Looks like Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer has woken up to smell the same coffee I'm smelling -- that Apple is chasing HP to become the world's biggest PC maker, and now the MSFT top man has said he's gunning for the tablet market.

As the world waits for Ballmer's words to materialize as something with somewhat more than Zune's 1 percent marketshare, and iMac maker Quanta confirms it will make twice as many iMacs as it will make all-in-on PCs for HP, let's look at Ballmers wordage...

On Apple's storming uber-succesful iPad, Ballmer said, with great grace, "Apple has done an interesting job of putting together a product -- they've certainly sold more than I'd like them to sell."

Enchantee. Also enchanting is Microsoft's determination that Windows 7 tablets will become relevant once the company delivers a credible machine (assuming it can get hold of the components).

"They'll be shipping as soon as they are ready," Ballmer said. "It is job one urgency. No one is sleeping at the switch."

"We have got to make things happen. Just like we had to make things happen on netbooks, we have to with Windows 7 on slates. We're in the process of doing that as we speak."

Translation: Now Apple's shown us how, we're firing up the photocopiers. Or is that unfair?

This spring at Twitter's first developer conference Chirp the big splash was a forthcoming feature called Annotations. The feature will allow publishing software to annotate Tweets with a wide open variety of metadata, which could then be read and analyzed by other software. Annotations are going to be big, if and when they launch.

At Chirp it was said that the Annotations feature would launch in the second or third quarter of this year. Now the company's developer advocate, Taylor Singletary, said today on the Twitter developers list that it's not going to work out that way. "We haven't yet announced a release date," he said in response to an inquiry, "and it's still a ways in the future while we tackle some other projects."

Sponsor

We've got an inquiry in with Twitter asking what that means, but it seems clear that the company is slammed with technical challenges, has other priorities and wrongly estimated the roadmap for this very important part of the platform. (Update: see below.)

Here's how Annotations will work. It will allow publishing software to mark-up tweets with any kind of characteristic or namespace (local weather when and where a twit did tweet, for example) and any kind of value - cloudy with a chance of meatballs, for example. Twitter messages are fairly rich with metadata already and incredibly easy to analyze and build on top of, but Annotations would open that up so far the sky's the limit.

It's worth mentioning that Twitter's unveiling of Annotations at Chirp happened around the same time as, and was widely compared with, Facebook's launching of personalized content widgets and tentacles expanding all over the web, among other things. Facebook shipped its announced project, for better or for worse.

Twitter is Busy

In another email on the same list today, Singletary said that the processing of white-listing applications to ping Twitter's servers with a production-level frequency was clogged with backlog, growing more critical in its evaluations and being re-evaluated.

Numerous advertising technologies have been rolled out since Chirp as well. Annotations is a hugely ambitious strategy, and the squabbling over namespaces and standards was one that Twitter said it was going to let the market work out on its own. That made some people quite unhappy.

We've asked Twitter for clarification on the revised Annotations roadmap and will update this post with the company's response.

Update: A Twitter spokesperson responded to our inquiry and said that yes, Annotations will launch. "We'll still launch Annotations. The team that was working on Annotations is currently focused on our number one priority, which is site stability." No doubt Annotations could themselves pose scalability challenges. They could at least blow our minds, if not a series of related servers.

Below is an image of what each Tweet looks like under the hood right now, before annotations. (Click for full size view.) Each of those fields is powerful, but inflexible and defined by the company. Imagine a new one that's open to being defined however a publishing tool sees fit. That's the vision behind Annotations.

Today at TechCrunch's Cruchup in Palo Alto, CA, Jeremy Stoppelman , Yelp's CEO and John Hanke , VP of Product Management at Google talked about the strain that is building up between Yelp and Google Places.

According to Stoppleman, Yelp now has 12 million reviews on Yelp, with 35 million uniques per month. 2.5 million uniques between Android and iPhone.

Asked if Yelp is like the yellow pages, Stoppleman said that, Yellow pages are boring, so I don't know if we want to be that. Google's Hanke said that, The Web [as a whole] is the yellow pages.

Henke believes that, The areas that Google can help [in local search] are data and monetization. Over 4 million business are feeding the Places API. The other part of the strategy is monetization. Henke said that there was a lot of local-focused startups that failed because there, wasn't an advertising platform for location startups, and Google aims to fix that.

We sell ads, we have 100 sales people on mobile we haven't done any monetization there we could just add in our search ads. Our most valuable data is our reviews. There longer than other site's reviews, said Stoppleman. He also noted that, check-ins have been awesome for Yelp.

Google Places vs Yelp

Our primary concern is what is best for the user. I think there is a real tension [between Google Places and Yelp]. I think Google has to be very careful that they don't block the best content, said Stoppleman. Later he said, That can be difficult for a company like Google to swallow.

If the best content on the web is Yelp or the New York Times, we're [Google] going to show it. The competition isn't between Google and Yelp or anyone else the real competition is getting local businesses to advertise in the first place, said Henke.

Original title and link for this post: Yelp CEO: There is real tension between Google Places and Yelp

Last night a group of M&A gurus from the corporate development teams at top tech acquirers Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, Facebook and Twitter gathered to share insights into their business with a group of startups at a fancy-pants Los Altos Hills, Calif. mansion. Though Facebook and Google might have been the most notable active acquirers lately, everyone on the panel said they are out shopping. They each have a bit of a different style, and a bit of a different target startup. Below are the most notable bits from each participant:

The ridonkulous Kelly Porter Mansion, where the event was held

Googles Amin Zoufonoun said that he looks at three types of acquisitions: a proven product and team, an uncertain big bet, or market and tech leadership (like YouTube and DoubleClick). He said recent acquisitions by Google and other companies like Apple point to the fact that mobile is not a core part of the DNA of many tech giants. As for advice, he warned startups that they always underestimate how long it takes to close an acquisition; for Google, deals usually take three to four months. As for areas he's interested in, Zoufonoun said he thinks music is overhyped (an interesting comment given Google is reportedly looking to make a play in this space), and mobile user interfaces are underhyped.

Ciscos Derek Idemoto talked up the value of post-acquisition integration. His company has been incredibly acquisitive, with 140 deals in the last 20-odd years. Idemoto bragged that 75 percent of acquired employees are still at Cisco after four years. He said he thinks video is underhyped, and that he's particularly interested in data. The most, and most relevant data might win, he explained.

Yahoos Taylor Barada, who joined the company a year ago, declared of the original Internet giant, We're back in the game. He said he thinks content discovery is underhyped, and personal measurement tools are an interesting, under-the-radar opportunity. He invited startups to come talk to him as his job's nature is to float across Yahoo's complex business. We like meetings with no real agenda, he said. We're a bit of a service arm to connect teams at Yahoo.

Facebooks Mike Brown (as might be expected!) talked up his company's inclination towards talent acquisitions of small companies that haven't raised much funding. Often entrepreneurs filled with chili powder and vinegar are the best hires as compared to trying to get them to apply for a job through the front door, said Brown. Most interesting, Brown talked about Facebook's particular preference to pay cash (and stock options) instead of stock for companies it acquires. Facebook needs to keep its number of common shareholders under 500 or risk having to file financial statements to the SEC. Brown told startups that their transactions could be more difficult if they have a large number of investors. We can't issue stock in those cases because we can't take on that number of new shareholders, he said. (That's an interesting contrast to the current trend of young startups taking early rounds from large syndicates of angel and sometimes VC investors.)

Microsofts Fritz Lanman said even though his team hasn't done a ton of deals recently, It's not like I've been on holiday for the past year. But he admitted that in a company worth $250 billion, the big value is in the core franchises usually not startup acquisitions. There's a natural ebb and flow between strategy and execution, he said. He encouraged startups to form relationships early and not to oversell themselves. We're a little bit smarter than we look. It shouldn't take us that many meetings to figure out what you're doing.

Twitters Jessica Verrilli said her company is still at an early stage, so she looks at deals that may be very core to its business. Sometimes the best talent happens to be working on something related to Twitter, she said and hiring is right now one of the company's top priorities. Twitter usually offers a combination of stock and cash in its deals. One area she's actively looking at is relevance and discovery, Verilli said.

Moderator Mike Marquez of Code Advisors also asked the participants for a moment of role-playing to say what startups the people sitting next to them should buy. One of most interesting responses was Lanman telling Brown that Facebook should buy Foursquare and Zynga. It's insane that Facebook lets Foursquare exists, he said. Facebook should be so much further in mobile. Local direct marketing is the next $100 to $200 billion opportunity. Meanwhile, Idemoto told Zoufonoun that Google should look into buying content companies as well as Nielsen for its data.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

Google Buys a Heap of Trouble With Ad Platform Purchase

The Information Commissioner's Office has said that Google did not grab "significant" amounts of personal data when photographing the UK with its StreetView cars, and that the information captured is unlikely to include "meaningful personal details" or information that could be linked to an "identifiable person."

In its statement, the ICO said that Google was "wrong" to collect the information, but that ultimately, there was no evidence that the data collected could cause any "individual detriment."

The advertising and search company is being investigated around the world after it emerged that its StreetView cars were recording data from WiFi networks. The company claims that the logging of data was accidental, and that its intent was only to record public information such as access point names and MAC addresses to allow approximate non-GPS-based positioning services.

The ICO said that it would continue to monitor the other investigations into the company to see if they find that Google has broken any data privacy lawsincluding another investigation in the UK by the Metropolitan Police.

Read the comments on this post

Be prepared to be scared about your cell phone privacy. Two security researchers showed today how they can track down cell phone numbers, identify the person who owns the phone, and then track the whereabouts of that person. And they can do it with technology available to ordinary civilians.

That last part is the shocking part. Government investigators and police can do this. But Don Bailey and Nick DePetrillo (pictured) showed they were able to do it by collecting bits of information and then amassing them into a powerful tool that can invade your privacy. They showed off working code and other proof from Project Carmen Sandiego (named after a computer game where you tracked somebody down as part of a geography lesson) at the Black Hat security conference today in Las Vegas.

This is intelligence gathering for civilians, said Bailey, speaking to a roomful of security researchers and hackers. We can find out where you are, who you talk to, where you are most vulnerable.

Bailey and DePetrillo joked that they could get actress Megan Fox's cell phone number and sell it to the highest bidder. But they said the point of doing this isn't to get the cell phone numbers of celebrities or executives like Apple's Steve Jobs. They wanted to show how security should be stepped up for cell phones and how shockingly easy it is to do. If they could do it, they reasoned, then the bad guys with evil intent have probably already figured out how to do it. In effect, Bailey and DePetrillo said that they have enough information to put together a White Pages for cell phones, with home numbers for everybody's cell phone.

Governments can pretty much afford the technology to do this now. But ordinary civilians can't. One of the tools they exploit is a central database called a Home Location Register, which records the phone number of every SIM (subscriber identity module) authorized to use the cell phone network based on the GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) standard, which is the standard used in about 80 percent of the world's phones. You can access HLR data through various third-party resources, Bailey said. You can cross reference that with Mobile Switching Center information that determines where you are, generally.

That data tells the researchers what city the user is in. They reverse engineered this data to get more information. In other countries, the MSC data has zip code data embedded in it, making it much easier to find someone's location. U.S. data isn't that easy to figure out. But the researchers say that can take a given MSC number and find out its location and its cell phone provider.

That information should be privileged, but it isn't, Bailey said. I shouldn't know that you switched from AT&T to T-Mobile.

You can buy CallerID information from companies such as Targus, which gets data from Verizon and other carriers. They add your name to the CallerID database with phone number data. If you buy a cell phone in the U.S., your name will wind up in a CallerID database. With this data, the researchers were able to reverse engineer the data to create a White Pages for mobile phones, which means they can put a name to a cell phone number. With the name and phone number together, the researchers can assemble other information.

It's extremely easy to build your own database, DePetrillo said.

The databases are more expensive if you want to get the most current data, but older data is cheaper, costing only 0.0024 cents per name looked up. One of the things they can do with names is piece together who your co-workers are, because they will be using company-purchased phones with similar phone numbers.

Some of the techniques they use to glean information include backspoofing. But if you don't want to do that, you can buy databases from Bulkcname.com for around $100 per 1,000 name lookups. The researchers say they can get 10,000 names identified for just $30. You can verify the data by cross referencing it with HLR data, which tells which carrier is associated with certain phone numbers.

During the talk, the researchers showed slides of text that showed phone numbers, names, locations and company affiliations. They can even make educated guesses about which banks of phone numbers are assigned to prepaid phones, which are phones bought at stores and can generally disguise their owners. The researchers say they can pinpoint people 99 percent of the time. With Google, Facebook and other tools, you can often then put a face to the name. You can find out if there are multiple phone numbers associated with one person.

Our intent is to get people thinking about their actions and their vulnerabilities, Bailey said. You can target people. You can locate private individuals. You can locate groups of individuals. You can track where people are traveling. That's a lot of information. It can be scary.

Added DePetrillo, This is simple stuff to understand. I have information I shouldn't have. I didn't do any crazy, insane hacker tricks. It requires very little intelligence.

Tags: BlackHat, Carmen Sandiego Project, security

People: Don Bailey, Nick DePetrillo

Content farms have been in the spotlight over the past year. They're companies that generate hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content on a daily basis. Much of their traffic comes from Google search, so the aim of content farms is to rake in the money with online advertising. Demand Media has been the most ambitious of these companies, but even the big portals are doing it nowadays. Yahoo! recently acquired Associated Content and AOL launched an initiative earlier this year disingeniously called Seed.

In our content farms coverage so far, we've focused mostly on textual content farms. But video may well be the next frontier. A startup called Howcast specializes in mass production of video content.

Sponsor

I spoke to Sanjay Raman, Chief Product Officer at Howcast, to find out what its strategy is and what he thinks of Demand Media and other competitors.

How Howcast Works

As the name suggests, Howcast is all about how-to videos. As with other 'content farm' companies, Howcast has identified a big opportunity to provide so-called "evergreen" informational content on the Web across hundreds of thousands of categories. The rationale being that people search, mostly on Google, for instructional content. How To Shuck an Oyster, How to Save Water in Your Garden, How to Avoid Dropped Calls on the iPhone 4, and so on.

Howcast is betting that how-to videos will have more relevance to searchers in the near future, than textual how-to articles. And given that YouTube is already the 2nd largest search engine in the world, behind only Google, that seems a solid business assumption.

Distribution

Howcast launched in February 2008 and now has nearly 200,000 instructional videos. It streams 25 million videos each month on both its own web site and across a network that includes web portals like AOL and Yahoo, and TV-on-demand sites like Hulu and Dailymotion. Its biggest distribution platform though is YouTube, where it has over 150,000 channel subscribers. Raman said that around 80% of its videos are viewed offsite, with 20% being viewed on Howcast's web site.

It also has a strong mobile presence, which Raman said was key to Howcast's future growth. He noted that Howcast has had over 2 million app downloads across the iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry devices. The Howcast for iPad app alone has been installed by 150,000 iPad users (approximately 5% of global iPad users) and was for a time the number 2 free iPad app in Apple's App Store.

Raman noted that user engagement is very good on mobile - for example users watch videos on average twice a day and watch two videos per session. Perhaps for this reason, Raman said that the value of users on mobile is much higher than on other platforms.

The Quality Question

In my discussion with Sanjay Raman, Chief Product Officer at Howcast, the word "quality" came up a number of times.

Every time I talk to 'content farm' companies, they insist that the aim is to produce quality content. That's because the most common criticism of content farms is that they clog up search engines with poor quality content.

In Howcast's case, the content appears to be professionally produced. It outputs about 400 how-to videos each month, most of which flows through its Emerging Filmmakers Program. Raman said that the program attracts wanna-be filmmakers, who are looking for a place to prove their skills. Howcast pays between $50-$300 per video.

Raman told me that Howcast wants to keep the content bar high. He claimed that Howcast has a much higher ratio of subscribers per video than Demand Media. Howcast is "not necessarily playing the volume game," he added.

Comparison to Demand Media

Who is the top YouTube provider, measured by views? You guessed it, Demand Media. This is because it produces far more video content per month than Howcast (Demand competes directly with Howcast with its property eHow). While Sanjay Raman didn't have exact figures, he estimated that Demand Media produces about 10 times more videos every month than Howcast. However he implied that this resulted in lower quality videos.

"Demand Media takes tasks and makes them smaller than they need to be," said Raman.

He also claimed that Howcast's playbacks per video are higher than Demand Media's. Howcast averages 44-50,000 playbacks per video, he told me, whereas Demand is around 7,000 per video.

Despite Demand Media Threat, Howcast Well Positioned

Many questions about content farms seem to center around whether other companies can compete with Demand Media, which operates on a much larger scale than its competitors. Perhaps the only company capable of stopping Demand's relentless growth is Google, which is reportedly tweaking its algorithms to better account for quality over quantity.

Howcast is hoping that its focus on professional video-making, via its filmmakers program, will lead to high search results. That remains to be seen. One thing that Howcast definitely has going for it is its positioning in the mobile space, which is increasingly where video content is consumed.

Ian Drew, executive vice president of marketing at ARM Holdings, a Cambridge, U.K.-based company that makes semiconductors powering a majority of the smartphones, tablets, 70 percent of world's hard drives and half the world's printers, is on a whirlwind tour of Silicon Valley. And what everyone (including me) wants to talk to him about is servers, or rather low-power server chips that can power the data centers of tomorrow.

With this foray into the fast-growing data center business, the company, which can trace back its roots to Apple Computer, is slowly becoming a bane to Intel's existence. And the funny thing is, it does so not by making chips, but instead it develops technology and licenses it to all comers.

Some special companies Qualcomm, Marvell and Infineon get access to all of ARM's entire technology stack, so they can build their own chips which in turn compete with Intel. The latest company to sign-up: Microsoft, the long time partner of Intel and the other half of the Wintel' monopoly. What Microsoft will do with ARM's technology remains to be seen, but it is a notable move nonetheless. It is a sign that the company is killing it.

Check out their American Depository Receipts: at the close of trading they were up nearly 165 percent over past twelve months. In the second quarter of 2010, its revenues jumped 42 percent to $150.3 million versus $105.5 million in Q2 2009. Earnings per share leaped 147% percent to $2.34 a share versus 95 cents a share it earned in a year ago quarter. From the looks of it, things seem to be going well for these guys.

The main reason ARM has done so well is because it has focused on developing low-power technologies that it licenses in turn to others, thus eschewing the headaches that come with manufacturing and selling your own chips. More importantly, ARM as a company sits at a unique position in the technology ecosystem. Because it licenses its chip technology to others, it has a good idea of what kind of products are coming to market, how well certain type of products are doing and more importantly where the industry is headed. In short, it talks to chip makers, device makers and these days even software companies that are developing software for these consumer devices.

And what Drew and his cohorts are seeing is a radical revolution in the data centers. While the x86 world focused on pure megahertz, we have focused on the megahertz per milliwatt, Drew said during our conversation earlier today. We focus on quarter-to-half milliwatts as a key metric. Most of the new devices such as the iPhones don't have heat sinks in them, he joked.

If you look at our heritage (of low power chips) it makes perfect sense for us to be looking at the servers and the data centers, said Drew. With cooling making up nearly half the capital expenditure and almost two-thirds of the operation expenses, Drew said power is going to be a bigger part of the conversation.

Everyone is using the Web and the Web is more demanding today which means all of the stuff is going to run through data centers, he noted. Two things are very clear: there is going to be a lot of data and need for less power. By getting the world to buy more edge devices (iPhones, iPads etc.), ARM is at the same boosting demand for back-end computing infrastructure. Now by diversifying into the data center server business, it can make more money selling its low-power chip technology to server makers. In other words, ARM wins on both sides of the trade.

Stacey, in a post earlier this year noted:

The news shouldn't come as a surprise to our readers, since I profiled Smooth-Stone, one company trying to build low-power servers earlier this month, and in that same post pointed to ARM's server ambitions. And it's not just startups that are interested in using the low-power ARM architecture inside data centers, either. Google recently acquired a secretive startup called Agnilux that was rumored to be making a server with the ARM architecture.

We also reported on a Microsoft job listing that sought a software development engineer with experience running ARM in the data center for the company's eXtreme Computing group. For the last couple of decades, Intel's x86 chips have gained dominance in the data center, but as power considerations begin to outweigh the benefits of a cheap, general purpose processor, other chip makers have started to smell blood. Nvidia is pushing its graphics processors for some types of applications, while Texas Instruments is researching the use of DSPs inside servers.

But don't expect this to happen overnight, Drew cautioned. We are going to see some pilots over next year, but this is a long term initiative. He believes that this long, continuous transition to lower-power server chips is going to take between three to five years. When I asked Drew what are those pilots, he declined to comment. From our reporting, we can easily tell you Microsoft, Smooth Stone and Marvell are experimenting with ARM-based server processors.

And while ARM tries to build a server business, the company, Drew said has plenty on its plate. For instance, the upcoming/next generation Cortex-A class processor codenamed Eagle, which is likely to help redefine the smartphone landscape again.

Related content from GigaOM Pro: (sub req'd.): Are Green Enterprise IT Pastures Within ARM's Reach?

In an interview with Fast Company today, Foursquare's Tristan Walker said that contrary to the recent Forrester report that said that check-in app such as Foursquare were 80% male, Foursquare's male-female ratio is approaching a 60%-40% split, and that the startup is moving, closer and closer toward [gender] parity.

Walker also said in the interview that he doesn't believe that Foursquare needs to have huge scale to be successful,stating that It's not only about reach, it's about engagement. This was in response to another part of the widely circulated Forrester report that said that 84% of online adults were not aware of services such as Foursquare. Also, Walker rebuffed the notion from the Forrester report that only 1% of users check in more than once a week, saying that a pretty high percentage of Foursquare users do just that.

Regarding Foursquare's business plans, Walker said, We're focused right now on making the experience better. How can we charge for that? We don't know. He also said that Foursquare may, charge for really robust analytics that haven't been served before, at some point in the future.

Original title and link for this post: Foursquare's male-female ratio approaching 60/40

Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham today offered an overview of how he has seen the angel and startup world evolve in the last year. Among other trends, he argued that the traditionally structured venture round is becoming irrelevant.

Speaking at AngelConf, the angel investing event hosted at Y Combinator's office in Mountain View, Calif., Graham compared the traditional venture model to the classic children's book Are You My Mother? Startup entrepreneurs raising funding are like baby birds, asking every venture capitalist, Are you my lead investor?

Now, however, more venture rounds aren't really being led by a single investor, and they don't have an official close date or amount, Graham said. There may be an official lead investor, but they're the lead in name only, and don't dominate the process like they used to. This benefits the startups because the lead investor has less power to screw them over. Even if well-intentioned the startup isn't held back by if the lead isn't moving fast enough to raise money. And rather than distracting itself with intense fundraising, a startup can keep raising money in the background as needed.

Graham said this is part of a larger trend where founders have more power than investors, a trend that incubator Y Combinator has been based on since the beginning. Entrepreneurs who have had difficult dealings with VCs may be skeptical that this power shift is really occurring, and even Graham acknowledged that the fundraising model the described isn't happening for every startup yet. But that's how the best ones are raising money.

If the best startups are doing this, what do you care what the other ones are doing? he said.

Companies: Y Combinator

People: Paul Graham

Along the way to creating Silicon Valley's definitive people reviews site, Unvarnished cofounder Peter Kazanjy ran into a problem. And he's solving it with what looks like visual inspiration from HotOrNot.com, the dating-rating site. Unvarnished, currently in an invitation-only beta, now invites users to rate people based on just their names, photos, and a five-star scale.

The problem?

Writing is hard, he explained.

Not for the thoughtfully verbose Kazanjy, that is, but for the tens of thousands of users his Yelp-meets-LinkedIn site has attracted. Unvarnished lets users anonymously rate and comment on people they work with, populating reviewers' lists with connections from LinkedIn and Facebook. It then ranks those reviews based on verifiable links between reviewer and reviewee. Identities are protected, as Kazanjy puts it, so people can't identify the author of a specific review, which in theory frees people up to say what they honestly think about a colleague's performance. But even with a veil of obscurity, some people struggle to find words to describe their work partners.

People always ask us, How do you get people to submit reviews for coworkers about whom they don't have very strong opinions?' said Kazanjy.

At launch, Unvarnished allowed users to leave just star ratings of colleagues, optionally ranking them on skill, relationships, productivity, and integrity, and writing descriptions of their experiences. But the new star-only interface will encourage ratings of those more cursory connections, Kazanjy hopes.

So far, the site has defied predictions that it would become enmeshed in lawsuits by people seeking to dispute information left in reviews. In part because the site has stayed in an invitation-only beta, and in part because of the site's clever algorithmic ranking of reviews to favor reviewers with real connections to the people they review, it hasn't received so much as a subpoena, let alone a lawsuit.

Right now we're happy with the invite-only approach, said Kazanjy. It's working well in conjunction with the checks and balances the site has built in to ensure that the content that comes onto the site is productive and professional. We're very happy with the quality of the content on the site.

Here's a video demonstration of the new quick-ratings feature:

[Photo via FWS]

Tags: people reviews

Companies: Unvarnished

People: Peter Kazanjy

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Tested today and got more than 20 Mbps on Comcast at our new place in Sunnyvale.

Top ISPs in San Francisco by speed, as of Wednesday, July 28, according to Speedtest.net rankings.

Want to know which ISP is the fastest and best-rated in your U.S. city?

Well, now there's a crowdsourced, Consumer Reportslike way to find out, thanks to the folks who run the online speed testing service Speedtest.net.

The company, which runs more than a million tests a day on its main testing page, updated its broadband statistics site NetIndex.com on Tuesday to let users see comparative results sorted by city. For instance, Los Angeles sees an average speed of 7.2 Mbps, with the Road Runner service slightly edging Charter Communications for the top speed 16.97 Mbps compared to Charter's 16.4 Mbps.

Moreover, since Speedtest.net asks users to rate their satisfaction with their ISP, you can see user rankings as well, with Road Runner clocking a 3.2 out of 5 stars, compared to 2.9 for Charter and 2.5 for third-place AT&T Worldnet.

The point, according to Speedtest.net co-founder Doug Suttles, is to make it easier for people to find a new ISP when moving to town, or when they want to find a better provider.

The speed data is compiled from the previous 30 days worth of data, and is updated daily, while the satisfaction ratings reflect votes placed over years. The rankings aren't particularly easy to find. The best way is to start on the Net Index homepage, scroll down to the state map and click on your state. Then under Cities, click on the tab to change the listing to By IP Address to find your city. The city-by-city data currently focuses on the United States, but will be expanding and there's plenty of international data already.

New York City beats Los Angeles on average speed, with an average of 11 Mbps, raised in no small part because AT&T's Worldnet service in the Big Apple registers an average 21.32 Mbp average, with Road Runner landing just behind at 17.29.

The data, Suttles argues, shows that broadband in the United States is better than many say think.

For the most part our feeling is the ISPs get a bad rap, Suttles said. The government wants people to be convinced that broadband is terrible but we are a pretty sprawled-out country. We are hoping politicians look at this and realize it is not so bad in some places.

Ookla, the parent company for Speedtest.net, is no newcomer to the world of broadband. It was founded four years ago as a spinoff from the ISP Speakeasy and sells versions of Speedtest.net's testing service to nearly all the net's top ISPs.

Speedtest.net was started largely as a tech demonstration, according to Suttles, but has since grown to be the place people turn to when they want to test their connections. And now, the site provides more than half the company's revenue, thanks to lucrative ads like those for Google's Chrome browser.

Now the company is asking testers to tell the company what speeds they were promised and how much they are paying, in order to come up with a ranking of ISPs by value and by which ones deliver the speeds they promise.

The company's preliminary data-crunching results may come as a surprise to some.

Nationally, 93 percent of people are getting the speed they signed up for, Suttles said. That's definitively a different story than anyone else is telling.

The company also has free mobile apps for Android and the iPhone as well, but data from those tests is not reflected in these results. Also not included is data from the testing suites the company provides directly to ISPs.

Some have questioned the methodology of the Speedtest.net tests and whether its tests are representative of the nation as a whole. In its defense, the company points to a recent MIT evaluation of different methodologies that found Speedtest.net was the best of the currently available data sources (.pdf).

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

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Haim Saban isn't just mad at Oliver Stone for his controversial remarks about the Holocaust and Jewish domination of the media, which caused such a conflagration that Stone was forced to issue a speedy apology. According to this post in the Wrap, the Israeli-born media tycoon has launched a campaign to get Showtime to cancel its upcoming 10-part series, "A Secret History of America," which Stone has produced. Saban said he has already called Les Moonves, the CBS chief who oversees Showtime, demanding that he cancel the series, which is designed to provide an alternative look at U.S. history subjects rarely taught in public schools.

Saban said that WME Chairman Ari Emanuel had also "privately" called CBS to urge that the series be yanked from the Showtime schedule (though I guess now that Saban revealed that Emanuel has made the call, it isn't so "private" anymore). Saban says that Stone's apology was "transparently fake," adding that "this guy should be helped in joining Mel Gibson into the land of retirement, where he can preach his anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in the wilderness where he belongs."

I know that some people are outraged by Stone's remarks, which included the nutty charge that America's support for Israel was the result of Jewish domination of the media. For one thing, it's pretty lame on Stone's part to ignore the fact that the U.S. is a natural ally for Israel on its own merits, since it's the only true democracy in the Middle East. On the other hand, I was surprised to discover that many of the people who left comments on my original blog post about Stone seemed convinced that the Jews actually do control both the media and the entertainment business, apparently because a lot of Jews work in media and showbiz. I hate to burst everyone's bubble, but that is transparently dumb on every level.

The most obvious: If you were putting together a list of the most powerful men in entertainment and media, you'd start with Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns 20th Century Fox and innumerable TV networks and newspapers; Brian Roberts, whose Comcast empire includes NBC/Universal and is a dominant player in cable TV; and Phil Anschutz, who controls innumerable sports teams, showbiz arenas, newspapers and Regal, the largest theater chain in the U.S. You know the punch line: None of them is Jewish.

Haim Saban is a pretty wealthy and powerful guy himself, but he's a pisher compared to guys like Murdoch and Anschutz. I admire Saban's passion, but I don't agree with his trying to bully CBS into dumping Stone's series. This is a free country, so there's nothing wrong with Saban saying how distasteful he finds Stone's remarks (we're in agreement on that score). But getting a network to pull a show simply because its producer has espoused some crackpot conspiracy theories opens the door for all sorts of unsettling decisions. It's really not so different from the reasoning behind the infamous 1950s Hollywood blacklist, where hundreds of actors and filmmakers were denied work because people in powerful places didn't like their politics.

To put it in a more modern context, Mel Gibson has completed work on a new film, "The Beaver," which is in post-production at Summit Entertainment, the company behind the "Twilight" series. Should Summit simply refuse to release the movie, saying it finds Gibson's personal views and behavior repugnant? I'm sure that would make a lot of Gibson haters happy. But even though I find Gibson's antics wildly repugnant too, since he seems to hate every minority group on the planet, I think the film deserves to rise or fall on its own merits. If people loathe Gibson, they can--and should--refuse to see the movie. If it flops, the fans have spoken, but at least it was given a chance to be judged on its own merits.

I feel the same way about Stone's TV series about America's hidden history. In a free country, one of the freedoms that's worth respecting is the freedom to hear all sorts of opinions and attitudes, not just the ones we agree with.

RECENT AND RELATED: OLIVER STONE HAS APOLOGIZED FOR HIS ANTI-SEMITIC RANT: BUT IS THE DAMAGE ALREADY DONE?

Photo: Oliver Stone, left, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in a scene from Stone's documentary "South of the Border." Credit: Jose Ibanez / Cinema Libre

Newspapers are now less important than the Internet as a source of information, yet the majority of online users say most online information is not reliable, according to the 10th annual study of the impact of the Internet on Americans by the Center for the Digital Future.

The study also found that 70 percent of online users believe that Internet advertising is annoying, yet 55 percent of users said they would rather see Web advertising than pay for content.

Among the study's findings:

• Americans on the Internet For the first time, the Internet is used by more than 80 percent of Americans now 82 percent. Weekly hours online The average time online has now reached 19 hours per week. Although more than two-thirds of Americans have gone online for a decade, the largest year-to-year increases in weekly online use have been reported in the two most recent Digital Future studies.
• Gaps in Internet use in age groups Not surprisingly, Internet use continues to increase as age decreases, with 100 percent of those under age 24 going online. However, a surprisingly high percentage of Americans between 36 and 55 are not Internet users: among respondents age 46 to 55, 19 percent are non-users; among those 36 to 45, 15 percent are non-users.
• Low adoption of new media Although new media is used by large percentages of Internet users age 24 and under, overall large percentages of Internet users never go online to do instant messaging (50 percent), work on a blog (79 percent), participate in chat rooms (80 percent), or make or receive phone calls (85 percent).
• Does technology make the world a better place The percentage of users age 16 and older who said that communication technology makes the world a better place has declined to 56 percent of users from its peak of 66 percent in 2002.
• Internet and Political Campaigns although more than 70 percent of users agree that the Internet is important for political campaigns, only 27 percent of users said that by using the Internet public officials will care more about what people think, and 29 percent said that the Internet can give people more of a say in what government does.
• Buying online 65 percent of adult Internet users buy online (the same as in 2008), and make an average of 35.2 purchases per year (up from 34.1 per year in 2008).
• Internet impact on traditional retail declines 61 percent of Internet users said that online purchasing has reduced their buying in traditional retail stores down from 69 percent in 2008.
• Top 10 online purchases 59 percent of Internet users said they purchase books or clothes online, followed by gifts (55 percent), travel (53 percent), electronics/appliances (47 percent), videos (46 percent), computers or peripherals (41 percent), software or games (40 percent), CDs (40 percent), and products for hobbies (38 percent).
• The study found that as sources of information their primary function newspapers rank below the Internet or television. Only 56 percent of Internet users ranked newspapers as important or very important sources of information for them a decrease from 60 percent in 2008 and below the Internet (78 percent), and television (68 percent).
• Even lower are the percentages of users who consider newspapers important as sources of entertainment for them, now considered important by 29 percent of Internet users, and down from 32 percent in 2008 also last among principal media.
• Eighteen percent of Internet users said they stopped a subscription to a newspaper or magazine because they now get the same or related content online down slightly from 22 percent in 2008, but nevertheless a strong indication that print newspapers can be sacrificed by a significant percentage of Internet users.
• Internet users were asked where they would go for information provided by their newspaper if the print edition ceased, 59 percent said they would read the online edition of the publication; only 37 percent said they would instead read the print edition of another newspaper.
• Twenty-two percent of users who read newspapers said they would not miss the print edition of their newspaper.
• Sixty-one percent of users said that only half or less of online information is reliable a new low level for the Digital Future Project.
• Even more disturbing is that 14 percent of Internet users said that only a small portion or none of the information online is reliable a percentage that has grown for the past three years and is now at the highest level thus far in the Digital Future Project.
• Also revealing is the percentage of users who have limited trust even in the Web sites they visit regularly: although 78 percent said that most or all of the information on the sites they visit regularly is reliable (a decline from the previous two years), 22 percent of users say that only one half or less of information on sites they visit regularly is reliable.
• Even search engines such as Google and Yahoo traditional stalwarts of online credibility have lost some of their luster. While 53 percent of Internet users said that most or all of the information provided by search engines is reliable and accurate, that percentage declined slightly in the current Digital Future Study and is well below the peak of 64 percent in 2006.
• 36 percent of users said only about half of information provided by search engines is reliable and accurate, and 12 percent said only a small portion or none of it was reliable.
• Only 46 percent of users said they have some trust or a lot of trust in the Internet in general. Nine percent of users have no trust in the Internet.

Among the study's findings:

• Americans on the Internet For the first time, the Internet is used by more than 80 percent of Americans now 82 percent. Weekly hours online The average time online has now reached 19 hours per week. Although more than two-thirds of Americans have gone online for a decade, the largest year-to-year increases in weekly online use have been reported in the two most recent Digital Future studies.
• Gaps in Internet use in age groups Not surprisingly, Internet use continues to increase as age decreases, with 100 percent of those under age 24 going online. However, a surprisingly high percentage of Americans between 36 and 55 are not Internet users: among respondents age 46 to 55, 19 percent are non-users; among those 36 to 45, 15 percent are non-users.
• Low adoption of new media Although new media is used by large percentages of Internet users age 24 and under, overall large percentages of Internet users never go online to do instant messaging (50 percent), work on a blog (79 percent), participate in chat rooms (80 percent), or make or receive phone calls (85 percent).
• Does technology make the world a better place The percentage of users age 16 and older who said that communication technology makes the world a better place has declined to 56 percent of users from its peak of 66 percent in 2002.
• Internet and Political Campaigns although more than 70 percent of users agree that the Internet is important for political campaigns, only 27 percent of users said that by using the Internet public officials will care more about what people think, and 29 percent said that the Internet can give people more of a say in what government does.
• Buying online 65 percent of adult Internet users buy online (the same as in 2008), and make an average of 35.2 purchases per year (up from 34.1 per year in 2008).
• Internet impact on traditional retail declines 61 percent of Internet users said that online purchasing has reduced their buying in traditional retail stores down from 69 percent in 2008.
• Top 10 online purchases 59 percent of Internet users said they purchase books or clothes online, followed by gifts (55 percent), travel (53 percent), electronics/appliances (47 percent), videos (46 percent), computers or peripherals (41 percent), software or games (40 percent), CDs (40 percent), and products for hobbies (38 percent).
• The study found that as sources of information their primary function newspapers rank below the Internet or television. Only 56 percent of Internet users ranked newspapers as important or very important sources of information for them a decrease from 60 percent in 2008 and below the Internet (78 percent), and television (68 percent).
• Even lower are the percentages of users who consider newspapers important as sources of entertainment for them, now considered important by 29 percent of Internet users, and down from 32 percent in 2008 also last among principal media.
• Eighteen percent of Internet users said they stopped a subscription to a newspaper or magazine because they now get the same or related content online down slightly from 22 percent in 2008, but nevertheless a strong indication that print newspapers can be sacrificed by a significant percentage of Internet users.
• Internet users were asked where they would go for information provided by their newspaper if the print edition ceased, 59 percent said they would read the online edition of the publication; only 37 percent said they would instead read the print edition of another newspaper.
• Twenty-two percent of users who read newspapers said they would not miss the print edition of their newspaper.
• Sixty-one percent of users said that only half or less of online information is reliable a new low level for the Digital Future Project.
• Even more disturbing is that 14 percent of Internet users said that only a small portion or none of the information online is reliable a percentage that has grown for the past three years and is now at the highest level thus far in the Digital Future Project.
• Also revealing is the percentage of users who have limited trust even in the Web sites they visit regularly: although 78 percent said that most or all of the information on the sites they visit regularly is reliable (a decline from the previous two years), 22 percent of users say that only one half or less of information on sites they visit regularly is reliable.
• Even search engines such as Google and Yahoo traditional stalwarts of online credibility have lost some of their luster. While 53 percent of Internet users said that most or all of the information provided by search engines is reliable and accurate, that percentage declined slightly in the current Digital Future Study and is well below the peak of 64 percent in 2006.
• 36 percent of users said only about half of information provided by search engines is reliable and accurate, and 12 percent said only a small portion or none of it was reliable.
• Only 46 percent of users said they have some trust or a lot of trust in the Internet in general. Nine percent of users have no trust in the Internet.