Zuckerberg, Milner, Brin and Other Tech Titans Donate Millions to Science

When you’re as rich as some of the Silicon Valley elite, most anything is at your fingertips. Jetpacks, yachts, skydiving while wearing augmented reality headgear. Oh, and there’s that whole philanthropy thing, too.

A few are opting for that last option with the launch of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Foundation on Wednesday, a non-profit organization drummed up by a handful of tech billionaires.

“I think that our society needs more heroes, more scientists, more researchers, more engineers,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, one of the sponsors of the foundation, at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday. “The things that we can do from the sidelines are build institutions that celebrate your work.”

The prize aims to spur innovation in the field of science research and is backed by tech luminaries including Russian entrepreneur and venture capitalist Yuri Milner, who reached out to Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Sergey Brin months ago to talk about launching the foundation. Art Levinson, Apple chairman and former CEO of Genentech, will act as the chairman of the board for the foundation.

The first round of prize recipients includes 11 scientists from a range of research disciplines, including studies in genetics, cancer research and neural behavior. Each of the 11 prize winners will receive a $3 million award for their work, and Brin, Zuckerberg, Milner and the rest of the sponsors have agreed to a five-year commitment to awarding prizes.

For now, the group’s board intends to remain small. Milner said the design of the five-person board — which also includes Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan and Brin’s wife Anne Wojcicki (a biology analyst and co-founder of 23 and Me) — is purposely small, targeting research on five specific diseases chosen by the board members. Wojcicki’s donation will go to supporting Parkinson’s research; the other sponsors haven’t named their chosen diseases yet.

At the same time, Zuckerberg said there’s room for expansion. “We specifically said we weren’t going to name the prize after a specific person,” he said, in order to potentially attract more sponsors in the tech industry.

Facebook’s Never Had A Big User Data Breach, But May Never Recover When It Does

It’s not if, but when. Between crooks, hackers and foreign governments, Facebook probably can’t avoid a serious user data breach forever. When it happens, Facebook may never be able to quiet fears that “personal data isn’t safe there.” That could cause a chilling effect on sharing, jeopardize its future in commerce, and cut short its lifetime.

This isn’t to say Facebook’s not doing everything in its power to prevent this. It has a sizable security team of top talent, infiltrates hacker rings to thwart their schemes, and offers cash bounties to white hats who identify bugs or holes.

Yesterday, though, Facebook announced something very unsettling. A “sophisticated attack” uploaded malware onto the computers of several Facebook engineers when they visited a hacked mobile developer site. Facebook quickly quarantined and scrubbed the devices, called the police, and kicked off an investigation. So far, there’s been no evidence that any user data had been compromised. Perhaps the attackers were after Facebook’s trade secrets or information about partners. Regardless, it was a very close call.

To date, Facebook has managed to keep what is possibly the world’s largest repository of private information from falling into the wrong hands. Its fellow social networks haven’t been as successful. Twitter most recently saw 250,000 accounts accessed by hackers, and last year the passwords for 6.5 million LinkedIn accounts were stolen and published online.

But there’s a huge difference between those social networks getting hacked, and someone getting into your Facebook account. Most data on Twitter and LinkedIn is public by default. Sure there are direct messages, or the few misguided souls who keep their profiles locked down. On Facebook, though, privacy is the default. That means Facebook has a lot more to lose from getting hacked.

The absolute damage of an eventual breach might not be too severe. Perhaps some photos and messages will be stolen, or at worst some credit card information. Facebook would likely respond quickly by quarantining affected accounts until users changed their passwords and reclaimed control.

It’s the psychological damage to Facebook’s brand that will be the real killer. The world’s news outlets would be all over a breach. Though it looks like no user data was accessed, yesterday’s announcement brought swift coverage from the New York Times, BBC, ABC News, The Guardian, and just about every tech news blog.

The world will know, and the fear will sweep across the news feed. Quick to jump to the worst conclusions and re-share sensational stories, Facebook will be filled with people advising friends to cease sharing, pull out all their data, and shut down their accounts. Most won’t go that far, but the looming worry that nothing is safe on Facebook will permeate the world population and slam its stock price.

Facebook already struggles to fight a perception that it creeps on people’s data, and that its privacy controls are so confusing that people accidentally expose their own information. The emergence of vulnerability to outside attack will compound these issues. Together, they could derail Zuckerberg’s Law — the theory that the amount of content we share doubles every year.

Facebook’s business model is a value exchange. It offers a free, powerful, unified communication tool, and to access it, users trade in their data and allow Facebook to monetize it through advertising and other methods. But that exchange requires that we trust Facebook to keep our private data safe. If that trust is shaken, adding your most private thoughts, media, contact info, and financial data becomes more of a conscious decision about risk.

Injecting that hesitation into the sharing process could be the biggest threat to Facebook’s long-term success outside of a rising social network that refuses to be acquired. In other words, no matter how well Facebook plays the security game, the odds are stacked against it, and the stakes have never been higher.

Facebook's Rose: Content Discovery Has Always Been Social, and It Always Will Be

Facebook likes to think of itself as a gateway to the huge markets that have arisen around the social graphs of its users. There’s no arguing with that. Facebook’s audience is a massive one, and there’s obvious value in reaching it. The question is, how do companies do that, and do it effectively? As VP of partnerships at Facebook, Dan Rose is charged with convincing media companies that Facebook’s audience is one worth reaching, and then delivering on that promise. Not always a sure thing, as Facebook’s high-profile falling out with General Motors last year shows.

During a wide-ranging interview at D: Dive Into Media, Rose talked about how Facebook views media, and how media should view Facebook.

“Facebook is primarily two core pillars — identity and sharing,” Rose said, adding that both pillars are part of Facebook’s media pitch.

“From an identity perspective, so much of who we are and how we identify ourselves comes from what we read and what we watch,” Rose continued. “So our identity platform can’t be complete without media being part of it. Similarly, the sharing piece can’t be complete without status updates about news stories, music friends are listening to, updates about movies people are seeing.”

The high-level principle driving this is the idea of finding the perfect balance between great user experience and delivering audience to platform partners.

“At its core, what we’re really striving to do is find the perfect equilibrium from a great user experience and a strong platform that developers and partners will continue to invest in,” Rose said. “… We need to keep the news feed interesting, and one of the ways we do that is through media.”

At the same time, however, Rose said Facebook must “honor” content, and presumably appetite for audience and buzz that’s ever-present behind it.

“We think it’s our job to honor content,” Rose said. “Media content deserves to be honored and respected in the news feed. For example, we recently increased the size of images from media partners. That’s more engaging for users, and for partners it’s great, because click-throughs and engagement increased.”

Media content also deserves to be consumed, says Rose. And here, too, Facebook plays a big role, and hopes to play an even bigger one in the future.

“How did you hear about ‘Downton Abbey’?” Rose asked. “I discovered it on Facebook. I kept seeing it pop up in my news feed. The simple fact is most of us find the TV shows we enjoy by listening to suggestions from our friends. That’s the primary discovery mechanism for content right now. Imagine a future, though, in which you turn on the TV and see a feed of all the shows your friends watch. We think that’s a very compelling idea. Content discovery always has been and always will be social.”

Additional Notes From the Session

• On mobile: “So many things are unlocked on mobile. You don't bring your computer to a restaurant or a party.”
• On Zynga: “I don’t think we walked away from Zynga at all. They built a large and successful business on our platform. … We still spend a lot of time with Zynga.”
• On Instagram: In the past, Facebook acquired small companies for talent, with Instagram being the first company it bought for the product. However, Rose said that more deals for product and technologies are likely.

[ See post to watch video ]

New Apple MacBook Air 11″ (2012): Unboxing and Tour

New Apple MacBook Air 11.6″ unboxing, setup and tour Price: 9 or 99 What’s new for 2012? Magsafe 2 Power Adapter, USB 3.0, FaceTime HD Camera, Ivy Bridge Intel i5 and i7 Dual Core chips, Faster SSDs Specs: CPU: Intel i5 Dual Core 1.7 GHZ RAM: 4GB SSD: 128GB GPU: Intel HD Graphics 4000 Display: 1366 by 768 USB 3.0 Thunderbolt No SD Slot (13″ Model Only) Backlit Keyboard FaceTime HD Camera (720p) Height: 0.11-0.68 inch (0.3-1.7 cm) Width: 11.8 inches (30 cm) Depth: 7.56 inches (19.2 cm) Weight: 2.38 pounds (1.08 kg)2 Battery: Up to 5 hours wireless web Amazon: goo.gl Tech Specs: www.apple.com Benchmarks: www.primatelabs.com My Info: Google+: Michael Kukielka Facebook: www.facebook.com/DetroitBORG Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DetroitBORG Instagram: detroitborg Follow me on Ping: MichaelKukielka Follow me on GameCenter: DetroitBORG E-mail me: mikekukielka@gmail.com Subscribe: www.youtube.com/DetroitBORG
Video Rating: 4 / 5

11″ Apple MacBook Air Review (2011) Purchase Link: goo.gl Tweet this video! clicktotweet.com This is my full review of the latest 11″ MacBook Air featuring an Intel Core i5 1.6GHz Dual-Core CPU, 4GB RAM and 128GB of Solid State Flash Storage. I’m using iStat Menus 3 to monitor my system: bjango.com Add me on Google+ goo.gl Follow us on Twitter! www.twitter.com TLD Facebook: www.facebook.com 11″ Apple MacBook Air Review (2011) 11″ Apple MacBook Air Review (2011) 11″ Apple MacBook Air Review (2011)
Video Rating: 4 / 5

Facebook Gains on Apple in Wall Street Rating Race

If Wall Street had a tech-stock popularity contest, Facebook would be closing in on Apple.

In a sign of the two companies’ changing reputations, Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc. are seeing the difference in the percentage of analysts recommending their stocks narrow, according to Thomson Reuters data. Just a month ago, the percentage of analysts rating each at “buy” differed by about 17 points: 84 percent of analysts recommended Apple and 67 percent recommended Facebook. Three months ago, that distance was 25 percentage points. Now, 71 percent of analysts recommend Facebook and 77 percent recommend Apple.

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Facebook recovers from outage affecting US users, says issue was DNS-related [Updated]

Facebook is suffering from an extended outage that is causing downtime for users based in North America. The site has been offline for many in the US this evening — including Texas, New York and others — for around an hour and a half, although other in certain parts of the country are able to access the social network as normal. Overseas users appear to have remained unaffected.

Update: Facebook is back to normal working order. In a statement — below — the company says that a DNS issue was to blame.

We’re not one for unnecessarily highlighting downtime or service inaccessibility here at TNW but the outage — while not a full-scale, worldwide problem — has left Facebook inaccessible to many for a considerable amount of time and that will be of concern to the company. With one billion monthly active users to serve, keeping the site online and reliable is a top priority.

Website monitoring service downrightnow flags Facebook’s current status as ‘Likely Service Disruption’, and it suggests that the site has experienced intermittent access issues since 20:00 EST.

Facebook-owned Instagram has been operating as usual.

We reached out to Facebook for more details. Here’s the company’s response:

Earlier today we experienced a DNS issue that briefly prevented people who typed ‘facebook.com’ into their browsers from reaching the site. People who accessed the site using a mobile app, typed ‘www.facebook.com’ into their browsers, or used a bookmark or a search engine to navigate to the site were not affected. We resolved the issue quickly, and the fix should be fully propagated now. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Headline image via westm / Flickr

A Sad Woman Lost Her Entire Life Savings in the Facebook IPO and Now Wants Her Money Back

A lot of average joes put on their faux-finance cap during the Facebook IPO and hoped it would get them rich. Everyone uses Facebook therefore everyone wants to buy Facebook stock, the logic went. Yeah, it didn't work out that way. I'm sure a lot of people lost money. One poor woman, Uma Swaminathan, lost her entire life savings and kinda wants a re-do.

Uma Swaminathan, who's a retired teacher and a widow, is trying to get restitution on the money she lost during the Facebook IPO. She had ordered her broker, Vanguard, to buy 6,200 shares of Facebook but then she changed her mind when Facebook didn't begin trading as expected. Vanguard supposedly didn't cancel in time and now she's lost a good chunk of change.

Furthermore, Swaminathan has beef with Morgan Stanley too. According to Reuters:

Morgan Stanley, she said, "informed their own privileged clients" that it was downgrading its outlook on the stock, just before the IPO, and then issued more shares while raising the price "just to suck more suckers into the stock," according to her FINRA complaint filed in July.

I'm pretty sure once the money is gone, the money is gone but Swaminathan wants $1.9 million in damages. Good luck? [Reuters via Business Insider]