INTERNET

 

LinkedIn passes 300M users, says mobile is key to goal of 3.3B

The social network for professional schmoozing wants the entire global workforce to sign on to its service.



LinkedIn's user base has risen to more than 300 million people across more than 200 countries and territories worldwide, the company said Friday, with 23 million of those members signing on since the beginning of the year.
Mountain View, Calif.-based LinkedIn now retains more than 100 million members in the US but says it has its eye on the entire global workforce of approximately 3.3 billion people.
Deep Nishar, senior vice president of products and user experience at LinkedIn, said in a blog post that mobile would be key to reaching that target.
"We know mobile is critical," Nishar wrote. "Later this year, we are going to hit our mobile moment, where mobile accounts for more than 50 percent of all global traffic. Already, our members in dozens of locations, including Costa Rica, Malaysia, Singapore, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom, use LinkedIn more on their mobile devices than on their desktop computers. Every day we see an average of 15 million profile views, 1.45 million job views, and 44,000 job applications in over 200 countries through mobile."
LinkedIn was trading at $175.42 a share as of 12:46 p.m. PT Friday, up $3.60, or 2.10 percent.
A version of this story originally appeared as "LinkedIn surpasses 300 million users, wants 3.3 billion" on ZDNet.

 

Ashampoo WinOptimizer 11

 Ashampoo's all-new WinOptimizer 11 packs more tools for cleaning, optimizing, and protecting your Windows PC than its freeware competitors, including WinOptimizer Free. And it has a sophisticated yet easy-to-manage layout with support options that the free system utilities can't match. In addition to regularly scheduled system maintenance and tweaks, WinOptimizer 11 has a One-Click Optimizer, extras like anti-spy protection, and a host of modules. Recent upgrades include Live Tuner 2.0, Game Booster, and User Rights Management.

Pros

Does it all: WinOptimizer 11 has an impressive array of tools and features -- more than other software of its type. It can analyze, maintain, boost, protect, repair, and manage Windows features, system options, and programs.
SSD-friendly: WinOptimizer 11's setup wizard asks if Windows is installed on an SSD instead of a conventional hard drive, since some disk utilities don't apply to SSDs. It's an important distinction that determines WinOptimizer 11's operations.
Modules: WinOptimizer 11's many modules cover everything from the Registry to backups to spyware. They can analyze and benchmark your system, schedule tasks, split and join files, and much more.

Cons

Freeware competition: While it's hardly overpriced, WinOptimizer 11 faces stiff competition from some capable freeware, including a free version of itself.

Bottom Line

WinOptimizer 11 more than matches its purchase price with value and performance. Yes, free tools (or a collection of them) can do much of what it does, but not better and not as conveniently. We've had good experiences with Ashampoo's system tools, both free and premium, and wouldn't hesitate to trust WinOptimizer 11 as the cornerstone of system support, maintenance, and optimization.
Editors' note: This is a review of the full version of Ashampoo WinOptimizer 11. The trial version is limited to 40 days.

Publisher's Description

Even with default system management tools, PCs and laptops can get cluttered with programs that don't properly uninstall, temporary files which aren't deleted when they should be, and Registry entries which get left behind. And run-off-the-mill machines are seldom tailored to the individual needs of their users.

• Ashampoo WinOptimizer 11 was designed and developed with these issues in mind to
• make your PC faster and more responsive,
• protect your privacy and safeguard or remove sensitive data,
• clean and declutter your system,
• fix and repair common windows errors and improve system stability,
• achieve and maintains peak performance.

New Features:

• Redesigned user interface
• User-definable favorites
• File Wiper now also wipes free disk space
• Improved detection rates for Drive Cleaner and Registry Optimizer
• New Modules: Duplicate Finder, Link Checker, Font Manager, Restore Point Manager
• Enhanced Windows 8 Support

What's new in this version: Version 11

• USER RIGHTS MANAGER (MODULE) - Comprehensive module to adjust restrictions for single or all user accounts based on the internal Windows system policy editor.
• GAME-BOOSTER - Automatically frees system resources temporarily based on a comprehensive database and shuts down non-essential system services and processes to provide more resources to applications.
• MORE DETAILED SYSTEM INFORMATION - Various new categories offer detailed information on other Windows

Facebook to share ads based on location history with advertisers -- but won't say when

With Nearby Friends, your location history is private to you and only you -- until the social network decides otherwise. Surprised? Don't be. Facebook is in the advertising business.

With its brand-new Nearby Friends feature, Facebook is collecting a log of your travels so that it can one day pass that data along to advertisers, CNET can confirm.

Facebook trotted out Nearby Friends on Thursday. The optional feature, currently rolling out to US users of the native Facebook application for iPhone and Android, lets people turn on location-tracking to receive notifications when friends also using the feature are close by.
Nearby Friends is outwardly intended to facilitate offline get-togethers, as in this is meant to better the average person's experience with Facebook. The social network will, at some future date, enable advertisers to target based on location histories, bettering their experience as well and likely bolstering Facebook's business in the process.
"At this time it's not being used for advertising or marketing, but in the future it will be," a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. CNET confirmed with Facebook that it may use the data for advertising or marketing at some point.
When asked ahead of the release, a Facebook spokesperson told CNET the company was not using data from Nearby Friends to target ads -- which is technically true, but for who knows how long. "The launch of this product doesn't impact the way advertisers can target people based on location," the spokesperson said at the time.
Though the news may be unnerving, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the social network would want to keep tabs on where you are. Facebook is in the business of selling advertising and the more data it can provide to ad buyers, a group that contributed $2.34 billion in revenue to the company in the fourth quarter, the better. If an advertiser had access to members' location history they could, for instance, target their ads to people they knew visited a competitor's store.
In Facebook's defense, the company has made the Nearby Friends feature optional and does allow those who have opted-in to delete their location history from their activity log.
Clarification: 4:17 PM: This article was modified to make clear that Facebook will in the future enable advertisers to target based on location histories.

Telerik Makes Framework for JavaScript Available via Open Source

 

 With strong roots in the Microsoft ecosystem, Telerik has always been part of the commercial software landscape. But starting today Telerik, a provider of application development tools, is embracing open source. The company today announced Telerik Kendo UI Core, an open source implementation of the JavaScript framework and user interface tools that Telerik created for its cross-platform application development environments.

Brandon Satrom, lead product manager at Telerik, says that by making available an open source version of its Javascript framework Telerik is obviously trying to increase the base of developers familiar with the company’s application development platform. Telerik will continue to offer a commercial version of Kendo UI for building enterprise class applications. But the core JavaScript framework itself can now be used by any developer under an open source license.

Telerik currently has 20,000 to 25,000 customers. Satrom says there are two to three million developers, so by making Telerik Kendo UI Core available, Telerik expects there be over 100,000 developers that eventually will be familiar with its Javascript environment.
Unlike other open source Javascript frameworks, Telerik has a vested interest in continuing to invest in developing a Javascript framework that is a core element of one of its major commercial development environments.
Available via Github or Telerik.com, Telerik Kendo UI Core includes 38 UI widgets, including all of Kendo UI Mobile and core framework features, such as templates, data binding, and input validation; thousands of tests and best practices; and integration with Bootstrap and UI widgets ready for use with libraries like AngularJS.
Satrom says that as an alternative to JQuery UI, the Telerik Kendo UI widgets are intended to provide access to graphical tools that will be regularly updated by major tools vendor.
In general, commercial software was historically perceived to be of higher quality than open source software. But a new report based on the scanning of 750 million lines of code by Coverity, a provider of application testing tools, finds that the quality of open source code now rivals commercial software.
As JavaScript continues to become the defacto standard for building Web applications there is no shortage of frameworks for developers to choose from. The good news is that while there are a lot of well-documented issues with working with JavaScript, the emergence of more frameworks for JavaScript means that the scripting language is finally getting easier to work with from both a performance perspective and the quality of the code generated.

   

BitTorrent names a new CEO

 Doug Walker, the former CEO at Alias Systems, is named to replace Bram Cohen.

 

 BitTorrent announced Wednesday that the company has named Doug Walker, former chief executive of Alias Systems as its new CEO.

Walker replaces Bram Cohen, the company's cofounder who steps aside to become BitTorrent's chief scientist. Eric Klinker, former chief technology officer of Internap, is now BitTorrent's new CTO.
As inventor of BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer file sharing protocol considered by many to be the Rolex of Internet piracy tools, Cohen is revered by techies and file sharers. As CEO of BitTorrent, a startup trying to cash in on the technology by offering a legal content-distribution service, Cohen has met with less spectacular results.
More than a year ago, the company received the blessing from some of the major movie studios to distribute their films. In February, the company opened the BitTorrent Entertainment Network, a digital media store that features movies, TV shows, and games. But in a sector dominated by the likes of YouTube, Tunes, Joost and the Web sites of TV networks, Cohen's company has generated little buzz.
To be sure, distributing feature films over the Internet has yet to fully catch on with the mainstream. File sizes are still too large and home connections too slow. But, in the year since BitTorrent signed its first studio deal, a score of new competitors have emerged. Cable companies have also bolstered their video-on-demand offerings.
Walker has some advantages going in. Many industry insiders think that the BitTorrent protocol is the most efficient method to distribute movies over the Web. The brand has value with tech-savvy types and if the company can ever offer a service that is as fast, high quality and not too expensive, they might have a chance to convince the file-sharing crowd to go straight.