iPhone updates:
iPod touch with camera shows up in Vietnam
Apple loses a second 4th gen iPhone, new insights discovered
iPhone Finder Regrets His ‘Mistake’
Police Raid Gizmodo Editor’s House, Confiscate Computers

Facebook updates:
Facebook Users Plan to Quit the Service on May 31
Senators’ letter to Facebook
Facebook and Others Caught Sending User Data to Advertisers

Google Street View troubles:
Google faces U.S., German probes on data collection

We started by tracking Apple’s stock price this year, beginning with the iPad announcement and following through until yesterday’s report that Apple made over 3 billion dollars in the last quarter.

Using Bing’s finance charts and Google’s time-related search results, we mapped increasing share price and product announcements over the last 3 years.  We found a clear trend – stock prices rise between the announcement of a new product and it’s actual launch.

Also, we realized that much of the pre-launch marketing around Apple products is free – news outlets and bloggers share stories and compete to scoop each other with rumors and insider (mis)information.  This is great news for Apple, since they don’t have to spend all of their money to get the word out.

Now to the rumor of the week – an Apple employee supposedly left a prototype of the new iPhone (to be released this summer) in a California bar.  The device was sold to Gizmodo, which has dedicated an entire portion of their site to stories about this gadget.  This creates more buzz for Apple as other news outlets report on Gizmodo’s reporting.

Students used Google’s real-time “updates” to monitor how many stories are bouncing around the blogosphere and Twitter channels about this story.  While there is a bump in traffic, we don’t think that this story is enough to sustain interest through the summer.  What else will Apple tell us about the new product to keep news outlets interested?

Some students wondered if Apple had “lost” the iPhone on purpose to try and get free advertising from bloggers, newspapers, television and radio.  Some bloggers suggest that Gizmodo got punked by Apple.

One class had an unexpected find during class today, a webpage that simultaneously searches Google and Bing, displaying results side-by-side.  In Firefox, you can actaully set http://www.google-vs-bing.com/ as your default search engine if desired.

We started with the official video that greets visitors to the Apple website.  What does Apple want us to believe about the new device?  How do they use music, backgrounds, demonstrations and interviews to convince us?

Next we broke up into groups to figure out if the iPad is a technological evolution or revolution.  Every group clearly agrees that this is merely an evolution – as Abe pointed out, “it’s just an iPod Touch that won’t fit in your pocket.”

Could the iPad be a replacement for your home computer?

“No way,” said Pearl and a few others.  ”There is no way to connect your digital camera or a printer.” Students also pointed out that you need another computer to efficiently upload contacts, calendars and mail.  Without USB, your limited in the devices you can plug in.

“There is no DVD player” pointed out Rowan. Mason thinks this is because Apple wants you to spend money at their stores to get content.

In looking at these new devices, we had conversations about the idea of technological evolution vs. revolution.  There is some amount of opinion when it comes to using these labels with tech – and we had some great debates.

• Evolution - a natural next step for a device.  (E.g., more megapixels in a camera)
• Revolution - a completely new gadget that has never been seen before and does something totally new. (E.g., the first satellite)

Our favorite new device of the day: Microsoft’s Project Natal

Cooper pointed out that Natal is a lot like the Wii, but you don’t need sensors. Rebecca stated that we could use the control abilities of Natal to control other computers.  According to students, Natal was the best contender for a technological revolution.

Another big impact was made by Google’s Nexus One (clearly evolutionary):

The Nexus One is, according to Josh, just an iPhone clone.   Peter argued that it is a revolution for Google, and Kelly said that it is cool because you don’t have to have AT&T to use the Nexus One.

Finally, we looked at a multi-touch Levono netbook:

Students were split on whether a swiveling-touchscreen was enough to be a revolution.  Ben said that the fact that it will only be $500 might cause a consumer revolution, but the tech itself isn’t new.

The laptop example was especially interesting because the review mentions Apple in the ad.  We talked briefly about 2 of the biggest tech rumors so far this year – the Nexus One (which was true) and the Apple iSlate.  There are over 7 million hits on Google for “iSlate” and Apple hasn’t spent anything on advertising yet.  The Levono review is essentially free advertising for Apple, as the laptop is compared to their products.  Students noticed that the Nexus One ad didn’t mention the iPhone, and Natal didn’t mention the Wii.

Today we talked about the mighty battle between Verizon and AT&T.  AT&T has the iPhone, and pays Apple money for the right to have this cool device on their network only.  Verizon has the best customer satisfaction rating for service (according to Consumer Reports) as well as a much larger 3G network in the USA.  AT&T is mad about Verizon ads that point this out, so they are suing Verizon and they also made some new tv commercials starring Luke Wilson that say “AT&T is better”.

We talked about tons of interesting marketing ploys, competitive negotiations, and operating system constraints. The most lively discussions focused on:

• Cell phone companies have claimed colors as their own – Sprint=Yellow, T-Mobile=Pink, Verizon=Red, AT&T=Blue&Orange
• Cell phone companies are really becoming data service companies – most people use their phones for way more than just making calls
• Verizon just introduced Droid, a new phone that is supposed to compete with the iPhone.  It runs Google’s Android 2.0 operating system.

Verizon attacks AT&T’s 3G service coverage

AT&T fights back

Students agreed that Apple is a computing company and Google is an advertising company.  They don’t compete for hardware (iPhone, computers, iPod, etc) but they DO  fight for software users (Apple sells software, Google gives it away).

Students pointed out that Google’s web browser (Chrome) only works on PC, not on Apple computers.  This makes us think that Apple and Google will work together to steal users from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

However, on January 5th, Google released a piece of software called Picasa for Mac, a direct competitor to iPhoto (the most popular free Mac photo organization/editing software).  What does this mean?  Is Google attacking Apple?

The 6th grade thinks that this will be a tough fight for Google.  Apple computers come with iPhoto already installed, and for people that already use iPhoto, there isn’t a lot of reason to switch.

I did research on Ask Eraser, a part of the Ask.com search engine that disables the engine’s ability to gather personal info from users. Without Ask Eraser engaged the engine could place cookies (pieces of software that a website puts on your computer), find out your personal info such as your name, and phone number, address, age, IP address (the location, or “call number” of your computer on the internet) It could possibly even take info such as credit card number, social security number or bank account number.

This sort of information would go into your digital identity, the trail of ones and zeros you leave behind every day you use tech. It can be used to find out something as harmless as what you ate for lunch or something as malignant as the aid to a murder (don’t go nuts, the chances of that are about one million to one) but you need to be careful.

On most search engines every time you type something in and press enter it automatically records your IP address and what you’re searching for. This info is usually kept inside a database and not read by anyone, but if it’s there there’s always some risk of info leakage.

Unfortunately Ask Eraser comes at a price, the second article states that when you go to Ask.Com, Ask Eraser itself places session cookies (identifying “name tag” cookies that enable websites to remember you) to record your preference of having Ask Eraser on. With these cookies in effect it could also extract identifying information from your computer without your knowledge.

With that on the table it really comes down to you, pick your poison. Do you trust Ask.com in default or Ask Eraser mode, both? Nether? Both of them have the downside of putting your personal info at risk. When I first wrote my thesis I only saw one side of the argument that Ask Eraser helps to prevent internet crime. But as I did more research the size of the catch 22 really became apparent. I do not recommend Ask Eraser simply because it implements the very thing it supposedly targets. This can rightfully classify it’s creators as un-trustworthy hypocrites.

Sources:
http://lifehacker.com
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9836002-7.html

Digital identity is when you give information of your self or people give information about them selves and put it up some where so others can read it. People often lie about their digital identity on places like MySpace and Facebook so they don’t get stalked. People also are careful about the pictures and information they put on the internet.

People that use Facebook are getting stalked even after they leave the site. Facebook is using a program called Beacon that traces your activity and where you go after you leave the Facebook site. It is not really a predator or stalker but it’s the people who monitor and make Facebook who watch you. That is not good because those people can watch where you go and if they want to they could post stuff about where you went and then the people who help you with stalker could be stalking you.

People on MySpace are getting stalked because they are not careful about their information that they put up. If you don’t set your settings right anyone in the world can see your pictures, comments and writing and will be able to figure out stuff about you. I think people should be more careful about the information and the pictures they put on because people could find out more about you.

Beacon could also be good to find out what kind of things you like. For example, web sites that you like and stuff like that. But they could also just have a survey that asks what kind of sites you go to and it wouldn’t be a problem because people wouldn’t get stalked. Everybody would be safer if they used a user friendly tracking device.

People are not checking their security and more careful about their posted information. The result of this is that people are getting stalked. People are also getting stalked be the website itself. Facebook is using a program to find out where people are going after their done using their website. I think it could be of some use to find out what people like to make the website better but I don’t think their using it for that. If they are using it for that then they should prove that they are or just get rid of it. Over all I think it is a bad program and they shouldn’t use it.

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Today News Corp. (Rupert Murdoch’s company that owns Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal, FoxNews and more) announced that it is in talks with Yahoo! to buy a stake in the company.

The 7th grade spent our class together discussing the implications of both of these potential events. For the Microsoft merge, we discussed why MS would be interested in buying Yahoo!, how search engines generate revenue from advertising, and the implications of having less choices for search engines.

When talking about the News Corp. deal, we went discussed freedom of the press, the building of communications conglomerates and the effect of monopolization on competition and freedom of choice.

Students ended class in small groups. Each group chose an industry (fashion, booksellers, ski resorts, to name a few) and imagined what things would look like if a single company took over that entire industry. Some discussion highlights:

• Maya and Becky suggested that if there was only a single clothing retailer, people’s economic status wouldn’t be reflected in their clothing but that people would lose their ability to express their individuality through dress.
• Owen pointed out that if Barnes & Noble were the only bookseller, they could drastically reduce the amount of stores needed in any geographic area, thus reducing costs.
• Nava, Savannah & Isaac hypothesized that if Papaya made and sold all the clothing in the country, the price of clothing could be reduced and garment workers could be paid a fair living wage.
• Sam, Tristan & Stephan said that if all the ski areas were owned by a single company, then that organization could raise and lower the prices of lift tickets at all resorts simultaneously knowing that there weren’t better deals in the area.

Microsoft buys stake in Facebook for $240 million dollars. We used this topic to learn about social networking services, how they rely on large adoption to be successful and how they leverage their customer base to create revenue from advertising.

Apple releases new operating system. From this article, we defined the term “operating system” as software that has a set of instructions that tells a computer’s hardware how to talk to each other and tells other software how to talk to the computer. We talked about Apple’s marketing, how they focus on the uses of their products (not necessarily just the hardware specifications) and how they work to generate “coolness”. We watched clips from a 20 minutes introductory video, produced by Apple, and discussed whether the new features were revolutionary, evolutionary, or just good-looking.

Students in one class had enough time to actually play with Leopard and tested Spaces, explored Safari 3 and looked at the new finder, dock and Coverflow features.

• Will free office suites supplant Microsoft
• ABC and AOL team up for free prime-time shows
• Finally: the lightsabre comes to the Wii
• How much time do we spend on MySpace at work?