In this leaked, six-page email, Richard Mollet, the Director of Public Affairs for the British Phonographic Institute (the UK's record-industry lobbyists), sets out the BPI's strategy for ramming through the Digital Economy Bill, a sweeping, backwards reform to UK copyright law that will further sacrifice privacy and due process in the name of preserving copyright, without actually preserving copyright. Mollet's memo, entitled "Digital Economy Bill weekly update 11 March 2010," appears to be ..   show all text

The 10-year plan would reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.

For the past two years, thousands of taxi drivers overcharged passengers a total of more than $8 million by switching the meter to double the rate.

Yesterday, Foursquare turned one. You read that right: The mobile social network that made its splash at SXSW 2009 and has tremendous buzz is just 366 days old. Despite that short amount of time, Foursquare has more than half a million users, 1.4 million venues and 15.5 million checkins, and it’s still growing. Experian Hitwise decided to use this milestone to analyze Foursquare’s growth. As you might imagine, not only have Foursquare’s mobile apps seen growth, but so has Foursquare.com. W..   show all text

The iPad officially became available for pre-order earlier today and while plenty of you are still debating about whether or not to pre-order, it appears as if the device might already sold 51,000 units in just two hours via pre-order. Wow. If you’ve ever doubted how insane dedicated Apple fans are, the background on how these figures were determined will assuage any doubts. A group of particularly prudent Apple fans from the APPL Sanity Board at Investor Village decided to put together a..   show all text

Aol launched Lifestream, a social aggregator and publisher, as part of their AIM platform at TechCrunch50 Last Fall. Since then it has gained nearly 2 million users, say Aol. Based on that success Aol is now launching Lifestream as a standalone product at lifestream.aol.com. Like Friendfeed, Lifestream aggregates a number of third party social networks – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc., so if you follow a Lifestream user you’ll see all of the c..   show all text

Reporters Without Borders released its annual report [PDF] on online access today. They call it Enemies of the Internet, and it shows a world where online censorship, intimidation and worse is increasing. It's not surprising that as access to the Internet expands, more and more dictators and tyrants will try to suppress it. But what's troubling about this year's report is the inclusion of two democratic countries: Australia and South Korea. Sponsor Both countries were included in the report..   show all text

Apple fanatics will be able to place their iPad orders at 5:30 AM Pacific time (8:30 Eastern) tomorrow, Friday, March 12th. The pre-orders will be available through Apple.com, and are expected to ship in the United States next month — April 3rd to be precise. The Unofficial Apple Weblog learned about the pre-order time after it asked Apple for the information in an e-mail. Let’s assume you’re the sort of person who wants an iPad; if so, you can still wait for the launch date and pick up an..   show all text

With iPad preorders officially starting tomorrow, attention has shifted to iPhone 4.0 software and what features it might bring to both the iPad and future iPhone models. Apple Insider is now adding fuel to the long-standing rumors that the next big update to Apple’s iPhone OS will feature support for multitasking — that is, the ability for third-party apps to run in the background. As anyone with a jailbroken iPhone knows, the multitasking limitation for third-party applications in the i..   show all text

A new study from security firm Barracuda Labs provides some interesting insights into the state of the Twitterverse. Unfortunately for the microblogging startup, the stats say that most of its users aren’t very active. The study looked at around 19 million Twitter accounts (PDF) in order to figure out how people are using Twitter. It started with one assumption: an active or “True” Twitter user has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people, and had tweeted at least 10 times. By tha..   show all text

When it comes to competition, CNN president Jon Klein fears Facebook. The man at the top of the news network believes that the social network is more of a threat to his business than other broadcast media organizations. In a recent question-and-answer session with BusinessWeek, Klein specifically states, “We want to be the most trusted source,” and, “I’m more worried about the 500 million or so people on Facebook versus the 2 million on Fox.” The intriguing statements come just weeks after..   show all text

Whenever I meet someone who finds out that I work on the directions team for Google Maps, the first question I'm asked is often "So when's Google Maps going to add biking directions?" We're big biking fans too, so we've been itching to give you a concrete answer. I don't want to keep the good news a secret any longer, so the answer is: right now! Today we've added biking directions and extensive bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S. My team has been keeping close tabs on all the public ..   show all text

Brands are engaging in the conversations that are taking place on social media sites now more than ever. But in order to tap into the social conversations that are taking place on the web, brands and agencies need to have a powerful tool to track, measure and engage sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and others. One of the leaders in the social media tracking space, Radian6, is launching a new Engagement Console to streamline this process. A desktop client built on Adobe AIR, the eng..   show all text

A 40 year-old unsolved murder mystery. Strange cryptic codes in a bible. Sweden, sandwiches, and many, many cigarettes. The badass-est female protagonist since . . . forever. And an author who has, posthumously, caused quite a ruckus in the book world and in the minds of conspiracy theorists everywhere. Yes, I’m talking about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. If you haven’t heard of it, the rest of us are inviting you to come out from under your rock. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (The G..   show all text

Business to business software can be a tough sell. Online B2B can be even a harder sell. While there is certainly money to be made, unless you’re one of the big players, the likelihood you’re going to succeed is pretty small. Starting today, Google is taking their roll as one of the big players and extending a platform to boost some smaller players. Tonight, Google has unveiled their Google Apps Marketplace. This is an app store for enterprise apps in the cloud. Using a set of APIs, these t..   show all text

As Director of Twitter's Trust and Safety team, a big part of my job is focused on the detection and prevention of spam and abuse. A couple weeks ago, Biz explained how Twitter users were being victimized by phishing scams spread primarily through links in Direct Messages. Basically, people click the link and bad things happen. My team can only detect these scams after malicious links have already been sent out. Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow ..   show all text

The social networking site plans to roll out features next month that will give its 400 million users the option of sharing their location with friends as part of their news feeds.

Foursquare, a location-based social network, is rolling out new tools that will give businesses more information about their customers and allow them to target special offers.

Today at the #140tc Twitter Conference in Seattle, Washington (which I keynoted this morning), HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes announced that its popular Twitter application will be integrating with both MySpace and Foursquare, starting this week at the South by Southwest Interactive conference. HootSuite is one of the more popular Twitter applications, one specifically geared towards power users and businesses. It has been on a roll recently, launching integration with Wordpress and rolling out..   show all text