Here’s an interesting development in the ongoing data-privacy imbroglio over at Bloomberg LP. The company just named former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano as an independent adviser with the task of reviewing and recommending changes on privacy and data policies.

The move is meant to regain the trust of Bloomberg’s terminal clients, like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs. They’re understandably perturbed by revelations that reporters at Bloomberg News used a function that tracks how recently a client has logged in as a way of generating story leads about personnel changes.

Palmisano, Bloomberg said in a statement, will “immediately undertake a review of the company’s current practices and policies for client data and end user information, including a review of access issues recently raised by the company’s clients.” He’ll report directly to the company’s board of directors. Helping him will be the Hogan Lovells law firm and the Promontory Financial Group.

One wonders if part of the job will be to conduct a full audit of how many reporters used the controversial “Z-function” to view client activity, how often it was used, and what the result was, specifically if its use led to stories that were published. As I wrote earlier this week, that data probably exists, because Bloomberg has always been a big data company with a knack for keeping track of what its reporters do. And if there is an audit, will its results be publicly disclosed?

The function in question showed two bits of data that have made Bloomberg clients — essentially the who’s who of Wall Street and the financial industry in general — a little queasy. First, it reveals the last time a person logged in to his or her terminal. Reporters would sometimes use that to start asking questions about whether or not someone had left a given firm, and if they had, write a story about it.

The other thing it was said to show is how often a client used a given function, though not in such granular detail that you could see what stocks or bonds were being researched. But again, it’s the sort of thing that might lead to questions that wouldn’t otherwise be asked, and eventually to stories that wouldn’t otherwise have been written.

Bloomberg also named its editor at large, Clark Hoyt, a former public editor at the New York Times, to review the relationship between Bloomberg’s commercial operations and its news operations.

(Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, I should remind you that for about a year during 2009-2010, I was an employee of Bloomberg News after the company bought BusinessWeek magazine from the McGraw-Hill Companies and relaunched it as Bloomberg Businessweek.)

Just a couple years ago, nobody thought much about wearing computers on their faces. But soon there will be actual differentiation among the competition: Google Glass offers an interface for searching and taking photos without pulling out a smartphone; Oculus Rift is much more immersive, blocking out reality to allow users to see themselves inside a game; Recon Instruments makes goggles (and coming soon, sunglasses) to help skiers and bikers track their activities.

For now, there’s no reason to worry about surreptitious Meta usage in bars and locker rooms.

The latest is Meta, an immersive 3-D headset layered on top of the real world. Meta wearers can interact with virtual games, architectural renderings and other 3-D objects by using their hands. The device captures gestures with an outward-facing camera (similar to Kinect or Leap Motion).

Meta launches on Kickstarter today, and is also announcing that it will be participating in the next Y Combinator batch out in Mountain View, Calif. Backers who commit $750 will be promised an early version to be shipped in September of this year.

Meta is a young company developed primarily by a Columbia University undergrad student and his adviser, with 12 more employees recently hired. But it already has a software partnership with widely used 3-D game-engine maker Unity Technology, and a hardware partnership with Epson, and it aims to get devices to buyers this year.

Meta will support the popular Unity 3-D software, so other developers will be able to build applications in an environment where they’re already comfortable. A developer kit is available today.

A Meta rendering shows a wearer adjusting 3-D landscaping in front of a virtual building.

If Google Glass brings your phone to your face, Meta aims to bring the computing power of a PC to your face, said Meta founder and CEO Meron Gribetz. “Before you can have the phone, you should have the PC,” he argued.

The “meta1” is not pretty; it definitely looks like a camera mounted to giant wraparound stereoscopic glasses. But it does seem like it’s at least close to working. Yesterday, I briefly tried a demo version that was tethered to Gribetz’s laptop, and there seemed to be minimal latency between me wiggling my fingers and moving my hands farther and closer to interact with the virtual spaceships and hovering balls I was seeing.

Gribetz said he is launching the Kickstarter campaign primarily to build awareness of the device, so he set his goal at a relatively low $100,000 in order to sell a few hundred or a thousand of them.

A term called gamification has taken UX by storm over the past few years, a trend likely spurred by Foursquare's success with badges. Whether they understand it or not, app designers desire to create a gamified experience, a supposedly sure route to the elusive engagement that makes free apps valuable. Even in the news business there is a hunger for gamification.

SEE ALSO: Engagement: The Big Word That Means Very Little

For those unfamiliar, gamification has little to do with game design.

Also weird to see my book called "the bible of gamification".... that word appears exactly 0 times in the book. Game design /= gamification

— Jane McGonigal (@avantgame) May 2, 2013 Read more...

Mr. Cook is going to Washington.

Apple CEO Tim Cook will testify before Congress Tuesday about the company's approximately $100 billion held overseas — more than double the estimated $45 billion it keeps in the U.S.

Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chairman Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) wants to grill Cook on Apple's offshore accounts and on the general phenomenon of offshoring. However, Cook has revealed in several pre-hearing interviews that he'll use the opportunity to offer Congress a plan simplifying the U.S. corporate tax code.

"If you look at it today, to repatriate cash to the U.S., you need to pay 35% of that cash. And that is a very high number," Cook told the Washington Post. "We are not proposing that it be zero. I know many of our peers believe that. But I don’t view that. But I think it has to be reasonable." Read more...

For weeks, Anne-Marie Baiynd kept a close eye on shares of Tesla Motors Inc.

On May 9, a day after the company posted its first-ever quarterly profit, the stock exploded higher in heavy trading. Ms. Baiynd, a full-time short-term trader since 2006, pounced. From her home office in Charlotte, N.C., the 48-year-old says she scooped up shares at $67.15 and sold them on Monday for a 31 percent gain.

The very next day, Ms. Baiynd changed tack, she says, successfully betting Tesla would head lower on a day when the shares finished down 14 percent from their intraday high.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The original Sonic the Hedgehog is now available for Android through Google Play.

Sega released the port, which has been modified for touch controls, to Android Thursday. Along with all the original Sonic the Hedgehog goodness, players will also be able to unlock Tails and Knuckles, characters that originally appeared in later Sonic the Hedgehog games.

This Sonic port was previously released for iOS and already received the free update with Tails and Knuckles.

SEE ALSO: 10 Great Android Multiplayer Games

Sonic the Hedgehog was originally released for the Sega Genesis in 1991, making the franchise more than 20 years old. Sonic has appeared in dozens of games since then. Read more...

The U.S. Department of Defense has officially approved Apple’s iPhones and iPads for use on its networks, as expected. In an announcement issued Friday morning, the agency said it has certified iOS devices running iOS 6, granting them the same security approvals it issued to BlackBerry and Samsung last week. A crucial endorsement, and one that should open the door to lucrative contracts from customers in highly regulated industries like health care and finance.

You can now add the Financial Times to the steadily growing list of media organizations that have been attacked by the band of a digital pranksters known as the Syrian Electronic Army.

The London-based financial newspaper (and competitor to The Wall Street Journal, which, like this website, is owned by News Corp.) saw both its main website and several Twitter accounts attacked, according to a report by another British newspaper, the Telegraph.

As of 10:30 am ET, Twitter accounts belonging to the FT’s Lex column, its tech news section and a few others were all suspended.

But this attack was a little different from the more recent moves by the pro-Assad group. Lately, they’ve stuck to attacking the Twitter accounts of Western media organizations including CBS, the BBC, the Guardian and the Onion. This time, they actually attacked the main website, as well, and left headlines announcing that they had visited.

Zach Seward of Quartz.com nabbed a screenshot, which he shared on Twitter:

#bbpBox_335364985276465152 a { text-decoration:none; color:#0084B4; }#bbpBox_335364985276465152 a:hover { text-decoration:underline; } Syrian Electronic Army appears to have hacked the Financial Times tech blog http://t.co/M2RAVhgDP3 @fttechnews http://t.co/A3r2JVuZWm about 3 hours ago via webReplyRetweetFavorite @zseward Zach Seward

Welcome to this morning's edition of "First To Know," a series in which we keep you in the know on what's happening in the digital world.

Today, we're looking at three particularly interesting storiesGoogle is rolling out some fresh apps for Glass. The company announced Thursday at I/O, Glass will soon get a handful of new featuresAndroid 4.3 is reportedly set to show up in the wild next month. And Yahoo is reportedly ready to “do a deal” with Tumblr.

Check out the video above for more on these stories.

Image courtesy of Google Read more...

Add the Financial Times to the list of publications who have been compromised in recent months by an anonymous hacker collective calling itself the "Syrian Electronic Army."

One FT blog and multiple social media accounts were hacked into on Friday morning, a spokeswoman for the FT confirmed to Mashable. On the FT.com blogs page, the headlines of some recent posts read, "Tech blog: Hacked By Syrian Electronic Army," according to screenshots obtained by The Telegraph. The group also posted the message, "Syrian Electronic Army Was Here," to various FT Twitter accounts, including @FTMarkets and @thelexcolumn. Read more...

Google took home the Advertiser of the Year trophy this week during the 54th annual Clio Awards — the Oscars for advertising professionals — on the strength of ad campaigns for such projects as Build with Chrome, 100,000 Stars, Re:Brief, Google Display and Google Fiber.

You've seen the ads (if you haven't, check them out below), but how does Google ensure they stand out in the ever so crowded world of advertising?

SEE ALSO: Google Uses Dracula to Hype New 'All Access' Music Service

"Always start with rabid empathy and always strive for radical simplicity," Robert Wong, chief creative officer of Google Creative Lab, told Mashable after accepting the award at Wednesday's ceremony in New York City's American Museum of Natural History Read more...

It’s easy to argue against a Yahoo-Tumblr deal. Internet history is full of misguided M&A, and Yahoo has its own, very expensive chapter.

But if you want to make the pro case for the deal, here’s how to do it: Pretend that Yahoo is Facebook, and Tumblr is Instagram.

The Facebook/Instagram deal is just over a year old, which means it’s still pretty early to gauge it. But so far it seems to have worked perfectly.

Facebook promised that Instagram would operate autonomously after the acquisition, and from the outside, it appears to have kept that promise. People who read sites like this when know the two companies are linked, but lots of other people don’t, which is a huge plus for Instagram. (See: parents who won’t let their kids use Facebook, but are ok with Instagram. For giggles, tell them the two are owned by the same company, and watch their face turn ashen.)

And we’ve yet to see Instagram clutter up with lots of ads – or any ads at all. Result: The app is still growing like a weed, which helps mollify critics who worry about Facebook’s inevitable slowdown.

So that sounds like a pretty good model, right? Can Yahoo do the same thing with Tumblr?

Maybe. Tumblr is a much more mature company than Instagram, with a much bigger infrastucture. Kevin Systrom had about a dozen employees when he sold his company.  After keeping his staff super lean for many years, David Karp has been on a hiring spree, and Tumblr’s headcount is on track to hit something like 200 this year, with its own sales staff. So it will be harder to just tuck that away in the Yahoo org chart.

The crucial difference between the two scenarios, though, has less to do with the seller than the buyer.

Facebook bought Instagram because Mark Zuckerberg wanted to remove an obstacle. If Marissa Mayer buys Tumblr, it’s because she’ll be looking for a boost.

That makes it much less likely that she’ll be able to resist leaving Tumblr alone, and letting it figure out how to sell ads. Zuckerberg can drop a billion (or so) on Instagram, leave it unmonetized for a year, and Wall Street shrugs. Hard to imagine investors reacting the same way to this one.

Look out Facebook! Hours spent participating per member dropping seriously. First really bad sign as seen by crappy MySpace years ago.

– Rupert Murdoch, still steamed about that whole MySpace thing, tweets a warning to Facebook

Just think about how much smarter you'll be after watching this week's episode of Reddit Facts. In it, we'll learn about exploding pistachios, panda poop and Ryan Gosling's failure to become a Backstreet Boy.

Don't forget to subscribe to Mashable's YouTube channel for more fun shows, reviews, interviews and cats.

If you're at work and can't watch our show, you can find links to the facts below.

RYAN GOSLING COULD HAVE BEEN A BACKSTREET BOY: [Reddit] [Source]

867-5309 SOLD FOR $190K: [Reddit] [Source]

RUSSIAN BEARS ADDICTED TO JET FUEL: [Reddit] [Source]

EXPLODING PISTACHIOS: [Reddit] [Source] Read more...

Google Glass makes it easy for wearers to surreptitiously take pictures or video of unknowing subjects. That's caused more than a few people to ask: What does Glass mean for our privacy? Now Congress, too, wants answers.

Eight members of Congress' bi-partisan privacy caucus sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page Thursday seeking answers about Glass' privacy implications:

• Will Glass collect users' data without their consent?

• What steps are being taken to protect non-users' privacy?

• Will Glass offer facial recognition to identify non-users and display information about them?

• What restrictions is Google placing on Glass and Glass apps?

• Will Google Glass cause Google to change its privacy policy?

• Will Glass store data on the device, and will it offer user authentication? Read more...