Facebook borrows $100M to build out its infrastructure

May 12, 2008

Facebook borrows $100M to build out its infrastructure

Facebook is borrowing $100 million from venture loan firm TriplePoint to finance the expansion of its server farms, and other infrastructure expenses, Business Week’s Spencer E. Ante reports. Why this additional money? Because the site is still growing really fast. It now has 109.2 million monthly users worldwide, according to comScore numbers cited in the article - which is much higher than even the 70 million number currently listed on Facebook’s own site. The company needs to build out its infrastructure to cope with its nonstop growth.

(Via Macworld UK News.)

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Twitter Shows Its Strengths As Earthquake Strikes China

May 12, 2008

earthquake‘
Creative Commons License photo credit: seektan‘

Twitter is finally coming of age, and is demonstrating why the microblogging medium is fast catching up to be the fastest news breaker in the world. Something like 7 hours back a huge earthquake struck in China. The earthquake measured 7.8 on the richter scale and thousands have been feared to be dead. The epicenter was 50 miles from Chengdu, which has about 10.5 million residents.’

Robert Scoble a noted tech blogger and a Twitter addict first broke out the news on Twitter, even before the news could reach BBC. I was in college when I first received the alert via a text message. When I logged onto the internet the Twitterverse was completely busy with reports of the earthquake.

I won’t really go into much details as to what happened on Twitter this afternoon, but I’d like you to point you to sites that have covered this in detail.

News continues to fly in by the second, and I wonder if Twitter is slowly going mainstream. By their own admission BBC agrees that it was Robert Scoble who broke out the story first sitting thousands of miles away from China.

‘Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media,’

That moment surely came a while ago, with Californian fires, more earthquakes, explosions and many other things. This is probably the first one that is gaining mainstream attention from news outlets like BBC etc…

As Twitter continues to battle its scaling problems, incidents such as this surely put Twitter in a position wherein everyone in the world can benefit from it. I know the investors behind Twitter are looking to make money from the service, but the social value derived from the service far undermines the economic value.

I think that ‘who’s first’ is not exactly the point: ‘how fast, how many’, and ‘how open’ for the spontaneous collaboration is much more interesting than who broke the story first.

We’re are going to see more of Twitter in the Twitter in the coming days. Here’s to hoping to that things go back to normal in China and may the god help the ones in need. I’m waiting for an official channel through which I can donate for relief purposes. Please let me know if you come across it.

To see the story unfold on Twitter visit Tweetscan. Do you think Twitter is slowly going mainstream and is ready to take on traditional media outlets like Reuters, BBC etc..

For more details on the earthquake visit NYTimes.

(Via dailyApps.)

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Laptop thieves nabbed with help from Mac software

May 10, 2008

Two alleged thieves were found with stolen computer and A/V gear taken from three roommates in White Plains, N.Y., because one of the victims is a Mac expert. She used the notoriously hard-to-get-working Back to My Mac feature in Leopard which allows single sign-in to .Mac for remote, secure access to all computers on which you’ve signed in. (It uses UPnP/NAT-PMP, wide-area Bonjour, dynamic DNS, and IPsec’s IKE coupled with IPv6 tunneling. Any surprise it’s wonky? It’s cool when it works, though.)

The unnamed victim in question was able to use remote screen sharing to capture a picture of one alleged burglar via the machine’s built-in iSight camera, and copied photos on the computer that apparently were of the other alleged thief.

One of the other roommates recognized the two alleged perps from a party at their apartment (they were friends of a friend), told the police, who tracked them down, and made the arrests, finding all the stolen gear in the process.

While I’ve heard of plenty of Webcams-lead-to-capture stories, this is the first story that ties in IPv6 and recovered gear that I know of.

(Via Boing Boing.)

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Audacity Update

May 9, 2008

AudacityThe Audacity Team has announced the release of Audacity v1.3.5 beta for Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix.

Audacity is a free, open source audio editing application that is popular with podcasters.

Changes in the new version include improvements and new features for recording, import/export and the user interface.

Here are the details:

Changes in Beta version 1.3.5

Recording / Playback:

  1. Several bugs fixed so that latency correction should be better, and more devices work correctly.
  2. Problems with invalid sample rates under Linux should be much rarer.
  3. Newer version of Portaudio library.
  4. New feature to record onto the end of an existing track (hold Shift while clicking Record).

Import / Export:

  • Updated versions of Libogg, Libvorbis, Libflac, Libsndfile and Twolame libraries.
  • Handling of unsupported file formats more informative.
  • Handling of file names with slashes on OS X improved.
  • New dialog allows replacement of illegal file name characters on all platforms.

Interface:

  • Improved scaling and layout for rulers and VU meters.
  • Envelope fixes/improvements including full control of undo/redo.
  • New keyboard shortcuts and improved menu navigation.
  • Preferences:
  • More intuitive tab arrangement.
  • New options for mute/solo and Metadata Editor behavior.
  • Language can now be changed without restart.
  • Expanded Build Information tab.

Effects:

  • New Vocal Remover plug-in, improvements for Generate effects.

Compilation:

  • Fixes when building Audacity with libraries disabled.
  • Improvements to make Mac and Solaris builds easier.

Security:

  • Full fix for issue CVE-2007-6061 on systems where temporary directories can be changed by other users.

Miscellaneous:

  • Updated translations for many locales.
  • Several stability improvements.

(Via Podcasting News.)

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