However, we also now know that this doesn’t mean what it seems to mean for the security of mobile payments.

The first thing to understand is that NFC devices that act in the capacity of credit or debit cards are replacing those cards and cards have zero security. If the PIN is discovered and the card is lost the owner of the card will find themselves in dire straits—well, they just need to call the bank and cancel the card.

In the case of Google Wallet, not only does the owner of the phone need to have their phone taken from them, but they must not be running any security on it at all. First, the phone must be rooted (a task that mostly only power-users do), second the phone must not have a screen lock enabled (basic security everyone with a phone should have), and third it mustn’t have full-disk-encryption enabled (another power-user activity but still a strong security move.)

Security firm Zvelo discovered this security loophole while attempting to confirm another issue with Google Wallet pertaining to privacy (also alleviated by the above actions) but they also discovered that the PIN happened to be in a place where it was less protected. Near-Field Communication devices have a secure hardware chip that allows apps to store highly secure information separate from the OS and storage on the mobile phone itself—to prevent attackers from getting easy access to it—however, Google Wallet simply encrypts the PIN on the phone itself.

“Knowing that the PIN can only be a 4-digit numeric value,” wrote Joshua Rubin, security researcher for Zvelo, “it dawned on us that a brute-force attack would only require calculating, at most, 10,000 SHA256 hashes. This is trivial even on a platform as limited as a smartphone. Proving this hypothesis took little time.” Here, SHA refers to an encryption algorithm commonly used to protect everything from passwords to secure communications; it’s currently one of the strongest used in the industry.

The sorter the information encrypted the easier it is to brute force (i.e. guess over and over). Only ten-thousand hashes to guess also trivially small for a computer that can make many guesses a second. However, as said above, the attacker would have to steal the phone first. This is not a vulnerability that allows anyone to get at it remotely; the thief must have full access to the storage on the phone.

As mentioned above Google could have made this more secure, but it’s already more secure than a credit card on its own. If Google were to change the architecture of their Google Wallet to use the NFC secure chip instead it would mean that attackers couldn’t just attempt to guess the PIN over and over. Protocols to protect the PIN would kick in after 4 or 5 wrong guesses and lock the phone either temporarily or until the PIN was reset making brute-force impractical or impossible.

Knowing this we can expect that future NFC wallet apps will be much more secure than much of what we already use today.

As usual, people who use their smartphones to make on-the-go payments should weigh their security against their convenience. First, if you’re not a power-user, don’t root your phone. Second, if you are a power-user, you probably know better than to leave the phone unlocked anyway and you probably already know how to turn on and use full-disk encryption. It’s always wise to follow a protocol for keeping your phone secure.

After all, if you lose your phone with all sorts of personal information on it (including outgoing calls, e-mails, address book, etc.) why let that fall into the wrong hands?

Google Wallet Security Woes Don’t Reflect Poorly on NFC or Mobility is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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When Brent called me last year and said he was putting together an event I said “sign us up” without even knowing what he was planning. I trust Brent and have confidence in his ability to pull together an interesting roster of speakers, participants, and most importantly, an audience to engage with.

Trust… let’s talk about that for a minute. The social technology industry has come up with an entire array of words that ultimately just convey the notion of trust between and institution and constituent, or person to person. These words include the ever popular “authentic” but also words like “transparent”, “open”, and “honest”. Whatever you name you give it, it is TRUST that we are talking about and the ultimate objective for companies using social technologies to engage the world around them should be using trust as a currency for influence.

The night before the event the speakers had a little dinner and over the course of the meal I learned a lot about the audience, the market, and my fellow speakers. After dinner and the next morning I put my deck together and assembled my thoughts into speaking points. I began my presentation by sharing this chain of events and then started with:

“Why did I tell you that at 11:00 last night and 6am this morning I put my deck together for you? Well it’s because I want you to trust me and know that what I am saying to you isn’t boilerplate, scripted, or slickly presented, because if nothing else I say makes an impression upon you let it be this, brands are lies, half truths and good intentions.”

Why are brands lies, half truths and good intentions? Keep in mind that I don’t subscribe to the notion that companies are inherently untrustworthy or that the people in a company, any company, are dishonest… I am part of a company, you probably are as well. The reason why brand statements are untrustworthy is that they reflect what a company, specifically those in the leadership of a company, want to believe about their organization, not what the customers of that institution reflect back to them as their values.

50 years of broadcast advertising has conditioned people to not believe what companies tell them is the truth, which is why Edelman’s trust barometer regularly ranks “people like me” as more trustworthy than any institution. As a society we have a generalized trust issue with institutions of all kinds and yes it should concern you as much as it does me because institutions of government, private enterprise, and everything in between form the backbone of society, and the demise of institutions has historically been a leading indicator for the demise of a society.

I have been thinking a lot about the notion of brands lately, but what I have been focusing on is how the communications revolution we have been participating in, also known as social media technology, is thrusting forward a notion that companies and customers need a better way of talking to each other.

Let’s not call them consumers… please, they are people and people have an inherent desire to be treated as individuals. The construct of consumer is something that companies created to group customers together because they lacked the ability to address each customer individually. Today we can reach customers as individual people so why do we need things like focus groups, demographics, and behavioral segmentation?

Well they do serve a valuable purpose, which is to roll up things which are best addressed in the aggregate, like product definitions and advertising strategy but when it comes to customer service and a collection of marketing functions we need to drill down to the individual level and treat customers as individual people.

Another aspect of this that I find particularly fascinating is that customer are behaving in a very different way that in generations past, not only do they have needs that have to be met with products and services but they also want companies to intersect them on the basis of values. In generations past we cared a lot about what the brand symbolized, the fashion appeal of it, but today we care about the values of the people that make up the company. Wow.

Couple this with another observation I have, which is that brand loyalty is easy to achieve but hard to hold… a direct inverse of what was the case even just a few years ago when brand loyalty was hard to achieve but very durable once acquired. We quickly embrace companies and products with a profound advocacy but one slip and a company quickly gets black listed. From heros to zeros in no time flat…. just ask the Komen Foundation.

So what does all this have to do with the idea that brands are lies? Well it all came together for me with something that Dion Hinchcliffe passed around on Twitter yesterday titled “Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch“. You should read this in it’s entirety but let me quote this one passage for you.

(…in successful companies) Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy.

Just as we need to recalibrate our thinking about customers as people rather than consumers, we need to appreciate that in successful businesses today, and tomorrow’s leaders, the organization exists as a unified body of individuals acting with single minded purpose and empowered with the ability to carry forward on the basis of what is right and wrong for the organization. Wow.

Brands are Lies is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Michael Hugos has published an article at CIO Blogs addressing just this question: how can we look at massively multiplayer online (MMO) games as models for business collaboration?

His example game is actually quite brilliant. EVE Online is one of the best-known sandbox MMO games ever produced, run by CCP Games headquartered in Iceland, this MMO has been at the center of a great deal of controversy because it broke the mold for a game played by and for players. In its science fiction environment, players are given all the tools they need to build a career from a multitude of actions that affect other players from resource gathering, hauling, trading, playing with the internal stock market, or even fighting wars as a mercenary.

The high fidelity model of social interaction with a corporate and resource model, however, isn’t what makes EVE Online perfect for looking at how MMOs could be an excellent model for business collaboration. It’s how the game allows players to communicate and pay attention the current status of what they’re working on in relation to everyone that they’re collaborating with. In many ways, the heads-up-display (HUD) and user interface of EVE Online generates a sort of near-technological telepathy between players working together in a corporation to get things done.

Essentially, EVE Online—sometimes chided as being “spreadsheets in space”—envelops a gamified approach to logistics and resource management.

Hugos presents this in  his article and I’d like to expand on it,

Business intelligence and analytics software has something to learn from games and from MMOs in particular. MMOs use well designed heads-up displays that combine data analysis with group collaboration capabilities. This is illustrated below in screenshots showing two of the heads-up displays used by players flying spaceships in a battle. Note how they use moving 3D displays to present information from real-time data feeds provided by the game.

In addition to the moving 3D displays in the center of the screens, notice the other information shown around the edges of the screens. There are dials and readouts with relevant data, and thumbnail displays showing their status and the actions of other players they are collaborating with. To supplement these visual displays, players also communicate with each other moment to moment using text messages via chat features and Internet-based voice messages that can be directed to individual players or the entire group through headphones and microphones.

What makes MMO games engaging and interesting to players often can be boiled down to entanglement and immersion. If what a player does has an impact on the world that they’re playing in, and they can see the fruits of their labor (and that labor is not intense) they feel rewarded by the experience. What I’ve just described may even be seen as the benefits of working for a real-world company, making an impact on that company’s outcome, and providing some sort of tangible labor.

With the advent of the mobile phone and apps that allow for close collaboration we’ve moved closer to having on-demand communication with colleagues through the day. With the introduction of gesture-detection we’ll even be able to bring intense amounts of data into an immersive format with 3D displays (the peripheral relevant data that Hugos refers to.) Video games even present a way to collect vast amounts of behavioral and active big data and democratize massive small-actions by a multitude of people into organized work—directed by a person with an interface that could allow them to direct that work it would become the next-gen of human resources.

While games like EVE Online may feel like “spreadsheets in space” and to some may become a second job (being CEO of a corporation in a video game can be quite stressful) these sorts of social and technological interaction provide keen insights into how we can engage workers, management, and executives in the businesses of the future.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games as a Model for Business Collaboration is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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EMC ironically pioneered flash in the data center when it added flash front-ends to its high-end Symetrix fibre channel disk arrays in 2008. The problem that flash is intended to address, as EMC President and COO Pat Gelsinger says in an interview with Wikibon Chief Analyst David Vellante, is the growing gap between the amount of data that the server CPU, which doubles in power every 18 months, can consume and the slow IO speed of spinning disk, which has not changed over two decades.

This put flash below the IO software stack. Since then several startups have moved flash into the server, putting it on the server PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) bus, providing fast, random access read/writes combined with persistent memory to protect the data in case of a server crash or power failure. This left EMC behind as the figures show. While Gelsinger bragged that EMC sold 25 Pbytes of flash in 2011, Fusion-io CEO Dave Flynn responded that his company sold 50 Pbytes. And that was only one of several startups in the market.

VFCache is EMC’s bid to get into this market, and it is in large part a defensive move. Gelsinger inadvertently admitted as much when he said, “Our customers are saying that the combination is really fabulous, so I won’t go with Exadata or someone else.” (emphasis added)

But VFCache differs in important ways from the competition. First, while the startup flash vendors are providing full read/write functionality on the server, VFCache is a read-only cache. New data is written through the cache to the EMC storage array, which slows writes. FVCache is designed to work with the traditional storage stack, while Fusion-io’s vision (and that of the other flash statups) is of single tier storage with all data residing in flash on the server. EMC believes that this will be prohibitively expensive for much of enterprise data, and Gelsinger talks of “hot”, “warm”, and “cold” data and envisions a three-tier system.

“It’s not unusal to see 80% of the IOPS on 20% of the data,” says EMC CTO of Flash Products Dan Cobb. “So what about the other 80% of data.” Putting that on flash will be a cost-prohibitive choice.

Wikibon’s View

Wikibon tends to agree with EMC in this. Vellante in his recorded analysis says, “Flash will become the predominant medium for IO-intensive applications.” The relevant measure for these applications will not be the traditional cost-per-Gbyte but rather cost-per-IO. By this measure, flash is already less expensive for these applications and will “enable a new breed of applications that were once too expensive to justify based on the IO economics of spinning disk.”

But for a variety of reasons including compliance, companies need to maintain very large amounts of data that are not constantly active. Despite the continuing fall of flash prices, it is unlikely to drop below the cost-per-Gbyte price of disk, much less tape, in the foreseeable future.

Dennis Martin, president of Demartek, which conducted an independent evaluation of VFCache, said “The cost-effective approach is to use a small quantity of flash compared to total storage with automated tiering or caching solution….The cache fills up with hot data, making the access times significantly reduced.”

Datamark’s evaluation of VFCache running against a typical Oracle application found that populating the cache fully from the storage array took about an hour but resulted in a 2.6X to 3.3X increase in transactions-per-minute and also increased write speed to the underlying disk array, which was relieved of much of the read load by the VFCache. Martin suggests that this architecture is most valuable when used with read-intensive workloads with small IO block sizes of up to 64K, random IO workloads, and/or multiple IO streams. It would be less effective with write-intensive applications such as those capturing large amounts of transaction data for near-real-time analysis.

This, however, presumes an effective intelligent data management layer to move the most active data to the VFCache and then replace it as that data cools and newer data becomes more active. EMC does have that technology in the form of FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) and Flash Cache, which, says EMC SVP of Flash Products Mark Sorenson, (http://siliconangle.tv/video/emc-launches-vfcache-pcie-flash-solution) it plans to extend to VFCache this year. EMC also promises high-performance deduplication for its flash product. Once this is available, EMC will offer unified multitier data storage from the server to the archiving layer with automated tiering. At present, however, FVCache is an immature product.

What is EMC’s VFCache Good For? is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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It is so easy to start a fight. Ask your friends whose legacy is more timeless: the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. If you’re watching a soccer game, declare that Cristiano Ronaldo is highly overrated. Or, if you’re at a database conference, tell those relational database types that Web apps don’t all need to conform to ACID principles (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability).

Yes, the fur will fly. But you’ll have broached a topic that urgently needs more attention. The fact is, the evolution of application design has not kept pace with the explosion of data. In today’s “connected era,” in which billions of devices are now generating, collecting, analyzing, and sharing massive volumes of data with each other, a company’s ability to innovate is largely dependent on its ability to process all this data in a timely fashion. And one frequent obstacle to innovation is the long-standing notion that only ACID-compliant databases will satisfy the stringent requirements of data-driven Web apps. The time has come to investigate other options.

The Limitations of ACID

ACID means that database changes are “all or none” (atomic), that any change or read doesn’t interfere with others (isolated), that the result of any change is a new database state that remains fixed (durable), and that any transaction performed will take the database from one consistent state to another. These guarantees come with certain performance costs, and applications that don’t require all properties of ACID can afford to trade off some of them for higher throughput. Such applications often include those that index large numbers of documents, serve pages on high-traffic websites, or deliver streaming media. In these cases, maintaining the integrity of a transaction is secondary to completing a request as quickly as possible.

Strict adherence to ACID also leads to an increased amount of development work as the database load grows larger and the volume of data increases. Techniques such as sharding (horizontally partitioning your data using a hashing algorithm) have emerged over time to address the complications of manipulating large amounts of data, but these solutions unnecessarily influence application architecture and don’t solve the underlying problem. For example, if you’re “lucky” enough to have “big data,” and you need to change the schema,  a migration could still take months to run!

Nathan Hurst’s guide to NoSQL Systems

Beyond ACID

The ACID vs. non-ACID debate is not going to be settled here and now, nor does it need to be. The purpose of this article is simply to point out that there are alternatives to ACID, and that the time has come to explore them. Why now? Several methodologies, practices and technologies have gained enough traction to encourage us to look beyond ACID-only data stores. Here are a few of them:

●      Widespread adoption and validation of agile development methodologies, fostering rapid innovation and an iterative approach to feature development.

●      Mature development frameworks that enable developers to connect alternative data stores more easily. This also means that projects are more likely to use different types of data stores depending on technical requirements.

●      Service-oriented application design – data stores and application logic are increasingly decoupled in modern architectures, with applications developed as a collection of functional modules connected via APIs.

●      The vast amounts of data gathered by social platforms – and most applications today have a social component – can often be represented more efficiently using a non-relational schema.

●      Non-relational databases have matured with the guidance of early adopters and companies whose businesses would not be possible without them. Companies have also emerged to provide commercial support and development for these technologies.

The New Breed of Databases

Thanks to the open source movement and the accelerating pace of commercial development, there is no shortage of non-relational, distributed databases. Of course, each database has advantages and disadvantages, as well as specific use cases.

Before we delve into specific examples, let’s be clear about one key point: it’s a mistake to assume that non-ACID datastores make absolutely no guarantees. They simply provide a different set of them. These guarantees are governed by the “CAP Theorem,” which essentially states that you may choose any two of the following three:

●      Consistency: all nodes have the same view of the data.

●      Availability: every request to a non-failing node returns a response.

●      Partition tolerance: system properties (consistency or availability) hold true even when the system is partitioned.

For example, you can choose to have consistency and availability, while sacrificing partition tolerance. Or choose availability and partition tolerance, so processing can continue even in the case of network failure, but decide to forgo a consistent view of your data.

An excellent summary of this concept, along with this very intuitive and useful visual guide to Non-ACID systems, has been developed by Nathan Hurst and others.

An Overview of the Current Players:

The list below summarizes key characteristics and use cases of some of the most popular non-ACID datastores.

●      Riak is a Dynamo-based NoSQL database designed specifically for extreme distribution, fault tolerance and scalability. It shines in applications where even seconds of downtime are unacceptable. It has no single point of failure, scales simply and intelligently, and makes data highly available for use in read and write-intensive Web applications. Commercial support is available from Basho.

●      Redis, sponsored by VMware, is an open source, disk-backed, in-memory data store written in C. It is a datatype server, so it provides highly optimized operations on sets, lists, arrays, etc. Redis is extremely fast and easy to set up; it may not be best for large databases, but it’s a great choice for rapidly changing data with a DB size that fits in RAM.

●      MongoDB is a document-oriented database written in C++. It provides schema-free databases that store JSON documents in binary format. It is extremely popular and remarkably easy to get running. MongoDB offers automatic failover when replicated in a set, and its single-master, low-concurrency read performance benchmarks are impressive. MongoDB is a good choice for read-heavy applications where all data fits in RAM. Commercial support is available from 10gen.

●      CouchDB: Another open source, document-oriented store, CouchDB is written mostly in Erlang and is designed for local replication and horizontal scaling across a wide range of devices. Like MongoDB, CouchDB is easy to use, but it has a more robust replication model and greater data consistency guarantees than MongoDB.

●      Membase/CouchBase: CouchBase Server is the result of a Memcache company and a CouchDB company joining forces. In its Membase mode, it is optimized for storing data for highly interactive Web applications. It provides a high-speed distributed key/value store that is extremely performant and very easy to set up. In its Couchbase mode, it offers the same data persistence, clustering, and flexible replication modes of CouchDB. Commercial support is available from Couchbase.

●      Neo4j is a popular open source database that is optimized to represent graph relationships. Implemented in Java, it is an embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than tables—meaning that operations that traverse a network are fast. Neo4j is developed by Neo Technology, a startup based in Malmo, Sweden and Menlo Park, CA.

●      Cassandra is a column-based DB designed to handle very large amounts of data spread out across many servers with no single point of failure. Cassandra is a NoSQL solution initially developed by Facebook to power its Inbox Search feature.[1] An industrial-strength DB, it is best for write-heavy applications. Cassandra can be a bit cumbersome to set up and manage, but commercial versions make this task easier. Commercial support is available from DataStax and Acunu.

●      Hadoop is an open source software framework with an entire ecosystem of tools, languages and knowledge. Inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers, Hadoop is best for heavy analytics and processing of vast amounts of data. It is extremely mature and battle-tested. Commercial support is available from Cloudera, HortonWorks and MapR, among others.

Simplifying Exploration of New Database Options

Without question, ACID is an essential requirement for certain types of applications and will continue to find usage. But there is an increased understanding of the potential of non-ACID databases and the opportunities they provide in improving performance in Web applications that don’t require transactional guarantees.

As the evidence continues to accumulate regarding the benefits of non-ACID databases, it’s important to ask yourself, as part of your requirements analysis, whether one of these databases might be a better tool for the job at hand. You should also consider whether a combination of tools is the best solution, mixing ACID and non-ACID data stores as appropriate.

Learn More: Suggested Reading and Upcoming Events

For additional discussion of the topics covered in this article, please read the following publications and blogs.

●      Alex Popescu’s myNoSQL: http://nosql.mypopescu.com/

●      NoSQL Tapes: http://nosqltapes.com/

●      Basho’s video resources ( http://basho.com/resources/videos/ ) The basho speakers are fantastic. You’ll always learn something new from them.

●      InfoQ NoSQL presentations. Great collection at /a>

●      10gen’s videos and presentations: http://www.10gen.com/presentations

●      Kristóf Kovács NoSQL comparison http://kkovacs.eu/cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs-redis

In addition, the following events and meetups are highly recommended:

●      Boundary tech talks (great place to learn about distributed systems): http://www.meetup.com/Boundary-Tech-Talks/

●      Riak Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Riak-Meetup/

●      MongoDB Meetups: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-MongoDB-User-Group

●      Cassandra Meetups: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Cassandra-User-Group/

●      HBase: http://www.meetup.com/hbaseusergroup/

●      SF Graph DBs: http://www.meetup.com/graphdb/

●      Couchbase: http://www.meetup.com/The-San-Francisco-Couchbase-Meetup-Group/

Guest Post: Unshackling Your Data-driven Web Apps is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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We found a total of 1,351 websites hosted on the said server and categorize the sites into five segments based on the type of guise they use for the distributed malware:

• Android Market apps
• Opera Mini/ Phone Optimizer apps
• Pornographic apps (sites were unavailable during time of checking)
• App storage sites
• Others (sites that were inaccessible during time of checking)

As for the unavailable sites, it seems that the attacker is still setting them up, or has permanently taken them down. The domains listed under App storage sites, which hosts Apps featured in the other domains, are inaccessible. However, the hosted Apps were still up thus making them available for download through the Android Market App and the Opera Mini/Photo Optimizer App sites.

The malware hosts revealed a surprising tactic of directing efforts in a shotgun approach towards multiple platforms. While Android has been seeing a giant increase in being targeted by viruses and malware, iOS and Symbian have also found themselves dead in the sights of malicious software.

Many of the apps act to pretend to be normal apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Barcode Scanner, Skype, Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube, and many others. Antivirus apps designed to protect mobile phones trigger on these malicious pretend apps as ANDROIDOS_FAKENOTIFY.A—a sneaky little Android Trojan that displays translated Russian text and sends messages to premium-rate numbers that costs the owner of the phone a great deal of money.

Mobile security is becoming a big trend (as it has been for the past year) and aside from Trendmicro, Norton Symantec is getting into the game by releasing a new security app. The middle of last year we saw an increase in the use of social engineering and fraudulent malware apps appearing on Android so it’s a good time to brush-up on your own security and know what you can do.

Most mobile security is all about only downloading apps from vendors that you already trust. Sticking to the market on your phone and verifying the source of downloaded apps before installing or authorizing them to use your phone. Also, a mobile security solution could be right for you if your lifestyle or job causes you do download risky apps on a regular basis.

Anyone can fall foul of many of these tricky apps; but fortunately the mobile security ecology is growing alongside the hackers and the Red Queen Race is on.

Much of mobile security is about paying attention and being prepared. This is the same for much of all online security.

Mobile Malware Hosted on German Server Shows Diversity of Fraud is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Well, we may not be at the point that we can download cars or appliances, but the first market that might react to what we can do right now is going to be the toy merchandise market. Why? Because The Pirate Bay just shipped its first “The Pirate Bay Ship” via BitTorrent (a protocol limited to the bits-and-bytes of digital media) and had it printed into a real-life model ship made out of molded plastic.

Just last month, SiliconANGLE reported on the rise of the physible pushed by The Pirate Bay. “We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles,” they wrote when they announced their new 3D printing section.

An article on TorrentFreak reveals the first physible downloaded via BitTorrent and shipped from Shipways.com by Canadian Charles Randall.

“I was entertained by telling shapeways.com that I owned the copyright on the design though, something they force you to accept in order to have the model printed. But I guess, in a way, we all do,” Randall told TorrentFreak. “I debated just putting it up for sale on the site, but despite the Pirate Bay sensibilities, I didn’t want to entangle myself in any weird controversy for trying to sell it.”

Unlike regular downloads on BitTorrent, 3D objects come with a hefty price tag. Using the cheapest materials available, 3D pirates have to invest roughly $100 to get their new toy made.

“The raw price was about $80 for the material, $6.50 for the shipping, and then I had to pay $15 in Canadian duties,” Randall said.

As with any other form of expression, the 3D models used to make a product such as a toy boat or an action figure from a movie can be copyrighted. Distributing and printing such figures on a 3D printer without permission could be seen as copyright infringement by the parties who hold the copyright—of course, The Pirate Bay wants people to distribute their boat so that’s not going to happen here. Shipways.com themselves requires that people getting artefacts printed and shipped by them affidavit that they own the copyright for this reason.

I’ve said before, I don’t see a multitude of people using even the MakerBot (a home appliance 3D printer) to make themselves copyrighted marketable toys. What I do see people doing is producing busts, and figures of their favorite characters from TV shows, cartoons, video games, and etc. I can see Makers and gamers using devices such as this to produce models that they can use to produce artwork and scenes—imagine how the model train or battle recreation scene might change fundamentally if they could model their figures, trees, landscape, equipment, etc. on the computer and print it out instead of having to get it cast in metal/plastic elsewhere.

Products like MakerBot still don’t paint the figures, as we can see with the Pirate Bay ship; but I see that as a likely next evolution of the physible.

Physibles Come to Town with First Downloaded, 3D Printed Pirate Bay Ship is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• 3D Printers Are Only the Vanguard for the Era of the Physible
• Finnish Music Industry Sues ISP to Censor The Pirate Bay
• Pirate Bay Founders Found Guilty in Sweden Amidst Web Copyright Drama
• The Pirate Bay Founders Launch Copyright-Friendly File Hosting Site
• Copyright Holders Take Aim at Over 200,000 BitTorrent Users in the US
• Comcast Users Unable to Reach The Pirate Bay, ISP Says “It’s Not Us”

During an investor assembly last week, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata announced the Nintendo Network. The adoption of such a network will end the gaming company’s long history of failing to engage users across the Internet. With Xbox LIVE and the PlayStation Network already in the marketplace, this will be an uphill climb for Nintendo but it’s a climb that they must make if they want to retain their position in the console ecology.

The plans are to bring the Nintendo Network live across two platforms: the Wii-U and the Nintendo 3DS. In addition the service will bring access to “Communities for Mario Kart 7,” “add-on Content Sales” (DLC), digital distribution, and “Introduction of Personal Accounts for the Wii-U.”

Already the Wii, DSi, and the 3DS allow for downloadable games and content and having a content network will bring an entire extra library of games to Nintendo consoles that do not currently exist. Also, a result, Nintendo benefits greatly from having a huge supporting cast of retail titles that will only be filled out with the opportunity to access and download digital content.

The modification to add personal accounts is particularly welcome—people who experienced the “Friend code” phenomenon with the Wii can attest how terrible that approach to social networking went. Instead of allowing people to sign up for an online service with a handle and a password, Wii’s exported a 12-digital hardware code that mapped the console itself into the service (irrespective of whomever was using it at the time.)

The advent of a cross-Nintendo-platform personal account on their service will open the gaming company up into being able to break into modern social gaming.

All that said, Nintendo does have a long-hard-trek to make if they want to get noticed for their interconnectivity, DLC content, and social gaming network versus the powerful networks of Sony and Nintendo. Although Sony’s network is best known for the debacle of their nearly month-long shutdown last year and the massive hackfest; the Xbox LIVE network continues to thrive, grow, and push its way into the living room cloud as well as the mobile cloud.

Nintendo, with their pressure to produce well-produced and highly adopted handheld devices already has a market in the mobile venue that companies like Microsoft and Sony must buy their way into and that could be the leverage that Nintendo needs to make it big.

Nintendo Network Shows Console Giant is Finally Serious About Going Online is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Nintendo Announces a Darker Financial Forecast as Wii-U Appears on the Horizon
• The Revival Of Video Game Consoles: Just a Holiday Fling?
• The Gamer Plight: Console Price Wars, Virtual Goods Loss
• Nintendo Seeing Positive 3DS Sales after Slow Year
• Nintendo Sales Drop as Competition Overshadows Main Offering
• E3 2011: Nintendo Mixed PS3 and Xbox 360 Footage Into their Wii U Highlights Reel

Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to prospective shareholders was incredibly vague about his company’s “social mission” and there was no announcement of a charitable foundation — as Google had done when it filed its IPO papers eight years ago.

A comparison of the two founders’ letter to shareholders reveals a surprisingly large difference in what motivates the rival organizations, what’s important to them … and what’s not.

Some industry watchers expected Mr Zuckerberg to try to best Larry Page’s eloquent and impassioned “Founder’s Letter” that launched Google’s IPO.

Both founders were close in age when they wrote letters introducing their company to prospective shareholders — a very important document that sets and explains the company’s culture.

Larry Page jumps straight to the point: Google exists as a business so that it can make a big difference in the world.

He introduces the concept of “Don’t Be Evil,” a rule to guide senior management decisions. The doctrine of “Don’t Be Evil” was remarkable, because it demonstrated Google’s keen awareness of its growing power, and with that, a great responsibility to act ethically and to be careful in its actions.

Mr. Page’s letter explained that Google’s ambitions for its social mission were greater than that of Google itself. In fact, the commercial side of the business would be used to fund the creation of Google Foundation, an organization that he expected would:

“Eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation…to the largest of the world’s problems.”

How would Mr. Zuckerberg trump Mr. Page’s inspirational epistle?

His letter to shareholders starts off well, demonstrating a keen understanding of his assignment:

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”

But that’s about as far as he gets. He spends many paragraphs saying pretty much not much at all, wishy-washy phrases, said in different ways: how Facebook enables people to share, that sharing is good, that open government is good, and that sharing helps people’s relationships; and how it’s good to connect people, and to give people voice. At times he makes Facebook sound like a phone company. Reach out and share with someone — it makes the world a better place.

In the letter, Mr. Zuckerberg struggles to deepen a collection of shallow sentiments about Facebook’s social mission. He uses a bold typeface to emphasize key phrases:

“We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.”

“We hope to improve how people connect to business and the economy.”

John Gapper, Chief Business Commentator for the Financial Times called the letter, “The unbearable vagueness of Zuckerberg.”

At some point, Mr. Zuckerberg realized he wouldn’t be able to beat, let alone match Mr Page’s letter, which is probably why the document is found deep within the SEC filing, on page 61.

Larry Page’s letter is right at the beginning of Google’s filing, even before page 1 — spanning seven pages numbered i to vii.

Mr Zuckerberg’s letter moves onto different subject: a description of a core set of values, which he calls “The Hacker Way,” a homage to Hewlett-Packard’s celebrated “The HP Way.”

It is mostly expressed as slogans, used internally, and repeatedly:

“Done is better than perfect.”

“Focus on impact.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that on the day of the SEC filing, Facebook printed posters with the slogan: “Stay Focused and Keep Shipping.”

The use of slogans to help manage a workforce is interesting — outside of North Korea and Foxconn — it has long fallen out of fashion.

Mr. Zuckerberg ends his letter by reminding staff: “We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value in everything they do.”

It sounds threatening, rather than inspiring, as Mr Page sought to do.

It’s clear that Mr. Zuckerberg doesn’t believe he needs to make a big song and dance about “social mission” to motivate workers, or impress shareholders. Facebook is clearly a different company to that of Google — maybe it also signals a new era.

[Cross-posted at Silicon Valley Watcher]

A Tale of Two Letters: Facebook’s Vague Social Mission is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Facebook: How To Raise Money Without Raising Oversight
• Facebook Valuation Shows Conditions For IPOs Are Ripe
• Facebook IPO Lessons
• Facebook IPO: What Happens When Users Leave?
• Facebook IPO: Hurdles, Monetization Demands
• Facebook: IPO, Soaring Ad Revenue And Timeline Movie Maker

Here are a couple of lessons worth reinforcing: 1) People’s view of what is normal and acceptable in emergent online activities is constantly evolving. What Facebook deserves a lot of credit for is not allowing itself to be held back by what a small and vocal group of critics said they should not do. As a result, by constantly pushing forward, and making mistakes, Facebook created a new normal that in retrospect would never have been accepted even 5 years ago.

2) Zuckerberg, like Larry Ellison and Bill Gates most notably, retained tremendous control of their respective companies through outsized stock ownership and voting structures that assured them total control of their destiny.  Shareholder rights advocates will say that this is precisely what needs to change about corporate America but stock ownership is not a democracy where every vote is equal… but it is also a structure that shareholders opt into when they buy stock in a company.

3) Don’t discard old business models because they are old… Silicon Valley is home to the shiny new object syndrome and we often forget that old business models are referred to as old because they WORK. Facebook was criticized for not having a business model, well they did and it was a tried-and-true one… advertising. Turns out that a company can still make a boatload of money doing this and it doesn’t require a 60 slide powerpoint deck to explain it.

4) Raise boatloads of money when it is available to you, and do it on your own terms. Facebook benefited from a wide range of factors that drove interest in the company, not the least of which was that for private equity investors who had large funds to put to work, there were few options that scaled to the degree that Facebook did. These investors are not looking for the returns that early stage VCs are, so they were happy to put large amounts of capital to work at high valuations, and it appears that these bets will pay off.

Mutual funds and other traditional investors that bought stock in the private secondary market that emerged were also reacting to a scarcity of investment options. The real lesson here is not to be constrained by the traditional venture capital cycle when macro conditions create an environment that allows you to be non-linear.

Lastly, I’ll refrain from repeating the oft-repeated mantra about hiring the best people… would you hire anyone but the best? I hate it when people say things which fall into the stating of the obvious category.

[Cross-posted at Venture Chronicles]

Facebook IPO Lessons is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• A Tale of Two Letters: Facebook’s Vague Social Mission
• Facebook IPO: What Happens When Users Leave?
• Facebook IPO: Hurdles, Monetization Demands
• Facebook: IPO, Soaring Ad Revenue And Timeline Movie Maker
• Facebook IPO – A Sign of Yahoo’s Decline
• Facebook Deals With IPO, Timeline and Phishing Scandals