Copyright Holders Ask Google To Take Down Their Own Takedown Notices
In a bit of copyright irony, companies like NBC Universal and Lionsgate have started targeting Google and the DMCA request clearinghouse ChillingEffects.org in their robotically-generated takedown orders simply because the site contains URLs that have been previously taken down. It is, in short, takedowns all the way down.
DMCA takedown notices are the quickest and easiest way for copyright holders to have things taken off of the Internet. While some takedown notices result in literal censorship, the ability to pull content off of Google is a boon for copyright holders. However, as each notice is processed, Google posts the request along with pertinent statistics and links. This, as TorrentFreak notes, has essentially created a search engine for piracy where pirate websites can be sussed out with a few keystrokes.
The takedown notices seem to automatically generated so I doubt the rightsholders even know what they’re asking let alone the irony of their requests. The ChillingEffects links are still accessible via Google because, as we well know, they only mention the takedown notices themselves and don’t host the content.
As this process becomes more and more automated, it becomes a stranger and stranger world. Given that many of these systems are robots, it’s a race of robot vs. robot for the takedowns and, sometimes, the robots turn on each other. We, at the very least, live in interesting times.
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After Bootstrapping, Data-Mining Specialist Ondore Closes Million-Dollar Round For Mexican, US Operations
Editor’s note: Maria Rocio Paniagua currently works as a project manager at Innku, one of the top mobile and web workshops in Mexico. Follow her on Twitter.
Ondore, the leading Latin American big data analysis company that develops online reputation management systems, has closed its first investment round for $1.5 million dollars with Alta Ventures. The company says it will use the capital round to expand sales and marketing efforts in Latin America, as well as Spanish-speaking U.S.
Ondore’s reputation management systems work via data mining: The information obtained is processed, interpreted and sorted automatically. They have different products that target different pains in the market. Scout helps businesses understand and benefit from social media, providing them with deep insights into the conversations that are taking place on the web and interpreting things like sentiment, source and influence. They have also built an API that allows the integration of social media and web analytics with apps.
Ondore founder and CTO Fernando Luegue started the company eight years ago in Mexico City at the age of 18. During the first three years, Luegue alone conducted scientific research on algorithms that processed information and solved problems for enterprises. Then he developed one that automatically organized information and last year received a patent in the U.S.
With offices in San Francisco, under CEO Todd Stein, Ondore was bootstrapped until it had a 35-person team on board. “We did data mining in Latin America before we even came across the term,” Luegue says, and now, he added, Televisa (the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world) and Ogilvy & Mather (one of the largest marketing and PR firms in LATAM) are among Ondore’s clients.
Finally last year, the company opened its investment round, visiting a plethora of VCs and private investors in both Mexico and Silicon Valley. They received a couple of offers, but decided to go with Alta, which, like Ondore, is based in Latin America and San Francisco. “I don’t want to talk about dumb money,” Luegue says, “but I can say that Alta’s technical side is incredibly talented.”
Ondore’s road has not been an easy one, however. Luegue says that building credibility and assembling a good team was challenging, as was penetrating a B2B market on an international level coming from a Latin American country.
In the next year, Ondore plans to consolidate its already strong lead in the Mexican and Latin American markets on the back of Scout, which the company says has some of the most competitive prices in the market.
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Google’s location-aware pocket tour guide app Field Trip comes to iOS
Google on Thursday released its location-aware Field Trip tour guide app for iOS. You can download it now directly from the Apple App Store.
Previously, the app was only available for Android, arriving on the scene back in September 2012. Now it’s available for iOS too, although Google notes “this app is optimized for the iPhone, not the iPad.”
For those who don’t know, Field Trip runs in the background on your phone, triangulating position via cell phone towers, and only notifies you when “get close to something interesting.” This can include anything local businesses, historical facts, landmarks, art, or culture.
You select the local feeds you like and the information pops up on your phone automatically as you move about; you can also specify the number of alerts you want to see. Field Trip taps the database of companies such as Thrillist, Zagat (acquired by Google), Yesterland, Cool Hunting, Curbed, and Scoutmob.
There’s a lot of similarity between Field Trip and Google’s Project Glass. While the app is not a predecessor to Glass, it does offer a contextual, near-VR style that my colleague Brad McCarty noted “bears a striking resemblance.”
The full feature list for iOS is as follows:
- Discover thousands of interesting places/experiences that fall under the following categories: Architecture, Historic Places & Events, Lifestyle, Offers & Deals, Food Drinks & Fun, Movie Locations, Outdoor Art and Obscure Places of Interest around you.
- Choose from three different modes to set frequency of Field Trip notifications. See “Field Trip” worthy places around you on a map, by tapping on cards in map view to pull up enthralling points of interest around you.
- Go on a Field Trip while you drive. Field Trip can detect when you’re driving and automatically “talk” about interesting places and experience around you.
- Came across an amazing story or restaurant? Mark it as a favorite to easily come back to it at any point.
- Capture the memory of a special place, by sharing a wondrous discovery through email and social networks such as Google+, Twitter and Facebook.
- Wondering where the gem that you recently discovered is? Find your discovered field trip cards in the “recent’ section.
Google adding support for iOS is really no surprise: it’s the only other mobile platform the company bothers making apps for, aside from Android.
Image credit: Sue Anna Joe
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Conditions for iOS is a beautifully simple weather app for where you are
At this point, weather apps are almost a rite of passage for iOS developers. It seems that new ones pop up with alarming regularity in my inbox, offering one unique feature or another. I personally still quite enjoy Check the Weather for a comprehensive overview of all kinds of weather information in one app.
But Conditions is a bit different and tickles my design-loving bones with its simple, coherent interface and focus on telling you what the weather and temperature are where you are right now, and not much else. Conditions is an app from developer Jake Marsh that uses iconography and bold typography to give you a clear view of the atmosphere where it matters most.
The interface sort of reminds me of the paper flyers you hang up when you’re looking for a roommate. You know the ones, with the details above and a rip-off tab with your phone number or email address below. It’s whimsical, but still effective, and best of all it’s very fast. A quick look at it gives you the info you need, and in a way that’s less visually complex (and therefore induces less cognitive load) than the standard Weather.app. There is a dark theme which automatically kicks in at night, and a high-contrast daylight theme, that’s about it. The location is pulled in automatically.
If you’re fine with the standard weather app, that’s great. Buit if you often check on conditions as you’re running out the door or exiting the office and want a cleanly designed app that offers a more concise and clear look at the weather, then Conditions is worth a glance.
Conditions for iOS $0.99
Image Credit: DANIEL ROLAND/Getty Images
Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only ever write about products we think deserve to be on the pages of our site, The Next Web may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question. For more information, please see our Terms of Service.
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Flickr’s iOS App Is Still Playing Catch-Up – Here’s What It Needs
A blog post from Flickr about new updates to its iOS application went relatively unnoticed yesterday. The post announced a series of incremental improvements to an app which has so far barely managed to catch up to the competition after months of abandonment, but has yet to really impress. The latest build brings a few now-standard features like the ability to save photos to your Camera Roll, communicate with @ replies, and more.
It’s nothing to write home about, so to speak, which is why the majority of the news-hungry tech blogs didn’t prioritize it on a day when Google was announcing new hardware (a high-end Chrome OS laptop called the Pixel, which actually does impress).
That being said, Flickr is still an important network to watch, especially because it has managed to maintain a foothold and consumer brand, even as Facebook has triumphed as the de facto place where users now go to upload and share photos with family and friends. Flickr, had it not been starved for innovation inside the machinery of a floundering Yahoo, could have even competed with Facebook, given its head start, once highly engaged user base, and massive collection of some 8 billion+ photos.
The tech blogosphere is now rooting for new Flickr and new Yahoo, given that we all like new CEO Marissa Mayer just so darned much. But if the company waited a year before the app update that arrived in December introducing the world to Yahoo’s new vision for Flickr, maybe it should have waited a little longer until it really had something radical and new to show us.
Don’t get me wrong.
Flickr is no longer a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad app, as it was pre-December revamp. The older version was a slow, buggy destroyer of image quality. And worse, it forced you to upload photos one-by-one. Yes, in 2012.
Meanwhile, the new Flickr for iOS is an entirely different application. It’s fast, solid and well-built with a smart and attractive user interface, and even some trendier features like filters.
Yes, filters are trendy. Ten years from now, I imagine we’ll look back on them and giggle a little about the hipster-fied 2010′s, with our skinny jeans and insta-aged photos. Filters, after all, are a way to evoke nostalgia in an age where everything moves a bit too quickly, and no one has time to pause and reflect. When the coldness of digital photography and the ease and ubiquity of camera phones means we now have 50 pictures of a moment when we used to have one. Filters are a way of saying to ourselves: stop, this moment is important. I’m selecting it specifically. I’m differentiating it from the stream.
Filters are solving the problem of too much/too fast, but that’s a problem that will eventually be solved by smarter technology. And Flickr would have done well to launch an app that was, at the very least, heading in that direction when it re-birthed itself over the holidays.
As it stands today, the app is instead seemingly working on a list of checkboxes of what a photo-sharing, social mobile application should be about. Does it have filters? CHECK. Can you @ reply to friends? CHECK. Share to the social web? CHECK. Post to Tumblr? CHECK. Save photos locally? CHECK. Multi-upload? CHECK.
What it hasn’t done yet is really surprise us.
A number of startups have tried, failed and are continuing to try to make sense of our fragmented, vast and exponentially growing photo collections. Facebook, too, is quietly experimenting in this area, following Google+ and Dropbox’s lead by introducing automatic, background-enabled photo uploads. The feature is always optional, however, as today, users worry about privacy and bandwidth issues. These concerns will reduce in time, especially as micro-networks like Snapchat pop up to provide outlets for private sharing at the same time as bandwidth costs decrease.
Flickr not only needs automatic uploads – that’s just another box to check – it needs to really innovate on the next step. That is, what to do with those photos once they’re in the cloud. A basic first move is automatically creating date and time-stamped photo albums (in Flickr’s parlance, “sets”). But there are many steps that would have to come afterwards. For example:
- Automatically recognizing, identifying, tagging and indexing the people, places and things in your photos
- Making not just faces and places searchable – making anything searchable in your photo collection. Show me photos of my house when it was being built; those new skiis I bought last year; that garden I visited on our last vacation; the photo of my grandparents at my kid’s 3rd birthday party; my friend Joe doing a keg stand; photos of mom and dad smiling; Whatever!
- Automatically grouping and tagging related images, as well as those from your friends who have shared with you, or who have shared publicly to the web.
- Hiding (but not deleting) the blurry or out-of-focus uploads.
- Offering a scrollable timeline of your photo-sharing history.
- Helping you find photo groups that match your interests through intelligent recommendation technology.
This is off the top of my head, so I’m sure Yahoo has these things in its sights at least.
What’s odd to me is that it didn’t come running out of the gate really nailing at least one of the above, when each item listed is currently in development by a photo-sharing startup somewhere. Everpix, for example, is tackling the problem of filtering the bad photos from the good and building object-recognition algorithms. Tracks helps you find photo streams that match your interests. Flock, Moment.me, Flayvr, new arrival Albumatic, and others group photos from you and friends (or strangers) based on time and place. Timehop and just-acquired Memolane let you delve into photos of days past.
The technology is out there, it’s just a matter of finding everyone’s price tag. And Flickr should because the time to catch up with other photo apps was over two years ago. Now is the time to out-innovate them or die trying.
Because the story we want to hear is not how Yahoo killed Flickr; we want to hear how Yahoo saved it.
Image credits: Bryce Durbin; Minnesota public radio (I think)
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