What a long, strange strange trip it's has been

If you are familiar with this phrase, it's no wonder as it is an achievement from World of Warcraft where it requires players to complete objectives from world events over the course of the whole year. At the end of this road, players are awarded with a Violet Proto Drake and 310% flight speed.

Similarly, this course has brought me on a trip throughout the various aspects of the Internet. In a way, they are things that I have already known, but never been able to categorize it properly in my head until now. There have been information taught on things that I have known about, and new information to add to my internal library. In the end, I can never know all that there is to know about the Internet, as it is constantly changing, improving, or digressing faster than I can catch up.

Many aspects of it, from its history, to its future in various disciplines. The future is unpredictable, as are the humans who forge it, therefore it is only for a few innovators who are able to harness the unpredictability of the Internet and make it their playground.

I for one, will prefer to watch it happen from the sidelines, and anticipate what the future will hold for the Internet.

P.S: Some of my posts mention about the Future of the internet, therefore I have left it out from my totals.

-Paperbear out, for good this time :)

We steal secrets

When it comes to political secrets being stolen and published on the internet, no one does it better than Wikileaks. The highly controversial website is home to millions of secrets that governments around the world try to keep away from both the public and their enemies. Now, for those who have not been religiously following the comings and goings of Wikileaks, we can now take a look into the idea behind Wikileaks, and its controversial creator, Julian Assange without scouring through websites and texts. We steal secrets: The story of Wikileaks takes a look at the impact of the an instant access world that we live in today.

-Paperbear Out

What's Buzzing?

Buzzfeed is a website that combines a technology platform for detecting viral content with an editorial selection process to provide a snapshot of "the viral web in realtime". It can be anything cool, funny, interesting stuff users find online or made themselves that they think has a strong chance of going viral and being shared by other people.

Last year Buzzfeed started morphing from a social news website known for its silly lists and images of grumpy cats into a real digital news enterprise. Established media started paying attention as Jonah Peretti, 39, picked off some of their best talent - such as editor Ben Smith, formerly on politico - and then started copying his viral genius, which Peretti played with at the MIT Media Lab and as a cofounder of The Huffington Post. The idea: Create content and ads that we can't resist passing along to everyone

Buzzfeed's Jonah Peretti: "We're not like something that came before." in an article by The Guardian, the social news site's creator and CEO talks about how it became a hit, meeting Murdoch, and why cat posts grab so much traffic.

When Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti is asked, as he regularly is, why there are so many animals on the social news website, he often illustrates his answer with a reference to Ridley Scott's seminal sci-fi movie Blade Runner.

"When people complain to me about too many animals on Buzzfeed I always ask them whether they're a serial killer and sociopath, or whether they're android," he says, only half-joking.

Peretti is referring to the Voight-Kampff test in the 31-year-old film, where investigators attempt to distinguish between androids (or "replicants") and humans by their response to a series of animal-related questions. Would you rescue a tortoise baking in the hot desert sun? Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you respond?

His point is that it is human nature to respond warmly and positively to animals – providing a possible explanation for the popularity of trademark Buzzfeed posts such as "60 Basset Hounds In Costumes" and "31 Cats Who Have Seen Things You Wouldn't Believe".

A combination of viral-ready hits, breaking news and spin-off memes has cemented Buzzfeed's rise as perhaps the world's fastest-growing news website. Since its launch in 2006, the New York-based site has grown to 40 million visitors a month and recently opened its first international office in London.

Buzzfeed has taken $46m in venture capital investment in five years, valuing it at $200m, or five times its expected sales revenue this year. It employs 215 writers, editors and algorithm wizards in New York, Los Angeles and London.

It places as much emphasis on spreading the word as on the message itself. In a similar way to YouTube and HuffPo, the site has a network of contributors supplying free user generated content, to which its in-house staff give a final polish. Contributors are awarded badges – "LOL", "Trashy", "Fail" – if their article inspires a certain number of responses. The most popular contributors sometimes land a paid job, following an induction process that includes receiving email elerts whenever a post begins to "go viral". The aim is that writers and editors will know how to create viral content before readers know they want to read it.

Buzzfeed is the brainchild of Peretti, a rail-thin Californian who is a combination of programmer, journalist and marketer. His love affair with viral content began in 2001 as a graduate student in the Media Lab at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Instead of writing his master's thesis, Peretti decided to play the smartass and asked Nike to emblazon the word "sweatshop" on a customised pair of trainers. Unsurprisingly, it objected – but his terse email exchange with a Nike official was quickly spread among thousands of bored office workers. Eventually Peretti debated the issue of sweatshop labour with a Nike spokeswoman on NBC's The Today Show.

That 15 minutes of fame gave him the bug. Peretti and his younger sister Chelsea, a standup comedian and writer, set up the New York Rejection Line, a service for those pestered by people who refused to leave them alone: it supplied you with "your" phone number to give them, which played an automated brush-off message when they rang it.

The pair's next stunt also ended up on national TV: BlackPeopleLoveUswas the online home of a fictional white couple, Sally and Johnny, who were desperate to befriend African-Americans. It went viral, and its creators were interviewed on ABC's Good Morning America.

Peretti was also part of the internet power quartet who founded the Huffington Post in early 2005, remaining at the helm of the news site and blog until its $315m sale to AOL in February 2011. After six years at HuffPo, 39-year-old Peretti said the acquisition represented a "natural breaking point" for him to leave and concentrate on Buzzfeed.

Now the two sites are in competition – but there is no indication that Peretti plans to follow Arianna Huffington's example by selling out. "A lot of web companies will take a short-term approach and sell to an incumbent and don't end up living up to their full potential," he says. "If we can entertain and inform people and generate great return for advertisers we can have a much bigger, longer path. We're not like something that came before us – we're qualitatively different."

Described by a former colleague as extremely pragmatic and shrewd rather than idealistic and hopeful, Peretti has an eye for the future that has drawn a number of senior media executives to beat a path to his door.

He met Rupert Murdoch and other top News Corporation executives at the CES gadget show in Las Vegas in January. The media tycoon described Peretti's Buzzfeed pitch as "the most fun" he'd seen – and Peretti is quick to return the compliment. "He was shockingly attentive and engaged at understanding things at a really high level," he says.

It is anyone's guess what Murdoch makes of a site that reacted to Lady Thatcher's death last week with an avalanche of stories, a mixture of serious and silly, such as "Margaret Thatcher's 19 Most Badass Moments" and "16 Cats Interpret 16 Margaret Thatcher Quotes".

Buzzfeed's New York headquarters are only a two-minute walk from Madison Avenue, but it is a world away from the Mad Men era of advertising. The site carries no display ads, shunning the intrusive banners that online readers have learned to ignore and instead experimenting with sponsored editorial. Brands such as Coca-Cola, Nike and Virgin Mobile regularly appear as "featured partners" on wacky lists that do not look out of place on the site's homepage.

"There was a [long] period where newspapers were the only way an advertiser could get its message to the public. They were essentially monopolies," he says. "Now brands can go direct to the public. If you look at the heritage of the best advertising you can make stuff that is great for both readers and advertisers. I don't think Don Draper would have loved banner ads."

So where is the rest of the media going wrong? "The biggest misconception people have is that quality is all that matters," Peretti says, in an admission likely to give further ammunition to those who think the site is trashy and downmarket. "The truth is that quality helps, but there's a ton of high-quality things that don't go anywhere."

In his keynote talk at MediaGuardian's Changing Media Summit in London last month, Peretti used a striking analogy with Judaism and Mormonism to demonstrate this point. There was one Mormon for every 10 Jews in 1950, according to Peretti, and now there are fewer Jews than believers in the religion whose best-known adherent is the Killers frontman Brandon Flowers. "Mormons know that it's not enough to practise your religion – you also have to spread your religion."

- Paperbear out

Aereo: The future of TV

Two years ago, Chaitanya (Chet) Kanojia visited the offices of the four US broadcast television networks to tell them about his plan to upend their businesses. How? Aereo makes tiny antennas that pick up broadcasters' channels for free. For $8 a month, a person can rent access to an antenna that beams the live feed directly to your computer, iPad, iPhone - compared with $100 or more for cable TV. "The reaction was ''We'll see you in court.'" Kanojia, 43, recalls. true to their word, all four broadcasters joined suit against Aereo last year, arguing it threatened them with "substantial irremediable losses." The US district Court in New York sided with the upstart, but the networks have appealed. Meantime, IAC chariman Barry Diller has joined Aereo's board and helped lead a $38 million venture round in January. Aereo is using that cash to expand from New York to 22 cities this year. It's also battling to license select programming. As for the rest of the television industry, Kanojia has little sympathy. 'What you have is a legacy business that's predatory," he says. "We have a chance to recast the whole system from the 1970s on"

The following is an article on Aereo and how it may possibly change the way people watch TV in the future.

by Tristan Louis

Watch and record live TV over the Internet, without having any hardware installed in your house: That’s the promise that Aereo, a New York based internet startup is making and it is an approach that has touched a nerve with the TV industry.

Aereo is based on a very simple idea: That over-the-air television, the kind one can get from a regular TV antenna, can be made available over the Internet. Based on that premise, the company built out data centers with small antennas that could capture TV signal off the air and redistribute them over the internet. Adding a small software layer to the technology allows the company to provide DVR services along with regular broadcast, which means its subscribers can record one TV show while they’re watching another one live. Customers can watch live TV on Apple iOS devices, Roku boxes, and soon Android-powered devices.

And best of all, it’s perfectly legal: the company found an interesting loophole in the way the TV business model currently works: The broadcast networks receive broadcasting licenses from theFCC, allowing them to send their signal out over the air to millions of customers. For over half a century, this was a great deal for TV companies as they could reach large pools of customers without having to worry about building out infrastructure to get programming to those customers. Then cable and satellite TV came along and were required to carry those broadcast channels too.

TV stations were thus able to distribute their signal to local audiences via either cable or antenna. But the internet changed all that, as distances were erased. First, the idea of needed to sit in front of a TV to experience a program was chipped at with VCR (which still were relatively complicated to operate) and then DVRs, which made most TV an on-demand model. This represented an issue for TV broadcasters, who look to amass audiences at a particular time so they can sell those eyeballs to advertisers. They sell this aggregation to affiliates, who pay them broadcast fees, and cable companies, who pay them carry fees.

Enters Aereo with a new model that take viewers and moves them from a TV screen to tablet and phone screens. The company went to great pain to design a system that would meet all the legal requirements of an existing over the air TV receiver, even going as far as creating limitations for customers in terms of geographical areas in which they can use the service. And Aereo is taking existing signal from the affiliates, without having to pay the broadcast networks.

Such a development, to many of the incumbents, is not welcomed. Broadcast transmission fees are now a multi-billion dollar business and Aereo could be upending this stream of revenue for the big broadcasters. If the broadcasters allow Aereo to get its broadcasting programming for free, this may lead to other companies retransmitting signal (eg. the cable companies) to request that broadcast retransmission fees be eliminated or at least lowered drastically.

So the big broadcast networks, and a large group of traditional content owners ranging from sport leagues to movie studios,  sued Aereo based on the idea that the company was stealing their intellectual property. And this week, the courts ruled in Aereo’s favor, declaring:

“It is beyond dispute that the transmission of a broadcast TV program received by an individual’s rooftop antenna to the TV in his living room is private, because only that individual can receive the transmission from that antenna, ensuring that the potential audience of that transmission is only one person. Plaintiffs have presented no reason why the result should be any different when that rooftop antenna is rented from Aereo and its signals transmitted over the internet.”

But while Internet activist and Aereo saw this as a major victory, the TV industry is now seeing red. Fox Network, CBS, and Univision are all considering becoming cable only channels. Such a move would leave theUnited States with only three network TV systems: ABC, NBC (ironically, those were the first two TV networks in the country), and PBS.

Questions could arise as to the business model for Fox and CBS as they have been relying on affiliates to carry their signal in the past. Those affiliates would now be left without a broadcast advantage. For example, a company like Sinclair Broadcasting, which carries 24 Fox affiliates and 11 CBS affiliates (along with another 57 other stations) could be forced to drastically change their business model as over a third of their business turns former partners in potential competitors.

The ownership of broadcast licenses that come with those channels could also be brought into question. If Fox, CBS, or Univision go to a cable-only model, would they have to return their broadcasting licenses back to the FCC or would they be allowed to resell them to third parties? This could drastically alter the telecommunication landscape, as the FCC is on a search for more spectrum.

On the Aereo side, it is clear that the company will expand its physical footprint (it is currently only available in New York but looks to expand to 26 other markets this year). Going beyond the core set of TV services, the company may then look at providing other cable station in a live form. The company could, for example, start offering an a-la-carte service, on a premium tier to customers, pitting it against traditional cable companies. And when that collision happens, TV will be forced to change yet again.

So while Netflix is busy working hard on becoming the next type of TV station, Aereo is working on becoming the next type of cable company. These days, the battle for your TV set is raging on and a variety of new models are emerging. The only question that remains is whether the incumbents will adapt or die.

- Paperbear Out

Dwolla

The story is taken from USA Today, January 21, 2013

by Lynn Hicks, The Des Moines Register

Ben Milne's tech startup uses the Web to move money quickly, safely, and at a low cost.

DES MOINES, Iowa -- In front of crowds, Ben Milne is magnetic: He's wowed technophiles at conferences from San Francisco to Dublin. His pitches have prompted venture capitalists to buy into his vision, and persuaded customers to entrust his company,Dwolla, with moving millions of dollars.

Milne sells an idea so simple, yet so mind-boggling: Use the Internet to move money quickly, safely and at as low a cost as possible.

The result could transform banking and business, saving money and reducing fraud. Simply put, it means changing the world. And he thinks he can do it from Des Moines, Iowa.

If Dwolla thrives, its success promises to lead to more startups, more investments, more jobs and more wealth for Iowa. But first he has to overcome the skeptics, who question how Dwolla will ever make money, let alone move billions of it.

Dwolla needs to sign up more users, merchants, websites and financial institutions. It makes 25 cents for every transaction over $10. That means it needs to handle millions and millions of transactions before it can make a profit. Milne also must find enough talent and funding to reach widespread usage.

Milne, 30, admits he has a long way to go as a CEO. He says he must "grow with his company" to be taken seriously. "If we want to build the company we want to build, that may mean growing up a little bit."

Even his biggest backers don't know whether Dwolla will succeed. But they believe in Milne.

"If you don't have confidence in Ben Milne, the world is a pretty sad place," said Mark Conway, a Waterloo, Iowa, lawyer who was one of Dwolla's first supporters.

Moving beyond a bright beginning

Milne and Dwolla are somewhere in the middle — a lonely and difficult place for a startup. It's the untold story. It's when an entrepreneur must live up to the hype.

Ben Milne of Dwolla in his Des Moines, Iowa, headquarters on Dec. 10, 2012. Dwolla aims to use the Internet to move money quickly, safely and at as low a cost as possible. (Gannett, Mary Chind/The Des Moines Register)(Photo: Mary Chind, The Des Moines Register)

The company's story had an undeniable hook, and it was told over and over: Ben Milne dropped out of the University of Northern Iowa his freshman year to sell audio speakers over the Internet. Four years later, the company grew to more than $1 million in sales. But Milne became obsessed with the money he was spending on credit card fees — $50,000 a year — and set out to fix the problem.

Technology industry websites, and later mainstream media, followed this guy in a T-shirt and sneakers with no financial background, who gives obscenity-laden speeches and calls for changing payments with the fervor of a hipster preacher. Business Insider called him the "man who wants to completely kill credit cards." And, reporters and Twitter followers buzzed, he's doing this from Iowa?

"His PR machine opened doors," said Mike Colwell of the incubator Business Innovation Zone of Central Iowa, one of the first people in Des Moines to meet Milne in September 2009, when he was hatching the idea.

Milne bankrolled the idea himself at first, and then found support from Veridian Credit Union, angel investors, and the state of Iowa, which awarded Dwolla a $55,000 grant in March 2010. Within six months of launching nationally in December 2010, Dwolla was moving $1 million a day. Investors on the coasts started paying attention. By February 2012, Dwolla had attracted $5 million from five top venture funds and an even bigger name, actor Ashton Kutcher.

STORY: Kutcher backs startup Dwolla in home state

That's the simple version. Of course, it's more complicated. Colwell, Conway and others marvel at how many hours Milne has put in, how he has learned so much about the financial system, how he has won introductions, how many rejections he has overcome.

"Few people know how to work and work to a goal like he does," Colwell said, to the point that Milne has neglected to do laundry or other mundane tasks that weren't part of his focus.

Moving to the next step will require a new focus for Milne. His crew is focused on building the company, hiring people, improving its products and making new partnerships.

That's "middle work," said Joni Cobb, president and CEO of Pipeline, a Kansas City-based group that helps entrepreneurs in the middle of the country navigate the difficult, uncertain middle of their journeys.

"It's arduous," she said. It's full of dead ends, rejections and pitfalls. And that's why policymakers and leaders who want to encourage innovation must pay attention to the middle, she said. "It's where the magic happens."

Revolution requires Milne evolution

Che Guevara, the Marxist guerrilla leader stands sentinel in Dwolla's 18th-floor headquarters in downtown Des Moines, with his words: "The revolution is not an apple. You have to make it fall." If you look closely, you'll see multiple images of Apple founder Steve Jobs within the print.

Yet he knows such images put Dwolla at risk of being misunderstood and even mocked. For example, he says the media, not him, said Dwolla was out to kill credit cards. "Anytime you do something off the beaten path, you put yourself at the risk of being misunderstood."

His true-believer passion has attracted true-believer employees, including Alexander Taub, a veteran of New York startups.

"The type of employee we have is here for the long haul," Taub said. "People here want to change the world."

Wearing a trademark hoodie, Milne has asked audiences whether they can imagine him the CEO of a company with hundreds of employees. It gets a laugh. But he jokes less about it now, saying people's livelihoods depend on his decisions and his execution.

"I can't think the exact same way I think right now and be running this company in five years. I've got to grow," he said.

"Don't get me wrong. It's going to take some work for me to stop swearing as much as I do. And work to get a little different wardrobe. And I don't think I'm going to start showing up with $500 ties or $900 shoes. That's not who I am, and I can't afford that anyway," he said.

For Milne, Dwolla, an unfinished story

Milne loves building things and solving problems, friends say. He may have found his ultimate project.

"I'd be very surprised if Ben didn't spend his entire life building Dwolla," Taub said.

Milne said he originally thought he'd be done with Dwolla by the time he was 30. But Dwolla is like a gangly adolescent, too young to judge its potential.

The challenges are massive, and include regulatory uncertainty and much larger potential competitors. Milne's plans are expensive, and analysts see little profit margin as a reward.

Expect more partnerships. And more rounds of funding. "We'll never stop raising money. It will take $100 million or more to build this company," Milne said, as costs for developing the technology increase.

His chief investor, Union Square Ventures, assures it will be patient. Partner Albert Wenger said the New York venture capital firm is interested in transformational companies, not ones that turn a quick profit. Its investments include Twitter and Foursquare, popular Web-based companies that are developing their business models. Wenger said he has no timeline for Dwolla's profitability.

"It may take many years or even decades for something like Dwolla to develop its full impact," Wenger said.

Dwolla is an attractive acquisition target, Milne said, but he's not looking to sell. He said a buyer must be devoted to its mission. In the next five years, he said, "Somebody will either be paying a lot of money for the company, or we will be looking at how we remain a very large, very creative company for the next 100 years."

How does Dwolla work?

by Sarah Kessler

Here’s the short version of how Dwolla works: It transfers money directly from your bank account to the bank account of someone who you want to pay. For free--if the transaction is less than $10. And for $.25 if it’s more than that. That is less than a credit card company would charge you.

But wait. Aren’t credit cards essentially just moving money from bank account to bank account, too? Shouldn’t they run into about the same fees for doing so? Get ready for the long answer.

“That 16-digit card number, when it’s left behind, or when it’s used at all, one, the fees to essentially move the money can't really go away, because they have to support that infrastructure, and a huge part of that infrastructure is not necessarily the reduction of fraud on the front end, it's already a loss baked into the entire cost of the whole network,” Dwolla founder and CEO Ben Milne told Fast Company at a meeting in New York City this August. “You just can’t remove it. It’s not coming out.”

A credit card transaction isn’t simple. It’s a complicated process (I often imagine a Rube Goldberg machine) involving players you’ve never heard of that have functions such as “merchant service provider” and nonsensical charges such as “acquirer processing fee.” Dwolla cuts all of this out with the credit card number.

Huh?

“It’s like if you have a landline phone, you can’t not use the copper in the wall,” Milne says. “If you want to reduce the cost of copper, you need to use a wireless phone. You remove hardware. You remove infrastructure.”

It took Milne, he admits, years of seriously geeking out to figure out how payments work. If you don’t have that long, this infographic helps.

- Paperbear Out

SnapChat

Only a little over a year old, Snapchat has the potential to shake up the social media industry. But what is Snapchat?

According to their website, Snapchat is,

A new way to share moments with friends. Snap an ugly selfie or a video, add a caption, and send it to a friend (or maybe a few). They'll receive it, laugh, and then the snap disappears.

The image might be a little grainy, and you may not look your best, but that's the point. It's about the moment, a connection between friends, and not just a pretty picture.

The allure of fleeting messages reminds us about the beauty of friendship - we don't need a reason to stay in touch.

Give it a try, share a moment, and enjoy the lightness of being!

But what is the appeal of Snapchat? Isn't it almost like another form of instagram?

More than 350 million photos are uploaded just to Facebook each day. Terrified that all of those images will stick around forever? Snapchat to the rescue. It's a smartphone app created by two former Stanford fraternity brothers that offers photo flashing: the opportunity to send a photo or video to someone and have it "self destruct" within seconds. By rendering digital photos fleeting rather than archival, Snapchat offers a face-saving alternative to our constantly tracked, unerasable lives on the Internet - and a chance to reintroduce a modicum of privacy. Users are now sharing over 150 million snaps daily

The revenueless Snapchat has attracted nearly $14 million in venture funding, as well as its own Winklevoss-style lawsuit. Spiegel, 22, says the idea for the company came from a college friend who said, "I wish these photos i am sending this girl would disappear." That friend, Frank Brown, is now suing Spiegel and Murphy, 24, alleging he was part of a previous, similar company, Picaboo, that the three had launched. brown claims he was unfairly cut out of the business after an argument and that Spiegel and Murphy stole his idea.

Snapchat is also not an app without its problems. The concept of having pictures "self destruct" and leaving no digital trace behind brings the idea of sexting to a whole new level, where explicit photos can be shared between users without fear of backlash. If this was kept private, it would be fine, but what if it was spam?

Users have complained that they had been sent photos from scantily-clad women with names such as "Honey.Crush9" inviting them to join them in a Skype conversation.

The reason why so many people received unsolicited photos from Honey Crush and her spamming counterparts is that Snapchat allows anyone to send you photo messages. By default, anyone who knows your username or phone number (or who can guess it) can send you a message.

To protect yourself from Snapchat spam such as this, the app can be configured to only accept messages from users on your list of friends.

Happy snapping!

- Paperbear out

EPIC 2020: A vision for education in the future

EPIC 2020, stands for the proposition that the education of the world will change dramatically for the better during this decade. The two movies that follow and this site hope to provide tools that shatter the paradigm that the future will be anything like the past as well as facilitate discussion and accelerate actions to bring about the transformation of the education of the world.

2012 The Tipping Point is a short presentation in a TED like format that was given by Bill Sams in June 2012 to the Ohio Tech Angel Fund members. Where EPIC 2020 is a futurist dramatization of what might happen in education and is designed to help people break out of their paradigm of traditional education  2012 The Tipping Point is a concise overview of what has already happened

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLJRXjSMsJ8

For some reason I can't embed the video, but the above link will bring you to the video.

- Paperbear out