Tech Today w/ Ken May

Facebook is nearing a billion users, but what could topple the big blue giant? Government intervention, the shift to mobile, and a loss of “cool” all have the power to violently disrupt the social network, or at least cause it to lose its strong grip on the market. Here’s a look at the four things that could ruin Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a single site that connects the world. The thread that runs between all these pitfalls is their potential to make Facebook irrelevant. If you can’t access it, its overrun by ads, there’s something better, or it’s simply uncool, Facebook could fade away. It’s size, network effect, and wise leadership could protect it from these threats, and honestly, I think Facebook has the potential to be successful for a long, long time. But if you had to bet against Facebook, here’s what you’d be betting on. Big Brother Facebook is banned in China and access is or has been restricted in several countries including Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Right now this is limiting the social network’s growth potential. But if disputes with governments over what content is appropriate cause it to be shut out of more countries, these roadblocks could divert users to other local social networks. That would fracture the value that comes with having such a high percentage of Internet users in one place. For example, Singapore is a valuable market with a strict government that could drop the ban hammer on Facebook. Regulation around privacy could also slow Facebook down and make it more vulnerable to competition. Facebook narrowly escaped privacy audits from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Union . If the government of a core market put restrictions on how Facebook can launch new products or what features it can show where, it could create opportunities for startups to eat Facebook’s lunch. Imagine how much bigger a threat Foursquare would be if Facebook had been restricted from launching its Places location service. Competition From The Next Mark Zuckerberg Facebook doesn’t actually need to worry much about Twitter , Google+ , or international players. They’ve failed to offer something revolutionary enough to make early adopters ditch Facebook, or mainstream enough to appeal to everyone. What big blue needs to worry about is the next social product visionary, the next Mark Zuckerberg that could turn Facebook into the next Myspace. While acquiring and acq-hiring top talent from companies like Instagram was easy when it had pre-IPO stock to throw around, recruiting that next Zuck to side with Facebook rather than wage war against it is about to get tougher. Same goes for keeping its current rock stars from leaving to start a true competitor. It might take a big hardware change like eyewear computers , holograms, or apps you download straight to your brain to finally make Facebook obsolete. Even then that upstart would have quite the uphill battle, but so did Facebook when it launched. Smaller Screens, Small Ad Revenue Staying afloat on display ads won’t cut it if the social network wants to live up to or surpass its ~$100 billion valuation, as Chris Dixon writes . It will have to think bigger. But for now, it has to worry about mobile. Handheld devices have less room for ads and Facebook’s long list of features. Currently, Facebook only shows a few mobile news feed ads per user per day, while it shows as many as four to seven ads per page on the web. But if Facebook chokes mobile with too many ads, usage could plummet. As more users shift the time they spend on Facebook from the web to mobile, it will make less of the money that keeps the lights on for the whole service. To counteract this, Facebook is aggressively acquiring and hiring from mobile companies like Instagram in hopes of getting its mobile site and apps up to draw more eyeballs . However, while it has a huge footprint of over 500 million mobile users, there’s widespread discontent with the speed of its mobile apps. Many people think they’re cluttered, and complain of slow loading speeds. Mobile is the biggest threat to Facebook, and the company admits it . If it can’t make more compelling mobile apps and earn more money from these small screens, the shift to mobile will see Facebook lowered into its own grave. Losing Its Cool Facebook doesn’t want to be cool. It wants to be a utility. It wants to be the cell phone or the television, not Virgin Mobile or HBO. But the fact is that a big reason Facebook is so popular is because it started by being accessible to only the most envied demographic in the world: Ivy League college students like those at Harvard. It used that prestige to spread like wildfire on every American college campus, and the sexiness of young adulthood to capture the teenage market. Its popularity in the trendsetting United States soon pulled in the rest of the world. But now your mom is on Facebook. You grandma, professor, little cousins, and plumber are too. It’s not exclusive anymore. Usefulness is what keeps it afloat, but cold, dry, utility for everyone is vulnerable. And soon Zuckerberg will be 30, and he might no longer be seen as the geeky boy genius challenging the adults. He’ll be one of those adults. There are already signs that apathy and distrust for Facebook are setting in . The slick destroyer of today’s social network would be something that starts elite but that gradually opens up like Facebook did. It would be designed specifically for the hip and young in-crowd. It would recruit big celebrities and carve out an influential niche from which to grow its power. This could be what makes Facebook seem old and boring. And the average Facebook user doesn’t want to go somewhere boring every day. That’s what their jobs are for. [Image Credit: WaterySoul , TheFW , E:TB .]

Living in Seattle, you tend to find yourself in the company of tech people all the time. With Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, Google, and a dozen other major companies established in the area, it’s never a surprise when you find out the guy next to you at the bar is working on Windows Phone 8 or Half-Life 3. This week, I was lucky enough to get a chance to see what Amazon has cooking for its next generation of e-readers. Their new offices and the mysterious Lab 126 are just down the street, after all, so I’m actually surprised it hasn’t happened before now. Back in November, I speculated that the new Kindles and Nooks and what have yous might have glowing screens, the likes of which we’ve seen occasionally but were never fully implemented. It turns out Amazon was thinking the same thing, and actually bought a company that was, I am told, the world leader in light-guide technology. They’ve finally gotten it to the point where it’s ready to be released, and a new generation of glowing Kindles will be coming our way sometime this year. Incidentally, that acquisition doesn’t appear to have ever been reported, so although it happened in late 2010, this is the first anyone has heard of it. The company, Oy Modilis, was founded in 1991 in Helsinki, and has a number of patents relating to this sort of thing. This one , for instance, seems to cover the type of lighting technology used in the new Kindle. The device I saw was crudely camouflaged in a sort of cardboard enclosure, but the screen was clearly visible. With a tap, a slider popped up on the screen, and as it was dragged to the right, the screen lit up evenly with a rather cool light. In the dark, it was plainly noticeable as a glow, and in uneven light — say, shade or a shuttered room — the slight illumination made the screen much more readable. At full blast it was definitely projecting some light (technically speaking it was reflecting it), but it was still a soft glow and not the harsh flashlight of a backlit LCD. I commented on the temperature of the light — it was that blue-white glow found in uncorrected white LEDs, not the warm light on off-white that most people associate with books by lamplight. But, of course, the e-ink screen is in fact grey and dark grey, not black on off-white, as paper is, so a cooler light may actually work better. At any rate, they are apparently sensitive to these issues and looking into it. I thought that the text looked better as well, but it’s possible that this was the result of improved font rendering and aliasing reduction, or perhaps something to do with the light. At any rate, it wasn’t any of the crazy new bistable displays we’ve been seeing at trade shows (alas). As for the shape of the device, it was impossible to tell, wrapped as it was in its little cardboard box. But the size appears the same, and the whole point of purchasing the light-guide company was to get the team and their patents, which essentially laminate the light diffusion layer right onto the screen without adding much in the way of depth or interfering with the touch system. I was told the industrial design isn’t finished yet, but I ruled out things like ruggedness, waterproofing, or a flush-front screen — all things, by the way, I suggested they look into. It shouldn’t be any thicker, though it will have to accommodate the LED circuitry and presumably a larger battery. The current crop of e-readers is, as I recently lamented , both troublingly homogenous and still not good enough for paper-lovers like myself. The new Kindle doesn’t look like it’s going to address all of my issues with this kind of device, but the improved display will definitely set it apart from its rivals. We’ll know for sure when it comes out later this year. [note: the top image is a concept image from Flex Lighting , not a real device]

We’ve known for some time that Microsoft would be bringing official Kinect support to Windows this week, but one thing they kept quiet was the fact that they’d be debuting a new version of the hardware as well. It’s not tiny, as some hoped, or built into the bezel of a laptop, as we know it will be eventually , but it does improve on the original in a few ways. The most visible improvement for most people will be a slight improvement of the minimum distance required for the device to operate. The Xbox 360 Kinect required you to be around 50cm away at least, and the Kinect for Windows will go down to 40cm — about 16 inches. That means it can sit on a monitor on a user’s desk and capture movements without the user having to scoot back at all. Other improvements are of the softer variety. Microsoft has improved the tracking software, providing an improved raw sensor stream, better color/depth synchronization, and more accurate skeletal tracking. On the downside, the new version costs quite a bit more: the new Kinect for Windows is going for $250 , while the 360 version is selling for just $100 at the Microsoft Store right now. The justification for the price seems to be that the new version has been updated to support multiple systems and situations, rather than the standard 360 hardware it’s been running on for the last year. And I’m guessing they’re not subsidizing this price quite as heavily. The official SDK won’t work with the 360 version, it seems, though you can still download the beta SDK, which works fine but officially can’t be used for commercial applications. Microsoft says they’ve been working with hundreds of companies and seeing lots of unique applications and ideas, so hopefully we’ll see some of those hit soon. In the mean time our Kinect tag has lots of projects that demonstrate the versatility of the device.

New submitter Bad_Feeling sends in a followup to the story we discussed on Monday about a new site that scanned a few popular torrent trackers and linked torrents to IP addresses. The folks at TorrentFreak decided to check IP addresses belonging to major companies in the entertainment industry and published lists of pirated files from several, including Fox, Sony, and NBC Universal. Of course, they used the information to make a slightly different point than the industry usually does: “By highlighting the above our intention is not to get anyone into trouble, and for that reason we masked out the end of the IP addresses to avoid a witch hunt. An IP address is not a person, IP addresses can be shared among many people, and anyone can be behind a keyboard at any given time.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Kindle Fire is about to get some major competition and as early as November 7th. The Digital Reader , pretty much the best source online for ebook news, has several sources indicating that B&N will have a large announcement on November 7th. The next Nook Color is expected to headline the show. The Nook Color set the standard late last year for enhanced ereaders. By using a color LCD screen and a highly curated Android release, the Nook Color was an instant hit and was no doubt the template for Amazon’s Kindle Fire. But Barnes & Noble isn’t just going to roll over and let the Fire steal the market it created. Enter the next-gen Nook Color. Expect the Nook Color 2 to go toe-to-toe with the Kindle Fire. It will likely carry the same $200 price and similar internal specs. But B&N isn’t Amazon and hasn’t built a massive Android ecosystem. Where Amazon can serve everything from books to movies to cloud storage on its devices, Barnes & Noble is stuck hawking just books and housewares. But B&N might be fine as long as they can sneak Netflix and the entire Google Apps suite onto their tablet. Plus, it needs to be as hacker friendly as the original. It was previously rumored that the new Nook Color would launch in September but that fell through. Another older rumor also states that there will be two new Nooks coming this quarter. November 7th might turn out to be a big day in the ereader world. Crunchbase BARNES & NOBLE Company: Barnes & Noble Website: barnesandnobleinc.com IPO: October 28, 1992, BKS Barnes & Noble, Inc. is a bookseller. Its principal business is the sale of trade books (generally hardcover and paperback consumer titles, excluding educational textbooks and specialized religious titles), mass-market paperbacks (such as mystery, romance, science fiction and other fiction), children’s books, bargain books, magazines, gift, cafe products and services, music and movies direct to customers. As of January 31, 2009, the Company operated 778 bookstores and a Website. Of the 778 bookstores, 726 operate under the Barnes &… Learn more

OnLive offered a challenge to their community: Get 62,791 likes on its Facebook page and all users would get one game for $1. Well, OnLive’s fans came through, and as of this post’s writing, the Facebook page in question has 67,938 Likes. OnLive made good on its promise. Starting yesterday, all users will their next game for $1. Best yet, there isn’t any silly small print. All games currently available are eligible including Dues Ex: Human Revolution, DiRT 3, Red Faction: Armageddon and the rest of OnLive’s library. Nice. Let me suggest DiRT 3; Dues Ex is boring. With OnLive, games aren’t delivered through traditional media. Instead, gamers buy access to the game, which is then streamed to a relatively small set-top box. Depending on the user’s Internet connection, the games are often delivered with graphics and game play comparable to that of modern gaming systems. Sometimes there’s a bit of lag, though. However, with extremely competitive prices and robust social features OnLive is becoming increasing popular with casual and hardcore gamers alike. This $1 deal will do nothing but earn the company even more fans. The offer is good for a limited time so, OnLive users, fire up your MicroConsole and snag a game for $1 before it expires. Again, the offer is only for games currently available so pre-ordering L.A. Noire and Batman: Arkham City do not qualify. Per OnLive’s Twitter account , new users simply need to sign into OnLive to access the deal while users who previously purchased a game should get a promo code emailed ( full details here ). What a good way to start the weekend. Follow @OnLive @OnLive OnLive, Inc. If you didn’t get a code via email, sign in to OnLive. Full PlayPasses should show as $1. Codes were sent to users who already purchased. about 20 hours ago via web Reply Retweet Favorite Crunchbase ONLIVE Company: OnLive Website: onlive.com Launch Date: October 22, 2011 Funding: $56.5M Onlive develops server-based video game processing, allowing games to run without game consoles or high-end computers, moving away from a system in which games are purchased and downloaded. Learn more

After months of leaks and speculation, it seems as if Apple is finally ready to unveil its next iPhone. AllThingsD pegs the announcement date as October 4th, which falls in line with most of the previous rumors concerning the next iPhone’s fall rollout. With Steve Jobs gone, his hand-groomed successor Tim Cook is expected to take over the dog and pony show. Apple’s future likely hinges more on his on-stage presence than just a piece of hardware. Steve Jobs is a masterful salesman. He previously used his keynote addresses to show the world why they wanted his latest toy. He would pull the product out of his pocket, pull back a black sheet or simply stand in front of a massive screen and, even for just a few moments, make the most mundane feel life-changing. That was the power of Steve Jobs: his passion alone drove sales. Surely if Steve likes it, then we will, countless Apple loyalists said after each Applenote. But Tim’s in charge now. He’s at the helm of Apple’s massive machine and to delegate the role of chief Apple spokesperson to anyone else would undercut his own role completely. During Steve Jobs’ medical leave, Phil Schiller took over the keynotes for Macworld and WDC, but per AllThingsD’s source, Tim is going to take the stage and announce the next iPhone. It is, after all, his company now and he has massive New Balances to fill. Tim should have some help, though. Steve Jobs rarely did keynotes alone. Expect department heads and marketing people to play wingman and help Tim Cook along. October 4th. That’s (reportedly) the day that Apple will move into the Tim Cook era with a little help from the iPhone 5. Crunchbase APPLE TIM COOK Company: Apple Website: apple.com Launch Date: January 4, 1976 IPO: September 21, 1980, NASDAQ:AAPL Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod (offered with… Learn more Person: Tim Cook Website: Companies: Apple , Nike Timothy D. Cook is Apple’s CEO, who took over from Steve Jobs on 25 August 2011. In his previous position as COO, Cook was responsible for all of the company’s worldwide sales and operations, including end-to-end management of Apple’s supply chain, sales activities, and service and support in all markets and countries. He also headed Apple’s Macintosh division and played a key role in the continued development of strategic reseller and supplier relationships, ensuring flexibility in response to an… Learn more