Google TV Is Coming to Your Living Room

Google is working with Intel, Sony and other partners to develop Google TV, a service aimed at putting the Internet search giant's Web offerings in people's living rooms, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

Google TV will combine the company's Android mobile operating system and applications with television devices made for the OS, including set-top boxes, the paper says.

The TV technology will run on Intel's Atom chips, the report says, and Google will develop a new version of its Chrome browser for the TV project.

In a similar report, the Wall Street Journal reported some of the same information. Both papers cited unnamed sources for their information.

Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The use of Android for TV could put applications and other software developed for the OS on TVs in addition to smartphones, the devices the OS was designed for. The companies working on the project, which also reportedly include Logitech, "envision technology that will make it easy for TV users to navigate Web applications, like the Twitter social network and the Picasa photo site, as it is to change the channel," the New York Times says.

Google will open the TV platform to Android developers as part of the initiative, with a software developer's kit, the New York Times reports.

Several companies have already started using Android in devices made for TVs, including set-top boxes and 2D/3D graphics accelerators, designed around MIPS Technologies' chip architecture. MIPS and its partners have done the development work on Android to tweak it for use in such devices.

Android was designed to work with Arm processing cores, the most popular cores in smartphones, but some companies have ported Android to other chip processing architectures, including MIPS and Intel's x86 processing architecture.

Facebook Ousts Google As Most Popular Web Site

Facebook has become the most visited site in the US, the first time Google hasn't held the top spot since 2007.

According to internet monitors Hitwise in the week ending March 13 Facebook accounted for 7.07 per cent of web visits, compared to Google's 7.03 per cent.

“The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185 per cent last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased nine per cent during the same time frame,” said Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise, in a blog posting.

“Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14 per cent of all US Internet visits last week. “

Facebook was also the most popular site on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year's Day, as well as the weekend of March 6-7. The last time Google wasn't the most popular site was September 2007, when MySpace displaced it.

Facebook's traffic dipped towards the end of last year but the success of games like Farmville have boosted traffic significantly.

New Site Launch!

We've just launched our new completely redesigned website at http://smartboxwebmarketing.com/

It's still a hair rough on the edges, but browse around, and if you find any bugs please report them! :)

Microsoft Says, Don't Press the F1 Key In XP

Microsoft has issued a security advisory warning users not to press the F1 key in Windows XP, owing to an unpatched bug in VBScript discovered by Polish researcher Maurycy Prodeus. The security advisory says that the vulnerability relates to the way VBScript interacts with Windows Help files when using Internet Explorer, and could be triggered by a user pressing the F1 key after visiting a malicious Web site using a specially crafted dialog box.

Parisian Love - Google

Just a lighthearted video..

HoneyGrid Reveals 95% of User Generated Content is Spam or Malicious

Websense Security Labs has published its bi-annual State of Internet Security report and, as usual, it makes for pretty interesting if somewhat scary reading.

Covering the last six months of 2009, the report is based upon the findings of the ThreatSeeker Network which is used to discover, classify and monitor global Internet threats and trends courtesy of something called the Internet HoneyGrid.

Makes you wonder if someone searching for you actually finds you, or just the 'noise.'

So what did the HoneyGrid have to report about the Internet security threatscape for Q3/Q4 2009?

Here are the key findings:

• 13.7% of searches for trending news/buzz words (as defined by Yahoo Buzz & Google Trends) led to malware.
• The second half of 2009 revealed a 3.3% decline in the growth of malicious Web sites compared to the first half of the year. Websense Security Labs believes this is due to the increased focus on Web 2.0 properties with higher traffic and multiple pages.
• However, comparing the second half of 2009 with the same period in 2008, Websense Security labs saw an average of 225% growth in malicious Web sites.
• 71% of Web sites with malicious code are legitimate sites that have been compromised.
• 95% of user-generated posts on Web sites are spam or malicious.
• Consistent with previous years, 51% of malware still connects to host Web sites registered in the United States.
• China remains second most popular malware hosting country with 17%, but during the last six months Spain jumped into the third place with 15.7% despite never having been in the top 5 countries before.
• 81% of emails during the second half of the year contained a malicious link.
• Websense Security Labs identified that 85.8% of all emails were spam.
• Statistics for the second half of 2009 show spam emails broke down as 72% (HTML), 11.2% (image), 14.4% (plain text with URL) and 2.4% (plain text with no URL).
• 35% of malicious Web-based attacks included data-stealing code.
• 58% of all data-stealing attacks are conducted over the Web.

This comprises of honeyclients and honeypots, reputation systems and advanced grid computing systems, all of which combine to parse through one billion pieces of content every day while searching for security threats. Every single hour the Internet HoneyGrid scans some 40 million websites for malicious code as well as 10 million emails for unwanted content and malicious code.

De-Anonymizing Social Network Users

The H has an article about some researchers who found a new way to de-anonymize people. Compared to the EFF's Panopticlick, the goal of this experiment is not to identify a user's browser uniquely, but to identify individual users.

The test essentially exploits the fact that many social network users are identifiable by their membership of various groups. According to the researchers, it's very unlikelly that two people on any social network will belong to exactly the same groups. A 'group fingerprint' can thus allow websites to identify previously anonymous visitors. They describe the setup and all details and the results look very interesting.

They also have a live demo for the social network Xing that was able to de-anonymize me.

Tracking Browsers Without Cookies Or IP Addresses?

The EFF has launched a research project called Panopticlick, to determine whether seemingly innocuous browser configuration information (like User Agent strings, plugin versions and, fonts) may create unique fingerprints that allow web users to be tracked, even if they limit or delete cookies.

Preliminary results indicate that the User Agent string alone has 10.5 bits of entropy, which means that for a typical Internet user, only one in about 1,500 (2 ^ 10.5) others will share their User Agent string.

If you visit Panopticlick, you can get an reading of how rare or unique your browser configuration is, as well as helping EFF to collect better data about this problem and how best to defend against it."

Twitter Intros Local Trends

Sick of all this Apple Tablet talk? Why not switch your Twitter Trending Topics to something more localized? Actually, the new feature is still confined to major cities, so odds seem pretty good that, no matter where you go, most people will be breathlessly tweeting about Steve Jobs and company.

The new feature, rolled out last night, lets users "localize" their top trends, by country or by city. The spot reserved for Trending Topics on the right hand column of the site now reads Trending: Worldwide. Users can change locations with a pull down menu.

Countries include Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, the UK, and the US. On the city side, the service is largely confined to the US, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Antonion, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C. London and Sao Paulo are also on the list.

Twitter is currently working on adding more cities.

Facebook, Attorney General of California, and Web 3.0

An interesting discussion/interview with a Facebook employee regarding their data retention policies. Cliffs notes: Never put anything on Facebook you don't want stored forever, even if you delete it.

Due to overwhelming privacy concerns, many large web companies are now employing a new position: CPO "Chief Privacy Officer." Chris Kelly is Facebook's CPO, now running for AG in California.

The interview touches a bit on "Web 3.0" and the direction things are headed. Worth the read.

Read the whole interview: http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/?full=yes

How you can find SmartBox??!

Speaking at a conference over the weekend in Orlando, the most frequent question I was asked was "How can we contact you for more info on your services?"

Well, the easiest way is simply to Google us.  Like this:  http://tinyurl.com/ybtfdg9

Or, if you can't remember the name of my business, try just my name: http://tinyurl.com/ycszv22

:)

The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s

The NY Times has an interesting report on the iGeneration, born in the '90s and this decade, comparing them to the Net Generation, born in the 1980s. The Net Generation spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently while the iGeneration — conceivably their younger siblings — spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group, and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger networks.

'People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,' says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. 'College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.' Dr. Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, says that the iGeneration, unlike their older peers, expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and don't have the patience for anything less.

'They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,' says Rosen.

12 Things Made Obsolete This Decade

We're entering 2010 with all kinds of new gadgets, gizmos, and tech tools, but let's not forget that we've lost a few things this decade, too.

HuffPostTech took a look back at 12 things that became obsolete this decade.

From fax machines to landline phones check them out (and get nostalgic) in the slideshow below!

We'll start with the YellowPages..

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/26/obsolete-things-that-expi_n_402674.html?slidenumber=EAtemGCqMvg%3D&slideshow

Adding an authorized user to your Google Analytics account

A quick video on how to add SmartBox as an authorized user on your Google Analytics account so we can view and manipulate your data as required. 

Each American Consumed 34 Gigabytes Per Day In '08

Metrics can get really strange — especially on the scale of national consumption. Information consumption is one such area that has a lot of strange metrics to offer. A new report from the University of California, San Diego entitled 'How Much Information?' reveals that in 2008 your average American consumed 34 gigabytes per day. These values are entirely estimates of the flows of data delivered to consumers as bytes, words and hours of consumer information. 


From the executive summary: 'In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.' Has the flow and importance of information really become this prolific in our daily lives?

Failure Rate Study in Netbooks and Notebooks

Netbooks are more likely to fail within the first year than their more expensive laptop brethren, according to new research. SquareTrade, an independent US warranty provider, analyzed the failure rates of more than 30,000 laptops covered by its own warranties. It found that 5.8% of netbooks malfunctioned within the first year, compared to 4.7% for regular laptops and 4.2% for premium laptops costing more than $1,000. The research also raises question marks over the legendary reliability of Macs. 

Three PC manufacturers — Asus, Toshiba, and Sony — boasted better reliability rates than Apple. Macs have a 17.4% malfunction rate over three years, compared to market-leader Asus, which has a 15.6% failure rate. HP was the worst of the nine PC vendors listed, with a malfunction rate of 25.6% over three years.

Microsoft Office 2010 to Include Social Networking

From Microsoft's press release regarding the "5 Best Features in Office 2010":

Microsoft recognizes the social networking trend by adding Outlook Social Connector to the Outlook 2010 application. Outlook Social Connector will let you see emails, status updates, shared files and photos, and more all in a single view. You will also be able to see who your mutual friends are and other information to help you maintain and extend your social network.

Read more @ PCWorld

Your Business & Social Media

If you think social networking is only B2C, watch this video:

The accelerating decline of newspapers

U.S. newspaper circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades, as papers across the country lost 10.6 percent of their paying readers from April through September, compared with a year earlier.

The newest numbers on newspaper circulation, released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, paint a dismal picture for an industry already feeling the pressures of an advertising slump coupled with the worst business downturn since the Great Depression.

The ABC data estimate that 30.4 million Americans now pay to buy a newspaper Monday through Saturday, on average, and about 40 million do so on Sunday. These figures come from 379 of the nation's largest newspapers. In 1940, 41.1 million Americans bought a daily newspaper, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

In September, for instance, Nielsen reported that the New York Times was the Internet's most popular newspaper site, with an average of 21.5 million unique visitors per month, up 7 percent compared with a year earlier. Yet last week, the Times Co. reported a 27 percent drop in ad revenue for the quarter. At The Washington Post, which has lost $143 million through the first six months of 2009, the number of monthly unique online users was down 29 percent, to 9.2 million, compared with September of last year, just before the presidential election.

Read more @ The Washington Post

Better Twitter Results in Google Search

A Google blog post announces that Google has “reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in the search results”. Real-time results from Twitter will probably included in a special OneBox triggered by keywords that are suddenly popular in Twitter.

“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information,” explains Marissa Mayer.

The most difficult problem that Google has to solve is ranking tweets, as most microblogging search engines sort the results by date and aren’t able to filter spam and irrelevant results.

Twitter’s blog explains why the company co-founded by two ex-Googlers partnered with Google. “Our friends down in Mountain View want to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. A fast growing amount of information is coursing through Twitter very quickly, and we want there to be many ways to access that information. As part of that effort, we’ve partnered with Google to index the entire world of public tweets as fast as possible and present them to their users in an organized and relevant fashion.”

In the meantime, Bing has released a Twitter search engine that sorts the results by date and highlights the top links shared by Twitter users.