Free Facebook, common globally, comes to US mobile phones

For years, Facebook has been cutting deals with telecom carriers in developing countries like India and the Philippines to offer free Facebook access to cellphone customers using simple phones with no data plans. 

Now, for the first time, Americans will be able to get free Facebook, too, even if they don't have a mobile data plan. 

In January, GoSmart Mobile, a little-known low-cost prepaid service from T-Mobile US, will begin bundling free access to Facebook's social network and instant-messaging service with all of its mobile plans, including a basic $25-a-month unlimited voice plan. The service is primarily aimed at smartphones that run Apple's iOS or Google's Android software, but it will also work on the cheaper, more basic devices known as feature phones.

For GoSmart, which is sold primarily through independent shops in urban areas, free Facebook is a way to differentiate itself from other prepaid cellular brands - including the more upscale offerings that T-Mobile sells under its own brand and through its MetroPCS unit.

"This is something that no one else is offering in the United States," Gavin Dillon, T-Mobile's vice president of partner brands, said in an interview Tuesday. "It's really about providing more value for GoSmart's cost-conscious customers." 

As in other markets, the free taste of Facebook, including access to videos and other multimedia content embedded in the service, could also persuade some GoSmart customers to upgrade to plans that include data.

For Facebook, which has 1.2 billion users worldwide, the benefits are less clear.

On any given day, more than 40 per cent of the US population is on Facebook, according to data that the company released in August. More than 100 million Americans access the service on mobile devices a day.

GoSmart's customers number in the hundreds of thousands, so any increase in Facebook usage will be minimal.

But as the social network embarks on its ambitious Internet.org project to bring everyone in the world online, mostly through mobile phones, the T-Mobile deal sends a message that Facebook wants to be ubiquitous, including in its home market.

The company has gone to great lengths to redesign its back-end infrastructure to reduce the amount of data and network capacity required to deliver its service globally. For GoSmart, Facebook further tweaked its service to help ensure that usage would not count against the limits for GoSmart customers who pay for some data on their plans.

"Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected, and we're delighted that GoSmart subscribers, many who don't have data access, will be able to use Facebook for free," Chris Daniels, vice president of partnerships at Facebook, said in a statement.

2014 Top Trends In Technology

Technology is going to get crazier. Weirder. Easier and more maddening. Welcome to 2014 tech trend predictions. Some of these may appear next year and others later.

A lot of people will talk about wearable computing and eyeglasses with connectivity built in (like Google Glass). Yes, they will come. But there are others that I think the media are perhaps missing.

Wearable watches

(Dick Tracy style) that makes smartphones seem clunky in a way. Watches are small and out of the way until needed. Apple, Samsung and others will likely make this a big "breakthrough" next year as the device to have. Maybe another "iPhone" moment (a la 2007 Apple Steve Jobs iPhone debut that changed mobile).

Beyond glasses and watches, I made a list (and checked it twice). Here are some thoughts on trends I see coming in tech for you:

Micro experiences

Data-driven experiences made for humans to use in everyday life, not CMO marketing big data. In other words, data is for computers; experiences are for humans. In essence, data is not human language. An example "micro experience"? Tailored TV.

Fragmentation of media 

Twitter is just the beginning of a wave of fragging media apart. It is the 'cableization' moment of media, doing to new media what cable did to broadcast. In other words, Twitter is the 'CNN' or 'HBO' of new media, opening up a field, just as Netscape opened up the Web itself. Nobody sees this yet.

TV and radio will be secondary to online experiences. Things will start online and head to old media.

New dating/relationship models will emerge in consumer Web.

Peer payment systems

Consumer payments will bypass banks and services like PayPal entirely. Peer to peer payments based on tokens/barter credits. Bitcoin is part of that but not all of it. Bitcoin is more like NetManage Chameleon browser, or GNN web guide... early but not the eventual winner.

Active apps 

Active apps will supplant passive ones. Most/all apps today are passive, require the human to initiate the action. Apps will start to work on their own and help humans. Do things for us rather than have us click and instruct them all the time.

Multi-lingual services

will blur language/culture. English Web will blend with Chinese, German, etc. End user experience will be contextual based on user parameters.

Jobs will find employees

rather than employees find jobs. Data will find the best person for the job vs. having to "apply" or "post a resume" ... this flips the job board model on its head. It's not about using alerts or search filters either. Those are all 1999-era ideas.

Humming homes 

will be monitored 24/7 by background apps that feed consumers relevant data and allow for managing way beyond turning off lights or setting alarms. Homes will be more of a corpus/biome. Humming with electronic life.

Consumer super-security 

will rise and be baked into everything. Beyond virus protection or ID theft. Also faux ID/smoke screen personalities to protect data.

Holistic cars 

Forget hybrids or electric. these cars will "self tune" rather than have to be manually tuned up. Like running optimizer on a PC.

Individual education 

the digital generation realizes the pitfalls of "homogenized" state-run learning as expanded online courses open up self-directed education.

Revolv brings multiple home automation devices together

Once you start automating your home with electronic locks, lights, switches, and other components, the number of apps on your phone can multiply very quickly. Worse, it seems like you should be able to easily link their behavior together yet can’t. After all, if you want the lights to turn off when you leave the house, shouldn’t the thermostat also turn down? The Revolv home automation system and associated smart phone app aim to simplify things with one centralized control hub that promises easy setup, no additional support fees, and an evolving lineup of supported devices and features.

Using Revolv is designed to be simple. Once plugged into a central location for optimal Wi-Fi coverage, the unit automatically adds supported devices from the home network, while others need to be added manually via a walkthrough on the Revolv app.

The unit boasts seven wireless radios supporting ten different wireless protocols, with Insteon, Wi-Fi, and Z-Wave currently covered, and more including ZigBee to be rolled out later. What it doesn’t require is an Ethernet connection, creating an account, or monthly fees, with the system registering your phone simply by using the phone’s flash. Only iOS devices are currently supported, but Android, Windows Phone and others will follow.

Once devices are enabled, the fun begins. You can design different home "scenarios," such as coming home, vacation, relaxation, movie night, or bedtime, with rules being triggered by the phone’s proximity, motion sensors, or based on time. Currently the GeoSense proximity trigger is only enabled for one phone, though this will be updated early next year. However, multiple phones can control a Revolv system.

The company is also working on more complex conditional rules, as might apply in households where not everyone has a smartphone. Also planned is a feature that recognizes when people are still at home, despite the GeoSense-linked user leaving the house with their phone.

Belkin WeMo light switches and electrical outlets, Philips Hue and Insteonlightbulbs, Kwikset and Yale locks, and wireless speakers from Sonos are just a few of the devices currently supported, with a full list that is being regularly updated found on Revolv’s website.

The Revolv system is currently available for US$299.

If you’ve started to automate your home, what would you do with Revolv? Let us know in the comments.

Below is Revolv’s video pitching the “sexiness” of home automation.

Bitcoin: Bubble? Maybe. The Wave of the Future?

Bitcoin. The world’s newest and hottest virtual currency. It has become the story du jour for a financial media hungry for stories, and its sudden surge in recent weeks, going from a price of less than $200 barely a month ago to $1200 last week, certainly attracted attention. And of course, rarely do things gain so much so fast without a concomitant fall.

It is perilously easy to dismiss the bitcoin phenomenon as Exhibit A for financial bubbles. With everyone from Nobel laureate Robert Schiller to the day traders who troll the web declaiming the perils of a world awash in central bank money and warning of asset bubbles, bitcoin is perfectly poised to fit that narrative. A virtual currency only invented in 2009, with a limited number of units in circulation that sees its value quintuple in a matter of days to command a total market of more than $10 billion simply begs for the word “bubble.”

But is it? Here’s where everyone has an opinion. Some have pointed to the eerie similarities between the bitcoin phenomenon and the South Sea Bubble of the 18 century or the Tulip mania of the 17 to prove that of course it’s a bubble. Others have taken the more recent history of the late 1990s internet boom – when companies traded on hopes, dreams and delusions of price to expectations – as the more recent parallel. Those arguments, usually hyperbolic, do seem at least apt in the case of bitcoin.

But then there is the fact of what bitcoin is: a virtual peer-to-peer currency that seeks to bypass governments and allow for individuals and organizations to do business without the mediation of the state. That is the truly dramatic trend that bitcoin represents. Bitcoin itself may be a bubble but the trend is most definitely not.

There are two speculated reasons behind what has happened with bitcoin of late. One was the congressional testimony of the assistant attorney general Mythili Raman who validated bitcoin both by refuting that it was a primarily vehicle for money laundering and by acknowledging that “many virtual currency systems offer legitimate financial services and have the potential to promote more efficient global commerce.” The signal from a senior government official that bitcoins are not an immediate subject of regulation and are a potentially valid means of exchange corresponded with the sudden surge.

The other reason floated is that Chinese millionaires have turned to bitcoin as a way to evade China’s rigid capital control, and that the signals from the United States that regulations isn’t imminent made bitcoin appear to be a safe haven for their money.

What then to make of this? Certainly the intense volatility of bitcoin has to be a negative for using it as a currency. In past examples of currencies undergoing wide gyrations, whether hyperinflation Weimar Germany or in more recent times Argentina and Zimbabwe, people simply stop using the currency because there can be no confidence in its actual value. How can you accept payment in bitcoin when the price could go up or down 25% a day, as it has recently?

The other question is whether it is, in fact, a currency, or rather a security, or perhaps neither or both. In all possible scenarios, it is hard to see why governments would not attempt to control or squash it. One of the immutable pillars of government sovereignty everywhere is the power to mint coin (or print paper money). Governments do not allow and rarely much like others to issue currency. And if bitcoin is a security then there will be inevitable pressure to regulate it, put it on an exchange, and subject it to various levels of scrutiny that could well undermine its utility as a viable peer-to-peer, private and largely anonymous international mode of exchange.

Standing back from this noise, however, bitcoin is part of a multifaceted move towards private commercial transactions that are not intermediated by the state. From fundraising sites such as Kickstarter, to investing networks, to new ability under the JOBS Act of private groups to fund themselves without onerous regulations, people are racing ahead to use and invest and spend their money without reference to states and governments that seek to protect them, constrain them, and track them. That appetite is one that no government will successfully contain (though they will try), and no bubble will effectively sate. Nor will the pricking of a bitcoin bubble (if one exists) spell the end of these innovations.

As a particular, bitcoin may be a proverbial flash in a virtual pan. As a symbol, it is potent. It is part of the next stage of global capitalism, one that could see vast sums of money in motion without the state having a central role. There is much to celebrate in that, and much to be concerned about. Who will care for the commons if too much economic activity circumvents the state? But the ability of people to connect financially, to transact, invest, and exchange as they see fit without permission from the state is also liberating and potentially transformative. We are in the very early stages here. Deriding bitcoin is easy. Dealing with the issues it raises, that is hard, and necessary.

Topsy could help fill in Apple’s big hole — big data

Thanks (largely) to Google, Apple’s business is no longer just about selling phones, tablets and laptops, but about selling an entire experience for which all those devices are just the access point. Data is a key part of that experience, and Apple doesn’t generate a whole lot of it on its own. That’s why its acquisition of Twitter-data specialist Topsy on Monday potentially makes so much sense.

If you think about the landscape of companies whose platforms span devices, applications and services — a collection that pretty much includes Apple, Google and Microsoft — one thing that stands out is how much data the latter two are generating compared with Apple. Microsoft has Bing, Hotmail and Xbox. Google has search, Gmail, Google+, YouTube, Zagat and more. Apple has Siri and little else (unless you count iCloud or Safari, which relies on external search engines) really comparable to those other two companies in terms of generating data about what users are looking for and how they’re using using language.

All that data helps Microsoft and Google do a lot of things. They’re analyzing search queries, social posts and comments to constantly improve their natural-language processing capabilities and search algorithms, which in turn leads to better speech recognition, translation services and search experiences. They’re analyzing images, videos, and even body movements (with Kinect) to further improve capabilities around computer vision and image recognition.

Microsoft has acknowledged the importance of Bing to its greater vision, even if the search engine never becomes a real threat to Google’s dominance.

There’s a social media angle, too, with Google presumably viewing Google+ in the same manner Microsoft views Bing. Google+ gives Google the ability to filter its users’ experience through a social graph and broader trends about what’s popular, and gives it an organic method of harvesting that data to further its goals around text and behavioral analysis.

All of a sudden, Siri doesn’t seem like such a competitive advantage.

Assuming its right to access the Twitter firehose transfers to Apple, Topsy helps Apple close this gap — to a degree. Topsy has data for the entire history of Twitter, as well as firehose access to Twitter data going forward. So Apple already has access to a huge corpus of Twitter data that can help with everything from natural-language procesing to trend analysis. Theoretically, Apple could shut down Topsy tomorrow, keep ingesting that data stream from Twitter and keep growing its database without having to pay a third party. (While Topsy focuses on historical data, Datasift and Gnip focus on real-time data, including from sources outside of Twitter, and likely would have cost more to acquire.)

And Apple certainly has services that could benefit from this data, including Siri, iTunes and Apple TV. Assuming Apple uses it to its fullest advantage, Topsy’s data is a way of ensuring Apple understands what people are talking about and what they mean. (If Topsy’s team has some specific skill sets around social media analysis, Apple also now has a group of employees to lead this charge.) This could help Apple provide a better user experience by improving its recommendation algorithms, highlighting (or predicting) trending media and making Siri work even better. The company certainly is trying to hire a lot of data scientists, analysts and engineers.

Twitter has been touting its role as a trend maker and de facto ratings system for television, and Apple might be able to capitalize on that positioning, too. Rather than relying on the data Twitter releases, though, Apple could focus on the data that’s important for its ends and perhaps use that to help secure rights around content licensing and other deals.

Granted, this is a lot of speculation just hours after the Topsy acquisition was reported, but it seems hard to believe Apple paid a reported $200 million for a company just to keep tabs on how people are talking about the new iPad on Twitter. Gigaom is hosting its Structure Data conference in March with a major focus on how companies are using data to distinguish their products and create entirely new user experiences, and nowhere is that trend stronger than in the web world.

Google and Microsoft are generating lots of data to help make their companies the place to go for mobile, movies, music, collaboration and just about everything else, and they’d rather consumers not do any of that on any device bearing an Apple logo.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user watcharakun.

Drinking Quotes

From Benjamin Franklin to Jim Morrison to Ron Burgundy, we have brought you our top 50 favorite drinking quotes of all time. Alcohol always seems to help produce some of the best quotes, so sit back and enjoy these funny drinking quotes by famous people. If you have any of your own favorite drinking quotes that you do not see on our list, please feel free to add them in the comment section below.

“I feel bad for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.”
~ Frank Sinatra

“Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
~ Ernest Hemingway

“When used separately, women and alcohol can be a lot of fun, but when you mix the two you become a dumbass.”
~ That 70’s Show

“Reality is an illusion created by a lack of alcohol.”
~ N.F. Simpson

“No animal ever invented anything as bad as drunkenness – or so good as drink.”
~ G. K. Chesterton

“I got so wasted one night I waited for the stop sign to change, and it did.”
~ Steve Krabitz

“Work is the curse of the drinking classes.”
~ Oscar Wilde

“All is fair in love and beer.”
~ Kurt Paradis

“Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn’t drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than to be selfish and worry about my liver.”
~ Jack Handey

“Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.”
~ Ogden Nash

“When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.”
~ Jimmy Breslin

“I distrust camels, and anyone else who can go a week without a drink.”
~ Joe E. Lewis

“We drink [to] one another’s health and spoil our own.”
~ Jerome K. Jerome

“If you drink, don’t park; accidents cause people.”
~ Anonymous

“The answer to life’s problems aren’t at the bottom of a beer bottle, they’re on TV.”
~ The Simpsons

“When I drink, I think; and when I think, I drink.”
~ Frantois Rabelais

“A drunk man’s words are a sober man’s thoughts.”
~ Steve Fergosi

“24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence?”
~ Steven Wright

“Drink what you want; drink what you’re able. If you are drinking with me, you’ll be under the table.”
~ Anonymous

“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”
~ Benjamin Franklin

“I envy people who drink. At least they have something to blame everything on.”
~ Oscar Levant

“A woman drove me to drink and I didn’t even have the decency to thank her.”
~ W.C. Fields

“I drink to make other people interesting.”
~ George Jean Nathan

“Time is never wasted when you’re wasted all the time.”
~ Catherine Zandonella

“Beauty lies in the hands of the beer holder.”
~ Anonymous

“I find the more I drink, the more interesting others become.”
~ Tom Ralphs

“I’ve never been drunk, but often I’ve been overserved.”
~ George Gobel

“Here’s to alcohol, the cause of, and solution to, all life’s problems.”
~ The Simpsons

“Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.”
~ Lord Byron

“Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.”
~ Dave Barry

“If you drink, don’t drive. Don’t even putt.”
~ Dean Martin

“It’s like gambling somehow. You go out for a night of drinking and you don’t know where you’re going to end up the next day. It could work out good or it could be disastrous. It’s like the throw of the dice.”
~ Jim Morrison

“Alcoholic friends are as easy to make as Sea Monkeys.”
~ Dry

“Maybe talking when I’m piss ass drunk isn’t entirely bright.”
~ Chris McGowan

“I love scotch. Scotchy, scotch, scotch. Here it goes down, down into my belly . . . ”
~ Anchorman

“If God had intended us to drink beer, he would have given us stomachs.”
~ David Daye

“It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is I can’t remember if it’s the thirteenth or the fourteenth.”
~ George Burns

“I know a lot more old drunks than old doctors.”
~ Joe E. Lewis

“I knew I was drunk. I felt sophisticated and couldn’t pronounce it.”
~ Anonymous

“Ah that’s just drunk talk, sweet beautiful drunk talk.”
~ The Simpsons

“Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?”
~ The Major and the Minor

“When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.”
~ Henry Youngman

“Everybody should believe in something; I believe I’ll have another drink.”
~ Anonymous

“One martini is alright, two is too many, three is not enough.”
~ James Thurber

“I drink too much. The last time I gave a urine sample it had an olive in it.”
~ Rodney Dangerfield

“He that drinks fast, pays slow.”
~ Benjamin Franklin

“Drinking beer doesn’t make you fat; it makes you lean… against bars, tables, chairs, and poles.”
~ Anonymous

“Whenever someone asks me if I want water with my scotch, I say, I’m thirsty, not dirty.”
~ Joe E. Lewis

“Responsible drinking? Now that’s an oxymoron.”
~ Aaron Howard

“Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.”
~ Frank Sinatra