The Beta News

This just in: European Xing has bought American Socialmedian!

I’m so proud. It doesn’t happen very often that a European company buys an American. This will definitely help the European social network, Xing expand their business in Europe and the rest of the world.

To Jason Goldberg: Welcome to Europe. I think you’ll find Hamburg a plesant surprise. Remember to go to AOL Arena and see some German soccer (football). They have a great atmosphere there.

The official press release:

I am thrilled to announce that socialmedian is being acquired by XING of Hamburg, Germany.

This is great news for socialmedian’s members as XING is committed to growing and developing socialmedian both as a standalone service as well launching integrated socialmedian services on XING, one of the leading online business networks in the world.

The entire socialmedian team will be joining XING as part of the acquisition.  I will be relocating to Hamburg, where I will lead up a major new initiative for XING, the XING Application Platform.  In this new role, in addition to strengthening and enhancing the socialmedian service, I will also be responsible for managing global partnerships for application developers and content providers to connect with the XING network.

This is an awesome development for socialmedian.

socialmedian delivers the news, filtered by your network.  XING is one of the leading global online networks and is rapidly growing around the world with nearly 7 million members, up from 4.8 million in 2007.  Together, socialmedian & XING will connect people with the people, information, and resources they need to get their jobs done, follow their interests, and pursue their passions.

More details immediately below.

• Here’s a link to the official press release
• Here’s a link to XING’s blog post by XING CEO Lars Hinrichs announcing the deal.

XING AG purchases socialmedian Inc.

• Transaction enables a  technological jump on integrating business news into Europe’s leading business network
• Socialmedian CEO Jason Goldberg joins XING in Hamburg, Germany in the newly created position of Vice President XING Applications Platform
• The company will launch integrated products in 2009

Hamburg / New York, December 19, 2008. The publicly listed XING AG (O1BC / ISIN DE000XNG888) announces today it has purchased New York-based socialmedian Inc., a leading innovator in the social news industry. The socialmedian solution enables people to get the news filtered by their social networks.  Socialmedian debuted in 2008 and has rapidly grown a highly engaged user-base.  Socialmedian is thus a natural fit with XING, a leading global online social network for professionals. Socialmedian’s founder and CEO, Jason Goldberg, will join XING in Hamburg, Germany in the newly created position of Vice President XING Applications Platform.

“XING is a uniquely active and innovative platform in business networking, offering real value for its members on a global scale. Combining XING with socialmedian’s next generation social news technology offers great potential to deliver highly engaging content and services to business professionals worldwide,” said Jason Goldberg. In the new role of VP XING Applications Platform, Goldberg will be responsible for managing global partnerships for application developers and content providers to connect with the XING network.

Success in business depends on access to the right information at the right time. The rise of the Internet has increased both the speed of information and the sheer volume of data. In addition to traditional media companies, social media such as blogs, tweets, videos and other user-generated websites now provide daily news, leading to a veritable flood of information. Time-strapped professionals are left to parse through numerous news sources for relevant information and sort, organize, and share stories on their own. socialmedian does this for you, gathering information from about 19,000 sources, including social services such as Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Google Reader, FriendFeed, the international blogosphere, and industry and online media sources, and then filtering your news through your social networking contacts. Thus enabling people to get the news they need to know for their jobs, their interests, and their passions through the people in their networks.

Over 6.5 million business professionals, managers, and experts use XING to keep track of information and updates in their professional network. Working with socialmedian, XING plans to launch several new innovations, including offering XING members custom filtered news.  “We want to offer our members the greatest value in their networks, and this includes having the relevant news at their fingertips. Now we have the technology necessary to do so. We’re also excited to have someone like Jason working with us to develop the XING ecosystem of partnerships with leading companies around the world,” said Lars Hinrichs, CEO and founder of XING AG.

XING will continue to grow and enhance socialmedian as a standalone service. There will be no interruption for socialmedian users.

About socialmedian:
Socialmedian delivers the news, filtered by your network. socialmedian’s mission is to help people discover the news and information they need to succeed at their jobs, pursue their passions and stay informed about the world around them.  Since launching in August, socialmedian users have created more than 2500 topical news networks, ranging from iPhone to campaign 2008 to the global financial crisis, aggregating newsfeeds and user feeds from more than 19.000 sources with 800 new stories added every minute. The NY-based company was founded by former Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg and is currently backed by Washingtonpost. Newsweek Interactive and leading angel investors including Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Reed Hundt, former FCC Chairman and Allen Morgan of the Mayfield Fund. For more information, please visit www.socialmedian.com.

About XING
XING is the leading network for business contacts in Europe. Far more than a directory of business contacts, XING makes your professional network an active part of your life, enabling members to discover professional people, opportunities and privileges through its unique discovery capability and advanced contact management tools. With the successful IPO of XING as the first Web 2.0 company to go public, XING AG has had a long-term impact on the social networking trend amongst professionals. By focusing on the target group ‘business people worldwide’, the company is able to offer tailored features, thereby making networking and contact management simpler. Besides Headquarters in Hamburg, XING AG is also represented with offices in Barcelona, Istanbul and Beijing.
XING. Powering Relationships.

Again congratulations Xing!

It’s always difficult to predict things, especially the future, and even more the future of the internet.

That was also my first thought when I read report from Pew Research Center, The future of the Internet III. The third report is just released and this one is based on a survey of, how the internet will be in 2020. They’ve asked 1,196 people.

If you feel like chewing through the 138 pages The future of the Internet III report you are more than welcome to.

If you are a bit lazy, I’ve collected the important conclusions below:

1. The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
2. The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
3. Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
4. Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
5. The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
6. Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

The list is a strange combination of tech predictions and predictions of more sociological and political future scenarios.

Most discussions are often centered around tech predictions and seldom about future political scenarios. Is the technological progress also progress for mankind?

Those that have a cell phone and a laptop often works more and longer. You are always connected, so wouldn’t you fear that we would crash at some point if we keep this up?

Read paragraph #2 again please.

Will the technological progress in the next decade also create a better world when it comes to personal integrity, social tolerance and forgiveness?

What do you think?

The theme I’m currently using is from WooThemes it’s called Fresh News. It’s probably the best theme I’ve ever owned and tried.

The support is great, it’s easy to set-up and customise and according to experts (Thank you Dan) it’s validated and everything is peachy.

This Halloween they had a sale, buy 1 theme and get 2 for free. Unfortunately I missed it, because I was on my way home from the States. Luckily WooTheme now have an even better offer. You can buy 1 theme and get 3 free themes.

It’s a $210 discount if you buy single licenses and $450 discount for developer licenses!

The offer runs from December 17 (midnight GMT) until December 24.

* Buy a Single License for $70 USD and get any 3 other themes (on Single Licenses) of your choice; or
* Buy a Developer License for $150 USD and get any 3 other themes (on Developer Licenses) of your choice.

It’s difficult to pick four themes, they are all so damn good, but I think I’ll buy Abstract, Busy Bee and Snapshot. I’m not sure, which one I should pick as the fourth one, but let me know if you have any ideas.

You can see the entire Wordpress theme portfolio here.

(Disclaimer: This is not a paid post, I’m writing this because I honestly think this is a great offer. I am an affiliate though, so I’ll earn $14 if you decide to buy a theme)

Do you miss Pee Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special? Or perhaps The Smurf’s Christmas Special? Or Alf’s? How about the Cabbage Patch Kids commercials?

Fear not. You can see all the christmas specials from 1988 in the comfort of your own basement or you can get close to.

A BeTaMaXMaS does exactly that. You have three channels to choose from and if the reception isn’t good, you simply adjust the antennas.

Remember to check out the TV Guide too. Just like real television, there are commercials and programs all day. So if you want to see Married With Children Christmas Collection, tune in at 2:19 PM (I think it’s your local time even).

Have yourself a very betamaxmas and watch some classic christmas specials.

I was “lucky” enough to get a beta invite to Google Friend Connect and like any good blogger I never turn Google down. Nobody wants to get in bad standing with Google.

So now I’ve installed it so please join this site, which is now in the same league as The Inquistr, Louis Gray, Mashable, WinExtra and TechCrunch (They use Facebook Connect).

The installation went very smoothly. I uploaded two files to my server and add a link to a text widget BAM! it was up and running.

I’ll be completely honest though. I’m not sure what I can do with it yet, but I guess something viral and important will happen very soon. I’ll take a look at the few gadgets available at the moment and decide which one adds value.

What do you think about it? Will you join my site? Perhaps even add it to your own blog?

My dear faithful readers. I’m terribly sorry about the recent trouble on The Beta News.

I did an update a few days ago, unfortunately it messed up my .htaccess file. I’ve fixed that and everything is back to normal again.

Well it is until I hit the “Update” button and update this blog to Wordpress 2.7.

I’ll see you on the other side.

I’ve just downloaded Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Beta from TechNet Plus. I was a bit surprised to see Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 Beta in the same pack.

I didn’t even know there was a Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 1?! Why yes there is. It’s already built into Windows Server 2008. Pretty clever huh?!

You can read the most notable changes in Windows Server 2008 SP2 Beta and Windows Vista SP2 Beta here.

Now the question remains. Should I install Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Beta on my work laptop?

Would you dare install it on your “production” PC?

Speaking of Windows. According to ZDNet we could expect Windows 7 Beta 1 in January.

YouTube has silently just “updated” the embedded videos with a very ugly search bar. It’s there until you click play and will reappear for a few seconds every your cursor is near the top of the video.

If you pause a video it will also reappear.

I know I know, this will help YouTube (Google) get even more user data and probably help them target ads even more.

To me it looks more like a piece of malware has infected my PC/Mac and added this terrible search bar to my videos.

YouTube please remove it or I’ll find another service to host my videos. (Yes, that quite a threat I know). Viddler, Vimeo, Blip and a few more are very interested in my many videos and they will give me a free T-shirt if I let them host my videos.

What do you think? Do you like the search bar or is it annoying?

Update: You can remove the search bar by adding this “&showsearch=0? to the URL. Google Code has released this information concerning the search bar.

Earlier today I wrote an email to Duncan Riley at The Inquisitr explaining the story about Stein Bagger, IT Factory and how he is wanted by Interpol and the Danish police for fraud worth $130+ million.

Unfortunately I didn’t hear from Duncan and I guessed he wasn’t interested in the story, so I contacted Techcrunch explaining it to them.

10 mins. later Michael Arrington wrote back to me, asking for more information about the story.

Robin Wauters from Techcrunch then wrote the post on TechCrunch. I’m proud to see that my tip has already gotten 27+ comments.

Though it didn’t give me any kind of link love or mentioning, I know deep (deep deep) inside me, that I contributed to a story that made it to TechCrunch.

You can read the story about IT Factory so far on TechCrunch.

Apple has just released iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPod Touch firmware 2.2. The software update contains many of the much anticipated changes including Google Street View, public transit and walking directions, and over-the-air podcast downloads via the iTunes app.

The update also includes numerous fixes including added stability in Safari and fixes for Mail.

Several blogs (including Gizmodo and Macblogz) expected the tethering option to be feature as well. The release notes doesn’t mention it though, so I doubt it’s an option.

This is the official release notes:

iPhone 2.2 Software Update
This update contains many bug fixes and improvements, including the following:
• Enhancements to Maps
- Google Street View
- public transit and walking directions
- display address of dropped pins
- share location via email
• Enhancements to Mail
- resolved isolated issues with scheduled fetching
of email
- improved formatting of wide HTML email
• Improved stability and performance of Safari
• Podcasts are now available for download in iTunes
application (over Wi-Fi and cellular network)
• Decrease in call set-up failures and call drops
• Improved sound quality of visual voicemail messages
• Pressing the Home button from any Home screen takes
you to the first Home screen
• Preference to turn on/off auto-correction in Keyboard
Settings

Products compatible with this software update:
• iPhone
• iPhone 3G

The update also upgrades iPhone 3G’s modem firmware (baseband). According to iPhone Dev Team you should NOT upgrade your iPhone 3G to 2.2. This will remove the unlock on your iPhone.

If your iPhone or iPhone 3G is jailbreaked, you should seriously reconsider upgrading too. The upgrade will remove the jailbreak feature. If the jailbreak doesn’t matter to you, you can safely upgrade your 1st generation iPhone.

If you plan on using the soft unlock from iPhone Dev Team for iPhone 3G when it’s released in the very near future, don’t update either.

Update: iPhone Dev Team has just written a post recommending those that want to soft unlock NOT to upgrade their iPhone 3G. The post also explains why you shouldn’t update.

Bonus info:
Tethering in cellular wireless is the connection of a non-mobile device (e.g. desktop computer, notebook computer, laptop computer), to a mobile device (e.g. cell phone, PDA) for the purpose of wireless Internet access by the non-mobile “tethered” device.

Thank you Wikipedia