Bitly is taking a stab at every browser’s bookmarking feature by offering its own bookmark service. Creatively name bitmarks are links you can save in your private collection or share with the world. Bitmarks can be added via bookmarklet (a button that goes in you browser’s bookmarks toolbar), a new Chrome browser extension, or on the Bitly website.

Of all the content- and link-saving services, Bitly might have the advantage of simplicity. Pocket, Instapaper, Springpad, and Evernote all provide spaces to save links and content, but are often hindered by webpage formatting issues. Bitmarks seem to be much simpler because they don’t grab any content, just the URL.

Bitly also includes a slick search feature, similar to Google’s, that makes searching for bitmarks quick. Bitly thinks that while there are people who will carefully organize their bitmarks, most of use are lazy and need a strong search feature to make the service useful. You can see it action below.

Comments on a company blog post in reaction to the redesign aren’t exactly positive. People who have used Bitly exclusively to shorten links are complaining about the more complicated design. If you don’t have an account with Bitly, or choose to not login, you can easily shorten a link on Bitly’s homepage. However, if you login into an account and want to shorten a link, you have to “add a bitmark,” save the URL, choose to keep it private or make it public, and only then can you get the shortened link.

An older feature of Bitly, called bundles, is getting a revamp with the update. Bundles are groups of links that can be shared with others. You can also invite people to curate a bundle on say, puppies or gadgets. Bitly has made bundles more interactive and easily sharable on Facebook and Twitter.

Bitly’s redesign corresponds with the release of the Bitly iPhone app to keep track of your bitmarks on your phone.

Bitmarks and bundles make up the new consumer-facing side of Bitly’s business. For enterprise customers, Bitly has an analytics service to track how links are shared on the Internet.

Bitly is in talks to raise a reported $20 million third round of funding. So far Bitly has raised $15 million from a laundry list of investors including Ron Conway, SV Angel, and AOL Ventures. The company is based in New York City and was founded in 2008.

The resignation was announced by Hawkins himself on the company’s blog over the weekend. He said he would move into a consulting and advisory role at Digital Chocolate, which hasn’t been one of the victors in the mobile and social gaming wars. Hawkins said that the company would moved to a narrower and more streamlined focus, so it made sense to make the change. Rumors suggest that Digital Chocolate has laid off about 180 employees.

“I’ve always had a mission and purpose in my career and I’ve always cared about helping game developers to prosper so that they can make better games for the public,” Hawkins wrote. “And I’ve worked towards making everyone in the world a gamer – a vision that is indeed on its way to reality.  I’ve had the highs and lows and mixed results, but the journey has been extraordinary.”

Hawkins founded Electronic Arts 30 years ago — an anniversary that came just yesterday — in 1982 with a vision to turn video games into an art form alongside books, movies, visual arts and music. He started EA Sports and John Madden NFL Football, and those properties are still driving EA’s revenues today. He left EA to start 3DO, which failed in its effort to establish a new game console.

He founded Digital Chocolate in 1983, driven to succeed in the mobile game markets and hoping to redeem himself after the failure of 3DO.  Hawkins was early in the mobile gaming market, and he pivoted into social games once that became big on Facebook. But Digital Chocolate didn’t have enough soldiers in its army, and it was short on hits.

Digital Chocolate has operations across the U.S., Russia, Spain and Finland. But it has apparently shut offices in Mexico, Armenia, Washington state, and part of its operation in Russia. Rivals such as Zynga, Rovio, Electronic Arts, Gameloft and others have beaten Digital Chocolate in the current social ad mobile gaming Gold Rush. While Zynga has nearly 250 million monthly active users on Facebook, Digital Chocolate has barely over 6 million.
Marc Metis, who has been at the company since 2009, will serve as interim chief executive at Digital Chocolate. Digital Chocolate has raised more than $60 million to date from backers including Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.

Facebook’s stock on the Nasdaq exchange has dropped by more than 9 percent in trading Tuesday and is now floating around $29 a share, a steep drop from its original IPO price of $38.

The massive social network debuted 11 days ago and since then, the stock has sunk on news that Facebook botched the IPO process, misled mom-and-pop investors, and is fighting perceptions that the stock is overvalued in light of diminished growth prospects. Today, options trading began so investors can place different kinds of bets on the stock. The Wall Street Journal reports that some investors have placed options bets that Facebook would “jump to $65 a share by January 2014, while others betting on a slump to $16 a share by December.”

Facebook’s stock has dropped as low as $28.65 today, which amounts to about 10 percent. Take a look at the chart below to see Facebook’s big dip today. We will update this post at the end of trading with the final damage for the day.

Mark Zuckerberg photo: Jim Merithew/Wired

Game Closure is announcing today that it has hired Laurent Desegur (pictured right), former chief technology officer of Zynga Mobile, as Game Closure’s new vice president of mobile engineering. Game Closure is making an HTML5-based cross-platform game technology.

Meanwhile, Zynga’s stock continues to drop, falling to $6.15 a share, down 7 percent, in trading this morning. Zynga went public at $10 a share in December and its stock rose to a high of $15.91 a share after speculation that the company could benefit from online gambling legal changes. But after Facebook’s botched IPO, Zynga shares have steadily fallen. And today, employees will be able to sell an estimated 325 million shares.

Desegur will lead all of the mobile initiatives related to the company’s game engine development.

“I vote with my feet. After first-hand experience with the Game Closure software development kit (SDK) and the people behind it, I knew that I had to be involved in the growth and refinement of the team and technology,” said Desegur. “Game Closure is building technology that radically enhances the quality, development speed, and availability of games on mobile. I believe these tools are essential to build beautiful, frictionless social games which can compete in today’s market.”

Game Closure was founded 15 months ago and it has 30 employees. The company’s Javascript game SDK allows publishers to distribute their video games across multiple platforms: iOS, Android and web browsers. That allows developers to create a game once and run it across multiple platforms.

In the first half of the year, Mountain View, Calif.-based Game Closure has received applications from more than 5,000 studios and its daily user data produced by partner games has grown 1,000-fold. Game Closure is run by Michael Carter, 27. The company says it has received multiple acquisition offers (and presumably turned them all down) including one from Zynga.

Game Closure raised $12 million from Highland Capital, Greylock Partners, Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital, General Catalyst Partners, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, and Joi Ito. Game Closure was launched via StartX, Stanford University’s student startup accelerator.

“I knew that we would end up working together from the moment I met Laurent at Zynga,” Carter said. “We were in sync on everything — from the direction of the mobile games industry to the best practices for HTML5 mobile technology. Laurent is a world-class engineer and an exceptional, time-tested company builder.”

Before joining Zynga, Desegur was chief technology officer of Big Fish Games, At Zynga, Desegur was involved in mobile technology and strategy as well as mergers and acquisitions.

It goes something like this: You’re in the running for the CEO’s job at a startup. Already a creeping sense of uncertainty has set in as you prepare for the next interview. What do you need to know about the company? What rocks do you need to peek under?

Senior executive changes are happening at lightening speed in the tech space. Seasoned managers move from one early-stage company to another, and from established companies and venture firms into the startup world. Some of the savviest new-gen Web companies recruit directly from brand-name consumer and media outfits.

If you’re in line for a CEO post at a pre-IPO company, you’ve got a lot to think about. I’ve been on both sides of the table, hiring CEO’s and being recruited. Asking the right questions is critical in order to avoid wasting your time and energy. Over the past six months, I’ve looked at opportunities, asked these questions, uncovered inconsistencies, and found situations where people were less than forthcoming. I turned on my heels and walked. That said, with my new gig I didn’t follow all of my own rules. So this is a bit of “do as I say, not as I do.” I’m still learning, but here goes…

My Top 7 Must Do’s:

1. Any prospective CEO candidate should ask for the most recent board decks. I suggest looking at the ones from the last year at a minimum. Once you’ve reviewed them, you might insist on a walk-through of the two most recent presentations as they were shown to the board.

2. Do your own due diligence on departures. Look on LinkedIn for people who were associated with the company. You may find core team members who are no longer there, even after you’ve been assured none have left. This is an obvious red flag. Why wasn’t this disclosed? Keeping critical information under wraps to a potential new CEO is highly suspect. I’ve been amazed by founders who claim no executive turnover when a quick LinkedIn search uncovers three former CFOs.

3. Talk to users, partners, customers. Find a way to subtly get access to people who know the business. Gain their perspective on the company’s value proposition and leadership team. With Internet companies, customer feedback is always in the data. Get access to Omniture, or a similar account, and have someone walk you through the data. In the last few years, we have all seen companies position their consumer traction as great when, in fact, organic traffic is off. Daily or monthly average user numbers speak to an engagement problem, and revenue success is driven off advertising optimization, not user growth.

4. Engage the board. Have direct conversations with each board member to understand their commitment to the company. You need to gauge your ability as a new CEO to add or change independent board members. You also need to understand the relationship between board members and the founders. Go beyond the board and talk to investors who don’t hold a board seat.

5. It’s crucial to understand a company’s financial position, both operationally and from a capitalization standpoint. Be sure to understand the cap chart and the preference stack. There have been plenty of examples in the past, though not as many recently, where the preferences of investors would make almost any exit worthless for the senior team and the team as a whole. Now may be your best and only chance to negotiate a better package for you and your team. No one wants to work at a startup where the only potential for a positive outcome is a Google- or Facebook-like exit.

6. Review the pitches to partners. Understand past exit discussions and how the company was positioned in those discussions. This will give you some of the best insights on exit potential and, more importantly, on the board’s view of exits.

7. Finally, find out what a typical day looks like at the company. Go to lunch with a random group of employees. Go for drinks after work. You’ll find out what people are really thinking. Show up at the company offices before 9 a.m. and after 5 p.m. Are people there? Are they working happily? Are they motivated? Are they having fun?

You may think you’ve found the world’s most wonderful opportunity. But you need to make sure. Remember, you’re investing your time and you can never get that back.

Ben T. Smith IV is CEO of ShopCo, a startup focused on reinventing circular shopping with a social experience. He is also a Venture Partner at Accelerator Ventures and co-founder of MerchantCircle.com and Spoke.com. Ben blogs at btsiv.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at @bentsmithfour. Tony Scott, president of ChampionScott Partners also contributed to the seven must-do’s in this story.

[Top image credit:  Minerva Studio/Shutterstock]

Amazon will now offer its streaming Instant Video service to Xbox 360 owners via a brand new app that was released today.

The move will make all streaming purchases, rentals, and free Prime videos available through the popular gaming console. It also means the Playstation 3 is no longer the sole game console to feature Amazon’s streaming video offerings.

An Amazon Xbox Live app makes perfect sense for the company. Not only has media usage on the Xbox risen above the console’s main purpose of gaming, but it’s also part of Microsoft’s overall strategy to break into the digital media market. Several other music and video streaming services are already available on the console, such as Comcast’s Xfinity TV, HBO Go, Last.fm, Netflix, Hulu Plus, and many others.

The bottom line is that any company with a streaming video service should be available on the Xbox.

Amazon is passing on its standard promotion to all Xbox owners that aren’t already Amazon Prime Members. The company is giving one month of the service for free, which entitles you to a fair amount of free streaming movies and free shipping on lots of products sold through Amazon.

Now if Amazon would only wise up and start building in some decent user-friendly controls to navigate through that 17,000+ title library of streaming videos and episodes, we’d all be in good shape.

Apple is said to be releasing a new maps application at its developer conference WWDC this year, and photos of the rumored app confirm that it will include 3D-imaging.

Image of rumored Apple Maps from BGR

Earlier this month, rumors that Apple was dumping Google Maps in favor of it’s own map application cropped up. The company, which is known for wanting to create and own its own software, is said to be releasing a custom-built mapping agent in iOS 6, the next installment of its mobile operating system. BGR says its sources have obtained images of the new map app. The images are fairly blurry, but give us a good indication of what the final product could be.

Image of rumored Apple Maps from BGR

In October, Apple acquired 3D-imaging company C3 Technologies, which focused on created 3D images for maps. At the time VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall estimated the deal to be worth around $240 million, though the terms were unclear. The company will undoubtedly use its technology to integrate 3D cityscapes, neighborhoods, and more. BGR’s sources say you will access the 3D by swiping the page turn symbol in the bottom right corner. You can toggle between this view and regular map view by using a 3D icon will appear in the bottom left corner of the app, along with the locate me button.

It looks like Apple will release iOS 6 at WWDC in June. The company released the schedule for the conference today as well as an event application, which is obviously for the iPhone and iPad. The app also includes a map of the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif. where the conference is taking place, but don’t count on it using the new maps app.

via BGR, top image via C3 Technologies, bottom images via BGR

If there was any doubt that Wall Street is a sucker’s game designed to take money from stupid people and put it into the hands of bankers and powerful corporations, Facebook’s initial public offering should clear that up.

Let me recap, for those of you who haven’t yet read Matt Marshall’s detailed story of what went on inside Facebook during its IPO roadshow, or Henry Blodget’s initial expose of these private communications.

As we now know, Facebook revised its earnings estimates downward during the two-week period leading up to its IPO. But while it put general, vague statements about the revenue into its public S-1 filing, it appears to have given much more specific information to its bankers, privately.

The bankers, in turn, communicated the substantially revised revenue figures to select investors. At the same time, key Facebook investors, including Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer, put an extra 83.8 million shares up for sale. The bankers and Facebook also increased the amount of shares they planned to sell to ordinary, “retail” investors to 25 percent, an unusually high number. And when Facebook priced its IPO, it did so at the very top of its range.

At the same time, because the specific revenue downgrades weren’t widely shared, the company continued pumping up demand for its shares. That kept demand high enough on the first day of trading that the IPO clogged up the NASDAQ’s computers, delaying the start of trading by about half an hour (an embarrassment for the NASDAQ). And it ensured that the underwriting banks, led by Morgan Stanley, were able to exercise their “greenshoe” option and sell an additional $2.4 billion worth of stock, bringing Facebook’s total raise to $18.4 billion.

By the end of the day, as the stock slipped dangerously close to the IPO price of $38, it looks like the banks were rapidly buying up more stock in order to level the price out. So they may have taken a bit of a bath in this affair as well, since the stock is now trading at $33.

But what really has taken a beating is the reputation of the banks that led this offering, starting with Morgan Stanley.

Of course, we can’t know why Facebook or its investors and bankers were selling as much stock as possible, at as high of a price as possible, to as many naive investors as possible. But the result is clear: Anyone who bought Facebook stock on the opening day got duped.

Now, from Facebook’s point of view, that just makes good financial sense. While a nice big “pop” in the stock price on its first day of trading makes for good headlines, it’s a sign that the company has mispriced its stock and left money on the table; in Facebook’s case, it maximized its return.

And if you’re buying an IPO stock on its first day of trading in hopes of a quick one-day profit, you’re presumably smart enough to know that you’re basically gambling with your money. So the onus is on you if it doesn’t pan out the first day — or has a terrible first week. Give up your dreams of a quick return and hold onto the stock; maybe it’ll go back into the 40s. Some day.

But what really irks me is the revelation that Morgan Stanley and Facebook may not have actually broken any SEC rules. It appears that it’s allowable for analysts to communicate different information verbally with select investors than they reveal in the publicly-filed documents. That’s a ridiculous situation that seems to run directly counter to the purpose of a public, and transparent, IPO.

Aswath Damodaran at CNN writes that he thinks this was a case of ineptitude on the part of the bankers more than a conspiracy to make as much money as possible. He bases his argument on the fact that the damage to Morgan Stanley’s reputation was far greater than the extra millions it got from the deal.

Indeed, there is a cost to pay for all this mess. Facebook has, yet again, broken the already-fragile trust it has with ordinary Main Street users. It will have a series of subpoenas and investigations to deal with in multiple states and perhaps in Congress. There’s a shareholder lawsuit against Facebook. Morgan Stanley has taken a hit to its reputation. (At a time when almost no one in this country particularly like banks, that can’t be good — although it’s not clear that bankers spend much time worrying about popular opinion.)

But in the long run, will it make a big difference? Probably not. The allegations, if true, will result in various fines, which Facebook and Morgan Stanley will pay. And then they will carry on doing business as before.

Like what you read here? Read past editions of my Dylan’s Desk column, and sign up to get future columns delivered to your inbox every week.

Tilted playing field photo by Conor Gaston/Flickr .

The current state of the mobile payment industry could at best be called slightly confounding, or, at worst, a complete mess.

But in spite of increased competition from stakeholders like Square, PayPal, Google, Mastercard, Intuit and, most recently, Verifone, the mobile payments industry is still set for some major growth.

According to Gartner research director Sandy Shen, mobile payments are set to top $171 billion this year. That’s a sixty percent jump over last year’s numbers, which totaled roughly $105 billion, Gartner said.

While much of that will be fueled by the larger companies, a significant percentage of the burden will be carried by smaller mobile payments players who will be better able to address specific regional needs, Shen noted.

Very much still in its infancy, the mobile payment industry has been defined so far by stakeholders aggressively jockeying for influence and market share. It’s a realm where Google is competing with the likes of MasterCard, and where established payment companies like PayPal are catching up to mobile-focused incumbents like Square. It’s an industry where the world is on its head.

One of the more interesting bits in the Gartner report concerns near-field communications (NFC), which has been a staple of mobile payment systems like Google Wallet. Gartner says that NFC transaction adoption will stay low until 2016, which doesn’t exactly bode well in the short-term for Google. The real progress in NFC will come from mobile ticketing, not retail purchases, Shen says.

If there’s a takeaway from the report it’s this: Mobile payment won’t reach its full potential  until consumer behavior shifts and the various stakeholders find a way to cooperate. Neither one of these things has a great chance of happening, however, until a clear frontrunner emerges.

Mobile payments photo via Shutterstock

Samsung has released new details/a> of its forthcoming streaming music service, Music Hub, and it might even turn out to be more than just another iTunes competitor.

“Samsung is not known for our content services; we make good hardware products but we haven’t done much in the content space but that’s changing,” Samsung SVP of Media Solution Center T.J. Kang said in an interview with Reuters. “We are doing it to create a better experience for our users. There are things we could do better if we have complete control over all of the service.”

Samsung acquired mSpot earlier this month for a reported $8.8 million to further its desire to get into the streaming media business. And aside from its top dollar purchases, part of how Samsung plans to make its own Media/Music Hub service go beyond the iTunes model is by cherry-picking features from other popular services.

Unlike iTunes, Samsung’s Music Hub will give its customers the option of subscribing to a premium version of the service for £/€9.99 per month that gives them virtually unlimited cloud storage space for their media as well as “smart” radio features found on services like Pandora and Last.fm.

It’ll be interesting to see if people actually prefer using Samsung’s new media hub over competing music services (like Pandora, Spotify, MOG, and Rdio) and digital media stores (Google Play, Amazon) — all of which have a pre-established base of users that currently have no reason to start using something new. (Of course, I won’t really be able to make a fair assessment until Samsung launches its Music Hub service in the U.S.)

Image via Samsung

It looks like the rumors of a longer iPhone 5 may be true, at least according to leaked case images from this morning.

Several alleged photos from the next iPhone’s rear case hit the web today, somefrom the repair company iFixyouri and 9to5Mac, and others from uBreakiFix.

While the images are somewhat grainy, they look legit enough to warrant our interest, especially since they sport both the longer screen and smaller dock connector of the most reason iPhone 5 rumor. The metal portion of the rear cases also aligns with rumors we’ve been hearing since last year.

9to5Mac claims the Chinese supplier of its image is reliable and is already selling the part. The supplier also claims to have seen at least two other colors for the back plate beyond black and white.

Judging from the images, the next iPhone will likely be thinner (as expected). You can thank the smaller dock connector for that, as it opens up more internal space within the iPhone for Apple to stuff more hardware. 9to5Mac’s source also claims there’s extra space in the back of the case to enhance the phone’s speaker, which will be “louder and of a higher quality” than current iPhone speakers.

Update: We’ve added some higher resolution images from 9to5Mac, including a front case part that looks like it can hold a taller display. Notably, the FaceTime camera has moved to the center of the iPhone, and the headphone jack is now located on the bottom (like the iPod Touch).

The Chinese equivalent of Twitter has just issued a “code of conduct” for its users in an attempt to put a stop to political criticism, rumors, and the spread of social unrest.

Weibo.com, an online property run by Sina Corp, is a microblogging platform not unlike Twitter. It allows information — well, some information — to spread rapidly through brief messages and images.

And like Twitter, it’s peppered with the same mundanity, the same inspirational cliches, the same celebrity-related chatter. But it also brings its fair share of political and social commentary, not unlike the Arab Spring and Occupy movements’ presence on Twitter.

Now, however, users will be expected to keep their missives squeaky clean by the government’s standards and to not post about politically sensitive topics, up to and including the very names of disgraced Party members or any criticism of the country’s constitution.

Weibo users’ conduct will be enforced with a points system (yep, they just gamified censorship) wherein you lose points for posting rumors or criticisms and earn points for, say, verifying your own identity. If you get down to zero points, your Weibo account gets terminated.

The timing of this decision is interesting. The Communist Party in China will be holding its 18th Congress in the fall; congresses are held about once every five years. The 18th Congress is set to bring about a huge leadership change, and so far, it’s going far from smoothly. The road to this fall’s political shift has been paved with oustings, rumors, infighting, political persecution, and all manner of drama. There have even been speculations that the Congress may be postponed this year.

Add a microblogging service to all that, and you have what some would consider to be a perfect storm for social media and social change. But not in the PRC, and not on Weibo or any other Sina property.

Unfortunately, this is just the continuation of a longstanding trend. Late last year, Sina execs pledged their support to government censorship programs.

And in early 2011, Weibo began blocking messages about the Arab Spring uprisings. A search for “Egypt” on the service would return a message stating, “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results are not shown.”

The new code of conduct was announced earlier this month and went into effect today.

The folks working at Jellyvision Games — and one obnoxious dude named after a high-calorie treat — have spent nearly two decades making me feel stupid. And they’re still doing it to this day. It was time for me to get these guys back.

These are the developers of You Don’t Know Jack. Various iterations of this highly irreverent (and often condescending) trivia game have been around since the mid-’90s, and today, a new version is out to terrorize your social network. The good news about YDKJ for Facebook? It’s a bite-sized, approximately seven-minute-long distraction that doesn’t require your friends to be physically next to you playing on the same computer monitor or TV screen. The bad news? It’s Facebook. That means everyone can see how dumb you are without them needing to be physically next to you.

Last week, Jellyvision gave me an early preview of the new YDJK. I had a chance to interview the men in the room: general manager Michael Bilder, marketing director Marc Blumer, and Tom Gottlieb, the infamous voice of the game’s wise-ass host, Cookie Masterson. But I wasn’t interested in asking standard-fare questions like “Tell us about your game” and “Why are all of you such jerks?”

Like I said, it was time for me to get these guys back, so I set out to make them look clueless with our own trivia game, 5 Hit Points. Let’s see if they can survive our questions and keep as much of their video game health as possible.

Question 1: Your games tend to make other people chuckle, but there’s another “You Don’t Know Jack” out there that’s no laughing matter. Who was the headlining actor in this 2010 TV movie, and who was the real-life person that he played?

Tom Gottlieb: Should I buzz in?

GamesBeat: Go ahead.

Gottlieb: Ding ding ding! That would be Al Pacino playing Jack Kevorkian.

GamesBeat: Very nice! You still have five hit points.

Question 2: Your game became an actual TV game show about a decade ago, but it ended up getting replaced by another series whose star now has his own game show. Who is this guy?

Michael Bilder: Oh, I bet I know! I guess I’m buzzing in. Ding! Oh, well, wait…

GamesBeat: You buzzed in, so you have to answer.

Gottlieb: His show replaced…the show was replaced really quickly….

GamesBeat: Michael, you only have like 10 seconds.

Bilder: Oh jeez, there’s a timer! Ah…I was going to say Baywatch and David Hasselhoff, but that isn’t right.

GamesBeat: It’s Wayne Brady.

Everyone: [collectively] Ahhh!

GamesBeat: He’s now the host of…

Bilder: Let’s Make a Deal!

Gottlieb: I do remember that now.

GamesBeat: You have four hit points left.

Question 3: Now, Wayne Brady had a guest role in the old FX show Dirt, starring Courtney Cox. What was the name of the particular episode of Dirt that he appeared in?

Everyone: [laughs]

Bilder: You make a hard trivia game!

Gottlieb: Wait a minute…I think I know: “You Don’t Know Jack.”

GamesBeat: Correct.

Bilder: Yeah! [laughs] Good thinking!

GamesBeat: Nice job, Tom. You guys still have four hit points.

Question 4: Which two of these are not real You Don’t Know Jack products? Snack Pack, The Lost Gold, Mock 3, 5th Dementia, and Louder! Better! Funnier!

Gottlieb: The first one I’m almost positive is real.

Bilder: I’m down with you on that. Lost Gold and 5th Dementia are legit. Isn’t it “Faster! Funnier!”? Yeah, it’s “Louder! Better! Faster! Funnier!”

Gottlieb: I hosted Volume 3.

Bilder: But that’s not Mock 3. I think it’s Mock 3 and the last one….

GamesBeat: OK, here’s what we’re going to do. Marc, we’re going to force you to answer this one since we haven’t heard from you yet. Tom and Mike, you have to be quiet now.

Marc Blumer: [laughs] Uhh, I’m going to go with my initial instincts, right or wrong…with Snack Pack and the last one.

GamesBeat: Sorry. It’s Mock 3 — the real one is Mock 2. But you were right on the last one. It’s actually Louder! Faster! Funnier! You now have three hit points left.

Question 5: He sang country songs with such great titles as “Take My Drunk Ass Home,” “We Rode in Trucks,” “Drinkin’ Beer and Wastin’ Bullets,” and, of course, “You Don’t Know Jack.” Who is he?

Blumer: [completely deadpan] Luke Bryan.

Bilder: Yeah!! [laughs] He’s the bane of Marc’s existence on Twitter right now.

Blumer: Yes he is. All of my social media monitoring? People Tweet his song lyrics constantly. [laughs]

GamesBeat: So you run into that when you’re looking for “You Don’t Know Jack”?

Blumer: Yeah! And I have to go into Excel and delete like 10,000 song lyrics to get my one “You Don’t Know Jack’s got a bug!” Oh great, thank you. [laughs]

GamesBeat: Thank you guys.

Bilder: Hey, wait, did we…pass?

GamesBeat: You’re a little bit crippled, but you’re still alive. You still have three hit points left. That’s about average.

Bilder: So do we get an insult? I mean, Cookie would insult us for just getting an average score.

GamesBeat: I don’t have a team of comedy writers like you guys do….

Blumer: Well, a little crippled is how we walked in, so if we’re walking out that way, that’s not bad.

38 Studios laid off nearly 400 employees last week after it couldn’t come up with payroll, and the state of Rhode Island reneged on a deal that would have allowed the company to claim film tax credits. Schilling said in an interview with the Providence Journal newspaper that state officials went back on a deal in which the studio was going to be allowed to defer a $1.125 million payment that was due on May 1 so that it could meet its May 15 payroll.

Schilling said that statements made by Gov. Lincoln Chafee, whose predecessor approved a deal to give financial guarantees to 38 Studios in exchange for creating jobs in the state, as “devastating.” Chafee revealed, against the company’s wishes, that the launch date of the company’s biggest project had been delayed until June 2013, and he said that the state was trying to keep 38 Studios “solvent.” Within 72 hours of that statement, a game publisher pulled out of a financing deal, Schilling said.

Schilling said that one publisher was preparing to invest in a $35 million deal to finance a sequel to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, as a result of those comments. Schilling said that he could lose more than $50 million of his own money as a result of the failure of the venture. The state may be on the hook for $100 million.

We’ve covered the history of 38 Studios, which the former Boston Red Sox pitched created with his baseball riches, closely in the past few years. When THQ put its Big Huge Studios team up for sale, 38 Studios bought it. Schilling got together with Big Huge Games’ role-playing game designer Ken Rolston to refashion his game into a part of a 10,000-year history for a fantasy world conceived by fantasy novelist R.A. Salvatore and animator Todd McFarlane. At last year’s E3 press conference for Electronic Arts, Schilling got up on stage to show his passion for the project. See our video with Schilling from a year ago below.

As big as it was, Reckoning was just the warm-up for Schilling’s would-be masterpiece, Project Copernicus, a massively multiplayer online game.

Google Apps for Business has earned ISO 27001 certification, an important step that will help Google better convince enterprise customers Apps is secure enough for their needs.

“ISO 27001 is one of the most widely recognized, internationally accepted independent security standards and we have earned it for the systems, technology, processes and data centers serving Google Apps for Business,” Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security for Google Enterprise, wrote on a company blog.

The process of earning ISO 27001 took about nine months. Google’s compliance with the ISO standard was certified by Ernst & Young CertifyPoint, an ISO certification body.

“This new certification, along with our existing SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 audits and FISMA certification for Google Apps for Government, help assure our customers that Google is committed to ongoing development and maintenance of a robust Information Security Management System (ISMS) that an independent, third-party auditor will regularly audit and certify,” Feigenbaum wrote.

More details on security audits and certifications for Google Apps can be found here.

Photo credit: Google Apps for Business video

Yesterday, we brought you news of a boneheaded teenager whose house was robbed due to indiscreet photo sharing. Today, we bring you a cure for what ails her — and some of you, too.

Kicksend, the app for sharing large batches of photos and videos with small, specific groups of people, has finally launched its Android app.

With the new mobile application, you can send photos, videos, and all other kinds of files to anyone — friends, family, individuals, groups, you name it.

Perhaps best of all, the app will let you send big batches of files (for example, pics of your one-year-old’s recent birthday party), and you can create and send to lists of contacts (say, all the grandparents). Since the sending is accomplished outside of traditional social networks, it all stays private.

“Today, everyone has a camera and video-recorder in their pocket, but we all have different ideas about what we want shared publicly and when,” said Kicksend co-founder Pradeep Elankumaran in an email to VentureBeat. “Kicksend was built with the idea that we’re moving away from blast-it-out style sharing and more to a granular, quality over quantity, send to the right people for the right reasons style sharing.”

The Android app (like Kicksend’s other apps) has built-in commenting, which is also private. The Android app is totally free, no matter how many fies you send or how much bandwidth you use.

Here’s a sneak peek at the UI and some of the features:

“We’re incredibly excited to bring the magic of Kicksend to Android users,” said Kicksend co-founder Brendan Lim in a release. “For the first time, Android users have an easy way to get large batches of photos off of their phones and into the hands of friends and family.”

Kicksend already has an iPhone app and a Windows desktop app. And just a couple weeks ago, the startup relaunched its web app with a shiny new interface and made all its applications — including mobile, web, and desktop — free of charge for users.

Kicksend emerged from the bowels of Y Combinator, the esteemed Silicon Valley incubator, just last year and has offices in Mountain View. In the past 12 months, the startup has received seed funding from True Ventures, Digital Garage, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Start Fund, and Milo.com CEO Jack Abraham.

Image courtesy of Warren Goldswain, Shutterstock

Nothing gets a company’s stock price moving quite like rumors of a Facebook acquisition.

The latest beneficiary is browser maker Opera, whose shares jumped 26 percent Tuesday on the speculation that it’s in Facebook’s acquisition crosshairs, Bloomberg notes. The move brought the share prices to its highest since the company began trading in 2004.

Rumors of the deal came last week, when Pocket-Lint reported that Facebook was mulling over buying Opera in an effort to increase its presence in the browser market.

The deal, of course, made sense. As VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar noted, buying Opera would give Facebook a big competitor to mobile browsers like Safari and Google’s Android Browser. It would also help solve Facebook’s general inability to make money on mobile, seeing as how Opera actually makes money in that realm. Sounds like a perfect fit.

Opera has also been in the midst of an expansion push, adding 150 million users of month in high-growth countries. Those could be the type of metrics that would attract Facebook’s attention.

As far as pricing goes, some analysts speculate that the deal could cost Facebook $1 billion.

If you’re lucky enough to be attending Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this year, which kicks off on June 11, you can now start planning which sessions to hit.

Apple released the full schedule for WWDC 2012 attendees this morning, as well as an official app for the iPhone and iPad.

This year’s WWDC sold out just a few hours after tickets went on sale. And while we don’t expect the company to show off the iPhone 5 at the event, we will hear more about iOS 6 and the upcoming OS X Mountain Lion. Apple says there will be more than 100 sessions and labs, as well as six technical tracks: Essentials; App Services; Developer Tools; Graphics, Media and Games; Safari and the Web; and Core OS.

In addition to letting you schedule your WWDC time, the official iOS app includes a map of the Moscone West conference center, photos and daily news. And of course, keep an eye on VentureBeat for all of the breaking news coming out of WWDC.

Facebook’s rumored interest in purchasing facial recognition startup Face.com may become a reality thanks to some help from an unlikely source.

Russian-based search engine Yandex is said to be mulling the sale of its share in Face.com to the social giant, according to Russian newspaper Vedomosti (Google Translate). Yandex, along with investment firm Rhodium, invested $4.3 million in the startup for a 18.4 percent stake of Face.com and an arrangement to add Yandex’s CEO Arkady Volozh to its board of directors.

Yandex is interested in a combination of cash and Facebook stock for its stake in Face.com, according to Vedomosti’s report.

Earlier reports indicated that Facebook was willing to spend upwards of $100 million on the startup. Face.com is an Israeli-based company that specializes in facial recognition technology. VentureBeat speculated that the deal would make sense, considering how well it would fit into Facebook’s overall mobile strategy.

We’re reaching out to both Facebook and Yandex for further comment, and will update the post with any new information.

Via Gigaom; Image via Face.com

Microsoft still doesn’t have much to show for its $8.5 billion Skype acquisition — except for a lackluster Windows Phone app — but Tony Bates, the former Skype CEO and now president of Microsoft’s Skype division, has at least managed to keep his ship independent of the software giant.

“We’ve kept our identity and our autonomy,” Bates told the New York Times in an interview.

How so? He’s based out of Silicon Valley (Skype also has offices all over the world); he demanded Skype-specific ID cards for his employees, instead of Microsoft cards; and perhaps most daring, he uses a MacBook Air in his office.

Skype now has nearly 250 million users, a 26 percent jump over the past seven months, the NYT reports.

Bates’ demand for freedom is understandable — Microsoft has been known to kill innovation as it absorbs interesting products into its Borg-like corporate culture. But it’s also dangerous, since Skype’s true value to Microsoft is the promise of deep integration across all of its many services. Skype is still working on bringing its service to the Xbox 360 (though that likely won’t happen this year), and Microsoft’s business-oriented Lync product, among other Microsoft services.

It may be tough to see now, but once Microsoft and Skype figure out a way to work together, the video chat service could end up being an even more powerful and ubiquitous force in our homes. Integration in the Xbox 360 will bring Skype to the living room, and it’s already available on most smartphones and tablets. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft pushes Skype as a standalone service as well, perhaps with more Skype handsets (which could potentially be powered by Windows Phone).

Solid-state array maker GreenBytes has raised $12 million in its second round of funding, with a goal of making SSD technology more energy-efficient while still keeping up performance, the company announced this morning.

The new round shows that the conversation around solid-state drives, which are much faster than traditional hard disk drive, isn’t letting up. Just a few weeks ago, EMC paid more than $400 million for flash-memory storage company XtremIO. GreenBytes’ stated goals are slightly different from EMC’s and XtremIO, but since they are all working on SSD arrays, there is some cross-over that will lead to competition.

Bob Petrocelli, CEO and CTO of GreenBytes, explained that he expects enterprise companies to quickly replace traditional hard drives in favor of SSD technology because they will see better data performance and other benefits.

“Primary storage optimization is accelerating the viability of flash storage in the enterprise, and we expect magnetic storage will be replaced with SSD technology faster than most analysts now predict,” Petrocelli said in a statement.

The second round of funding was led by Generation Investment Management, with participation from Battery Ventures and GreenBytes management.

“The explosion in the volume of digital data, combined with the performance demands of I/O-intensive applications such as virtualization and analytics, has escalated data storage to a mission-critical level,” said Greg Wasserman, partner at Generation Investment Management, in a statement. “Legacy storage technology and data centers with tightening power and rack space budgets simply cannot keep pace with today’s demands. With its cutting-edge utilization of innovative software optimizations and solid state technology, GreenBytes has engineered a storage platform that delivers a truly impressive mix of performance and price, while simultaneously reducing the energy intensity of data.”

Photo credit: wongwean/Shutterstock

You’ll have to wait a few weeks if you had your heart set on a Pebble Blue Galaxy S III — Samsung announced this morning that the blue version of its new phone will be in limited supply for the next few weeks, as the company works out some manufacturing flaws with the color.

The news comes only a few hours after Samsung announced that it’s launching the Galaxy S III in 28 countries today, including many European and Middle Eastern countries. For now, eager buyers will have to make do with the white Galaxy S III model (which is much more attractive, in my opinion).

“Samsung’s GALAXY S III Pebble Blue version comes with a newly invented blue color and special hyperglaze material,” the company wrote in a statement to the Verge and several other sites this morning. “In order to meet the highest internal quality standards and to provide the best quality GALAXY S III to customers, a short supply of Pebble Blue version is expected in some regions in the next 2-3 weeks. Samsung is working hard to ensure that customers will get the Pebble Blue colored devices as soon as possible.”

You can catch a glimpse at the potential issue with the blue Galaxy S III in Mobile Bulgaria’s review of the phone (below), which appears splotchy beneath the rear cover. Even if you see a Pebble Blue Galaxy S III on sale in the next few weeks, I’d recommend holding off on purchasing until Samsung says it has fixed the manufacturing issue.

The Galaxy S III sports a massive 4.8-inch screen with a 720p resolution. Samsung unveiled the phone earlier this month and showed off a Siri competitor, dubbed S Voice, that will function as a digital assistant. It also has eye tracking features, to keep the screen active while you’re viewing it.

Moving to where the desktop PC market is hot, Dell is launching several new All-in-One computers for consumers today.

The new machines are targeting consumers looking for family entertainment machines that fit in a smaller, uncluttered space. These machines, which combine a monitor and computer in one flat-panel device, are increasingly popular as old-style desktops go by the wayside.

The products include the Dell XPS One 27, a 27-inch PC that is Dell’s largest All-in-One ever, the Inspiron One 23 (with a 23-inch screen), and the Inspiron One 20 (with a 20-inch screen). The devices are slim and reflect Dell’s newfound emphasis on design aesthetics. The designs are reimaginings of prior All-in-One designs that focus on energy efficiency and performance.

The 27-inch is aimed at creative users who want a big-screen experience. It has a resolution of 2560 x 1440 in full high-definition. The widescreen format works with movies, games, photos, and digital content creation. It has optional discrete graphics from Nvidia, Waves Maxx Audio 4, and Infinity-branded speakers. It has a metallic silver color housing, a single “clutter free” cord design, a wireless keyboard and mouse, and Intel’s new generation of quad-core processors.

The Inspiron models use the latest Intel processors. The XPS One 27 starts at $1,399 and is available today in Asia and in the U.S. in the coming weeks. The Inspiron models are $749 for the Inspiron One 23 and $529 for the Inspiron One 20.

Dell chose not to put touchscreens on its All-in-Ones as rival Hewlett-Packard has done with some of its models.

10gen, the startup that created the popular MongoDB open-source data application, has raised a new $42 million round of funding to improve its data-harnessing technology and build out its team.

The New York- and Palo Alto-based company generates most of its revenue by offering support, training, and consultation for MongoDB. Customers come from a wide cross-section of industries and include Foursquare, Disney, Viacom, eBay, Telefónica, and several governments across the world. The response from these customers has been tremendous, as the company has seen 50 percent quarter-over-quarter sales growth during the past five quarters.

There are quite a few similarities between 10gen and another big database startup, Cloudera, which has made a name for itself by developing and supporting open-source data platform Hadoop. However, MongoDB and Hadoop are used for different things and some customers use both data apps to help make sense of and manage their data.

“MongoDB handles real-time interactive queries, while Hadoop is used for analytics and data analysis,” 10gen President Max Schireson told VentureBeat. “MongoDB is fast and scalable on one hand and very flexible on the other.”

The major new round of funding was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from prior investors Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital, and Union
Square Ventures. The new round brings the company’s total raised to about $73 million.

“I’ve had my eye on 10gen and their amazing trajectory for several years,” said Harry Weller, general partner at New Enterprise Associates, in a statement. “They’ve solidified themselves as the dominate player in the NoSQL market and a real disrupter in the database space in general. The NoSQL market is exploding, and we see MongoDB becoming the de-facto database for both Web 2.0 companies and large enterprises.”

One other big thing the company will do with the funding is invest in new hires. The company has around 130 employees now, but Schireson said it intends to have at least 200 by the end of the year. It also plans to open an office in Sydney soon.

You can view a video outlining MongoDB below:

Photo credit: nokhoog_buchachon/Shutterstock

The London and NY-based venture, founded by serial entrepreneur Martin Warner, attacks the most time-consuming, painful part of the process: interview selection. ”There are four stages to the hiring process,” Warner told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview: finding candidates, the interview selection process, the actual interviews, and finally the HR details. “60% of the hiring life-cycle is in the interview selection process.”

Think about it: You posted the job and got slammed with 500 resumes. A 10-second glance at each has winnowed that pile down to 25: still too many to bring in for interviews, or to pre-screen via phone or Skype. How are you going to separate the wheat from the chaff?

enRecruit’s answer: Ask each candidate three questions. Get them to answer on video in 2 minutes or less. And motor through that stack of 25 applicants in less than an hour.

For the hiring manager or recruiter, it’s easy: sign in with LinkedIn and set up a job profile. Then comes the critical part: Post three questions that will help you decide who might be best for the vacancy. Tell enRecruite who you want to answer the questions, and wait for a day or two.

Applicants will get an email inviting them to submit a video response. They can record their answers — and re-record as needed. Part of the magic of enRecruit, according to Warner, is that they can do this on just about any platform: Mac, PC, iPhone, or Android mobile device.

The job seekers then submit their responses (see a sample below) and recruiters can review all videos. In addition, recruiters can share video responses internally with other staff members to get a second opinion, or to review them in a meeting.

This is the hardest part of finding job candidates, according to Warner. “It’s very time-consumptive when it’s in person. We can achieve great efficiencies through technology.”

The question that always comes up: Does using video as part of the process make it easier for hiring managers to let prejudices affect hiring? “We’re aware of the challenges,” said Warner. “Really, you have the same problems online and off.” CEO Moira Smith highlighted the fact that one of their pre-launch clients is a law firm, indicating that legally, enRecruit is handling the issue very sensitively. “Ultimately, companies are responsible for how they use the tool.”

There’s been a lot of movement in the recruitment space around video lately. VisualCV, Spark Hire and others such as InnovateCV have been promoting the idea of making your resume visual. Their largely consumer-focused strategy doesn’t worry enRecruit, which is focusing on the enterprise side of the hiring equation. A more direct competitor is New York-based startup TaketheInterview, which has already launched and is attacking the same problem from, frankly, an almost identical angle. “They’re doing something very similar to what we do, but the product isn’t there,” says Warner.

There are much larger potential competitors, of course. LinkedIn, Monster, and the other giants of job search come to mind. Warner is extremely aware of LinkedIn, but not terribly concerned. “We know their product very well. Down the road, if LinkedIn were to become more of the entire recruitment cycle, they’d have to significantly increase their features.”

The LinkedIn question, however, brings up another: Is enRecruit a feature or a platform? It certainly looks perfectly constructed to be a bolt-on addition to LinkedIn’s suite of hiring tools. And that could be a good exit for enRecruit. But when asked, Warner was coy: “Are they a legit exit? Possibly.”

Right now, however, both he and Smith are adamant that their goal is to “build something that we think will be valuable in the market and hope it scales.”

Both Warner and Smith are active angel investors. For the moment, enRecruit is privately funded, but they may be seeking a public round of financing in the next few months to accelerate growth.

Here’s a sample applicant’s video:

Photo credit: Laverrue/Flickr

Tim Cook opened the lines of communication between Apple and Washington, DC even further with a visit to the nation’s capital this past Tuesday.

Cook, who follows Steve Jobs as chief executive of Apple, is seemingly more willing to interact with the government than his predecessor. Cook spent his time in Washington quietly meeting with a number of political big wigs, including House Speak John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

According to sources cited by Fortune, the conversations didn’t touch on Apple’s product roadmap, or lawsuits against Apple, such as the Department of Justice lawsuit regarding e-book price fixing. Instead, they focused on building the Apple-Capitol Hill relationship. Indeed, one source said Cook is interested in policy making and “recognizes the role an engaged CEO can play in making a difference on those policy priorities.”

As Fortune notes, Apple spent only $500,000 on lobbying in this year’s first quarter 2011. Google, on the other hand, continued to increase lobbying efforts, spending $5.03 million in the same quarter. Google has focused on privacy and cyber security legislation, and also paid lobbying attention to the CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) bill. Indeed, Google increased its lobbying spending by 240 percent since the first quarter 2011.

via Fortune; Tim Cook image taken by Heather Kelly

Derwent Capital Markets is using Twitter to figure out where the money is going. Just like this bird

A hedge fund that analyzed tweets to figure out where to invest closed its doors last year after just one month, the Financial Times reports.

That’s not because its analysis of Twitter wasn’t working. During the one month that the $40 million Derwent Capital Markets fund was operation, it reportedly returned 1.86 percent, beating the overall market as well as the average hedge fund. The fund’s founder says that its analysis worked so well that one of the fund’s principal investors suggested making a mass-market product out of it, so as to reach a larger market instead of the handful able to invest in a hedge fund.

“As a result we made the strategic decision to close the Derwent Absolute Return fund and invest directly in developing an online trading platform,” Derwent Capital Markets founder Paul Hawtin told the Financial Times (registration required).

Derwent Capital Markets now has a one-page website that promises it will soon offer … something. With the tagline “Trading Global Sentiment,” it seems clear that the product will give customers some kind of ability to analyze social media for signals as to the market’s direction.

It’s not quite as far-fetched as it might seem. DCM’s approach is based on research done at Indiana University, published in early 2011, that found a strong correlation between sentiments expressed on Twitter and the direction of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. According to the study, “Twitter mood predicts the stock market” (PDF), Twitter sentiment correlates with the ups and downs of the next few days on the DJIA with 87 percent accuracy (registration required).

A separate study at Pace University in 2011 found that social media could predict the ups and downs of stock prices for three global brands, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and Nike. And sentiment analysis has become an indispensible part of marketers’ toolkits, thanks to companies like Radian6 and Webtrends.

Via TheNextWeb

Photo: striatic/Flickr

Flattr, a “micro-payments” company that lets you donate to your favorite applications, blogs, and websites, says Apple is rejecting apps that use the service because it can’t take its usual 30 percent cut of the donation.

Flattr lets you support an app, website, or service by donating an amount of your choice through the micro-payments system. The donation is done by loading a lump sum of cash onto your Flattr account, then choosing which websites and apps you want to donate to by clicking the “Flattr” button. Flattr remembers each site you’ve bookmarked for a donation and makes the transaction at the end of the month.

Recently, Apple removed Instacast, an app that aggregates your favorite podcasts, from the app store for using Flattr. The company cited wording in its App Store Guidelines that payments need to be made using an SMS message or be completed in Safari, Apple’s mobile browser.

“We understand that directing your user outside of your app may not be the user experience you prefer to offer your users. However it is a common experience in a variety of iOS apps,” Apple told Instacast.

Given the nature of Flattr, and there not being a direct transaction made the moment someone pushes the “Flattr” button, the company tried to explain that this was an unnecessary extra step. Apple, which reserves the right to pull any app it wants from its app store, wouldn’t change its position.

Flattr says it is working to figure out a way to appease Apple and is testing new theories through its own iOS app. The company also says that Martin Hering, the head of Vemedio, Instacast’s parent company, will be bringing the Flattr issue up at Apple’s developer conference, WWDC, this June.

hat tip The Next Web, Getting the boot image via Shutterstock

The world now has access to a list of words and phrases that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security uses to monitor social networks and news article comments for terrorism and general threats against the country.

The list was part of a 39-page “2011 Analyst’s Desktop Binder” document that was released due to a Freedom of Information Act request by privacy watchdog organization Electronic Privacy Information Center. The list contains references to all the related governmental agencies, obvious references to threats (attack, nuclear threat, etc.) and then some pretty generic words like pork, cloud, electric, port, dock, and many others.

The overall report is interesting because it sheds some light on how these security agencies are trained to track potential threats online, but it does raise more than a few questions. For instance, why is Homeland Security tracking many vague terms, and what do they do with this information once its been identified as a possible threat?

The department claims that the practice is simply to monitor activity and not to track anti-U.S. comments made by individuals — a practice currently employed by the governments of Iran and Syria.

The FBI is also getting into the business of crawling social media sites for possible threats against the country with a new tool, as VentureBeat reported back in January.

We’ve embedded the Homeland Security Department’s document below for further inspection. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Via Daily Mail; Image via Andrea Danti/ Shutterstock

Today, an Australian teenage girl’s indiscreet Facebook post led to a break-in and robbery at her mother’s home.

The girl, 17, had been helping her grandmother count the 72-year-old woman’s personal savings. Apparently wishing to impress her friends and the world at large, the teen snapped a picture of the cash and uploaded it to Facebook.

Within hours, masked robbers showed up at the girl’s own house with a knife and a club, breaking in and stealing cash and personal possessions from the teen’s 47-year-old mother.

Local police issued a general warning to Facebook and other social network users that they shouldn’t be total nimrods about what they post and who they make their posts visible to. The teen’s home address was listed publicly on her Facebook profile; fortunately, the robbers didn’t have the grandmother’s location.

Cops have asked citizens to “be cautious” when using social media. We would add to that subdued note: “Use the sense God gave a horse and don’t share your location, or anyone else’s, publicly on the Internet. Ever.”

We’ve already given our perspective on why public checkins are a pretty bad idea, especially for more vulnerable demographic groups such as young women flying solo. But location-sharing isn’t limited to checkins. The same provisos should apply to sharing your location publicly via location-tagging for images on Twitter or adding your address to your Facebook profile.

The teen in this cautionary tale didn’t only endanger herself and potentially her elderly grandmother; she also put her mother directly in harm’s way.

Facebook takes a lot of heat for its stance on privacy, but all thing considered, the network is a relatively neutral sharing platform that will let you expose as much or as little information as you want — up to and including residential addresses. Ultimately, our privacy is up to us, and if this one young lady’s behavior is any indicator, we still don’t have a clue about how to cover our own butts on the Internet.

Image courtesy of Couperfield, Shutterstock