’s Questions

The SEC had asked Facebook for more disclosure about the impact of mobile users on revenue during a two-and-a-half-month volley of messages, which were published after the IPO on the agency’s website. While it succeeded in getting Facebook to reveal more details about its business, it did not ask the company to estimate how mobile usage may affect its forecast for lower revenue in 2012, the messages show.
“The SEC bears some responsibility here, too,” Diamond said. “That’s a question I think Congress ought to ask. Why didn’t the SEC wake up and smell that something was going on here?”

Amazon: TV is about to get way more interesting

With the original programming strategies off all the major Internet video-streaming companies now in place, the TV business is about to change drastically.

When Amazon announced the creation of Amazon Studios and its plans to create orignal TV programming in May, it was widely described as a "crowdsourcing" project, giving ordinary people a chance to become TV producers. But of the six pilot shows the company has greenlghted, five come from producers either with impressive television resumes, or who are famous for something else.

 

 Just one show, a sitcom, was written by unknowns. The others include TV veterans from shows like 30 Rock, The Daily Show, and Big Bang Theory, as well Gary Trudeau, author of the Doonesbury comic strip, and the people at the satirical newspaper The Onion.
The roster of pilots sets up a battle royale involving Amazon and other Internet-video outfits and the TV networks. Nearly all major Internet-based companies have high-quality (or at least, potentially widely popular) programming in the works. They'll be battling the networks and the cable companies as much as with each other. The TV business is about to get even more interesting than it already was.

By largely abandoning the "crowdsourcing" of production, Amazon is acknowledging that its competitors -- Netflix, Hulu, and to some degree YouTube (which is focusing mainly on niche programming mainly comprising short videos) -- are working like big-time TV producers rather than Internet startups. Netflix is producing "premium" programming that supposedly would fit in well on HBO or maybe AMC. Hulu's budget for its original programming is a stunning $500 million a year.
Hulu's programming is the most network-TV-like of the bunch, which is not surprising as it is owned by several traditional TV networks. Its shows include a documentary series hosted by Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame, a travel show hosted by director Richard Linklater, director of Dazed and Confused, and a scripted comedy. Like network TV, the shows will be released weekly. On Netflix, by contrast, whole series will be made available all at once -- a strategy that's designed to attract high-level talent.

Competing with such fare would be highly risky if Amazon were to stick hard to the plan to solicit scripts from the general public. The "crowdsourcing" element, however, will stay in place in one respect: the pilots will all be streamed free of charge, and the viewing public will be given a chance to weigh in. The shows that are chosen to become series will be made available to subscribers to Amazon Prime, which already offers access to Amazon's film and television library. (Amazon's Prime service is increasingly the nexux of all its consumer-oriented services and hardware businesses.)
There is a big risk element for all the Internet-TV producers. It's not yet known whether they will be able to attract anything approaching the kinds of ratings TV networks enjoy, and hence grow to be truly competitive. But they also have little choice: as their libraries of second- and third-run moves and TV shows grow increasingly similar to each other, they risk becoming commodities. They have to shell out one way or another: either by paying premiums for exclusive distribution contracts with studios, or by creating their own programming. By doing the latter, they are at least more in control of their own destinies. And by hiring top talent, they are clearly formidable competitors to the traditional TV business.

Google Launches New Experimental Search Features For Tracking Your Online Purchases, Reservations & Events From Gmail

Google has long been running a number of experimental Search and Gmail field trails anybody can signup for and today it’s launching a few nifty new search features for searching your Gmail inbox from Google.com on the desktop and your iOS or Android phone. Previously, Google already let you find you flights by using the [my flights] search operator, but now you can also use queries like [my purchases] to find your latest Amazon acquisitions and track they packages they are coming in.



In addition, you can now search for various reservations through new search parameters like [my hotel reservation] or [my restaurant reservations] to bring up your travel plans and OpenTable bookings. In addition, you can also use [my events] to, as Google says, “see information from Ticketmaster or Eventbrite about your upcoming concert, sports game or other event.”
It’s worth noting that Google already uses some of this information, including your hotel and flight reservations, in its Google now product on Android 4.0 and higher so it can alert you of flight delays and when you need to check out of your hotel. Today’s update brings a bit more Google Now to the web.




These new features – just like the field trial – are only available for users with @gmail.com addresses in the U.S. and in English for now. Google Apps accounts can’t currently sign up for the trial.
Interestingly, Google is actually a bit late to the game here. Microsoft’s Hotmail introduced what it called Quick views in 2010. Quick Views is actually a bit easier to use than Gmail’s search operators, as they are highlighted in the sidebar of what is now Outlook.com and just take a click to select. Unlike Google’s implementation, though, Microsoft’s email service can’t be used to easily retrieve event updates and restaurant reservations.