ReadWriteWeb

Over the weekend Facebook bought another mobile social app, this time a product called Glancee. One of the leading apps in a very new category known as "ambient location," Glancee and its main competitor Highlight were the most talked about apps at this year's SXSW Interactive conference in March. Highlight won the popularity contest amongst mobile phone toting hipsters at SXSW and it now has the most users of the two. However, as I discovered when I interviewed Glancee co-founder Andrea Vaccari at SXSW, Glancee's technology is superior - at least on the backend. And that is almost certainly what Facebook was after: Glancee's technology and talent.

So the big question is: what will Facebook do with Glancee?

A year into its life, the Amazon Appstore for Android is kind of like the quirky stepchild of the other major app stores. It is not directly tied to a platform, the way Apple's App Store or Google Play are, but it is distinctly different from other third-party app stores like GetJar that are not controlled by a large, trusted brand. Its uniqueness provides both benefits and pitfalls to Android developers, including the chief concern of many app publishers: How am I going to make money off my app?

Yes, you read that correctly. According to Barracuda Labs, two out of the top 25,000 domains (at least top of Alexa's rankings) serve up some tasty and annoying malware to their visitors. Hopefully, this is unintentional and the result of some compromise. The lab rats found that more than 10 million folks were exposed to exploits in February, and almost every day there was a new compromised website. The top-ranked domains that served malicious content spanned across 18 different countries, demonstrating that this problem has no geographic barrier. Making matters worse, almost all of the compromised sites were at least a year old, and half were more than five years old. This indicates that attackers use well-established, long-lived websites for their drive-by download campaigns.

The researchers used an automated script to bring up a series of URLs inside a virtual Windows VM and observe what happens to its OS, plug-ins, and other browser settings. Once the site is visited, the VM's network traffic is monitored to see what malware has been placed on it.

On the link on their blog post is more information on their methodology and the complete infographic, which we have truncated here in the interests of readability.

So far in our series on car connectivity, we've focused on infotainment systems. It's early in the evolution of Internet services in vehicles and up till now, it's been all about information and entertainment. Early in-car apps have focused on music, navigation and news. The next generation of in-car apps will be about providing "smart" services, such as taking some of the cognitive load off the driver - including making the car autonomous in some ways.

At CES in January, Audi showed off futuristic concepts like the gestural-based dashboard above. At SXSW in March, I sat down with Anupam Malhotra, Manager of Connected Vehicles at Audi of America, to talk more about the future of Audi's connected services.

Most observers think of the big multinational technology outsourcing firms - especially the ones based in India - as a reliable source of relatively inexpensive technology expertise for routine IT projects. Not surprisingly, those firms desperately want to move up the food chain and become known for innovation as well.

A conversation with Dr. Gautam Shroff, Vice President at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and head of the TCS Technology Innovation Lab in Delhi, reveals that they’re making progress, but that they still have a ways to go.

Whether you think the protestors camping out in various city parks around the world is justified or not, it is interesting to see this analysis published in Technology Review today. They used a tool from SocialFlow that examined a pile of Twitter data. Did you know the first use of their hashtag was in a July 13 Adbusters blog post?