Facebook Shifts Its Approach to Payments

It knows who you are. It knows what you like. Now it wants to make it easier for you to buy things, in your own currency.

Facebook on Tuesday signaled its ambitions to grow as a payment platform, with changes to how its users can buy goods and services without leaving its site. It is also a clear indication to Wall Street that the company is pushing to make more money. Concerns about the company’s revenue prospects have held back its shares since its public offering last month.

Until now, Facebook has had its own virtual currency, called Facebook Credits, which was used mainly to buy virtual goods in games like FarmVille. Facebook took a 30 percent cut from those sales, bringing in a hefty 15 percent of total revenue last year. The changes announced on Tuesday are designed to encourage companies well beyond game developers to sell their wares on the Facebook platform itself. It carries the additional benefit of potentially keeping Facebook users on the site longer and harnessing more data about what they buy.

The changes announced are twofold. First, Facebook users will be able to subscribe to services that require monthly payments. In the past, the service allowed one-time payments only. Second, users will be able to pay for things on Facebook in their own currency, rather than credits, which is vital for Facebook because it is a global network.

“By supporting pricing in local currency, we hope to simplify the purchase experience, give you more flexibility, and make it easier to reach a global audience of Facebook users who want a way to pay for your apps and games in their local currency,” Facebook said in a blog post for app developers.

The new system will allow users to plug in their credit card information once and store it on Facebook, just as they could to buy Facebook Credits. But now, with one click, they will be able to buy whatever is on offer, priced in their own currency: a magazine subscription in euros, say, or concert tickets in dollars or games in Indian rupees.

At the moment, there isn’t a whole lot to buy on Facebook, though companies like Spotify, which offer music streaming, or Milyoni, which streams movies and concerts on Facebook, can take immediate advantage of the monthly subscriptions and seamless payments.

The changes will begin next month, the company said, and are designed to work on mobile devices as well.

Facebook is far from becoming iTunes, which is Apple’s online entertainment store. But the tweaks announced Tuesday are a nod to the Apple model, where you pay in dollars and cents, not a whimsical currency. It is also a window into how Facebook is seeking to bring in more revenue from sources other than advertising.

“They are showing us we care about driving revenue, and I think that’s great,” said Michael Pachter, an equities analyst with Wedbush Securities. “That’s what investors want to see.”

Microsoft Shows Off Payment Technology in New Phone Software

Microsoft’s mobile operating system, Windows Phone, hasn’t made much of an impact on the phone market. But the company is far from giving up. It is investing even more in the software with a major upgrade set for release this fall. What’s it got that the iPhone doesn’t? A complete mobile payment system.

The new software, Windows Phone 8, will be built on the same foundation as Windows 8, the next version of Microsoft’s operating system for desktops and tablets, the company said on Wednesday at a conference for software developers in San Francisco.

Among other features, Windows Phone 8 introduces support for hardware with near-field communication, a technology that enables devices to exchange information wirelessly over very short distances, allowing smartphones to be used for payments. Accompanying that, Windows Phone 8 will include a wallet application to store credit cards, coupons, frequent flyer accounts and customers’ credit and debit card information.

That’s a bit better than what Apple offers for mobile payments. Apple’s new iPhone software, due out this fall, has a similar wallet app called Passbook. But its hardware doesn’t include near-field communication, so it relies on displaying bar codes to redeem purchases. (The addition of Passbook, however, hints that Apple may be preparing to add near-field to a future iPhone.)

Other than enabling payments, the technology will allow Windows phones to pull off some other nifty tricks. Tapping two phones together could exchange business cards, or link the phones  to play a board game, said Joe Belfiore, Microsoft’s vice president for the Windows phone program.

Windows Phone 8 will also add features like encryption to improve security and support for multicore processors, which would improve multitasking.

WP8 won't run on current Windows Phone, a problem for Nokia

Windows Phone 8, coming in the fall, won't run on existing Windows Phones, Microsoft said during the launch of the smartphone operating system Wednesday.

As a result, analysts expect sales of existing Windows Phone models to get battered in the coming months, creating acute problems for the ailing Nokia, which makes Lumia smartphones running Windows Phone 7.5.

"Because Windows Phone 7 is not truly upgradeable to Windows Phone 8, this could have a negative impact on sales of existing WP7 smartphones, Nokia's Lumia devices in particular," said Malik Saadi, an analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, on Thursday.

Saadi said wireless carriers and users will hold off on purchasing smartphones running the Windows Phone OS until the new devices that run WP8 are on the market in the fall. "This will have a serious impact on Nokia's financial performance this quarter as the company relies strongly on Windows Phones as the main platform for its smartphones."

Nokia could not be reached for comment. A week ago, Nokia said it was laying off 10,000 workers amid poor sales of low-cost phones and its Symbian-based phones, while the share of its new Windows Phone sales was still small.

Some features of Windows Phone 8 will be part of upgrades to Windows Phone 7.0 and 7.5 devices, including the Lumia 900 and Lumia 800, with an interim version called Windows Phone 7.8. But WP7.8 will only "mimic Windows Phone 8 but will lack performance and functionality that will require a deep integration with the hardware," Saadi said in an email.

Part of the reason for the lack of integration is that today's Windows Phones run single-core processors. Microsoft is promising that WP8 will run on smartphones with multicore processors and high-definition screens that support more sophisticated video and gaming applications.

Aside from concerns over phone sales, Saadi said he considers WP8 a marked improvement over WP7, and a possible "game-changer" for the platform that could bring back key manufacturers like HTC, Samsung and LG. Microsoft on Wednesday said that Nokia, Samsung, HTC and Huawei are working on Windows Phone 8 smartphones.

For the most part, analysts say Windows Phone 8 brings the OS into parity with Android and iOS smartphones. WP8 will have near field communication (NFC) technology, a mobile wallet, an updated start screen, support for encryption and the "secure boot" specification, built-in Nokia Navteq map technology and a full Internet Explorer 10 browser with new HTML 5 features.

Another new feature -- a removable micro-SD card -- will allow users to expand storage. Apple doesn't have expandable storage in its iPhone, and the feature would help set the Windows Phone apart, analysts noted.

"Differentiating WP8 from the iPhone by adding SD card capabilities is ... a positive move," said Al Hilwa, an analyst at IDC.

However, Saadi said IT managers might be concerned about losing corporate data when a micro-SD card is removed from a WP8 phone and obtained by someone not authorized to have the data. "An external SD card makes operators and IT managers quite nervous," he said. It isn't clear whether WP8's encryption capabilities could be applied to the SD card data.

EBay Plans Data Center That Will Run on Alternative Energy Fuel Cells

EBay plans to build a data center to handle its billions of dollars in retail transactions that will draw its power from alternative energy fuel cells rather than the national power grid, which is heavily dependent on coal plants.

Enlarge This Image

Bloom Energy

Bloom Energy servers. The company will provide the cells for a new data center that will handle eBay’s retail transactions.

It will be the first major tech company to use alternative power as a primary source for energy-hungry data centers, although the new center will connect to the electricity grid for backup. Environmental groups have issued a series of rebukes to Internet companies because of their heavy reliance on coal-fired power to run their centers.

Some companies already use alternative energy to run the data centers that power social networks, stream entertainment or manage commercial transactions, but only as a supplemental source.

EBay plans to use about six million watts of power generated on-site by fuel cells, which are a substantially cleaner and more efficient source of energy than coal, in its new data center in South Jordan, Utah. The company also operates PayPal, the online payment service, out of the South Jordan site. Bloom Energy, a private company in Sunnyvale, Calif., will make the fuel cells.

The new center will double the size of an existing data center there, which will still be on the grid. The grid will serve mainly as a backup power source for the new center. Even so, the fuel cells will account for less than 15 percent of the energy needs of all eBay data centers around the country — a clue that the industry is likely to remain deeply dependent on the grid and its energy mix indefinitely.

“Does it have risk? Sure. Did it require investment? Sure. But it’s an investment and a risk that is worth taking,” said John Donahoe, president and chief executive of eBay. Mr. Donahoe and KR Sridhar, co-founder and chief executive of Bloom Energy, confirmed the fuel cell plans. EBay signed an agreement this week with Bloom for the fuel cells.

Haresh Kamath, program manager for energy storage and distributed generation at the Electric Power Research Institute, said that it was still unknown how the fuel cells would hold up.

“Purely from a power-reliability standpoint, it’ll be interesting to see how this proceeds,” Mr. Kamath said. “I’m glad that somebody is trying to do this.”

Mr. Sridhar sought to dispel those doubts, saying that the Bloom cells were specifically designed so that no simple string of failures could bring a system down. Thirty Bloom cells will be installed at the eBay data center.

Arrays of various sizes are in use by more than 20 major organizations, including FedEx, Wal-Mart, AT&T and Kaiser Permanente. But Peter Gross, vice president of mission critical systems at Bloom, said that nothing was comparable to the data center redesign undertaken by eBay. That redesign, Mr. Gross said, is “an extraordinary step to do something that has never been done before.”

Dean Nelson, the vice president of global foundation services at eBay, who is in charge of data centers, said that the shift demanded a radical redesign, since nearly all data centers now draw their main power from the grid and must have complex backup systems — absent in the new concept — available in case of a blackout.

“It is really throwing out the way people have done it in the past,” Mr. Nelson said. “You can build a better mousetrap.”

The cells are essentially large batteries whose charge is maintained by the hydrocarbon energy contained in natural gas. Fuel cells by various manufacturers have become more economically competitive with grid power in recent years as the price of natural gas has plummeted.

Although the Bloom cells function at high temperatures internally, the charge is maintained by chemical reactions, not combustion, so the efficiencies are much higher than at an ordinary power plant. The reactions produce mainly carbon dioxide and water. By generating power on-site, the fuel cells also save energy that is normally dissipated as electricity runs though transmission lines.

The Bloom cells can also run on so-called biogas, a byproduct of landfills and animal waste at large industrial farms. Annie Lescroart, an eBay spokeswoman, said that in another bow to the environment, the company would pay a premium to enable the production of biogas somewhere in the United States in amounts comparable to its gas usage in South Jordan.

EBay relies on large amounts of computing power to carry out its mission of connecting buyers and sellers among its 102 million active users. The company estimates that through its services, a men’s necktie is sold every 25 seconds, a pair of women’s jeans every 17 seconds, and a piece of golf equipment every 7.1 seconds. It handled $69 billion in transactions in 2011.

In all, Mr. Nelson said, transactions flow through eBay’s computers at the rate of roughly $2,000 a second. Those computers use large amounts of energy. Ebay estimates that its data centers will consume an average of 43 million watts in 2012. The Electric Power Research Institute estimates that in the United States, 1 million watts powers about 600 homes.

Particularly on the Utah grid, that energy is supplied mostly by coal power, according to the research institute. “The energy mix there is what it is, and it’s not pretty,” said Gary Cook, an information technology analyst at Greenpeace who has assessed the industry’s energy appetite.

Moving some of that load to fuel cells from the grid, Mr. Cook said, would be a major shift. “Other companies would be wise, if they’re serious about their carbon footprint, to do so as well,” he said.

Google+ chat allows to chat with anyone who exist in mutual circles!

When we polled for favorite features few months ago, Google+ chat surprisingly came as one of the most popular features in Google+.

With chat being more important, more features were added to chat and more ways to connect through the chat feature.

We’ve compiled a shortlist of new features

• Now chat with anyone on Google+ by typing their name in chat section of Google+ (with one condition, that person must have you in one of their circles [mutual circles]. previously only if you know their email address, add and confirm you’ll be able to chat)
• Google+ chat list will show only users you had recent conversations with instead of showing all the contacts (Type a name in the search within chat to talk to a person)
• When both of you have in each others circle, you’ll be to chat across other google products like Gmail, Google+, Orkut and GTalk client

Also try these secret chat emoticons on Google+ chat (a.k.a Google+ chat Easter eggs)

“:3″
“:(:)”
“:(|)”
“V.v.V”
“<@%”
“~=[,,_,,]:3″

note: please ignore the double quotes

Enjoy!!!

New army attack game on google+

New army attack game has been released on google+ social games, command your army and lead to victory.

Looking for variety in games? Here is the new game…

Become a true army commander and lead your troops to victory in Army Attack

Army attack game screen on google+

Enjoy the new game on google+.

Google+ android app version 2.6 released with brand new look and experience

Few days ago google+ iphone app released with a major UI overhaul and new features. Yesterday they have released version 2.6.0.30400255 of the android app with similar features.

Do we need a voice plan anymore? newly designed Google+ android app let’s you to start ahangout right from your mobile phone and rings people you have invited to the hangout. If they missed the ring they can always join back later (make sure your phone has a front facing camera to start a hangout).

Newly designed navigation ribbon in google+ android app

Gorgeously designed incoming stream of posts that lets to go through posts like viewing a gallery. One problem we found was it is kind of hard to figure out where each post ends i.e the separator. Although it gives a seamless experience of browsing through posts, they should improve the separator  between posts.

The old boring icons of launching features in the application is gone and replaced with a nicenavigation ribbon (refer image above) that allows to quickly navigate to stream, profile, messenger, photos and circles.

New features

• Start a hangout right from your phone
• Fine control of instant upload settings
• Newly designed navigation ribbon
• It is fast and very responsive
• Ability to download photos and turn into wallpaper
• Edit posts inline
• and many more

Overall this is a great release and heads the android app in a whole new direction designed for better experience. Great job guys!

The new google+ android app is readily available for download on android play store or just update if you have already installed.

Main stream in android app

Communication and notification settings

Instant upload settings

Newly designed navigation ribbon in google+ android app

What’s hot stream in android app

Incoming stream from All Circles

Google+ sms posting now available in 43 countries and 9 languages

Google+ allowed to post via SMS right from the beginning but this feature was available only in 2 countries i.e United states and India. Now this feature is available in around 43 countries.

Google+ via SMS numbers list

Google+ sms numbers (for 43 countries)

The list of 43 countries, carriers supported and their SMS numbers are listed in the table below (Source: Google+)

Country	Carrier	SMS number(s)
Afghanistan	AWCC	2125400
Afghanistan	Etisalat	8080400
Afghanistan	Roshan	4664400
Algeria	Nedjma	+213558996400
Angola	Unitel	46645400
Bahrain	Viva	87700400
Bahrain	Zain	94004400
Benin	Moov	95650400
Cambodia	Smart	1000400
Cameroon	MTN	8741400
Cameroon	Orange	+23798008301
Congo, Democratic Republic	Vodacom	+243822063400
Congo (DRC)	Vodafone	+243822063400
Cote D’Ivoire	MTN	4442400
Cote D’Ivoire	Orange	2258500
Cote D’Ivoire	Moov	41918400
Egypt	Mobinil	34400
Ghana	MTN	1980400
Ghana	Tigo	8300
Ghana	Airtel	5400
Guinea	Orange	500000400
India	All carriers	+919222222222
Indonesia	Axis	71400
Indonesia	Hutchison	4665400
Indonesia	Indosat	367400
Indonesia	Telkomsel	4664400
Indonesia	XL Axiata	94640400
Iraq	Zain	2601400
Israel	Orange	1000400
Israel	Pelephone	10400
Jordan	Umniah	99813400
Jordan	Zain	909070400
Kazakhstan	GSM Kazakhstan	30400
Kenya	Airtel Kenya	+254786100400
Kenya	Safaricom	+254700999400
Kenya	Yu	+254754001400
Kenya	Orange	10400
Kuwait	Viva	5078400
Kuwait	Wataniya	1971400
Kuwait	Zain	898400
Kyrgystan	Megacom	46245400
Liberia	Cellcom	8400
Malawi	Airtel Zain	+265991903400
Malawi	TNM	80400
Malaysia	Digi	222350400
Malaysia	Maxis	260060400
Maldives	Dhiraagu	+9604664400
Maldives	Wataniya Maldives	4645400
Morocco	Inwi	333400
Mozambique	Vodacom	8418400
Niger	Orange	91995268
Nigeria	Airtel	+2348021600400
Nigeria	Glo	20202400
Nigeria	MTN	40700
Nigeria	Starcomms	33166400
Nigeria	Visafone	610400
Pakistan	Mobilink	2434400
Philippines	Globe Telecom	2662400
Philippines	Smart Communications	4664400
Philippines	Sun Cellular	22020400
Saudi Arabia	Mobily	611011400
Saudi Arabia	Saudi Telecom Company	88555400
Saudi Arabia	Zain	710466400
Senegal	Orange	+221774699400
Senegal	Tigo	22408400
Sierra Leone	Comium	60400
Sri Lanka	Dialog	4664400
Sri Lanka	Mobitel	89000400
Sri Lanka	Etisalat	103200400
Tanzania	Tigo	46400
Tanzania	Vodacom	+255766790400
Thailand	DTAC	42662400
Thailand	TRUE	47640400
Tunisia	Tunisiana	871222400
Tunisia	Orange	871818400
Uganda	MTN	902801400
Uganda	Orange	+256790791900
Uganda	Uganda Telecom	+256715887400
United States	All carriers	33669
Uzbekistan	Ucell	45400
Vietnam	Vinaphone	9666400
Zambia	Zamtel	3566400

Besides 43 countries, sms commands are supported in 9 languages i.e english, french, spanish, portuguese, arabic, hebrew, swahili, indonesian and thai.

There are millions of smartphones that have the capability to access google+ via browser and google+ app on iphone and android phones. But at the same time there are billions of devices which are not smartphones that have SMS / texting capability. This Google+ sms feature would give them the opportunity to connect with the world and share their thoughts.

IT world

11ac chip with NFC, Bluetooth unveiled by Marvell

The next generation of Wi-Fi -- the superfast IEEE 802.11ac standard -- will integrate a range ofwireless technologies on the same chip, as Marvell showed this week at Taiwan's giant annual Computex show. The semiconductor vendor announced a chip that will include 11ac with Bluetooth and near-field communications (NFC).

The integrated system-on-a-chip, part of Marvell's Avastar line, will reduce components, costs and time to market for the consumer mobile devices that are the product's target market, according to Bart Giordano, director of product marketing at Marvell, of Santa Clara. More importantly for end users, the chip's two 11ac data streams will deliver a data rate of over 860Mbps, compared to 300Mbps for a comparable 11n chip.

BACKGROUND: Speedy 802.11ac Wi-Fi set for fast, wide rollout

In both cases, useable throughput is about one-third to one-half less. Even so, 11ac represent a huge boost for Wi-Fi connectivity. [For the high end of today's three-stream 11n products, see Network World's Clear Choice Test on "Three-stream Wi-Fi hits the mark"] 

The speed of 11ac should impact the efficiency and capacity of Wi-Fi connections. "I can transport data two times as efficiently [compared to 11n], so I spend less time on the [Wi-Fi] link transmitting or receiving," Giordano says. That can translate into more availability and capacity for clients.

As with announced plans for rival products, the Marvell 11ac chip will connect with the full range of existing Wi-Fi radios.

NFC is a very short-range wireless technology that's used in an array of computerized smartcards, generally for what's called "contactless" transactions: A card or other NFC-equipped device, like a smartphone, can be waved near a reader, and a bank account or other payment system is triggered to make an electronic purchase. It's long been touted as the basis of using a cellphones as electronic or mobile wallets.

But Marvell sees its first really widespread use, and that of Bluetooth 4.0, as companion technologies for Wi-Fi, to make Wi-Fi connections as seamless and effortless as cellular. Both NFC and Bluetooth can be used as "out-of-band" channels to set up and authenticate Wi-Fi connections, for example between two handsets.

"Today, the user has to search for a network, enter a pass phrase and so on," says Giordano. "With NFC, you just bring the smartphone near the connection, and the out-of-band NFC channel can be used to authenticate and then pair them."

Bluetooth is finding a growing role in consumer electronics, as a radio alternative to infrared, according to Giordano. In home media centers, Bluetooth can provide connectivity for remote control devices, 3D glasses, and an array of audio streaming applications. Here again, NFC could be used to pair these devices automatically without user input.

Apple tries to stop US sales of Samsung's Galaxy S III

Apple has asked a court in California for a preliminary injunction against Samsung's Galaxy S III smartphone, ahead of its U.S. launch, claiming the device infringes at least two of its patents.

Samsung said earlier this month that the Galaxy S III will be available in the U.S. starting this month from five carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless and U.S. Cellular. The smartphone was launched in May in the U.K.

Apple obtained the Galaxy S III sold in the U.K., and found that it infringes at least two of four Apple patents at issue in a preliminary injunction motion filed by the company against the earlier Galaxy Nexus, Apple said in a filing on Tuesday before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose division.

These are U.S. Patent No. 8,086,604 relating to an universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system, and Patent No. 5,946,647 regarding a system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data.

"Given the extent to which the Galaxy S III infringes and will cause immediate and irreparable harm to Apple, it is imperative that this Court have an opportunity to consider and rule upon Apple's motion for a preliminary injunction before the Galaxy S III is launched in the United States," Apple said in a filing while adding to its original complaint against the Galaxy Nexus.

Apple said it requested Samsung to confirm that it would not launch the Galaxy S III in the U.S. until the court has had an opportunity to consider and rule on Apple's motion for preliminary injunction. Samsung refused, stating that Apple's pending preliminary injunction motion will have no bearing on the release date of the Galaxy S III, Apple said.

It is too late to add new products to the pending motion for a preliminary injunction, Samsung said in its opposition to Apple's motion on Wednesday. Apple has not provided an explanation for waiting until the eve of the hearing on the motion to enjoin a new product when Samsung will have no opportunity to investigate the issues or to prepare a response, it added.

A hearing on Apple's motion for preliminary injunction is scheduled for Thursday.

Apple's motion to supplement rests on the flawed premise that the two Samsung smartphones are fungible and thus no discovery or briefing about the product it seeks to enjoin is necessary, Samsung said in its filing.

Apple i pad new arrival..................

David Ho Highlights Launch of Bio-IT Asia Conference

Ten years after the launch of the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo series in Boston, the conference made its debut in Asia in the sparkling Marina Bay Sands convention center. 

The trio of speakers who opened the three-day meeting was veteran HIV researcher David Ho, bio-IT consultant Chris Dagdigian, and AstraZeneca bioinformatician Yaron Turpaz. 

David Ho, who was born in Taiwan and is currently director/CEO of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, presented a broad overview of current trends in HIV research and vaccine development. He left the audience in no doubt as to the continuing plague caused by AIDS. For example, the lifetime risk of contracting HIV among teenagers in Botswana is 50%, and 33% in South Africa. 

On the other hand, Ho said that nearly 30 drugs are currently available to combat HIV infection—more drugs to treat HIV infection than all the other viruses combined—including the familiar reverse transcriptase and protease inhibitors, as well as more recently developed entry and integrase inhibitors. 

Ho talked about the “big bang” of HIV dissemination. Comparison of two of the oldest isolates of the virus, from 1959 in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, and another sample dated to 1960, revealed a surprising diversity of sequence. Modeling studies suggest that the virus probably arose in the late 1800s/early 1900s in Western Africa, only emerging as a pathogen when the virus left Africa decades later.  

Ho is not hopeful for vaccine development “anytime soon,” because of the “swarm of diverse viruses” that are mutated HIV that a vaccine would need to target; superinfection any given patient due to multiple virus strains; and the glycan envelope that hampers antibody defenses. Advances in prevention (feted by Science magazine as its ‘breakthrough of the year’ in 2011) include the use of prophylactic antiretroviral drugs, but getting patients to take the drugs not just for a week but potentially for long periods is very difficult. 

Data Connections  

Chris Dagdigian, a founding scientist at the BioTeam, gave a review of IT trends that he and his colleagues have observed over the past year. While it was natural to envy the resources of genome centers such as the Broad Institute, the Sanger Institute, and BGI, Dagdigian recommended that others to benefit from their experience. When it came to metatagging and data storage, for example, better for smaller organizations to shamelessly copy larger organizations’ adopted solutions after a year or two, he said. 

Amazon is still the infrastructure-as-a-service- leader, he said, but there are welcome signs that other cloud competitors, forced to innovate to capture any sort of market share, are producing some exciting new technologies. 

“It will be a MapReduce world. Get used to it. There’s no need to roll your own Hadoop,” he said. As for moving large volumes of data over the Internet, while Dagdigian still likes Aspera, he was impressed with the number of users reporting success with GridFTP, which he called “a fantastic piece of software.” 

Yaron Turpaz worked in Singapore for several years with Eli Lilly before assuming his current position as vice president of informatics and information sciences, R&D, AstraZeneca. The pharma industry is under a lot of pressure to develop drugs more quickly, Turpaz said. Not only are there financial pressures and patent pressures, but the patients are waiting. “I believe that informatics has a key role in the opportunities to accelerate the system and accelerate our pipeline,” he said. He also highlighted the role that Asia and Asian researchers would have in this acceleration, and the importance of collaborations and conversations within Asia.  

He discussed several initiatives in data sharing. One called PharmaConnect, for research literature and clinical data, had recruited more than 1,000 internal users over just 3 months. Not as successful as a YouTube viral video, but promising nonetheless. 

AstraZeneca has seen demands among its own scientists that mimic requirements across the industry, Turpaz said. AstraZeneca now has its own app store, having developed internal mobile apps for scientists to access their data, and public apps for physicians and patients around specific indications. Real time modeling and simulation tools are also in demand. Scientists want their data to be computed yesterday, Turpaz said.  

Finally, Turpaz encouraged a diversity of mindsets and ways of thinking in drug discovery because we often miss the things we were not specifically looking for (a video example). Open innovation or pre-competitive collaborations such as the Asian Cancer Research Consortium, Pistoia Alliance, and the Galaxy-based platform CISTROME, and others can bring together different perspectives and truly accelerate our pipelines.  

Facebook will host 'SimCity Social' starting this month

The "SimCity" franchise will break ground in Facebook later this month as they roll out a free version of SimCity Social.

When your game has "city" in the title, multiple players interacting makes sense. So Electronic Arts announcedSimCity Social for Facebook at the game convention E3, adding to The Sims already available on Facebook. Players are expected to enjoy "an all-new deeply social experience" starting in a few weeks.

Fans of Zynga's Cityville may feel targeted, and many reports believe this new partnership between Facebook and Electrnic Arts means trouble for Zynga, which is almost totally reliant on Facebook. But since Cityville has been the largest game on Facebook for the past year, no immediate impact is expected. But for virtual builders of cities, SimCity is the original. Whether Facebook users will fall in love to the point of purchasing the game for off-line use when released in February 2013 is the gamble for Electronic Arts.

New HTML5 control blends Web with native mobile apps

A new HTML5 Browser Control lets enterprise mobile app developers quickly blend dynamic Web content with native and hybrid apps, using the cross-platform tools and middleware from Verivo Software.

With the new component, which is part of Verivo's AppStudio toolset, Web developers can use their HTML and Javascript skills to build mobile apps that can access a range of back-end enterprise databases and apps. And the Browser Control lets existing HTML5 content be quickly incorporated into mobile apps, alongside native app components.

BACKGROUND: Four reasons to jump to HTML5

A recent survey of enterprise software coders found higher-than-expected interest in HTML5 for mobile apps. [See "Interest in HTML5 growing among mobile developers"] Seventy-nine percent of nearly 2,200 mobile developers in the study said they will use HTML5 in their apps in 2012, a big jump compare to an earlier survey in late 2011.

Verivo's introduction of its new Browser Control, and its roadmap for future HTML5 features, is part of a trend by application tools vendors to use the emerging HTML5 standards in building and deploying mobile applications. These applications can run inside a HTML5 browser or be wrapped as part of a native application, to display Web content.

Rivals such as SAP's Sybase Unwired Platform, Antenna Software, Appcelerator, Appsbar and many others, offer competing services but there are wide differences in their approach, architecture and capabilities.

Mozilla.org, creator of the Firefox Web browser, has even greater ambitions for HTML5: making it the basis for eliminating conventional mobile operating systems, and instead replacing them with a very small Linux kernel and drivers, to support Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. Coupled with a growing array of new APIs, and a user interface dubbed Gaia, the platform can fully control the phone and its features without the complexity of a conventional OS. [See: "Mozilla's 'modest proposal:' Dump the smartphone OS"]

The Verivo package has three parts. AppStudio is a drag-and-drop designer for laying out a mobile app. The app is stored as an XML configuration file on the Verivo Server, which is a middleware server that supports interfaces to back-end databases and applications as well as a variety of optimization services such as user authentication and data compression. Finally, the Verivo Client, on Android, iOS or BlackBerry OS, logs into the server and authenticates, and then the appropriate app configuration file for that mobile OS is downloaded to the client and instantiated.

In a demo of Verivo's existing native app capabilities, a change made in AppStudio to the central XML configuration file for a mobile CRM application was almost at once reflected in the corresponding app running on simulators for a Samsung Android phone, an iPhone and a BlackBerry smartphone.

Verivo's Browser Control works with the embedded Web control offered by each mobile OS's software development kit: This Web control, with an embedded rendering engine, lets a native app access and display Web content without resorting to the separate full Web browser. Verivo wraps that Web control with a rich set of HTML5 interactive features.

In a demo of the new component, for an app running on an iPad simulator, the same CRM app was displayed initially, showing a static chart of sales analytics data. Using AppStudio, Mark Rosenbaum, Verivo's director of sales engineering, quickly made changes in a couple of menu selections that redirected the mobile app from the static chart to a highly interactive HTML5 chart, created by a third-party charting app and hosted on a Web server. After logging back into the original iPad CRM app, Rosenbaum now saw the dynamic Web chart: He was able to adjust data variables and see chart trends change in response, and drill down for more detailed information.

Yahoo implements latest antispam defense Yahoo is rolling out the DMARC system this week, which helps email providers eliminate bogus messages

Yahoo said it will roll out globally this week a new antispam specification intended to make it easier for service providers to confidently discard suspicious email messages.

The specification, called DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance), allows email senders to tell receiving services if they are using two other technologies to weed out spam.

Many email senders use DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, which wraps a cryptographic signature around an email that verifies the domain name through which the message was sent.

The second technology, SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, allows email senders to indicate which hosts are authorized to send their email, allowing receiving organizations to discard messages coming from spoofed "from" addresses.

The DMARC specification, which is supported by companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others, lets a sender indicate if they are using SPF or DKIM, or both. It also allows senders to tell the recipient what to do with messages if authentication of some messages fails.

Senders can also receive a report from recipients on how they've handled the questionable messages. DMARC helps solve the problem of what to do with suspicious messages, which in some cases might have been delivered.

The messages could be phishing attempts, or ploys intended to trick recipients into revealing sensitive information or encouraging them to click on malicious links leading to bogus websites purporting to be, for example, a bank.

"If you receive an email claiming that it is from your bank, the applicable DMARC policies require the email to prove that is indeed from your bank in order to be delivered to your mailbox," wrote Ajay Gopalkrishna , a senior product manager with Yahoo Mail. "If the incoming email cannot be verified, Yahoo Mail will not deliver the email to your mailbox."

Gopalkrishna wrote Yahoo will encourage ISPs and other email providers to deploy DMARC. Organizations and companies behind DMARC intend to submit a draft specification to the Internet Engineering Task Force in the hope it will become a standard.

Facebook joins Google, ISPs in notifying DNSChanger victims

Facebook has started notifying victims of the DNSChanger malware who visit the social networking site that their computers will be cut off from the Internet on July 9, if they don't clean them until that time.

Facebook's DNSChanger alerts will include a link the DNSChanger Working Group's website, which contains more information about the malware and instructions on how to remove it.

"Earlier this year, Facebook joined the clean up effort by participating in [http://www.dcwg.org DNSChanger Working Group], which is comprised of computer security experts from the public, private, and academic sectors," the Facebook security team said in a blog post on Monday. "As a result of our work with the group, Facebook is now able to notify users likely infected with DNSChanger malware and direct them to instructions on how to clean their computer or networks."

DNSChanger is a family of Trojan programs that hijack Web search queries, display malicious advertisements and redirect users to fake websites. They do this by forcing infected computers to use DNS servers controlled by attackers.

DNS servers play a very important role on the Internet -- they translate domain names into numerical Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that computers use to communicate with each other. By default, most computers use DNS servers operated by their respective Internet service providers (ISPs) -- entities that are implicitly trusted with routing their connections.

The FBI shut down the DNSChanger operation in November 2011 following a two-year investigation and temporary replaced the rogue DNS servers with legitimate ones. The replacement servers are operated by a non-profit organization called the Internet Systems Consortium, which also operates one of the Internet's thirteen authoritative DNS root servers.

A judge initially signed off on this arrangement until March 8 in order to give ISPs sufficient time to identify and notify victims. However, the deadline was later extended by four months.

The replacement servers are now scheduled to be taken offline on July 9, after which time computers still infected with the DNSChanger malware will no longer be able to access the Internet.

The DNSChanger Working Group estimates that there are over 350,000 devices still infected with DNSChanger, out of the 4 million that were originally affected by the malware.

Facebook's decision to notify the owners of the remaining infected computers follows a similar decision by Google, which started alerting DNSChanger victims through its search pages on May 22.