Posts tagged starting
Watch a YouTube Video With Your Friends by Starting a Google+ Hangout
Aug 22nd
YouTube has added a new option when you click the share button underneath a video. It says, “Watch with your friends. Start a Google+ Hangout.”
Now, Hangouts have been around since the day that the Google+ project was announced. On J…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Facebook to Offer Bug Bounty Program With Rewards Starting at $500
Jul 29th
Facebook today is launching a “bug bounty” program where it will pay researchers who find bugs and vulnerabilities in Facebook and report it to the company to be fixed. Developers who find bugs and report them to Facebook through its “Responsible Disclosure Policy” will be rewarded starting $500 or more, with no cap on how big a bounty developers can harvest.
Facebook follows in the footsteps of Google and Mozilla that also have bug bounty programs. Mozilla offers up to $3,000 for bugs found within its open-source software such as Firefox and Google offers between $500 and $1,337 (a number associated with geek lexicon “leet speak” created in the 1980s). One of the reasons that Facebook became the dominant social network in the Web. 2.0 movement is that it has fostered a developer community that has aggressively built on top of the platform. As such, the bug bounty program is a natural extension of that community.
Sponsor
See Also:
The Benefits of Bug Bounties
The Benefits of Bug Bounties
To qualify for the bounty, developers must adhere to the Responsible Disclosure Policy and find a bug that “could compromise the integrity or privacy of Facebook user data.” That includes cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF/XSRF) or remote code injection or any other such known hacking methods or vulnerabilities.
Only one bounty will be awarded per specific bug, starting at $500 with the ability to increase based on the type of bug. Bugs in third-party applictions, websites, corporate infrastructure are not eligible nor are denial of service vulnerabilities or social engineering (phishing) or spam techniques. Essentially, they have to be bugs in the Facebook platform itself and not part of some type of extension, app or add-on.
Here is the Responsible Disclosure Policy from the new White Hat information page for security researchers:
“If you give us a reasonable time to respond to your report before making any information public and make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations, destruction of data and interruption or degradation of our service during your research, we will not bring any lawsuit against you or ask law enforcement to investigate you.”
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Link Building by Starting a Market Research Firm
Jul 14th
One successful link building strategy is to start a market research firm for your specific industry. This strategy is so great because it forms a reusable, multi-usable, and specifiable asset that can become its own link building machine. Here&rsq…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Angry Birds Magic Connects Game to Real World, Starting at Barnes & Noble
Jun 28th
Today, Barnes & Noble has been revealed to be the first-ever location where you can unlock the free Mighty Eagle character in Angry Birds Magic, the new game from franchise creators Rovio. The idea behind Angry Birds Magic is to use technology, like GPS and NFC (near field communication), to connect gamers with their surroundings in order to augment gameplay and unlock special location-based rewards.
Sponsor
How to Unlock the Mighty Eagle at Barnes & Noble
With GPS, when gamers play Angry Birds Magic in certain locations, “magic happens,” explained Ramine Darabiha, Product Manger for the game at ReadWriteWeb’s 2WAY Summit earlier this month. But not every location will be magic, he said, only those that “make sense” for the brand.
That’s why B&N is the first location to be transformed into a “Magic Place,” as these special locations are called. It can promote Angry Birds both on its Nook Color e-reader and within its store, through merchandise displays.
In order to unlock the free Mighty Eagle character, gamers have to play Angry Birds Magic on the Barnes & Noble Nook Color while visiting one of the company’s 700 bookstores across the U.S. The Nook version of the game is available for $2.99 in the Nook’s app store and can be played over B&N’s free in-store Wi-Fi.
In addition, B&N will capitalize on their new partnership by offering Angry Birds-themed games, toys and other merchandise for sale and will offer free stickers and temporary tattoos to Angry Birds fans who visit the store.
More to Come, via NFC
This is just the first of many partnerships for Rovio. Other rewards will be enabled through the use of NFC, a short-range wireless frequency that enables data transfers over short distances. With NFC, you just tap or wave your phone over a sticker, tag, poster, object in order to enable a connection.
For NFC work, it has to either be built into the phone itself, or added on afterwards, via a case or microSD card. However, for its use with Angry Birds, it’s possible that you could simply place an NFC sticker on your phone to let the “magic” to happen.
Rovio previously said that the NFC features would be limited at first to Nokia’s devices, but would roll out to all other NFC-enabled phones soon. Currently, this is a short list, including Google’s Nexus S, some variants of the Samsung Galaxy S II and the upcoming BlackBerry Bold phones (9900/9930), among others.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Amazon Web Services Starting to Come Back Online but Problems Persist and Questions Unfold
Apr 22nd
Amazon Web Services disruption issues are now in a second day as engineers work to get the last of the availability zones restored.
Meanwhile, the customers affected spent the day talking with their customers while others such as Twilio were able to show how they avoided outages.
Sponsor
The latest update from AWS came late Thursday night:
10:58 PM PDT Just a short note to let you know that the team continues to be all-hands on deck trying to add capacity to the affected Availability Zone to re-mirror stuck volumes. It’s taking us longer than we anticipated to add capacity to this fleet. When we have an updated ETA or meaningful new update, we will make sure to post it here. But, we can assure you that the team is working this hard and will do so as long as it takes to get this resolved.
AWS kept its status page updated throughout the day. By early afternoon, all but one availability zone had been restored:
12:30 PM PDT We have observed successful new launches of EBS (Elastic Block Storage) backed instances for the past 15 minutes in all but one of the availability zones in the US-EAST-1 Region. The team is continuing to work to recover the unavailable EBS volumes as quickly as possible.
Data Center Knowledge wrote that the issue is specifically about EBS. You may recall that EBS has been something Reddit has struggled with for some time. We wrote about the issue in March.
AWS briefly explained what happened in an update yesterday morning:
8:54 AM PDT We’d like to provide additional color on what were working on right now (please note that we always know more and understand issues better after we fully recover and dive deep into the post mortem). A networking event early this morning triggered a large amount of re-mirroring of EBS volumes in US-EAST-1. This re-mirroring created a shortage of capacity in one of the US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, which impacted new EBS volume creation as well as the pace with which we could re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes. Additionally, one of our internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it’s difficult to create new EBS volumes and EBS backed instances. We are working as quickly as possible to add capacity to that one Availability Zone to speed up the re-mirroring, and working to restore the control plane issue. We’re starting to see progress on these efforts, but are not there yet. We will continue to provide updates when we have them.
The AWS region that went down is out of Northern Virginia. It has four availability zones. Customers have learned to use multiple availability zones within a region to avoid outages. And that’s what puzzling. How did this all happen? It may come down to how AWS defines availability zones.
The founder of FathomDB reviewed that question himself in a post on the topic:
AWS has two concepts that relate to availability – Regions and Availability Zones. They have five Regions – two in the US (one east coast, one west coast), one in Europe (Ireland), and two in Asia (Tokyo, Singapore). Each region has within it multiple “Availability Zones” (AZs), which are supposed to be isolated so that they have no single point of failure less than a natural disaster or something of that magnitude. AWS says that by “launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location”. It’s not clear whether ‘location’ means separate datacenters or separate floors/areas of a single datacenter, but it doesn’t really matter – the point is that AZs should fail independently until a catastrophic failure occurs. [Update below: it seems likely that they are in fact separate datacenters]
The post goes on to state that AWS, not customers are to blame:
This morning, multiple availability zones failed in the us-east region. AWS broke their promises on the failure scenarios for Availability Zones. It means that AWS have a common single point of failure (assuming it wasn’t a winning-the-lottery-while-being-hit-by-a-meteor-odds coincidence). The sites that are down were correctly designing to the ‘contract’; the problem is that AWS didn’t follow their own specifications. Whether that happened through incompetence or dishonesty or something a lot more forgivable entirely, we simply don’t know at this point. But the engineers at quora, foursquare and reddit are very competent, and it’s wrong to point the blame in that direction.
BigDoor CEO Keith Smith wrote in a blog post that he and his colleagues spent the day in crisis control. Amazon is historically pretty quiet about its problems. Smith said that has made it more difficult to respond to customers:
We aren’t just sitting around waiting for systems to recover. We are actively moving instances to areas within the AWS cloud that are actually functioning. If Amazon had been more forthcoming with what they are experiencing, we would have been able to restore our systems sooner.
But Twilio delighted in the outage as it gave it a chance to tout its architecture. Twilio has instituted a set of architectural design principles that minimizes the impact of occasional, but inevitable issues in underlying infrastructure. A post on the new Twilio engineering blog outlines the company’s approach.
The AWS outage will pass but there are some things that need to be explained. In particular how it treats availability zones. Customers need that clarification to better prepare for future outages that may occur.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
The Engadget Team Is Starting A New Tech Blog Under SB Nation – The Business Insider
Apr 3rd
 The Business Insider |
The Engadget Team Is Starting A New Tech Blog Under SB Nation
The Business Insider Topolsky says he's joining SB Nation because it, "believes in real, independent journalism and the potential for new media to serve as an answer and antidote to big publishing houses and SEO spam — a point we couldn't be more aligned on. … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Starting From Scratch: My Top 10 Desert Island iPhone Apps
Jan 27th
The life of a technomad cyclist (that’s me) can be hard on an iPhone and a couple weeks back, my phone had had enough. With the case coming apart at the seams and the on/off button no longer functioning, I trod to the Apple store in search of a quick fix. Luckily, I’d only had the device for one month shy of a year, so the nice folks at Apple promptly handed me a new one.
Somewhere along the lines, though, I managed to mess up the restore process and lost every app I’d had installed. Rather than going off the deep end, I took the turn of events as an opportunity to see what apps really mattered in my day-to-day iPhone use. Two weeks later, these are my results.
Sponsor
After some quick reorganizing to stick all those iPhone apps I never use (don’t you wish you could just delete “Stocks” already?) in a junk folder, I vowed I would keep all of my apps in the order that I downloaded them. I also vowed that I wouldn’t simply go about and try to recover the apps I could remember – I would wait until the moment I needed an app and then, and only then, download it.
As I left the Apple Store, I remembered an event I’d heard about earlier, but where was it again? Echofon, the iOS Twitter client, it turned out, would be the first app on my new phone. And what would I do with the rest of my night? Oh yes, Facebook you were a close second. And where was that great burrito place down the street? Where were my notes again? Ahh, Evernote, I knew it wouldn’t be long.
From there, the downloads came quickly, but naturally over the next day or two, before slowing to a trickle. I checked in with Foursquare, searched for a Pho spot with Yelp, snapped some pics of Wikipedia’s birthday party with Flickr and so on. (For those of you wondering, here’s why Beluga is on my top 10 list…and if you haven’t tried Plancast, it’s essential for finding out what’s going on where.)
Since then, I’ve added on a couple more, such as Hashable, the Twitter-based introduction and contact tracking app, Posterous, the simple blogging platform, and ReadItLater, the time-shifting TIVO for text on the Web. But there you have it. There’s my two-weeks-later, must-have list of iOS apps.
I know, I know. I’m a minimalist. I’m missing out on the hundred other apps I had on my phone before that fateful day…but until I find that moment, the one where I pull out my phone and think “I really need to…” I just won’t download it.
Think about it. If you only had ten apps to download, what would they be? Would they be admittedly-intriguing apps like Shazam or EveryBlock, or would they be the same old, mundane, world-changing apps like Twitter, Facebook and Google?
Tell us your top 10, stuck on a desert island apps in the comments below.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
BlockChalk Starting to Look Like Delicious Meets Foursquare Meets Technorati
Jan 12th
BlockChalk, an unusual location based service that has yet to launch publicly but will focus on allowing users to post messages to their neighbors, announced today that it has hired Ian Kallen, an engineer who helped build high-profile blog search engine Technorati for 5 years.
Kallen said of the BlockChalk team, “their vision coincided with my long-standing interests in virtual communities and bringing them to real communities.” The small startup was founded in late 2009 and includes former Delicious engineers Josh Whiting and Stephen Hood and was funded by Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, among others.
Sponsor
Technorati was once one of the most important companies in the emergence of social media: indexing, searching, categorizing and ranking the wildly disruptive world of blogs. Kallen helped build that system from 2004 through 2009, when it began to go downhill fast. The former blog search marvel is now mostly an advertising network.
BlockChalk has been closely watched not just because of its founding team and backers, but also because it has been quite public pre-launch about the general outline of its work, including a discussion this Summer about lessons the company learned in raising funds.
The company calls itself “a bulletin board in your pocket” and though public reaction to simple early tests has so far been lukewarm, the company must have some interesting things being prepared behind the scenes in order to continue making such interesting hires.
Discuss
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Checkins Starting to Pay Off? Topguest Nabs World’s 2nd Largest Hotel Chain
Dec 2nd
Topguest, the location-based “checkin” service that gives travelers hotel points, airline miles and other travel perks, has just nabbed one of its biggest partners yet: Choice International, the world’s second largest hotel company. Choice manages brands like Quality Inn, Comfort Suites and Cambria Suites.
What, you ask, only the second-largest hotel chain? Actually, Choice joins Topguest’s previous partners, including IHG, the largest hotel chain worldwide. That means the top two hotel groups are now using Topguest’s service for location-based marketing. Maybe it’s time you sign up, too?
Sponsor
Checking Fatigue? Not With Topguest
When Topguest launched this summer, we asked if you were sick of “useless badges and mayorships” and ready for something that really paid off? That sentiment has grown in recent months, it seems. Although Foursquare and sites like it are seeing increased numbers of check-ins (Foursquare is almost at 5 million users now), a backlash from those who don’t see the point of these apps is growing as well. For example, this recent diatribe on the blog All Facebook vehemently calls out Foursquare and others for massaging our egos to the extreme, in a very bad way. Of course, that’s just one example. Another is TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy explaining why she wouldn’t bother with Foursquare.
In addition, a cavalcade of studies on the actual use of checkin services all report nearly the same data – location-based check-ins are still a very niche activity.That doesn’t mean their users aren’t passionate (they are) or that the trend won’t go mainstream at some point (it probably will), it simply hasn’t caught on yet.
But why not? What about the deals? There are plenty of those out there, especially if you live in urban areas like New York or San Francisco, but for the rest of us, there’s only the occasional retail discount or free cup of coffee. Good to have, but not ground-breaking.
Topguest’s Checkins Lead to “Real” Deals
However, with Topguest, you’re getting deals that have a bit more impact on your bank account and lifestyle. You can check into your hotel and earn reward points or you can check into your flight and earn airline miles. And unlike in other “checkin” based applications, those points add up to real perks. Instead of unlocking a badge, you can earn free drinks, spa passes, complementary stay credits, 25% off rooms at top hotels and more.
The best part about Topguest is that it works on top of the check-in services you’re already familiar with, including Foursquare and Facebook Places. So if you can’t stand to lose your mayorships, or whatever else kitschy stuff they come up with next, you don’t have to. Just associate that account in Topguest’s smartphone app and checkin. (The app is Android or iPhone only, for now. If you’re a BlackBerry user, you can still earn points by signing up online.)
Other Parnters
Since its launch, Topguest has been quickly adding partnerships with major travel brands. In addition to Choice it’s now partnered with Standard Hotels, Soho/Tribeca Grand Hotels, Viceroy Hotels, Priority Club (Holiday Inn, InterContinental, Indigo), Select Radisson, Best Western and Leading Hotels of the World properties, Thompson Hotels & Restaurants, Avis Car Rental, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, Doubletree, Hilton HHonors, Wingate by Wyndham and Virgin America.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
SEO- Final Opportunity 10% Discount SEO Link Building Starting October 25 – FPRD (press release)
Oct 25th
 theEword (blog) |
SEO- Final Opportunity 10% Discount SEO Link Building Starting October 25
FPRD (press release) Search engine optimization or SEO is a process that increases the visibility and efficiency of a website by making it easier for customers to find a website … SEO Services Company Techmagnate launches new 'Business' SEO package Five Lies SEO Companies Tell 7 Hot SEO Tips For The Holiday Season – Get Started Now! |
View full post on SEO – Google News
