Man watches his home being burglarized Live via his iPhone

The Associated Press is reporting the story of a Dallas man who went out of town to visit relatives 1400 miles away in Hartford, Conn. While he was there he got an alert from his iCam app running on his iPhone that motion had been detected in the house -- which turned out to be two intruders trying to get in, and eventually throwing a brick through a glass door to gain access.

He called 911 and the next motion alert he received was the arrival of police officers with guns drawn. It isn't clear from the story if the burglars got away with any loot, but certainly iCam did work and relayed the message to the owner of the house.

We've reviewed iCam before. I use it to keep an eye on the house and pets when I'm away, and for the cost of US $4.99 plus a couple of webcams it really is a great low-cost security system. The software can be set to take a rapid series of still photos when motion is detected, so the police should get some shots of the burglars to help make a case when and if they nab them.


[via the Dallas Morning News]

Facebook Job Postings this Week: Recruiting in India and Seattle, Legal and Online Operations

Facebook has been expanding its business and customer service operations, judging by our review of Facebook’s Career Page and our review of its listings since our story last week. And it has also been featuring its new Seattle engineering office at the top of the Page.

Positions that have been taken down since our post last week include some in the areas of corporate communications, data analytics, recruiting, IT (in India and Palo Alto), an account executive position in Singapore.

Jobs pertaining to online/platform operations are also no longer listed on the Careers Page, a fraud investigator positions was gone and several marketing positions were also absent from the list this week.

Also, the company no longer lists its Director of Global Facilities and Real Estate Management position this week.

It is most likely that these positions have been filled, although it’s possible they were renamed or not filled.

A few new listings this week: Communication designer, content strategist, data analyst-platform, product marketing communications manager-ads, operations managers, sales account managers, build engineer and quantitative business analyst.

Facebook seems to be gearing up for hiring in India, as several new positions for recruiters have been listed in the company’s Hyderabad offices: Lead recruiter, recruiter-contractor and recruiting coordinator-contractor. Facebook is also seeking a contracted recruiting coordinator at its Palo Alto offices.

An administrative assistant position has also been listed in India and a physical security manager position has appeared, which may be because people and equipment are beginning to fill the office.

Online operations positions are opening in Europe and Palo Alto, most of them directed at user and platform operations, and fraud analysis.

New Facebook Photo Album Layout Launching for Everyone, Showing Up to 200 Photos Per Page

Facebook has long said that it is prioritizing engagement over pageviews, and the latest evidence of that has arrived, in the form of its new photo album layout. You can now view up to 200 photos on a single page, ten times the previous 20 photos per page you could see in the previous layout. You don’t need to click through consecutive pages of an album this way, you can just keep scrolling down the page.

The company officially announced the change today (although we and many others have been seeing the change for weeks) and noted a couple other benefits to the new design. One is that additional photos on the page only load as you scroll down, so the change won’t slow down your browser; another is that the thumbnails are slightly larger, making the page easier to browse.

Photos have already been getting some upgrades lately, including the tag-a-friend option and larger sizes, and we expect more to come.

An Optical Mouse That’s Also a Skype Phone

Innovators has an optical mouse that flips open into a phone that can be used with Skype or other VOIP services. The wired USB optical mouse has a 1000 DPI sensor. Flip it open to access the microphone, speaker, and a 128×64 pixel LCD screen with backlight. You get crystal clear audio with 16bit 48 KHz sampling rate, and this phone is compatible with all versions of Skype and Internercalls, SparVoip, NetAppel, poivY, VoipDiscount, VoipCheap and WebCallDirect.

It’s all here; your ability to remain in touch with the world at large is as close as your USB port. The Mouse Skype Phone will add a whole new dimension to your desktop workspace. From chatting with friends at home, to conference calls at the office, the Mouse Skype Phone is your answer to staying connected in the 21st century.

Features:

• 128x64 pixel LCD screen with backlight
• Connect with USB to your computer
• 1000 DPI optical sensor
• Crystal clear audio with 16bit 48 KHz sampling rate
• Fully compatible with all versions of Skype
• Also compatible with Internercalls, SparVoip, NetAppel, poivY, VoipDiscount, VoipCheap and WebCallDirect
• Included disc with VOIP software is not needed to use the mouse. The installation of software is purely optional. More current versions of each VOIP software can be found on the internet.

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill blames Bluescreen of Death for the failure.

A recent report in the New York Times details a myriad issues that led up to the eventual explosion that started the mess known as the "BP oil spill," but aside from obvious mishandling of warnings and red flags, one particular issue was troubling those working on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig long before April 20th.

Mike Williams, the rig's chief electronics technician, has come forward with a multitude of icky details surrounding the negligence that was involved in the catastrophe, with the one most germane to our discussion being the following: "For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew called the Blue Screen of Death." Williams continued, noting that "it would just turn blue," with "no data coming through." Of course, it's not as if BSODs are totally uncommon out in the working world --

Microsoft's Windows powers the vast majority of systems that corporations rely on daily -- but this one rubs just a wee bit differently. Hit the source link for the full spill.

[Image courtesy of Ultrasaurus]

Remembering the 2010 Fifa World Cup

Spain now have a star on their shirt. I’m not exaggerating when I say that my limbs were numb and my mouth was dry during yesterday’s World Cup final. I was truly a hot mess. Moving on… It’s now time for all publications to run their World Cup retrospectives, and since we barely qualify as a publication it’s time for ours. Well, mine; nobody else on staff could name a single player from yesterday’s final. But, of course, I’m taking a more technological point of view. Because if there’s anything I excel at, it’s writing about marginally relevant topics right here on CG.

Jabulani

How many of you knew the name of a World Cup ball prior to World Cup 2010? None of you, correct. Now, how many of you are sick of hearing about the Adidas Jabulani? I’m certainly tired of writing about it every other day. Person A hates the ball, Person B loves the ball. Study A says the ball is garbage, Study B says the ball is fine. Lather, rinse, repeat. For World Cup 2012, I’d like to see FIFA return to the ball that Ferenc Puskás used to kick about. PROBLEM SOLVED.

Goal-line technology

Long overdue, but we may have reached the moment where Fifa, world football’s generally incompetent governing body, has finally recognized the necessity of goal-line technology. There’s still probably no chance in Hell that Fifa will adopt video replay anytime soon, which is fine by me. Baby steps and all that. But if the 2014 World Cup doesn’t have goal-line technology, well, that would be very stupid. Maybe Conmebol will use next year’s Copa América to test out a form of goal-line technology.

Apps

There were plenty of Apps to chose from this time around. I used Goal.com’s App quite a bit, but that was only to check the game schedule. ESPN on TV had a knack for showing their broadcast time instead of game start time. I want to tune in when the players are walking down the tunnel, not when Alexi Lalas is pontificating about this or that topic. That said,

Roberto Martínez, Ruud Gullit, and Jürgen Klinsmann did a fine job when I saw them.

ESPN & ESPN3.com

Despite the fact that the games broadcast live on ABC weren’t on ESPN3.com weren’t streamed live, ESPN really outdid itself with ESPN3.com. You have to figure that Disney paid through the nose for the broadcast rights for the World Cup, so it’s good to see the games promoted and shown on TV and on the Internet. Proper ESPN, too, not like ESPN 800 or anything like that. And with actual commentators who know that game! Really, ESPN’s coverage of the World Cup this time around was very, very good. Yeah, the network was a tendency to make EVERY SINGLE SECOND terribly overdramtic, but I think that’s a problem with American broadcasting as a whole.

Paul the psychic octopus

Paul is about as far away from technology as you can get, but I still love the idea of a psychic octopus. The world needs more psychic animals making sports predictions.

BRAND WARS

In the end, the best player of the tournament wasn’t wearing Nike or Adidas, but Puma (though Puma and Adidas share a common lineage). Diego Forlán, a great man, won the Fifa Golden Ball, the award given to the tournament’s best player. (He was also on my fantasy team, so there.) The final came down to an epic battle between Nike (The Netherlands) and Adidas (Spain). Now, I could be wrong, but I don’t think anyone on the Spain team had those fancy Adidas TechFit kits (the tight-fitting kits where you cold see straps on the back.) Does that fact mean anything? Well, no, it was just something I noticed. (Arjen Robben wore a TechFit kit in the Champions League final last May. He lost, of course.) TechFit kits will be used in the upcoming domestic leagues across Europe.

On the whole, I’d have to say that Adidas’ kits looked better than everyone else’s (favorites includes Germany home and away, Mexico away, Argentina home, and France home.) Other standouts were Portugal’s away (Nike) and Holland’s home (Nike; anybody know what font typeface they used?). The color of the Urugauy (Puma) home kit was great, too.

So, that’s it. I now need to find some other way to occupy my time. Well, until the European leagues kick off again.

And how great would it be if the Vuvuzela catches on all over the world? All vuvzela, all the time.

[via-CrunchGear]

Windows XP still going strong: 74 percent of work computers use it

Ah yeah, XP. You continue to be the man, nine years later. I’m still rocking XP myself, and see no reason to do otherwise, though I have heard fine things about Windows 7. And despite that OS’s popularity, a huge number of business PCs still use XP. Sure, why not? Who wants to retrain their employees and roll out thousands of new PCs? Better to run the old ones into the ground — an expected behavior. But even Microsoft didn’t plan on XP’s durability.

At the rollout, Microsoft originally planned to let people buying OEM-installed Windows 7 machines “downgrade” to Windows XP for up to six months. Then they extended that deadline for a year. And now they’re extending it for ten years. Will anyone still be running XP in 2020? Other than me, I mean.

Actually, I should probably admit that I hardly got any work done today because I was too busy fending off a TDL3 rootkit. Ironic? Yes. Tragic? Also yes. Pathetic? Hey, buddy, come here and say it to my face!

Google Employees Explain What It’s Like Working at Google

There’s an interesting thread today over at Reddit, where Google employees are asked to describe their experiences working for the Internet giant.

The replies are anonymous, and should thus be taken with a grain of salt. But some seem genuine, revealing some fascinating tidbits about Google’s corporate culture, strategy, and day-to-day life of a Google employee. The experiences are vastly positive, but some of them describe the downsides of being a Googler, too.

Here are some interesting quotes from the thread:

CinoBoo: I’ve been there for about 5 years. You can read about the good parts anywhere, so I’ll try to offer a counterpoint based on having worked at other software companies.

A common problem is that it’s easy to become spoiled by all the perks. Several offices have developed distinct cultures of entitlement, and people whine about the quality of the fudge on the free brownies. It’s embarrassing to be around people who’ve become like spoiled children.

An engineering-specific problem there is that there’s a lot of support for operations — that is, lots of people whose job it is to keep the systems running. Engineers don’t habitually carry pagers and are on-call relatively infrequently. The plus side is that they can focus on development, get adequate sleep, and be more productive. The downside is that they can easily lose touch with what’s really going on in the data centers and sometimes even their customers. It’s a trade-off. Google is at least aware of it and uses incentive programs to entice engineers to spend time in ops roles.

Last, the company is big into “generating luck”, which means trying a whole bunch of stuff in the hopes that a few efforts will pay off.

GoogleEmployee22k: Google is a great place to work. These are the things I like about my job:

1) Everyone is super smart
2) 18 different cafes
3) Free Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
4) The food is gourmet quality (e.g. omelet bar, chefs that make custom sandwiches for you, sashimi, free drinks 24/7, free snacks of all sorts 24/7.
5) The 7 person conference bicycles
6) Every Friday, Larry, Sergei, or Eric takes questions from us (in person), and we get free beer (e.g. Downtown Brown)

solyanik: Management institute is awful. A typical manager has 50-100 employees, so even if they meet with their reports once a month for 30 minutes, that’s about 2 weeks worth of almost constant 1:1s per month (allowing just a bit of time for stretching in between ). That’s not a lot of time for interaction. As a result, managers aren’t empwered to participate in technical decision, they don’t have very much vote in performance reviews (these are done by committee), and not even hiring (which is also done by committee). I’ve asked older Googlers what the managers did there, and they universally said “I don’t know”. Almost all managerial decisions that I witnessed at Google (mostly around resourcing the new projects) were not great, and the only way I could explain them was by some sort of internal political struggles between different players in the management game. The good thing was that, as I said above, they don’t have very much role in day to day operations of the company. But if you LIKE being a technical manager, if that’s how you see your career, Google is definitely not for you.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

DSLR Rain Case May Also Pose a Choking Hazard [Concepts]

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Apple's Redesigned Apple TV Might Be a TV? [Apple TV]

The NYT corroborates Engadget's previous Apple TV leak, saying that Apple is working on re-designing the product with some kind of iOS operating system instead of what it uses currently. However, the NYT hints at something more: an actual TV. More »