Bits: Yahoo Chief Executive faces unhappy shareholders

Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo, almost escaped his company's shareholder meeting Thursday with hearing nothing but support, despite a stagnating business and shares depressed. But in the final minutes, the unlikely lovefest transformed litigation when an investor has made a fierce attack on the direction of Yahoo and called for MS. Bartz be replaced.

"Out of disbelief and frustration, I think it's time to talk and demand change," the shareholder told the microphone. He added that "talks to buy out your contract need to start today".

Ms. Bartz Yahoo is trying to turn around after several years of indirection and missteps by his predecessors. Patience of investors for his mandate of two years, however, is wearing thin.

Shareholders of Yahoo expected to be a public airing of frustration shareholder. But only one of a few questions from participants was negative.

The investor who voiced dissent, later identified as Steve Landry, called himself as an individual who advised the shareholder holds more than a million shares to institutional investors. The media was not invited to the meeting and could hear only through a Webcast.

Mr. Landry has taken issue with slow turnaround of Yahoo and criticized the portrayal of Ms. Bartz of the company during the event as a strong and growing. He then mentioned a rumor that the Council had been looking for a replacement — the elephant in the room, as he put it — and said that "the last thing that Yahoo needs is a lame duck a.d."

Ms. Bartz, who is known for his pugnacious, replied calmly: "thanks for your opinion, thanks to bloggers and thanks for the entries. Wonderful — which was certainly a downer. "

Then the meeting ended abruptly.

At the beginning, Roy Bostock, Yahoo's President, gave a glowing review of the work of Ms. ra Bartz, which included streamlining its operations, concentrating on its strengths such as content and restructure its infrastructure. Although there remains much work to do, said he was confident that the company was heading in the right direction.

"The progress that we have done is thwarted because this card is very supportive of Carol and the management team," said Mr. Bostock.

A person who knows the mind of the Council emphasized support for MS. Bartz said "rumors that there is a search c.e.o are unequivocally false."

In their voting, investors showed some dissatisfaction with Ms. ra Bartz and Mr. Bostock, though not an overwhelming amount. Both were re-elected after receiving the votes against them by about 20 percent. The other members of the Council supported by the society were elected with votes against them by about 10 percent.

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Advertising: Build a buzz in Social Media ahead of traditional Marketing

Perfetti Van Melle has hired the Agency Martin part of Richmond, Virginia, the Interpublic Group of companies, as the Agency of social media in the United States for its line of Mentos mints and gums. As Perfetti Van Melle Mentos prepares to introduce UP2U, its first rubber stick sold in this country, initial publicity efforts will focus in social media like Facebook.

For example, the new rubber already has a Facebook fan page on facebook.com,/up2u, that more people have shown 95,900 their "likes." The first 1,000 visitors who clicked on the button "as" obtained in a rubber free promotion that began on June 13 and ended on Wednesday.

Plans call for an invitation to be made next month on the fan page, wondering who "like" the new product to provide the name of friends who would like to receive samples.

•

Perfetti Van Melle long has been a part of digital media for Mentos. In 2003, during the election for Governor, California Mentos introduced a microsite, or special Web site, which tried to declare a new boxed product, Mentos mints, such as "chewy Mint official" of the elections.

And in 2006, when performance artists loaded to a website called eepybird.com, a video clip that showed how mixing Diet Coke with Mentos mints can produce cool explosions, Perfetti Van Melle hugged them and posted the clip on mentos.com.

The strategy of introducing Mentos UP2U "is very marketing 360 degrees, starting with very compelling and unique content, social media," said Mehmet Yuksek, executive vice President for North America at the Office of Perfetti Van Melle in Erlanger, KY.

"We would like to build a buzz," he added, and then navigate to advertising in traditional media such as television.

To help generate that word of mouth, Perfetti Van Melle is also using Lizzie – Grubman public relations in New York, which will distribute samples of Mentos UP2U to events in places like Las Vegas and Miami.

Aspects of interactive marketing plans are indicative of the growing importance of digital initiatives at companies that peddle packaged consumer goods.

"Only a few years ago, digital information meant one thing to senior executives: risk," said Susan McPartlin, retail and consumer industry leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he joined with the Grocery Manufacturers Association, on Tuesday to release a study entitled "thriving in a world connected".

"However, companies are no longer defending the thought," he added. "They are using the digital data to advance their competitive position."

At the same time, social media, smart phones and other digital technologies are empowering consumers with more control of their shopping choices, "ms. McPartlin said. "And are not shy of posting their feelings about products online, where they literally are deliver reams of potential insights that can create a tremendous opportunity for consumer packaged goods organizations that can find patterns in noise."

Which is shown repeatedly on Facebook fan page UP2U. For example, about an hour after the mark has posted a question on the Wednesday afternoon — "a song theme plays whenever you enter a room. The UP2U, what song is choose? "— There were already more than 120 comments that included "I Will Survive", the theme from "Jaws", "Like a Virgin" and "my children say the music from ' the wizard of Oz ' when the old lady is on her bike. "

In this realm, "consumers are out in front, said Marc Kempter, senior vice president and group account Director at Martin, in particular the target for the gum, which is of teenagers and young adults.

"Television is still necessary to create broad awareness" for a new product, he added, but the propensities of digital extroverts "" in the market for core UP2U has led to a decision "to launch it digitally before, building up a following of fans and then take mass."

There are disadvantages to this strategy, Mr. Kempter said, especially that "there is no playbook" for success.

"Six months ago, a year ago, everyone was talking about Facebook ' likes '," he added. "Now, it's not just ' tastes ', is the interaction that you want to have with consumers. "

•

Perfetti Van Melle already sells a variety of chewing gum pellets of Mentos, called Mentos pure fresh, but wants to enter the segment of Chew Stick because it is about four times larger. The segment of baton-rubber, however, is intensely competitive, as the confectionery giant Mars, which now owns Wrigley chewing stick brands like orbit, juicy fruit, 5 and collides with Kraft Foods, which now owns brands like Cadbury-stick gum, Dentyne and Trident Stride.

"We are a top-tier global rubber formidable player," Mr. Yuksek said, referring to the brands Perfetti Van Melle sold internationally as Brooklyn and Happydent. "We are here to make it happen in the United States."

Mentos UP2U carries that name, because each package 14-stick contains seven sticks of a flavor and seven sticks of a second. Packages to declare: "2 flavors. 1 package. You decide '. The four couples include Berry watermelon/fresh mint and fresh mint sweet/bubble.

In September, there will be "an entire digital experience bringing the brand to life, all about choice celebrates," Mr. Kempter said, "and then TV in late autumn."

According to Mr. Yuksek, Perfetti Van Melle expects to spend 50 million dollars in advertising and marketing to introduce new rubber. The company spent $ 17.3 million in the United States last year, the unit of WPP's Kantar Media reported, to advertise in major media in all its gums, mints and candy, including taffy Air Heads and Chupa Chups lollipops.

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Errol Morris: my brother invented E-Mail with Tom Van Vleck? (Part 4)

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This is part four of a five-part series. Parts 1 | 2 | 3 4.

THE FIG TREE AND THE WASP

From “Commercial Gardening Volume III”, John Weathers (editor), 1913

It could be a 20th century version of Genesis. In the beginning there was Robert Fano, Fernando Corbat? and J. C. R. Licklider. There were others, of course. Many others. John McCarthy and Edward Fredkin at a Cambridge consulting firm, BBN (Bolt Beranek & Newman) — Licklider was at MIT, then BBN, then at ARPA, and ultimately back at MIT — but MIT was the hub. A group of professors and engineering students wanted to change how computers were used and as a result changed the world. Licklider, by all accounts, was the visionary, the force behind it all. He was not only the oracle of the revolution, but he managed to put himself in a position in the government (at the newly created ARPA) where he could channel financing to projects of interest to him. And he wrote a number of legendary articles, where he foresaw the World Wide Web and personal computers. [23] He saw computers not just as adjunct to problem-solving, but — he took the term explicitly from biology — in a symbiotic relationship with man. His paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (from 1960) opens with what might be considered a metaphor — except that it isn’t one, it is an illustration of what the relationship between man and computer can become.

The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorum. The larva of the insect lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it get its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent: the tree cannot reproduce without the insect; the insect cannot eat without the tree; together, they constitute not only a viable but a productive and thriving partnership…

Man-computer symbiosis is a subclass of man-machine systems. There are many man-machine systems. At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses… The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today. [24]

Many of these early pioneers came from different fields. Licklider had come from psychology; Corbat? from physics; Fano from electrical engineering. [25]

I contacted Dr. Corbat?.

ERROL MORRIS: Tom Van Vleck urged me to talk to you about my brother and his contribution to e-mail.

FERNANDO CORBAT?: I don’t remember the technical details of who did what and so forth. But Noel was right in the middle of things — working on the inner machinery of the system — and was one of the really crack system programmers. He knew how to make things work, how to put them together. And could write really well. It was a big project. And a very tough one, because we were breaking new ground in all directions. But the core of it was the young people who believed in the idea and made it work.

MIT MuseumProfessor Fernando Corbat?, c. 1965MIT Museum

ERROL MORRIS: What was the idea?

FERNANDO CORBAT?: Back in the early ‘60s, computers were getting bigger. And were expensive. So people resorted to a scheme called batch processing. It was like taking your clothes to the laundromat. You’d take your job in, and leave it in the input bins. The staff people would prerecord it onto these magnetic tapes. The magnetic tapes would be run by the computer. And then, the output would be printed. This cycle would take at best, several hours, or at worst, 24 hours. And it was maddening, because when you’re working on a complicated program, you can make a trivial slip-up — you left out a comma or something — and the program would crash. It was maddening. People are not perfect. You would try very hard to be careful, but you didn’t always make it. You’d design a program. You’d program it. And then you’d have to debug it and get it to work right. A process that could take, literally, a week, weeks, months —

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. I remember my brother lugging around reams of paper, all of these computer print-outs. It seemed like a nightmare.

Try writing some code and then send an e-mail from 1965.

FERNANDO CORBAT?: Yes. People began to advocate a different tactic, which came to be called time-sharing. Take advantage of the speed of the computer and have people at typewriter-like terminals. In principle, it seemed like a good idea. It certainly seemed feasible. But no manufacturer knew how to do it. And the vendors were not terribly interested, because it was like suggesting to an automobile manufacturer that they go into the airplane business. It just was a new game. A group of us began to create experimental versions of time-sharing, to see if it was feasible. I was lucky enough to be in a position to try to do this at MIT. And we basically created the “Compatible Time Sharing System,” nicknamed CTSS from the initials, that worked on the large mainframes that IBM was producing. First it was going to be just a demo. And then, it kept escalating. Time-sharing caught the attention of a few visionary people, like Licklider, then at BBN, who picked up the mantle. He went to Washington to become part of one of the funding agencies, namely ARPA. ARPA has changed names back and forth from DARPA to ARPA. But it’s always the same thing.

ERROL MORRIS: They’re close.

FERNANDO CORBAT?: Yes, it is the same organization. They just keep periodically relabeling themselves. Sometimes “Defense” was the initial word and sometimes “Advanced Projects Research Agency.” Anyway, Licklider went down to DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] and proceeded to get in the position where he could go out and parcel out a lot of money, to try to encourage people to do good research. And, in particular, the one thing he was quite interested in was time-sharing and he came up to MIT and talked to a bunch of us. In those days, the MIT computation research was sprinkled in a lot of directions, a lot of different groups. And Bob Fano was one of the people that was involved in the discussions. He was a little bit like the elder statesman, even though he was just a few years older. But he took it upon himself to propose a new project, which came to be called Project MAC, which would collect together all these different groups who were interested in man-machine interaction.

ERROL MORRIS: What year was this?

FERNANDO CORBAT?: I believe it was ’63. I don’t have the dates firmly locked in my mind. But we had done a demo with four typewriters in November of 1961 and we kept improving it. Fano proposed this project, which we all kind of coalesced on, and by the end of 1962, he had the proposal written.

ERROL MORRIS: And the goal was —

FERNANDO CORBAT?: — to use CTSS as an initial platform and to explore the ramifications of man-machine interaction. It was also an opportunity to build a tool. [26]

Scientific American

ERROL MORRIS: From the beginning, did you have terminals hooked up to the mainframe? Was that something that happened early on?

FERNANDO CORBAT?: It happened fairly rapidly. During that summer of anticipation, we beefed up CTSS by acquiring an IBM terminal controller, which was a big box called a 7750 that allowed us to have a large number of terminals. Modems were just coming into play. We were able to attach modems to the 7750, and modems to the terminals, and interconnect the modems via phone lines. MIT, at that point, had its own switched telephone network and we were allowed to put our modems onto the MIT telephone network. So to connect a terminal, it was just a matter of dialing up from the terminal’s modem and being assigned to the next available modem at the 7750.

ERROL MORRIS: I spent a summer with my brother in 1969. And his apartment had a terminal.

FERNANDO CORBAT?: In ’69? Absolutely. We had a phone and a modem at each terminal. And we could dial up the computer. The speed wasn’t very high. The modems started out being 110 baud, which roughly is a dozen characters per second.

ERROL MORRIS: That’s incredibly slow —

FERNANDO CORBAT?: They were slow and as big as a shoebox. And it was really pretty awkward. We were lumbering along. But just being able to do it at all was a big step forward. The technology was just changing from vacuum tubes, the 709, to the transistor machine, the 7090. Project MAC was going to be several hundred people, and so we needed the space to start a project of that magnitude. Fano managed to work out the plan to get space over in Technology Square, which became Project MAC’s first home. Initially we had just two floors. One of the service bureaus had decided they’d over-expanded and wanted to give up the space they had in the building. We were able to get one floor, and then another floor opened up, and so forth.

ERROL MORRIS: Did many patents came out of this?

Cambridge Historical Commission

FERNANDO CORBAT?: We didn’t try to patent anything. The object was to influence the direction of the computer industry.

ERROL MORRIS: Which you did.

FERNANDO CORBAT?: — which we did. That was our goal. And to form a nucleus of computer science at MIT. Until then, computer specialists had been sprinkled around in various groups and places.

ERROL MORRIS: And still no computer science department —

FERNANDO CORBAT?: Most of the key leaders came out of the electrical engineering department. But electrical engineering at MIT was a peculiar department. It had a very, very broad view of what its charter was. It had everything, from biologists to material scientists — a rich tradition of being very spread out in its research directions. And so, most of the people that joined us, Project MAC, were part of electrical engineering, but not all. And Fano asked everyone to make their principal office in the same building where the computer was. This is turning into a longer story than I expected.

ERROL MORRIS: That’s fine.

FERNANDO CORBAT?: And we wanted to come up with hardware that was designed to be time-sharing from the word go, rather than designed for batch processing. So we shopped around. And we talked to about half a dozen different vendors. IBM thought they were the prime possibility, because we were using an IBM machine for CTSS. But we discovered afterwards that they had been working on the 360 line of computers — a very ambitious project in its own right — to produce a family of machines, small to large, which were all batch processors. Unfortunately, a lot of the architecture was against the grain of what we were trying to do with time-sharing. [27]

ERROL MORRIS: So you didn’t go with IBM —

FERNANDO CORBAT?: We formed a triumvirate. Bell Labs, MIT and the G.E. Computer Department agreed orally to work on this project. And each group had its own expectations of what they were going to get out of it. MIT was trying to influence the world. Bell Labs was trying to get a machine which was going to be a workhorse for their laboratories. And General Electric was hoping to get a brand new shiny product that they could sell to other customers. That was the genesis of Multics. We threw down the gauntlet and said, “This is what we’re going to do,” which was very unusual for software projects in those days.

ERROL MORRIS: Did you have any idea how difficult it would be to actually change how people used computers?

FERNANDO CORBAT?: No. We didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be. Once you start from scratch, you really have to do everything. And even though we had anywhere from 50 to 100 people at one time working on the project, it was still a tremendous effort to try to get everything right. It was a visionary goal that everyone who joined the project came to believe in. It wasn’t just another job. And that’s how we kept people like your brother interested as a career. He was part of a group of people that knew how to make things happen. It was an exciting time, and everybody was inspired because they felt they were working on something worthwhile, not just another programming job. Not just another product.

MIT Museum

ERROL MORRIS: But e-mail? Was it a big thing? Or was it just —

FERNANDO CORBAT?: E-mail just evolved. One of the first things you notice when you have everyone on the same machine is that it’s possible to share information back and forth. You can let others use your programs. You can send them data. You can send messages to one another. So early in the game with CTSS, we started up the ability to send messages to people that were logged in. I don’t remember exactly when we began to allow messages to be saved. But that was a natural consequence. And about the time that Multics was coming to life, the idea of networking also began to come to life.

ERROL MORRIS: Networking?! Did everything start at MIT?

FERNANDO CORBAT?: No, it started with Larry Roberts, then at ARPA, who proposed — with Licklider’s encouragement — what came to be called the ARPANET. [28] He went around to all of the sites that Licklider was funding and talked up the idea, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could all send programs back and forth to each other, and to even operate computers from one side of the country to another?”

ERROL MORRIS: But didn’t you have to deal with different kinds of computers?

FERNANDO CORBAT?: The ARPANET was complicated, because everybody in the country had different kinds of equipment. And so, part of creating the ARPANET was to come up with a plan to, homogeneously, allow people to talk to each other, even though they had different kinds of equipment. And Larry proposed a so-called interface message processor — an IMP — attached to what ever computer they were using. And the IMP smoothed out the fact that everybody had a different computer. [29] There were a lot of DEC computers, but there was a tremendous amount of variety. And that allowed the variety to be screened off, so people could communicate. Each of the sites that was interested got an IMP and programmed it to match the ARPANET, and then programmed the IMP to match whatever equipment they had. [30] At MIT we did that, too.

ERROL MORRIS: With so many innovations, what are you most proud of?

FERNANDO CORBAT?: Oh, the fact that it was a team effort. We were able demonstrate that interactive computing was not only a viable idea but a powerful one.

ERROL MORRIS: But when you first started —

MIT Museum

FERNANDO CORBAT?: It was very different. Batch programming software was not designed to be interactive. It was designed to dump out reams of paper, at best. It’s when you begin to get into the man-machine business, when we had first had time-sharing, that you designed different interfaces. You designed different ways to edit text. You designed different ways to write programs. It changed your strategy. All of that first began to show up on these mainframes that were being time-shared. And then, it migrated from the mainframes to the mini computers, which maybe had 10 or 15 people on them, and finally the personal computer, as the hardware kept allowing more new options.

ERROL MORRIS: Did you foresee any of this back in the early ‘60s?

FERNANDO CORBAT?: In a dim way. Not quite so dramatically. We didn’t quite know which shoe would fall next. For example, we knew, from the earliest days, that a graphical interface would be advantageous. But the economics were such you couldn’t afford it. It would cost $50,000 to create a terminal for just one person. It just was not feasible.

ERROL MORRIS: But didn’t you experiment with graphical interfaces, as well? I remember seeing one.

Scientific American

FERNANDO CORBAT?: Yes, we did have one attached to CTSS, which was called the Kluge, a very fancy graphical terminal. [31] [32]

But it wasn’t until the personal computer showed up that people began to really see the potential. There is a side bar on that. One of the reasons that IBM jumped into personal computers was that Apple II was so successful. But the reason the Apple II was so successful was not because it was such a great machine. It was because there was one program on it which suddenly made it of immense value to companies, namely VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet. It was a runaway success. Apple doesn’t like to admit it, but that was the main reason why people were buying Apple IIs. And that’s what got IBM’s attention — suddenly the business world was finding something valuable that they weren’t building.

ERROL MORRIS: History is odd. It’s almost impossible to guess what will be saved and what will fall by the wayside. I’m indebted to Tom Van Vleck and glad that he has become an historian. Without him, I would never know about my brother’s work. I told him he should publish a book. And he said, “What would I want to do that for?” [laughter] He said, “If I put it online, I can constantly update it and correct it and improve it. If I write a book, it’s just a book.”

FERNANDO CORBAT?: Yes, yes. That’s the modern publishing conundrum, isn’t it?

ERROL MORRIS: I keep thinking of the crowd at my brother’s funeral. How did they all know? Do you remember how you found out?

FERNANDO CORBAT?: I don’t remember, but I remember it was a shock. The Multics group, by and large, was young. And death was not a common phenomenon. Very few people have died that worked on the project. That will change with time, of course.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. Time catches up with all of us, eventually.

FERNANDO CORBAT?: But this project inspired people. They felt they were working on something that would last. It was a chance to make a mark on the industry and to change the way things happened.

ERROL MORRIS: To change the world.

FERNANDO CORBAT?: Yes. We were the forerunners of the way things went.

*******

I then learned that Robert Fano, Corbat?’s roommate and officemate, was still alive. And delighted to talk about the past.

Try writing some code and then send an e-mail from 1965. Go to the interactive feature ?

Follow Errol Morris at twitter.com/errolmorris or join him on Facebook.

*******

[23] Memorandum For Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network

[24] Man-Computer Symbiosis

[25] Oral history with Robert Fano from the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota: “It was around 1960. Let me see if I can remember the exact date. There was a great deal of concern on the part of the administration about computer facilities at MIT. So they appointed a committee to make a recommendation consisting of Al Hill, Phil Morse, and myself. Various records also show Jerry Wiesner [Pres. Kennedy’s science adviser and, eventually, president of MIT] was a member. But I do not recall — he probably left for Washington. But he did not really play a part. We promptly appointed a technical committee, which consisted of the various computer types at MIT: Corby, and John McCarthy, and Minsky, and Doug Ross, and Jack Dennis were there. Herb Teager was chairman. Now by that time the idea of timesharing was already moving, and they proposed the development at MIT of a timesharing system.”

[26] In an interview years earlier, Corbat? said, “So that was mostly to convince the skeptics that it was not an impossible task, and also, to get people to get a feel for interactive computing. It was amazing to me, and it is still amazing, that people could not imagine what the psychological difference would be to have an interactive terminal. You can talk about it on a blackboard until you are blue in the face, and people would say, ‘Oh, yes, but why do you need that?’ You know, we used to try to think of all these analogies, like describing it in terms of the difference between mailing a letter to your mother and getting [her] on the telephone. To this day I can still remember people only realizing when they saw a real demo, say, ‘Hey, it talks back. Wow! You just type that and you got an answer.’”

[27] Fernando Corbat?, “IBM was trying to humor us. They viewed it as kind of an interesting experiment. Unbeknownst to us in this whole time frame, they were hard at work developing what came to be known as the 360 line of machines and they had it close to their vests. The people that had sold the management of IBM on the 360 had convinced them that it was a machine to solve all problems from here to forever after. That wasn’t true. Clearly, timesharing was not on their agenda and they viewed it as an aberration. They saw the goal as to have a line of machines which allowed them to sell much like the auto manufacturers. You would have a starter machine and then a larger machine and then a larger machine. They saw it only as a way to sell machines to customers. They did not think of it in terms of the way people would use computers.”

[28] In his ARPA Program Plan of 1968, Lawrence Roberts wrote, “Just as time-shared computer systems have permitted groups of hundreds of individual users to share hardware and software resources with one another, networks connecting dozens of such systems will permit resource sharing between thousands of users.”

[29] IMPs were the forerunners of today’s routers.

[30] Interface Message Processor (IMP) 1969

[31] “Cyrus Levinthal, the Kluge and the origins of interactive molecular graphics” (pdf)

[32] Early Interactive Molecular Graphics at MIT

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Accelerating Android with tips and tricks

But despite the variety of Android phones and carriers, there are a lot of useful functions that are common to all. Here are some tips on how to find them:

The long press The key to many of these suggestions is the long press: instead of tapping a button, or icon on the screen, press and hold your finger on it for two seconds. Often, this will bring up a menu of options specific to the type of item, such as one to bookmark a Web link. You can also press the hardware keys on the phone and the background of the home screen, to reveal the various options.

In general, long-tap functions are intended to save from eavesdropping through a series of menus to perform a common task. Is the equivalent of right-clicking your mouse on the screen of a PC.

So, for example, you can long press the home button on your phone — one that looks like a small house — to bring up a menu of your eight most recently used apps. This allows you to hop quickly between, say, an email that are writing and Web browser.

You can also press the search key — looks like a magnifying glass — to pop-up a microphone icon labeled "zansu". Voice command system Android understands at least 10 commands, such as "text Send to Alison Wright, late you will see a 6," "go to the nearest pizza place," "Listen to Taylor Swift" and of course, "Note to self". If it does not begin with a special command, Android will assume that you speak a Web search.

Within the browser app, press the back key — the one marked with an arrow left U-turning — snap open a screen with bookmarks, most visited pages and navigation history displayed in tabs.

Press on your home screen to bring up a menu of options that includes links. You can create a shortcut, it just seems like an app on your home screen, which connects directly to a Web page bookmark, a person in your contact list or a navigation destination. Android will label the link with the logo of the website, the face of a person or an icon you choose for destinations.

Too many icons on your home screen? Press on the screen a pop-up menu that includes a folder option. You can create an icon folder and call it, say, games, in which you can drag all your applications.

Click a link on a webpage to pop-up menu to open the link in a new window. To switch to windows, press the menu key — what is a grid of four square — and tap Windows in the options that appear on the screen.

And prolonged pressure may also be used for accent marks. To enter, say, an e with a grave accent in a message, press the "and" on the keyboard. That opens a menu of characters "and" with different accents.

Quick access to phone, text and email In your address book, do not touch the name of the person. To touch their photo. That opens a menu of icons to call, text or email. There are also options to send messages through Twitter and Facebook.

Take photos of yourself Android cameras without a second camera for self-portraits have a Self Portrait in the camera APP. Tap and the camera will search for faces in its crosshairs using facial recognition software. The phone will be turned over a new photo of you every few seconds, adding that the images from your camera roll. Is more hit or miss to take your photo in a mirror, but it's more fun, as the robbery in an old fashioned photo booth.

Phrases faster Android collected a trick from BlackBerry phones of old school: when you type a text message or e-mail, there is no need to fumble for the key at the end of a sentence. Just press the SPACEBAR twice. Android will insert a period and a space much faster than you could type them yourself.

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Upending anonymity, these days the Web reveals all

Now, apparently, is the place where he died the anonymity.

A commuter in New York that tangled verbally with a conductor on Tuesday — and defended herself asking "do you know which schools, I've been to and educated as they are?" — has been identified publicly after a fellow pilot posted a video phone meeting on YouTube. The woman, who had gone to NYU, was ridiculed by a group of bloggers, one of which was the last episode of "Name and shame on the Web."

Women who were friends of pen on-line former representative Anthony d. Weiner Similarly learned how quickly Internet users can sniff all the details of a person's online life. So did the men who set fire to cars and shops looted in the wake of Vancouver's Stanley Cup defeat last week, when they have been identified, marked with online acquaintances.

The collective intelligence of the two billion Internet users and fingerprints that many users leave websites, combine to make it increasingly likely that any embarrassing video, every intimate photos and every email Indelicato is attributed to its source, if that source wants it or not. This intelligence makes the public sphere more public than ever before and sometimes forces personal lives in public view.

For some, this may evoke comparisons to repressive Governments in the Middle East that control the exact punishment offline and online protests. But the positive effects can be numerous: criminality can be booked, can be rebutted falsehoods and individuals can become icons of the Internet.

When a freelance photographer, Rich Lam, digested his photos of the riots in Vancouver, saw several shots of a man and a woman, surrounded by police officers in riot gear, in the middle of a kiss like nobody's watching. When the photos were published, a worldwide roundup of sorts followed to identify the pair kissing. " In one day, relatives of the couple had leaked news websites for their identity, and there were, on Monday, her show "Today": Scott Jones and Alex Thomas, the ultimate test that, thanks to the Internet, every day could be a day that will be remembered around the world.

"It's kind of amazing that there was someone there to take a photo," ms. Thomas said "Today".

The "couple kissing" will probably only worth a tweet of Fame, but it is worth noting that were monitored at all.

This erosion of anonymity is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cell phone cameras, photos and videos free Web host, and perhaps most important of all, a change in people's views on what should be public and what should be private. Experts say that sites like Facebook, which require real identities and encourage the sharing of photos and videos, have accelerated this change.

"Humans want nothing more than to connect, and companies that we connect electronically wants to know who says what, where," said Susan Crawford, Professor at the Benjamin n. Cardozo School of Law. "Consequently, we are more popular than ever."

This growing "publicness", as it is sometimes called, comes with significant consequences for the trade, for the political discourse and for ordinary people to the right to privacy. There are the efforts of Governments and corporations to create online identity systems. Technology will play an even greater role in identifying individuals once anonymous: Facebook, for example, are already using facial recognition technology in ways that are alarming to European regulators.

After the riots in Vancouver, unnecessary spaces such facial recognition technology — they simply combed through social media sites to try to identify some of the people involved, as Nathan Kotylak, 17, a star on Canada's junior water polo team.

On Facebook, Mr. Kotylak apologized for the damage he had caused. Reports not only hit him, it influenced his family: local news media reported that his father, a doctor, had seen its rankings on a site review of medical practice, RateMDs.com, after people posted comments on his son's involvement in the riots. Other people then went to the website of the doctor and improve his place.

Predictably, there was a reaction to the identification of persons involved in the riot-assisted Internet alcohol-fueled. Camille Cacnio, a student in Vancouver, who was photographed during the uprising and who admitted to stealing, wrote on his blog that the "21st century witch hunt" on the Internet was "another form of bullying".

In the area of New York commuters who was the object of derision on-line last week shut down both her Twitter accounts and LinkedIn once his name bubbled up on blogs. Even if the person who originally posted the video took down cell, other people quickly republished, giving new life history. The poster of the original video remains anonymous because his YouTube account was closed.

Half a world away, in countries such as Iran and Syria in the Middle East, activists sometimes have managed to identify victims of violence and dictatorship through YouTube videos uploaded anonymously.

They are also able to identify false: In a case widely publicized this month, a blogger who claimed to be a Syrian-American and lesbian herself called "A Gay Girl in Damascus" proved to be an American man, Tom MacMaster.

The investigator was led by Andy Carvin, a strategist for NPR who exhaustively covered Middle East protests on Twitter. When said sources who were skeptical of the identity of the blogger, "I just started to ask questions on Twitter and Facebook," Mr. Carvin said on CNN. "Have you met someone in person? You know you at all? As I asked, but I've learned, because no one had even met her, presumably had reporters who interviewed her in person. "

Mr. Carvin, his followers and other on-line used photos and server log data to connect your blog to the wife of Mr. MacMaster.

"Advertisement" — something normally associated with celebrity — "is no longer scarce," Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia, written in an essay of this month.

He postulated that because the Internet cannot be made to forget "pictures and moments of the past, such as an explosion on a train or a kiss during a riot," the reality of a world government inevitable is a problem that we're going to hear about a lot more. "

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Camera of a start-up allows you to take shots before and later will focus

The company's technology allows the focus of an image to be adjusted after it is taken. When viewing a photo taken with a camera Lytro computer screen, you can, for example, click to bring people in the foreground into sharp relief or change focus to the mountains behind them.

But is the technology of Lytro only a neat feature, or is the next big thing in cameras?

Team founder of Silicon Valley startups and investors who have put in 50 million dollars is betting on the latter. The technology has won praise from computer and rave from early users of his prototype camera.

"We see technology companies in all the time, but it is rare that someone comes up with something that is so much of a breakthrough, said Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a big investor in Lytro."Is superexciting ".

The Lytro founder and chief executive is Ren Ng, 31. Its success, experts say, was to take the research projects of recent years — that require perhaps 100 digital cameras and hurled a supercomputer — and squeeze the technology in a camera Assistant for the consumer market, this year.

Mr Ng explained the concept in 2006 in his doctoral thesis at Stanford University, who won the contest for the best PhD dissertation in computer science that year in the world of the Association for Computing Machinery. Since then Mr Ng tried to translate the idea into a product that can be brought to the market — and building a team of people to do so.

The camera Lytro data capture more light, from many points of view, it is possible with a traditional camera. That is accomplished with a special sensor called a microlens array that provides the equivalent of many goals in a small space. "That is the heart of the publication," said Pat Hanrahan, a professor at Stanford, who was Director of Mr Ng's thesis but is not involved in Lytro.

But the wealth of raw data only light comes to life with sophisticated software that enables a viewer to pass fire points. This allows you to still photographs to explore, like never before. "Become interactive images, living," said Mr Ng. He believed that a popular use can be families and friends roaming through different perspectives on the images of, say, holidays and parties published on Facebook (Lytro will have a Facebook application).

For a photographer, both amateur and professional, the Lytro means that the technology headaches to focus a shot go away. Richard Koci Hernandez, a photojournalist, said that when he tried a prototype of this year, he immediately recognized the potential impact.

"You just concentrate on image composition, but you don't need to worry about focusing more," says Mr Hern?ndez. "This is something you do later."

"That was the aha! time for me, "said Mr. Hernandez, Assistant Professor of new media at the Graduate School of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. "This is game-changing."

Mr. Hernandez, who is not affiliated with Lytro, was one of several photographers who tested prototypes. His model, he said, was sheathed in a black plastic shell, so he has not seen his design. But he said it was the size of a standard point-and-shoot camera. Image resolution, he added, was indistinguishable from that of his other point-and-shoots, a Canon and Nikon.

Eliminating any loss of resolution in camera as of Lytro, which is capturing light data from many points of view, is a real step forward, said Shree Nayar, Professor at Columbia University and expert on computer vision. Mr Nayar is familiar with the work of Mr. Ng, but said he had not seen anything that lytro did in more than a year.

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State of the art: Apple Final Cut is dead. Viva the final cut.

He did use the present tense? Sorry. Final cut has been the industry leader. Did it cost $ 1,000. But now that it's all over.

Tuesday, Apple pulled a typical move by Apple: he killed off the two Final Cut 7 years at the height of its popularity.

Instead, Apple now offers something called Final Cut Pro X (pronounced "10"). But don't be fooled by the name. Is a new program, written from scratch. Apple says that a fresh start was needed to accommodate huge changes in the technological landscape.

Veteran Apple may, at this point, be feeling some creepy d?j? vu. Have you seen this movie before. Apple iMovie, not kill too, in 2008 and replace it with a completely new version, less capable that lacked many important features? It took three years before new updates iMovie finally passed its predecessor in features and consistency.

Some professional editor are already insisting that Apple has done exactly the same error with Final Cut X; underlined several flaws with the program after an earlier version of this article was published online on Wednesday. They say the new program lacks high-end features like the ability to edit multiple camera angles, for export to tape, to burn something more rudimentary DVD and work with EDL, XML files and OMF (used to exchange projects with other programs). You can use a second monitor to your computer, but you need new drivers of TV output for connecting a video monitor. You cannot change the settings of your exported QuickTime movies without the compressor to $ 50.

Apple admits that version x is a foundational piece ". It says that it will restore some of these features in time, and that other companies are quickly filling other holes.

For nonprofessionals, meanwhile, Final Cut is already tempted — especially because the price is $ 300, not $ 1,000. Is the first program of Apple which is only available for download by Mac App Store online, not on DVD. All programs previously called Final Cut Studio have been rolled into Final Cut except Motion and compressor, which are sold separately. Final Cut Express and DVD Studio Pro are gone.)

The new Final Cut has been radically redesigned. Actually, it looks and works much like iMovie, all dark grey, with "skimming"; you run the cursor over a clip without pressing the mouse button to play it.

Once you're past the shock of the new layout, the first thing you'll notice is that Apple has left most of the biggest annoyances of the old Final Cut cutting-room floor.

First — and this is huge — no more waiting to "make". You no longer sit there, dead in the water, while the software calculates the changes, block the program, meanwhile, whenever you add an effect or insert a piece of video that is in a different format. Final Cut X renders in the background, so you can keep right on changing. You can, however, organize your files, or delete clips during rendering.

Secondly, in the old Final Cut, was all too easy to drag and drop audio and video clip of sync accidentally; Little indicators " -1" or "+ 10", which shows how many frames out of you were a chronic headaches. But in the new final cut, "sync is sacred," as Apple puts it. Primary audio and Video are always in sync, and you can also block other clips together so that all move as one.

In fact, a clever feature called Compound clip allows you to collapse a stack of audio and video clips into a single sequence, resulting from the merger on the timeline. You can edit, move, and apply effects as if it were a single unit and then UN-Union that whenever you like. Clip compound make it simple to manage with a complicated composition without going quietly mad.

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