Twitter, Facebook postings can kill dreams of landing your dream job

Getting selected for that dream job has just got tougher, as companies are now scouring Facebook and Twitter accounts to know an applicant’s personal details before hiring.

As Internet search technology grows more sophisticated, surviving a background check is going to get even harder. Employers are now scanning social networking sites like they never did before.

Explicit posts suggesting a person likes racist joke, is fond of too much booze or is a bit too fond of guns, could become grounds for an employer to reject a job applicant.

The Federal Trade Commission has given its approval for Social Intelligence Corp. to sell these reports to employers and the file will last for seven long years.

“You can be deemed a bad apple by association. Are all your friends gay, rich, poor? Do they all live in California or New York or Kansas? What are your hobbies? Do they look expensive or entail high risk?” ABC News quoted Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum as saying.

Dixon also warned that the chance of getting that dream job depends on the would-be employer's predilections.

The employer's decision not to hire a potential employee may be ethically outrageous but its legal.

“It's kind of scary,” says Tena Friery, research director for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

“We know social networking sites can be hacked, that someone can post something under someone else's name. What happens if somebody wants to sabotage a job applicant? And would the potential employee even know it was taking place?”

E-chat lands IIT graduate in trouble

An IIT Kanpur graduate, working as an engineer in a multinational firm in Gurgaon, has knocked the doors of the Delhi High Court seeking protection from his online friend –– a woman research associate with IIT, Mumbai –– who allegedly subjected him to emotional blackmail.

After hearing the plea of Mr Subhash (name changed), Justice Suresh Kait has issued summons to the woman to appear in his court on Monday.

In his plea, Subhash told the court that he befriended the girl on Internet last August and began chatting with her.

The duration of the chat gradually grew longer and often ended late into the night. Mr Subhash said as the friendship grew, she insisted upon meeting him and came over to Delhi.

“After meeting me, she began pressing for marriage despite being at least five to six years older to me,” 25-year-old Mr Subhash said.

Mr Subhash submitted that when he refused to marry her, she began sending him threatening mails and SMSes saying she would commit suicide.

Facebook overtakes Microsoft in UK

Facebook overtook Microsoft websites in Britain for the first time last month, becoming the UK's second-most popular after Google as people aged over 50 flocked to social networks, online measurement body UKOM/Nielsen said.

Facebook attracted a record 26.8 million visitors in Britain in May, up 7 percent year on year, beating the 26.2 million who visited Microsoft's MSN/WindowsLive/Bing sites combined, the organisation said on Monday. Google had 33.9 million.

Twitter's UK audience jumped by a third to 6.1 million, after thousands of users retweeted allegations of celebrity scandals in defiance of gagging orders, including an extra-marital affair by Manchester United soccer star Ryan Giggs.

UKOM/Nielsen said the number of women pensioners visiting the site doubled after "Giggsgate".

"The growth in audiences to these social networks is now primarily being driven by the 50-plus age group. Just a few years ago, this group may have found itself out of place on these sites," UKOM general manager James Smythe said.

He said over-50 year-olds accounted for more new adults visiting Facebook in the last two years than under-50s, resulting in an age profile far more closely reflecting that of the UK online population as a whole than previously.

Older age groups were also more likely to visit Twitter than in the past, but under-18s were less likely to visit the site than two years ago -- which was not the case for Facebook.

Business network LinkedIn, whose market value has risen 58 percent to $6.65 billion since its New York stock market debut last month, registered 3.6 million UK visitors in May, up 57 percent from a year earlier.

Elsewhere, Facebook attracted 140 million visitors in the United States, up 12 percent. In Spain its numbers were up 7 percent, in France 18 percent, in Italy 26 percent and in Germany 72 percent.

Twitter's visitor numbers rose 22 percent in the United States, 48 percent in France, 58 percent in Italy and more than doubled in Spain. But in Germany they fell by 11 percent.

UKOM/Nielsen monitored the online behaviour of about 50,000 people in Britain and similar numbers in the other countries. The panel was recruited both online and offline.

Bamboozled

Bamboozle from Parker Brothers is a delicious union of an instant word builder and Password. This hybrid involves two teams racing to make five words, each starting with random letters. Both teams work on an identical set of letters, and stop their timers the moment they’re done!

Never buy an extravagantly-priced game that requires two AAA size batteries. They’re never in the set when you need them. And don’t even get me started on the likelihood of a star screw driver readily at hand to open the battery compartment! While the LED displays and electronic timers add a certain game-show urgency to the moment, the game works just fine without. There’s a solid two-stage idea at play here. First, two teams scramble to come up with words starting with the same five letters. Second, the teams exchange their word lists, and now have to clue/guess the words.

Aditya brought the game over to Neha’s place. It was an open piece. The scoring pegs missing. The batteries clearly also missing. The man was clueless, and hadn’t bothered to learn how the game worked. If only they’d read the rules, they’d have been charmed with an elegantly simple word game, which promises hours of enjoyable play.

After rattling cubes in the shaker, you tip five cubes into view. The letters facing up are the start letters for the round. Place the shaker in the double timer unit. And start scribbling. There are no extra points for long words. The trick here is to get your words done as quickly as you can. The time you take, is the time the opposition now has, to guess the words on your list. One of the opposition team members clues the other team members. Every word guessed right, moves you ahead on the pegged scoring track!

Bamboozle is a cleverly put together well-finished game, built on a terrific two-staged idea. Understand the game, and you can play it with alphabet flash cards, scrabble counters, or Boggle cubes. Parker Brothers won’t like this. But hybrids are still a little out of reach!

The author may be contacted at arup_kavan@yahoo.com

Facebook to launch mobile phone

London: After reaching heights of success, Facebook is now out with its phone for millions of users. A mobile phone manufacturer is set to launch the first Facebook phone.

INQ Mobile Friday revealed two new Android smartphones for the UK market that are designed expressly for 18/28-year-old Facebook users - the INQ Cloud Touch and the INQ Cloud Q.
Working closely with the team behind Facebook, London-based INQ has given the home screen a visual feed that lets users quickly access updates, pictures, videos, and other Facebook content, the Daily Mail reports.
The phones provide quick links to all the popular Facebook features, including chat, messages, wall postings and notifications.
Facebook messages and instant online chat facilities are what today's generation now uses for communication.
Facebook Events replaces the traditional diary and lets people schedule events and sync these with Google Calendar, and instead of an address book there is simply a 'friend list'.
"Writing on a [Facebook] wall is as easy as sending text messages," says INQ's co-founder Ken Johnstone.
Facebook Places is accessible directly from the homescreen, giving people the ability to use the feature to check in at stores, restaurants, clubs, and other spots.

New BlackBerry video touts its tablet as better than iPad

To build upon the hype already surrounding its soon-to-be-released PlayBook, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) Tuesday unveiled another video to project its tablet as better than Apple’s iPad.

The Canadian wireless giant released the new video about the capabilities of its tablet just before the opening of the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas Thursday.

Giving a sneak peak at PlayBook, the new 3 minute and 18 second video highlights the multimedia capabilities of its Web browser. Taking viewers quickly through various websites, it highlights how versatile its browser is.

But more importantly, the BlackBerry maker is using the new video to score points over Apple’s iPad by highlighting how its tablet browser is built on open Web standards and thus supports Flash which Apple’s iPad does not.

It means PlayBook users will be able to fully access YouTube and Facebook whereas iPad users cannot access full versions of these popular sites.

PlayBook uses a new software platform built by QNX Software Systems. RIM bought Ottawa—based QNX Software Systems for $200 million in April to have exclusive access to its software technology for its tablet.

The new video demonstrates how PlayBook users can send instant messages on Facebook Chat and play Flash—based games inside Facebook - which is not possible for iPad users.

With 2011 set to become the year of the tablet, Motorola, Microsoft, Dell, Samsung and HP will also likely unveil their tablet plan at the four-day electronics show opening January 6.

PlayBook, which was unveiled in September, will be launched in the U.S. market by the end of March. It measures seven inches against the 9.7-inch iPad.

Interestingly, BlackBerry bosses were forced to unveil their tablet so early before its launch because of Apple boss Steve Jobs’ dismissal of it as “too small” in September.

“The 10-inch screen size is the minimum required to have great tablet apps. We don’t think you can make a great tablet with a seven-inch screen. We think it’s too small to express the software that people want to put on these things,” Steve Jobs had taunted the BlackBerry maker.

RIM has already announced to sell PlayBook below $500 to undercut sales of iPad which has sold more than seven million units since its launch in April.

Keywords: playbook, iPad, tablet market, portable electronic device, apple, smartphones

Verizon reveals first 4G wireless tablets, phones

This year, the big national wireless carriers will be racing to stake their claims in the new frontier of service, ultra-fast data access, for smart phones and laptops as well as for gadgets like tablets.

The companies are boosting their wireless data speeds and revving up the marketing hype. They’re moving away from talking about call quality and coverage, and focusing on data speeds, megabits in place of minutes. For consumers, there are benefits in the form of faster service and cooler gadgets. Yet some of the marketing campaigns seem designed to confuse consumers about the gadgets’ speed.

At the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, Verizon Wireless revealed the 10 gadgets with built-in access to its new high-speed wireless data network, including smartphones, tablet and laptops. Some are to launch as early as March.

Along with Sprint Nextel Corp.’s subsidiary Clearwire Corp., Verizon is at the forefront of the move to a new network technology, designed to relay data rather than calls. Verizon’s fourth-generation, or “4G” network, went live for laptop modems in last month.

The new wireless network is the nation’s fastest. Verizon is hoping to cash in on that advantage by selling tablets and smartphones that devour data.

One of the devices, Motorola Mobility Inc.’s Xoom tablet, will come with a 10.1-inch (25.65 centimetre) screen and two cameras - one for video chatting, the other for high-definition videos. The Xoom will begin selling by March. Initially, it will work with Verizon’s 3G network but will be upgradeable to work on the speedier 4G network.

Motorola’s Droid Bionic smartphone will also have two cameras, to help with videoconferencing, a data-hungry task. It will be one of the first phones with a so-called “dual-core processor” that will roughly double its computing capacity. That should help with video processing.

LG Electronics Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC Corp. are bringing out similar phones for the network. Hewlett-Packard Co. is adding 4G capability to a laptop and a netbook.

There will also be two “mobile hotspot” devices for the network - small battery-powered bricks that act as Wi-Fi access points, connecting Wi-Fi-equipped computers to the 4G network.

Verizon didn’t reveal what the new devices or wireless plans will cost.

Verizon , by number of subscribers, is the largest U.S. wireless carrier, and the quality of its network are helping it gain traction with manufacturers.

“By deciding to go early and go first to (4G), we sent a signal to the entire consumer electronics market that this technology would develop very quickly,” said Lowell McAdam, Verizon’s president and chief operating officer, in a keynote address at the trade show Thursday.

There’s speculation that Verizon will get to sell a version of Apple Inc.’s iPhone this year. That would break AT&T Inc.’s exclusive hold on the most popular smartphone. But there was no talk of an iPhone from Verizon at Thursday’s events.

With or without the iPhone, Verizon’s new network is pressuring its competitors to step up their offerings. AT&T Inc. on Wednesday said it’s on track to launch its own 4G network this summer. Also, it said it will start calling its current 3G network “4G,” since it’s been upgraded to be capable of nearly 4G speeds.

T-Mobile USA said Thursday that it will upgrade its 3G network to double the possible download speeds in two-thirds of its coverage area. It started calling the network “4G” in ads last fall. It, too, revealed two tablets for its network, to launch later this year.

Sprint and Clearwire have chosen a slightly different route to 4G. They’ve picked a 4G technology called WiMax that was ready before Long Term Evolution, or LTE, which Verizon is using.

Now, however, WiMax looks set to be a niche technology, while the rest of the industry adopts LTE. That will hamper Sprint’s efforts to get competitive devices for the network. Still, it was able to launch its first 4G phone last summer, ahead of the competition. On Wednesday, it announced it would be the first to carry a 4G tablet computer from Research In Motion Ltd., the maker of the BlackBerry, some time this summer.

The most distinctive feature of 4G technologies like LTE and WiMax is that they’re designed to carry data rather than phone calls. That makes them more efficient at serving today’s smartphones, tablets and other gadgets that need data access on the go. It also makes the networks cheaper to build out and manage.

They’re faster than today’s 3G networks, though not by much, which makes T-Mobile and AT&T feel justified in calling their upgraded 3G networks “4G.” After all, they say, speed is what really matters to users.

Aside from the bump in speed, the main reason the LTE buildouts of Verizon Wireless and AT&T significant is that they add fresh spectrum to the nation’s wireless networks. That means more capacity for the growing number of mobile gadgets.

Also, both companies are using spectrum that was previously used for UHF TV channels, a prime piece of the airwaves. It can cover wide areas easily and penetrate deep into buildings. (Clearwire’s WiMax network uses a frequency that has shorter range and more difficulty penetrating buildings.)

Future upgrades can further boost the speed of wireless networks. But at some point, they will run out of room for improvement. There’s a theoretical limit for how much information a certain slice of the airwaves can carry. When that happens, there will still be two ways to add capacity to wireless broadband.

The government can assign more spectrum, perhaps by taking it from TV stations. But spectrum, too, will run out. The carriers can add more cell towers, but that’s expensive and difficult. They can’t put cell towers everywhere they’d like.

Given these limiting factors, wireless broadband isn’t likely to ever replace wireline connections for home broadband, except possibly in rural areas where it’s expensive to draw cables for high-speed connections to homes.

The U.S. is at the forefront in the international race to LTE. Verizon’s buildout is the world’s largest. The U.S. was faster than most other countries in taking back airwaves from TV stations and selling it off for wireless broadband.

Another reason Verizon has been aggressive about LTE is that its 3G network uses a technology that isn’t upgradable to higher speeds as AT&T’s and T-Mobile’s are. That’s left it with a burning need for the next network technology.

Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC of Britain. Motorola Mobility Inc. was formed this week as Motorola Inc. split into two parts. The Mobility consists of the cell phone business.

Keywords: 4G technology, Consumer Electronics Show