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Thursday, August 29, 2013

Protesters Demand Montana Judge Resign Over Rape Sentencing

Angry that a Montana judge sentenced a former teacher who had admitted to raping a 14-year-old student to only a month in jail, several hundred people gathered outside the Yellowstone County Courthouse in Billings on Thursday, demanding that the judge resign. The victim committed suicide three years after the rape, just before her 17th birthday.

The decision by Judge G. Todd Baugh of State District Court on Monday to suspend the teacher’s 15-year prison term, combined with remarks he made about the rape victim during the proceeding, has sparked outrage in Montana and around the country, with online petitions gathering more than 30,000 signatures in a few days. During the sentencing, Judge Baugh said the victim “seemed older than her chronological age” and was “as much in control of the situation” as the teacher.

The death of the victim, Cherice Morales, who was a student of Stacey Dean Rambold, contributed to delays in the prosecution of the case, which was originally filed in 2008.

Judge Baugh later apologized for his remarks, telling The Billings Gazette: “I don’t know what I was thinking or trying to say. It was just stupid and wrong.”

But Marian Bradley, who heads the Montana chapter of the National Organization for Women and helped organize the rally on Thursday, said that the judge needed to step aside and that state lawmakers needed to consider mandatory sentencing for convicted rapists. “It’s highly unusual to get several hundred people to show up for a protest in Billings,” said Ms. Bradley, a longtime rape crisis volunteer. “Everyone here is outraged.”

In an interview with CNN, Auliea Hanlon, the mother of the victim, said she was “floored” by the sentence and by Judge Baugh’s remarks.

A CNN interview with Auliea Hanlon, the mother of the rape victim.

Mr. Rambold, 54, a former technology teacher at Billings Senior High School, pleaded guilty in April to a felony count of sexual intercourse without consent. The charges were first brought in 2008, and his prosecution was deferred in 2010 after Ms. Morales’s suicide raised concerns among prosecutors that a conviction would be difficult to obtain without the victim’s testimony.

Under a three-year agreement, Mr. Rambold attended an outpatient program for sex offenders, and if he had completed it, the charges would have been dismissed. But after he violated the terms of the program last fall, prosecutors brought charges against him again earlier this year and he pleaded guilty to one count, which brought him back to court for sentencing on Monday.



Facebook Post Said to Be by Assad’s Son Dares Americans to Attack

A Facebook post said to have been written by the 11-year-old son of President Bashar al-Assad may offer a glimpse into the defiant worldview of the Syrian elite.Facebook A Facebook post said to have been written by the 11-year-old son of President Bashar al-Assad may offer a glimpse into the defiant worldview of the Syrian elite.

A Facebook post said to be written by the 11-year-old son of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and “liked” or commented on by several people who appear to be the children and grandchildren of other senior members of Mr. Assad’s government, may offer a glimpse into the mindset of Syria’s ruling elite as the country braces for a potential Western strike in response to a chemical weapons attack on Aug. 21.

It is impossible to confirm whether the Facebook account does, in fact, belong to the son, Hafez al-Assad, and aspects of it invite doubt. For example, the owner of the account wrote that he was a graduate of Oxford University and a player for a Barcelona soccer team, neither of which would be likely to appear on the résumé of an 11-year-old boy in Damascus.

But those claims could also be read as the ambitions of a child, and there are reasons to believe that the account may actually belong to Hafez.

The owner of the account wrote that he was a graduate of a Montessori school in Damascus, a detail of the Assad children’s lives that Vogue magazine reported in a February 2011 profile of their mother, Asma al-Assad. That article portrayed them as typical suburban children who played with remote control cars and watched Tim Burton movies on an iMac as they lounged around the family home, described as running “on wildly democratic principles.” It has since been removed from the Vogue Web site, but Joshua Landis, a well-known scholar of Syrian politics, posted a copy to his blog.

Perhaps most significantly, the Facebook post said to have been written by Hafez al-Assad has been “liked” or commented on by several accounts that appear to belong to the children or grandchildren of other senior figures in the Assad administration. Among them are accounts that seemingly belong to two children of Deputy Vice President Mohammed Nassif Khierbek, Ali and Sally, and to three children of a former deputy defense minister, Assef Shawkat, who was killed in a bombing in July 2012.

The accounts said to belong to the children of Mr. Shawkat â€" one of his sons, Bassel, and two of his daughters, Anisseh and Boushra â€" appeared to be authentic, according to a Syrian journalist from Damascus who has extensive knowledge of the country’s ruling elite and spoke on condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns. Mr. Shawkat was married to the sister of Bashar al-Assad, making these three children cousins of Mr. Assad’s son Hafez, who is believed to be the author of the Facebook post.

Many of the people who commented on the post had changed their profile pictures to show portraits of the Syrian leader or his father, also named Hafez, who ruled the country for three decades before Bashar al-Assad took power in 2000. Several of them referenced the author’s relationship to the two President Assads. One referred to the author by a diminutive and familiar nickname, “Hafouz,” and complimented him for his strength and intelligence, writing that such a feat was unsurprising for the son and grandson of the past two presidents. Another commenter wrote: “Like father like son! Well said future President!”

The Facebook post was Facebook The Facebook post was “liked” or commented on by several people who appeared to be the children of other insiders in the Assad regime, including one who referred to the post’s author as a “future president.”
Many of the people who commented on the post had changed their profile pictures to portraits of the Syrian leader.Facebook Many of the people who commented on the post had changed their profile pictures to portraits of the Syrian leader.

If the Facebook post attributed to Mr. Assad’s son is a hoax, it is either a highly elaborate one involving dozens of fake accounts purporting to belong to the children of other regime insiders, or a forgery so impressive that some of those children themselves â€" including the boy’s cousins â€" have been fooled.

Regardless of its provenance, the post appears to illustrate the mindset of Mr. Assad’s core supporters, who have stood by him through more than two years of a grinding war that has killed more than 100,000 Syrians and caused millions more to flee their homes.

The post is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors that would not be unusual for a child, and it may offer a glimpse into the way the country’s leaders â€" or, at the very least, Mr. Assad’s supporters â€" speak to one another and to their families as the specter of foreign military intervention looms.

Judging from the post, supporters of Mr. Assad do not appear to be particularly afraid of the United States.

“They may have the best army in the world, maybe the best airplanes, ships, tanks than ours, but soldiers? No one has soldiers like the ones we do in Syria,” the post’s author wrote of the United States military. “America doesn’t have soldiers, what it has is some cowards with new technology who claim themselves liberators.”

The author then compared the potential American airstrikes to the 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, a close ally of the Assad regime in the current conflict. Many in the Arab world saw Hezbollah as the victor of the 2006 clash.

“I just want them to attack sooo much, because I want them to make this huge mistake of beginning something that they don’t know the end of it,” he wrote. “What did Hezbollah have back then? Some street fighters and some small rockets and a pile of guns, but they had belief, In theirselves and in their country and that’s exactly what’s gonna happen to America if it chooses invasion because they don’t know our land like we do, no one does, victory is ours in the end no matter how much time it takes.”



Tracking the Wildfire Near Yosemite With Online Tools

A handful of online tools are helping people monitor the wildfire burning near Yosemite National Park, which has become the sixth largest wildfire in California’s recorded history.

According to the latest online update from California fire officials, nearly 200,000 acres have been destroyed since the fire began on Aug. 17 in Stanislaus National Forest, but it has not reached the popular tourist destination of Yosemite Valley. Nor has it stopped people from visiting the park, as my colleague Malia Wollan reported. Only parts of the park are temporarily closed.

Mixing satellite images with real-time data, Esri’s interactive map shows the extent of the destruction and the areas under threat, including the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, which is a major source of San Francisco’s water supply.

Mother Jones has produced a Google Earth view on YouTube that shows how the fire has progressed.

A look at how the fire has spread via Google Earth, by Mother Jones.

And a Google crisis map provides both national and local wildfire information for the 2013 fire season.

Southern California Public Radio has produced an online dashboard with the latest information.

Another way to see how the fire has progressed is a time-lapse video produced by Yosemite National Park, with footage from webcams around the park.

A time-lapse video showing the Rim Fire from the official YouTube account of Yosemite National Park.

Then, there’s the old-fashioned webcam view. This one is of alf Dome. It showed clear skies on Thursday, even as the fire was causing air quality problems nearby, keeping schoolchildren inside in Reno and Carson City, Nev.



Tracking the Wildfire Near Yosemite With Online Tools

A handful of online tools are helping people monitor the wildfire burning near Yosemite National Park, which has become the sixth largest wildfire in California’s recorded history.

According to the latest online update from California fire officials, nearly 200,000 acres have been destroyed since the fire began on Aug. 17 in Stanislaus National Forest, but it has not reached the popular tourist destination of Yosemite Valley. Nor has it stopped people from visiting the park, as my colleague Malia Wollan reported. Only parts of the park are temporarily closed.

Mixing satellite images with real-time data, Esri’s interactive map shows the extent of the destruction and the areas under threat, including the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, which is a major source of San Francisco’s water supply.

Mother Jones has produced a Google Earth view on YouTube that shows how the fire has progressed.

A look at how the fire has spread via Google Earth, by Mother Jones.

And a Google crisis map provides both national and local wildfire information for the 2013 fire season.

Southern California Public Radio has produced an online dashboard with the latest information.

Another way to see how the fire has progressed is a time-lapse video produced by Yosemite National Park, with footage from webcams around the park.

A time-lapse video showing the Rim Fire from the official YouTube account of Yosemite National Park.

Then, there’s the old-fashioned webcam view. This one is of alf Dome. It showed clear skies on Thursday, even as the fire was causing air quality problems nearby, keeping schoolchildren inside in Reno and Carson City, Nev.



Facebook to Update Privacy Policy, but Adjusting Settings Is No Easier

Facebook announced Thursday that it planned to enact changes to its privacy policies on Sept. 5.

But the social network’s famously difficult privacy controls will not become any easier to navigate.

Mostly, the new data use policy and statement of rights and responsibilities lay out more clearly the things that Facebook already does with your personal information, Ed Palmieri, the company’s associate general counsel for privacy, said in an interview. “The updates that we are showing in the red lines are our way to better explain the products that exist today,” he said.

In some ways, the company is making it more clear that it uses a wide variety of personal data about its 1.2 billion users to deliver advertising, including things they share and do, what they like, how they interact with ads and applications, and even demographic data inferred from everything else.

Facebook also said that it might use its customers’ profile photos to help their friends tag them in photos. Those photos are already public, but Facebook does not currently use them to help recognize faces when photos are uploaded to the service. “This will make the product better for people,” Mr. Palmieri said. “You can still opt out of it.”

But the company is also deliberately deleting information about specific privacy controls. Instead, Mr. Palmieri said, Facebook decided it was better to send users to various other pages, such as one on advertising, to learn more about privacy issues and how to adjust the controls.

For example, the data use policy will no longer offer a direct path to the control for opting out of your name and activities on the site being used as endorsements on ads sent to your friends.

Facebook is also doing nothing to simplify its maze of privacy settings.The company doesn’t offer clear links or explanations of the settings from its own “Facebook and Privacy” page, and its Graph Search feature isn’t especially helpful for the task, either.

Privacy controls are still buried in at least six different menus. To plunge down the rabbit hole, click on the little lock icon next to your name in the top-left column of your news feed page. You will find privacy settings in the tabs for Privacy, Timeline and Tagging, Blocking, Followers, Apps and Ads.

Mr. Palmieri said the company added one section to its policies in response to its $20 million settlement on Monday of a 2011 lawsuit asserting that the company used its customers’ personal information in advertising without compensation or allowing them to opt out.

The old policy explicitly stated, “You can use your privacy settings to limit how your name and profile picture may be associated with commercial, sponsored, or related content (such as a brand you like) served or enhanced by us.”

Facebook’s new language starts with the opposite position. “You give us permission to use your name, and profile picture, content, and information in connection with commercial, sponsored, or related content (such as a brand you like) served or enhanced by us,” the company said. “If you have selected a specific audience for your content or information, we will respect your choice when we use it.”

Mr. Palmieri said the two versions amount to the same thing.

It brings to mind Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass.” As he told young Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean â€" neither more nor less.”



Reporter’s Notebook: Divining a Start-Up’s Potential

Divining the future potential of a start-up is no easy job. And yet, this is the task that tech reporters take on constantly. We spend a lot of our time trying to figure out which companies, both large and small, are newsworthy and why.

It’s not an exact science â€" more of a balance between intuition and reporting. For clues, we look, in part, to venture capitalists who finance these companies because, after all, they want to bet on winners. These investors say they write checks for entrepreneurs who seem confident, capable and driven by an inner hunger and desire that will carry them to success, and say they often prize these qualities more than the particular idea or company that is involved.

We also, of course, talk to entrepreneurs, who often say a winning idea is one that invents a new way to do something â€" like exchanging messages with your friends or how to find the best restaurant. And we look at data, seeing which companies are gaining users quickly, or attracting people who are particularly interesting to advertisers for one reason or another â€" teenagers or women, for example.

Still, none of these factors are enough to necessarily warrant coverage. An all-star roster of investors is not a surefire measure of success. Investors can bet on losers, too. Good entrepreneurs, by loose definition, are generally passionate about their pursuits, so that doesn’t cut it either. Gaining users is important, but what if the company isn’t making money from their customers yet?

The tipping point â€" the moment at a which a start-up transitions from being an interesting company in the periphery of your radar to a notable that is prime for covering â€" is hard to pinpoint. In some ways, it’s just a gut feeling, based on overall experience. The app, game, service or idea that you’ve had your eye on starts to pop up all over â€" in casual conversations at random parties or in an overheard conversation on the subway. In some ways, a gut instinct is the only way to distinguish between companies that perform the exact same function â€"  Vine versus Viddy, Instagram versus PicPlz, GroupMe versus FastSociety, WhatsApp versus Kik.

Sometimes we get it right, but we can also miss the mark.

Last year, after Facebook announced plans to buy Instagram for a mind-boggling $1 billion, we tried to figure out which companies might be next. We waded through the list of companies we had noticed and picked the ones that seemed most promising for the year.

One company that we originally put on the list was Tumblr, the popular microblogging service. But then we took it off. The company, founded in 2007, felt a bit older than the rest to be considered a start-up and while we knew plenty of people who obsessively used it, it seemed as if most of them worked in media in major coastal cities. We knew that the company was self-reporting eye-popping page view numbers, more than other popular social media sites â€" as far as we could determine based on what we knew about these private companies that don’t have to reveal details about their business. But Tumblr didn’t seem to have a clear revenue-generating strategy or plan for forward momentum.

We went back and forth over whether it belonged, and then decided to take it off and keep it on a mental list of “companies to watch.” Either Quora or Findery, nee Pinwheel, took its place on the roundup.

Then, a few months later, Yahoo bought the company for $1.1 billion, proving it doesn’t always take revenue or a clearly defined road map to attract the big bucks.

As for our other picks last year, demand for Uber seems to only be increasing, amid rumors of a round of funding that would push the company’s valuation into the multibillions. Similarly, Dropbox seems to be sustaining its momentum, by more than doubling the number of visitors who are using the mobile application in the last year, according to comScore, a Web analytics firm. Path also appears to be drawing large numbers of users through mobile. And Pinterest is still widely considered to be a social media heavyweight and is now valued at $2.5 billion, thanks to a recent $200 million investment in the company.

Quora, on the other hand, has lost traffic to its home page in the last year, with a 20 percent dip to 1.5 million visitors from 1.8 million visitors, according to comScore. Airtime and Findery weren’t generating enough traffic at all to register on comScore’s tools. And although Square has convinced many a venture capitalist to funnel several hundred millions to its coffers, the payments start-up seems to be struggling to impart that faith in consumers.

This year, we’ve tried our luck again at picking out a fresh crop of companies that seem poised to take off, both among consumers and among larger companies and corporations who might buy them for their talent and technology. As always, dozens were considered, but not all made the list, including VHX, a video-delivery service, Tinder, a popular dating app, Feedly, a news reading application; Leap Motion, a device that lets you control your computer with hand motions; or Dots, an addictive iPhone game.

We’ll have to wait another year to see how we did.



At Google, a Love Triangle and a Departing Executive

When summer turns to fall, the Silicon Valley gossip scene is usually tantalized by the next iPhone. But this year, it is Google’s secrets, not Apple’s, that have people abuzz.

On Wednesday, reports from Google emerged about a love triangle involving Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, and Hugo Barra, an Android executive who announced the same day that he would leave the company for a rival phone maker in China.

The tech blog AllThingsD reported Wednesday that Mr. Brin was separated from his wife, Anne Wojcicki, and dating a Google employee who was previously in a relationship with Mr. Barra.

See why this is the talk of the valley?

The news set off a burst of publicity in tech blogs and whispers among people in the industry.

Two people with knowledge of the relationships, who would speak only anonymously, confirmed that the couple had separated, and that Mr. Brin was involved with Mr. Barra’s ex. Google declined to comment on the personal lives of employees.

Mr. Barra is a major loss for Google because he was one of the most public faces of Android, often presenting new products onstage, most recently last month, when he introduced the new Nexus 7 tablet in San Francisco.

While he will continue to promote Android in his new job at the fast-expanding Chinese company Xiamoi, he is also working for a competitor of Motorola, the phone company owned by Google. The Android team has been in transition since Andy Rubin, its founder and former leader, stepped down in March.

Mr. Brin and Ms. Wojcicki, who have two children, were married six years ago in a secretive wedding in the Bahamas. The swimsuit-clad couple invited guests to swim to a sandbar for the ceremony.

Their separation has other ties to Google’s business. Ms. Wojcicki, who was often spotted at Google events, is the chief executive and co-founder of 23andMe, the personal genetics company, in which Google has invested. She is also the sister of Susan Wojcicki, Google’s senior vice president for advertising, who met Google’s founders when she rented them her garage to start the company.

Should they divorce, the couple has a prenuptial agreement in which Mr. Brin retains the voting power he has through ownership of Google stock, according to a person briefed on the issue. Mr. Brin’s shares make up the bulk of his $23 billion fortune. They will continue their family charitable endeavors, the person said.

As for Google’s rules on an executive dating an employee, its code of conduct says that relationships between co-workers that create “an actual or apparent conflict of interest” can lead to re-assignment or termination. Mr. Brin currently oversees special projects at the Google X lab, including Google Glass.



At Google, a Love Triangle and a Departing Executive

When summer turns to fall, the Silicon Valley gossip scene is usually tantalized by the next iPhone. But this year, it is Google’s secrets, not Apple’s, that have people abuzz.

On Wednesday, reports from Google emerged about a love triangle involving Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, and Hugo Barra, an Android executive who announced the same day that he would leave the company for a rival phone maker in China.

The tech blog AllThingsD reported Wednesday that Mr. Brin was separated from his wife, Anne Wojcicki, and dating a Google employee who was previously in a relationship with Mr. Barra.

See why this is the talk of the valley?

The news set off a burst of publicity in tech blogs and whispers among people in the industry.

Two people with knowledge of the relationships, who would speak only anonymously, confirmed that the couple had separated, and that Mr. Brin was involved with Mr. Barra’s ex. Google declined to comment on the personal lives of employees.

Mr. Barra is a major loss for Google because he was one of the most public faces of Android, often presenting new products onstage, most recently last month, when he introduced the new Nexus 7 tablet in San Francisco.

While he will continue to promote Android in his new job at the fast-expanding Chinese company Xiamoi, he is also working for a competitor of Motorola, the phone company owned by Google. The Android team has been in transition since Andy Rubin, its founder and former leader, stepped down in March.

Mr. Brin and Ms. Wojcicki, who have two children, were married six years ago in a secretive wedding in the Bahamas. The swimsuit-clad couple invited guests to swim to a sandbar for the ceremony.

Their separation has other ties to Google’s business. Ms. Wojcicki, who was often spotted at Google events, is the chief executive and co-founder of 23andMe, the personal genetics company, in which Google has invested. She is also the sister of Susan Wojcicki, Google’s senior vice president for advertising, who met Google’s founders when she rented them her garage to start the company.

Should they divorce, the couple has a prenuptial agreement in which Mr. Brin retains the voting power he has through ownership of Google stock, according to a person briefed on the issue. Mr. Brin’s shares make up the bulk of his $23 billion fortune. They will continue their family charitable endeavors, the person said.

As for Google’s rules on an executive dating an employee, its code of conduct says that relationships between co-workers that create “an actual or apparent conflict of interest” can lead to re-assignment or termination. Mr. Brin currently oversees special projects at the Google X lab, including Google Glass.



Troubles Ahead for Internet Advertising

When it comes to advertising, the Internet is at war with itself.

Much of the Web relies on advertising income, but anti-ad technology could put a dent in that revenue. A recent report from the Web service PageFair said that on average 22.7 percent of visitors to 220 Web sites were using ad-blocking software, which automatically removes most ads from a Web page. The figures were highest in gaming and technology Web sites, which tend to have a large concentration of savvy users.

PageFair said the practice was growing at a rate that suggests almost all sites will appear without ads by 2018.

There are plenty of reasons to say that isn’t so. For one thing, PageFair makes money by helping companies get around ad blocking, so it has an interest in making ad blocking seem like a problem in dire need of solving. In an e-mail, however, PageFair executives defended their methods and conclusions. The company compared visits recorded on Google Analytics with the ad impressions recorded by a separate ad server.

In addition, Till Faida, a co-founder of Eyeo, which produces the Adblock software for numerous browsers, said Adblock for browsers was being downloaded 170,000 times a day. “Faster than ever,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Eyeo claims over 200 million downloads of the software since it started offering Adblock in 2011.

Earlier this year, Google kicked Adblock for Android mobile devices off its store, making it harder to get the mobile version (it’s still available at an Adblock site). This “had a significant impact on user growth,” he said.

Google is keen to make income from mobile ads, partly because the price advertisers pay Google for largely nonmobile Web advertising has fallen for the past seven quarters.

Risks for ad industry workers

There is another, possibly more serious problem ahead for online advertising â€" or at least the people working in it. What ads are, how they work, and what role they play in the final goal of arousing buyers are changing, too.

We are all increasingly tracked, online and offline, and our friendships and tastes are noted in order to send us the ads that algorithms suggest we will act upon. If we do seem interested in something expensive, like a car or a trip, we may be tracked and fed information for a period of days or months. That means a single ad is relatively less important.

Advertising, in effect, will have a less distinct role in overall marketing. And when a product or function is subsumed, it typically loses some of its profit margin.

“Agencies have to think about having a ‘journey strategist,’ neither a data head or a pure creative, who maps where you’re going with a product, and figures out the best possible way that journey goes,” said Phil Fernandez, the chief executive of Marketo, an online marketing company. The relative value of studying and understanding someone, he said, will be greater than just a pitch. Advertising, marketing, and even sales “are all going to be much more continuous,” he said.

Mr. Fernandez says he often counsels companies to put out even more ads, which is often done more cheaply than was possible even a couple of years ago. The surprise to him, he said, is how little traditional agencies seem to understand how much tracking and data manipulation threaten their businesses. “I see shockingly little presence” in Silicon Valley, he said.

“Their customers are going to start doing this themselves,” he said. “Corporations now have campaign people and infrastructure people, they are building databases of advocates for themselves. They are thinking about durable relationships with their customers.”

Salesforce.com, which makes sales management software, is likewise investing in social media marketing and direct advertising companies, likewise anticipating that corporations will be communicating directly and less expensively.

“Companies are setting up to maintain relationships with 100 million or more people at a time,” said Marc Benioff, a founder and the chief executive of Salesforce. “They will connect with their customers from all sorts of places: Canon from inside an Internet-connected camera; Toyota from inside a connected car.

“The killer app for marketing today, television, still gets the vast majority of the dollars, and agencies procure those,” he said. “It’s early days, but there is a new standard emerging.”

If it does turn out that companies turn their products, like cars and cameras, into media devices, much of what used to be ad messaging will travel there. At that point, not just agencies, but Web pages that depend on them (like, to some extent, this one) will have struggles of their own.



A Tale of Two Online Business Models

Over the weekend, the tech blogosphere was in a tizzy over a profile of Marissa Mayer, the chief executive of Yahoo.

While some readers slurped up the content in the piece, titled “The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography,” others seemed more excited by where it was written and published: Business Insider, routinely the home of kitten videos and endless lists of Top 100 slide shows.

For many, finding this piece on Business Insider was like going to a vegetarian restaurant and being served a bloody, rare steak sprinkled with bacon bits.

Nicholas Carlson, the reporter for Business Insider who wrote the profile  â€" which arrived on the Web weighing a hefty 22,000 words â€" said he spent months reporting and writing the article because, in a sense, the readers asked him to.

“We have an advantage of seeing what the readers are interested in by the page views and comments,” Mr. Carlson said in a phone interview. “As soon as Marissa Mayer became C.E.O. last year there was an incredible surge of interest in stories about her.”

But when the piece was published on Sunday, many readers asked why Mr. Carlson did not publish it as an e-book, or even as a physical book, and charge people to read it, rather than simply place it online free as a very long blog post.

“For us, the decision right now is to invest in the property that is this free online thing, where we can create great content and where it’s great for our readers,” Mr. Carlson said. ”It’s also great for our other constituents, which is our advertisers, who are going to be placed next to that great content.”

Henry Blodget, the chief executive and editor of Business Insider, echoed that statement, noting that pushing something online on the Web site is a lot more agreeable than the difficult routines of the traditional publishing industry, even the digital side of it.

This approach is the opposite of that taken by another online publication, NSFWCorp, which was formed by Paul Carr, a blogger and author. NSFWCorp bills itself as The Economist as written by The Daily Show, and generates what Mr. Carr calls “real long-form journalism â€" but with jokes.”

Those jokes and journalism are not free. Mr. Carr decided that rather than throw his content against the Internet and see what sticks, he was going to charge a hefty $3 per month to readers for access to NSFWCorp’s Web site or $7 per month for a newsprint version of the site.

While NSFWCorp has taken some money from investors, subscriptions are helping prop up the reporting and the site employs several seasoned full-time writers.

“We wanted to explore an online business model that allows great journalists to do great work without resorting to slide shows and videos of kittens,” Mr. Carr said. “And we don’t have to worry about what we write. We can offend 10,000 subscribers and still be in business; if we offend one paid advertiser we could be damaged.”

From the outside looking in, it seems that both models are working. But what about the future?

Mr. Carr sees two different types of online publications. Those that rely almost exclusively on support from readers and subscribers, like his $3-per-month Web site, and those outlets that are solely supported by ads, like Business Insider. ”They will both feed each other; there’ll be a nice symbiosis.”

But he still believes that long-form, fully reported journalism will be difficult to create simply based on revenues from advertising. ”The ad rates are so cheap today that you have to get a trillion page views to pay for real journalism, and you can really only do that with kitten videos.”

For now, there are rare outlets like Business Insider that seem to find no problem placing long-form “real” journalism next to kitten videos and Top 100 lists.

It seems that Business Insider made the right choice by choosing not to charge people to read the profile on Ms. Mayer, and instead giving it away online. The article was shared more than 13,000 times on Facebook and 5,500 times on Twitter, all of which helped garner nearly 900,000 page views for the article.

And that’s 900,000 page views that were framed by several online ads.

“I think it’s hard asking people to pay for something,” Mr. Carlson said. “As a writer, I was excited that we went with the free route because then I knew a lot more people were going to be reading what I was writing.”



Today’s Scuttlebot: A Separation at Google and Twitter Conversations

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Today’s Scuttlebot: A Separation at Google and Twitter Conversations

Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

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Create an account »

Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
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With New App, Foursquare Strives to Be ‘Magic’ in Your Pocket

Foursquare, the social network built on persuading users to “check in” to locations they’re visiting and share relevant tips with others, is preparing to ditch the check-in entirely.

On Thursday, the New York company plans to announce the first public test of a new version of its service that will automatically detect what restaurant or neighborhood a user is in and make suggestions accordingly. The new app, which has no official name, will be given to about 2,000 Android users in the next few weeks and rolled out broadly later this year.

“What we’re launching here is this smarter version of Foursquare that can sense where you are and give you the best recommendations,” said Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s co-founder and chief executive, in an interview. He said it would be as if you got all of the advice from all of your friends, shrunk down into a single voice that whispers the most relevant information, unbidden, as you walk by.

As an example, he said that when he visited Mo’z Cafe in San Francisco on Wednesday morning, the new app “told me the thing people talk about here are the breakfast burritos and this particular type of iced coffee.” No need to open the app, search for the cafe and check in to tell the service where he was.

“We’ve basically removed the friction from Foursquare,” Mr. Crowley said. “We’ve made a piece of magic that lives in your pocket.”

Foursquare didn’t make the new app available for reporters to try out, so it is hard to say if it is really magical. Foursquare tried something similar in 2011 with a feature it called Radar, only to see it fail, in part because the constant location tracking chewed up the phone’s battery life. Mr. Crowley said Foursquare has licked that problem, with the new app draining less than 1 percent of the battery per hour.

For Foursquare, jazzing up its service in a big way could lead to new interest among users and advertisers. Foursquare says that it has about 35 million users and 6 million check-ins a day, and that it is adding about 1.5 million new users a month as it expands in foreign markets like Russia, Brazil and Turkey. It has been slowly expanding its efforts to sell advertising to reach those users, including through a new self-service ad platform for local merchants.

Mr. Crowley envisions that eventually 100 million people or more will use Foursquare to help them find the best, most relevant location information.

While that might be its own bit of magical thinking, if the new app is as robust as Mr. Crowley claims, it would be a huge technical achievement. A phone that always knows where you are and automatically gives you timely, relevant information without being annoying is a holy grail in the mobile world.

Google, for example, is trying to predict what you will search for next with its Google Now feature for Android phones. But so far, the technology is clunky, basing its guesses on clues from your search history, Gmail and calendar entries.

Foursquare is taking a different approach. It mines your personal check-in history, as well as what your friends have recommended and the accumulated data from six billion check-ins by users since its founding in 2009, to make recommendations the company says are highly personalized.

Will automatic recommendations seem creepy, as if your phone were HAL 9000 and knows too much about you? Initially, Mr. Crowley said, the new version will make only a couple of unsolicited suggestions per week, with users getting the option of increasing the frequency as they get comfortable with the idea.

The new technology still needs additional refinement, he said, but he is enthusiastic.

“This is what we started the company for,” Mr. Crowley said. “Everything has been built leading up to this moment.”



With New App, Foursquare Strives to Be ‘Magic’ in Your Pocket

Foursquare, the social network built on persuading users to “check in” to locations they’re visiting and share relevant tips with others, is preparing to ditch the check-in entirely.

On Thursday, the New York company plans to announce the first public test of a new version of its service that will automatically detect what restaurant or neighborhood a user is in and make suggestions accordingly. The new app, which has no official name, will be given to about 2,000 Android users in the next few weeks and rolled out broadly later this year.

“What we’re launching here is this smarter version of Foursquare that can sense where you are and give you the best recommendations,” said Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s co-founder and chief executive, in an interview. He said it would be as if you got all of the advice from all of your friends, shrunk down into a single voice that whispers the most relevant information, unbidden, as you walk by.

As an example, he said that when he visited Mo’z Cafe in San Francisco on Wednesday morning, the new app “told me the thing people talk about here are the breakfast burritos and this particular type of iced coffee.” No need to open the app, search for the cafe and check in to tell the service where he was.

“We’ve basically removed the friction from Foursquare,” Mr. Crowley said. “We’ve made a piece of magic that lives in your pocket.”

Foursquare didn’t make the new app available for reporters to try out, so it is hard to say if it is really magical. Foursquare tried something similar in 2011 with a feature it called Radar, only to see it fail, in part because the constant location tracking chewed up the phone’s battery life. Mr. Crowley said Foursquare has licked that problem, with the new app draining less than 1 percent of the battery per hour.

For Foursquare, jazzing up its service in a big way could lead to new interest among users and advertisers. Foursquare says that it has about 35 million users and 6 million check-ins a day, and that it is adding about 1.5 million new users a month as it expands in foreign markets like Russia, Brazil and Turkey. It has been slowly expanding its efforts to sell advertising to reach those users, including through a new self-service ad platform for local merchants.

Mr. Crowley envisions that eventually 100 million people or more will use Foursquare to help them find the best, most relevant location information.

While that might be its own bit of magical thinking, if the new app is as robust as Mr. Crowley claims, it would be a huge technical achievement. A phone that always knows where you are and automatically gives you timely, relevant information without being annoying is a holy grail in the mobile world.

Google, for example, is trying to predict what you will search for next with its Google Now feature for Android phones. But so far, the technology is clunky, basing its guesses on clues from your search history, Gmail and calendar entries.

Foursquare is taking a different approach. It mines your personal check-in history, as well as what your friends have recommended and the accumulated data from six billion check-ins by users since its founding in 2009, to make recommendations the company says are highly personalized.

Will automatic recommendations seem creepy, as if your phone were HAL 9000 and knows too much about you? Initially, Mr. Crowley said, the new version will make only a couple of unsolicited suggestions per week, with users getting the option of increasing the frequency as they get comfortable with the idea.

The new technology still needs additional refinement, he said, but he is enthusiastic.

“This is what we started the company for,” Mr. Crowley said. “Everything has been built leading up to this moment.”



Daily Report: Chinese Mobile Phone Company Poaches Google Executive

In a sign of the rising export ambitions of the Chinese mobile phone industry, the smartphone maker Xiaomi said Thursday that it had hired a top executive away from Google to lead its international expansion plans, Eric Pfanner reports.

The executive, Hugo Barra, is one of the highest-profile Westerners to join a Chinese technology company, analysts said.

“He’s a significant figure in the industry, a significant figure at Google,” said Pete Cunningham, an analyst at Canalys, a research firm. “It underlines the trend we’re seeing in the market. The Chinese vendors are going to play a big part in shaping the future of the industry.”

At Google, Mr. Barra has served as vice president for Google’s Android mobile operating system, which is used by the vast majority of smartphones in China.

Xiaomi is one of a number of Chinese smartphone makers that have been gaining market share in China against foreign rivals like Apple and Nokia. Until recently, these Chinese companies seemed happy with their rising sales in China, the biggest smartphone market, but now companies like Xiaomi, Lenovo and Huawei seem intent on expanding abroad.

Mr. Barra said in a statement posted on a Google social networking service that he intended to help Xiaomi “expand their incredible product portfolio and business globally.”

“I’m really looking forward to this new challenge, and am particularly excited about the opportunity to continue to help drive the Android ecosystem,” he wrote.



U.S. Government Issues Warning About Security on Android Phones

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Daily Report: Nintendo Introduces Cheaper Entry-Level Device

SAN FRANCISCO â€" Nintendo’s portable video game device, the 3DS, is selling well. But a plan to court children has the Japanese company cutting prices, Brian X. Chen reports.

Nintendo on Wednesday introduced a new portable gaming system, the Nintendo 2DS. The device will cost $130, or $40 less than its 3DS sibling, when it is released Oct. 12. It is capable of running all the games made for the 3DS, but without 3-D effects.

For Nintendo, the price drop is a hedge against a future filled with tablet computers made by companies like Apple, Samsung and Amazon.

“Forty bucks may not be a lot, but for families it’s a lot,” said Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, in an interview. Mr. Fils-Aime said the 2DS was intended for the “entry gamer,” especially in families with multiple children. Nintendo is pairing the device’s release with the introduction of two new Pokémon games, a series that is popular among children.

The growing popularity of tablets among adults means that children are increasingly exposed to tablets at an early age. About one-third of American adults own tablets. But that figure rises to about 50 percent among parents with children living at home, according to Pew Internet Research. In another survey, IDC, the research firm, polled gamers who were considering buying a tablet or dedicated gaming device. Roughly 60 percent of respondents said they were leaning toward buying an iPad, iPod Touch or Android tablet, IDC said.

Younger gamers are drawn to tablets as well. A large number of the respondents to the IDC survey who said they were planning to buy a tablet or iPod Touch were under 24 years old, a demographic group that has historically been strong for Nintendo, said Lewis Ward, an IDC analyst that focuses on the game industry.



Pure Storage Goes Global

Pure Storage, an upstart maker of data storage equipment, hopes that $150 million is enough to take on a multibillion-dollar competitor.

Pure, which offers a “flash storage” product that it says can store lots of digital information on silicon cheaply and fetch it fast, announced Thursday that it had secured $150 million in new financing, mostly from T. Rowe Price, Fidelity Investments and Tiger Global Management.

It was the company’s late-stage “E” round of funding, and it valued Pure at well over $1 billion. The presence of a lot of financial firms and that substantial valuation should indicate that the company will soon go public, but Scott Dietzen, the company’s chief executive, said he was in no rush.

“The best engineering talent likes to be part of the uplift from an I.P.O.,” he said. “We want to attract a lot of great talent.”

What is likely to happen is that Pure, as well as EMC, will start competing globally with new products that put data storage on silicon rather than traditional methods, like discs.

Fifteen months ago, EMC, which is the leader in traditional disc storage, paid about $400 million for a company called Extreme IO, which had technology similar to Pure’s. Mr. Dietzen believes there are a number of things he needs to build to be a serious, global competitor to EMC.

“We need a sales force, we need global marketing, we need 7Ã-24 global support,” he said. “We’re trying to beat a $15 billion global business in disc drive storage.”

The costs of putting storage on silicon are likely to keep dropping, which means that, in time, it will be more affordable to expand how flash storage is used in business computer systems.

That is potentially good news for Pure, though Mr. Dietzen’s company will have to address a lot more customers and uses effectively. EMC can already do that, but every flash sale does undermine its legacy disc storage business.

Pure Storage also announced that Frank Slootman, who is the chief executive of ServiceNow, a cloud-based enterprise software company, would be joining its board. Mr. Slootman was previously chief executive of Data Domain, which was purchased by EMC in 2009 for $2.9 billion.



Pure Storage Goes Global

Pure Storage, an upstart maker of data storage equipment, hopes that $150 million is enough to take on a multibillion-dollar competitor.

Pure, which offers a “flash storage” product that it says can store lots of digital information on silicon cheaply and fetch it fast, announced Thursday that it had secured $150 million in new financing, mostly from T. Rowe Price, Fidelity Investments and Tiger Global Management.

It was the company’s late-stage “E” round of funding, and it valued Pure at well over $1 billion. The presence of a lot of financial firms and that substantial valuation should indicate that the company will soon go public, but Scott Dietzen, the company’s chief executive, said he was in no rush.

“The best engineering talent likes to be part of the uplift from an I.P.O.,” he said. “We want to attract a lot of great talent.”

What is likely to happen is that Pure, as well as EMC, will start competing globally with new products that put data storage on silicon rather than traditional methods, like discs.

Fifteen months ago, EMC, which is the leader in traditional disc storage, paid about $400 million for a company called Extreme IO, which had technology similar to Pure’s. Mr. Dietzen believes there are a number of things he needs to build to be a serious, global competitor to EMC.

“We need a sales force, we need global marketing, we need 7Ã-24 global support,” he said. “We’re trying to beat a $15 billion global business in disc drive storage.”

The costs of putting storage on silicon are likely to keep dropping, which means that, in time, it will be more affordable to expand how flash storage is used in business computer systems.

That is potentially good news for Pure, though Mr. Dietzen’s company will have to address a lot more customers and uses effectively. EMC can already do that, but every flash sale does undermine its legacy disc storage business.

Pure Storage also announced that Frank Slootman, who is the chief executive of ServiceNow, a cloud-based enterprise software company, would be joining its board. Mr. Slootman was previously chief executive of Data Domain, which was purchased by EMC in 2009 for $2.9 billion.



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