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Anonymous Is Building A New Social Music Platform

The RIAA and the hacktivist group Anonymous has been at odds for a while. Anonymous and coherts LulzSec went after most of the major record labels in 2011 getting usernames, email addresses and more and doing data dumps all over the place.

The new service called Anontune is still in the early stages of development. The system is designed to pull songs from third party sites like Youtube and then users can put them into their own playlists and share them. They plan to do all of this and all the while keep the service from getting shut down by the music industry, reports wired.

“We would say stuff like, ‘People really use YouTube as a music player yet it really sucks for that purpose … it’s too unorganized,’” the anon wrote to Wired. “And then, ‘YouTube does make a good music player but you can’t play all your songs on it since the obscure ones aren’t uploaded,’ then eventually, ‘Hmmm, what if you were to combine music websites like Myspace, Yahoo, YouTube and others?’”

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Not Anonymous This Time: 15 Year Old Austrian Boy Arrested For Hacking 259 Businesses

Austrian officials admit they are still investigating and totaling up the damage however as it stands 15-year-old who goes by the hacker handle ACK!3STX has been arrested, and so far charged with hacking over 259 businesses.

The damage includes stealing data from businesses and publicly posting it, defacing company websites, and of course breaking security infrastructures. There was no specific target. The young hacker hacked everything sports sites, travel sites, tourism sites, adult sites and more, reports ZDNet.

The Austria Federal Criminal Police Office reported that as soon as the boy was questioned he admitted to the attacks. All of the hacking happened between January of 2012 and March of 2012. He said he was bored and wanted to prove himself, and proving himself is exactly what he did. He found a hacker forum that gave points for successful hacks, after three months he was in the top 50 out of 2,000 hackers registered on the forum.

At some point the young man either forgot to use anonymizing software or his anonymizing software failed him and his IP address was traced back to his residence in Lower Austria. From there authorities were able to get a search warrant and track him down.

The investigation is on going and its also been reported that Europol is trying to determine the number of attacks in both Austria and abroad. The hacker’s real name was withheld because of his age.

source: ZD Net
image courtesy of ZDNet via Sebastian Gruber

And Now Electronic Arts To Lay Off 500

Electronic Arts was just recently voted the worst company in America by the users at consumerist.com. They actually beat out Bank of America and Walmart. Well there woes haven’t stopped there as Monday it was reported that the gaming giant could lay off as many as 500 people.

Startup Grind’s Derek Anderson is reporting that Electronic Arts could lay off between 500-1000 people as soon as this week.

CNet is reporting that this news may not come as surprising considering EA recently had a horrible Q4 which is a crucial time for video game companies. Q4 includes holiday shopping which is supposed to be the best time of the year for video game sales. 2011, not so much for EA as they reported a $205 million dollar loss in Q4 2011.

Q3 2011 was actually worse as EA saw a $340 million dollar loss.

EA was harshly criticized for the lackluster ending of their game Mass Effect 3. Die hard gamers were expecting much more out of the franchise hit. CNet reports that EA was accused of disrespecting gamers for the horrible ending to Mass Effect 3. In fact it was so bad that EA announced that they would release a free “Extended Cut” for those that bought the original version.

To top all this off EA is under-performing with investors as well. Shares of EA stock are down 21.5% to $16.18 In the past five years EA stock has lost 70 percent of it’s value. They aren’t the super sports franchise company we used to know and love.

source: CNet

Chicago Startups Yield $160M In Q1 From Funding To Acquisition: What’s This Midwest Mentality?

Whoever said Chicago didn’t have a thriving tech scene may need to crawl out from under their own angels and actually look at the facts. Builtinchicago.com has just released the Q1 numbers and they are mighty impressive for a town with no startup culture and entrepreneurs who are at home by 5:00pm.

According to the latest data from builtinchicago, 32 new startups were launched in Q1 2012. 17 startups saw funding to the beat of $33 million dollars and there were 12 acquisitions for a total of $127 million dollars. If you put your basic arithmetic hats on you’ll see that Chicago startups (and just the ones builtinchicago.com reports on) yielded $160 million dollars in funding and acquisitions.

Ageology, gtrot, Band Digital, Hireology, BodyShopBids, Kauzu, Buzz Referrals, Lab 42, CareShare, MediaFly, Channel IQ, Retrofit, Eved, Tap.me, Fippex, Univa and Vmock all saw some kind of funding in the first quarter of 2012.

Cellit, ClearTrial, Pointbridge, PrepMe, FeeFighters, RegistryPro, Intelli, RoundArch, ki edit + design, Savid Tech, MobManager, and Quiet FDN all saw exits through acquisition.

data from builtinchicago.com

LulzSec Chief Snitch Sabu Skips Court Date

By now you probably know that the most infamous member of hacktivist group LulzSec isn’t the least bit anonymous any longer. That’s because Sabu, who’s real name is Hector Xavier Monsegur, was arrested last summer and immediately flipped on the rest of his coherts. This was a betrayal of epic proportions, the kind that leaves mafia bodies in the Hudson River.

Monsegur was facing well over a century in prison for hacker related charges ranging from attacks on financial institutions, movie and production companies and government agencies. While no one has the details on the deal Monsegur has made with authorities, it’s definitely worth some kind of reduction in sentence. The blogsphere reported when Sabu’s snitching was discovered, that he was doing it because he couldn’t stand to be away from his kids. Instead now, five of his accomplices will probably end up spending lots of time away from their families.

Earlier this week Monesgur was due for a court appearance. That particular court appearance actually resulted in the dropping of an “impersonation” charge. At one time Monsegur had been arrested and identified himself to police as a federal agent. Whoops. The judge hearing Monsegur’s cases dismissed that charge, presumably to make room for the meat and potatoes of his case.

That’s all well and good except Monsegur wasn’t in court to hear the charges dropped. He apparently didn’t totally skip as his lawyers said he didn’t show up for fear of his safety and that seems to be ok with the judge.

At this point we’re hearing from betabeat and others that Monsegur may cost the tax payers even more as they are considering witness protection.

source: BetaBeat

Amazon Now Accepting CD Trade-ins

Amazon has been recycling electronics and giving customers Amazon gift cards for a while now. They recently announced they are going to start taking CDs on trade in. While this news is met with excitement for many, those who use small local CD shops to buy, sell and trade CDs may be a little put off by it.

Personally I’ve traded or sold CDs at the regional chain Edward McKay’s in North Carolina and at the Sound Garden in Baltimore’s Fells Point. Both stores provide more than just money for CD’s you get the eclectic feeling of trading up for CDs that you really want, or want to try. The other advantage to the local store vs Amazon is the fact that most local record shops will give you straight up cash for your CDs rather than a gift card or store credit (if you want it).

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Technically Philly Expanding To Cover Baltimore

One thing that Cameron and I have noticed on the road covering startups “Everywhere Else” is that there are some really great locally focused websites out there (and some really horrible ones). Sites like inthecapital.com (covering Washington DC’s thriving tech scene), Builtinchicago (covering Chicago’s Tech Scene), Silicon Prairie, TechCocktail and Technically Philly do a great job of keeping the tech community in their target areas in focus.

Technically Philly is expanding this summer. They let their readers know in this blog post that they plan on soft launching Technically Baltimore.com later this summer with the help of Baltimore entrepreneur and startup evangelist Mike Brenner. Brenner maintains the startupbaltimore.org site and will be instrumental in Technically Baltimore’d launch. They plan on having a more formal launch in the fall.

Technically Philly has a revenue model that consists of an annual event called “Philly Tech Week” which is just about a week away, along with other shoulder events, and some underwriting. They plan on continuing a similar model with the Baltimore site, so while reporting on the Baltimore tech scene will be priority number one, companies in Charm City will also get the chance to showcase themselves in an event similar to Philly Tech Week (we hope).

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Latest Rumor: Mircosoft To Buy RIM?

The interwebs are a buzz today about the latest rumor involving Waterloo Canada based RIM/Blackberry. According to financial website Benzinga.com Microsoft is allegedly about to invest $3.5 billion dollars into the company.

This comes as a surprise and out of left field so of course we take it with a grain of salt. It doesn’t make that much sense either. RIM has been steadily losing market share due to Apple and Android’s stranglehold on the smartphone OS market.

RIM did release a product earlier this month that allows Android, iPhone and RIM to play nice in the next iteration of Blackberry Enterprise Server, which they are calling “Mobile Fusion”. RIM is also expected to release their Blackberry 10 devices which will utilize the QNX platform, the same platform on the Blackberry Playbook.

Microsoft has been desperately trying to gain traction with their Windows Phone 7 products. The first of their Nokia Windows Phone 7 handsets have hit the market however they haven’t made any significant gains in market share.

Perhaps putting the two failing operating systems together would amount to one working, worthwhile system.

AOL Shoots Up 35% After $1 Billion Dollar Patent Announcement

AOL has inked an amazing deal with rival Microsoft to sell 800 of their patents to the Redmond based computer giant. The deal is said to be worth $1 billion dollars and includes licensing back to AOL.

AOL stock closed at $18.42 on Friday and skyrocketed to $25.16 on the news of the patent sale. While Tim Armstrong is taking much of the credit for the patent sale it was actually sparked by activist shareholder Starboard Value LP who had said earlier on that, if structured properly, AOL could stand to earn $1 billion dollars or more off it’s treasure trove of patents.

Obviously it was structured properly.

AOL is holding onto 300 of their patents which revolve around some of their current core business’ like maps, and search.

“This is a valuable portfolio that we have been following for years and analyzing in detail for several months,” Microsoft’s General Counsel Brad Smith said in a statement.

The patent transaction is expected to close by the end of 2012 and has a sweetheart breakup clause as well. Should the sale not go through, Microsoft will be on the line to AOL for $211.2 million dollars.

Analysts are hopeful that this influx of cash from the sale of it’s patents will help AOL continue to rebuild it’s core business units.

source: Reuters

Rawporter Roadtrip: FOSE 2012: Griffin Shows Off Tech For Government, Military & Medical

Griffin the global music and accessory company has shown off a whole different side of their portfolio of accessories at the FOSE show in Washington DC today. We visited the FOSE show today as part of our Rawporter Roadtrip (www.rawporter.com).

Griffin showed off their survivor series cases for the new iPad. These are the only government certified to military spec A10 iPad cases on the market today. We found out that some companies like Otterbox say they are “designed to meet mil spec standards” however the Griffin line is the only line that is certified mil-spec A10 approved. That means that Griffin has gone through the rigorous testing process which includes fully submersing the cases, dropping them from 6 feet and more.

The newest survivor series case, the Survivor 2 will be available in May for the iPad, iPod and iPhone however they are coming shortly after for Samsung and Motorola tablets and smartphones.

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Infographic Suggests Just 5% Of Startups Founded By Women

We’ve featured some really great women led startups lately here at nibletz. We brought you the story of KlutchClub in Chicago and it’s founder Julia Bashkin. We also recently featured Y-Combinator startup 99dresses and their Aussie woman founder Nikki Durkin and more.

According to the infographic below, published by IT Manager Daily, 56% of professional jobs in the U.S are held by women. However in IT just 25% of jobs are held by women. Then there’s the startups. According to the infographic only 5% of startups are currently founded by women. This may be in dispute though as women seem to be more and more involved in starting their own businesses. In ABC’s “The Shark Tank” it seems that a lot more than 5% of those startups presented are founded by women.

We’ll be featuring more and more of the best startups from around the country and we’re sure we’ll see more than 5% are led by women.

Siri Gets Sued Again

Siri has been in the news it seems like everyday since she was released on the iPhone 4S. Not only has she been in the news she has been featured in regular sitcom tv as well. Earlier this year Big Bang Theory featured Siri in an episode where Raj falls in love with her. Raj has an ailment that doesn’t allow him to talk to human women without consuming alcohol. With Siri, he didn’t need to consume alcohol. The joke is driven home when Raj tracks down the Siri command center and tries, to talk to the real life Siri and just stumbles in disappointment.

The way Apple showed off Siri’s abilities have driven two different men to file suit against Apple. The latest plaintiff is David Jones. He filed his lawsuit on Tuesday in a Los Angeles district court. The suit was filed because of “false and deceptive representations” of Siri’s skill set, according to the Los Angeles Times.

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Razer Gets Enough Facebook Likes, Announces Left Handed Naga MMO Mouse

If you’re a gamer than you are well aware of Razer and their superior line of gaming peripherals. If you’re a hardcore gamer and hardcore fan of Razer than you know already that they had a Facebook contest of sorts to see if there was enough community support to back the release of a left handed Naga gaming mouse.

Well lefty’s rejoice as YES there were enough likes on Facebook to start production of a left handed Naga mouse.

“That Facebook post generated more buzz than we could’ve ever imagined, which proves that there have been a number of gamers that have had their needs ignored for some time,” said Razer CEO and Chief Gamer Min Ling Tan. “We pride ourselves on being gamers ourselves, and we all know that there is no substitute for gaming with your dominant hand.”

This isn’t Razer’s first time producing a left-handed mouse. Two years ago the company released a left-handed version of their popular DeathAdder mouse. There are only two professional gamer left-handed mice in existence and Razer is the proud manufacturer of both.

Source: Engadget

Google Opening Startup Tech Center In London

We love reporting about Great Britain’s thriving tech scene. We’ve recently reported on Hailo, a taxicab app that could put the squeeze on any potential plans for Uber in the home of the 2012 summer Olympics. We also reported on Culture Label an upscale mesh between Etsy, and Amazon offering access to the world’s finest museum shops and more. DeadSoci.al is also one of our favorite startups in the UK targeting, tackling the issue of mortality and making it more social.

London is heating up as one of Euope’s hot tech epicenters and Google will be there in full force. Bloomberg reported today. The tech center model Google is building rivals that of American centers popping up all over the place. Shared work spaces, access to high speed internet, conference rooms, mentorship and collaboration are all things that will be offered in the London venture, as portfolio.com says is in one of Europe’s “hottest zipcodes for technology”.

Google’s new startup tech center will be close to Amazon’s new tech center, both on London’s east end.

source: Portfolio.com