This year, about 2,000 bands will arrive in Austin to play SXSW, hoping to grab the attention of label execs, A&R reps, and most importantly, new fans.

Typically, bands play around four shows during the music portion of the festival, which is plenty of opportunity to get exposure. But what if someone hears a band and wants to check out their site via mobile phone? Will most artist websites be ready to serve up a quality mobile experience for fans on the ground at SXSW?

The folks at ShareSquare parsed over 1,700 band websites listed on the official SXSW roster to figure out if they could handle the expected mobile traffic. They found not many band websites had links to their social profiles, which could be a huge closed door for those fans eager to connect. Some of the websites were also woefully out of date. Some even used the dreaded framesets not seen since the Geocities days. For anyone on a phone, a crashed browser would be reason enough to kill interest.

Buying someone a drink in person is a nice gesture, but buying someone a drink via Twitter is, well, not something you do often.

Online networking app Tweet-A-Beer hopes to change that and make paying for other Twitter users’ drinks more of a habit. The web tool officially rolls out at South by Southwest.

Here’s how it works (flip through the gallery below for a visual tour): Tweet-A-Beer uses Chirpify — an ecommerce platform that lets you buy, sell and donate money — to sync your Twitter account to your PayPal account. You can safely send beer money in $5 allotments.

Oregon-based agencies Waggener Edstrom Worldwide and tenfour brewed the app for public consumption in six weeks, just in time for SXSW where networking is known to stem from quaffing alcoholic beverages.

Privacy settings may not stop employers or colleges from gaining access to your social media accounts.
Here’s a trend particular to the social media age: employers requesting access to applicants’ accounts during job interviews. The ACLU filed a complaint last year after applicants were asked to give their user name and password to the Maryland State Department of Corrections.

The department has since asked potential employees to login to their accounts themselves — but to allow interviewers to page through the accounts, looking at information typically only available to the user’s Facebook friends.

Similarly, collegiate student athletes are sometimes required to allow coaches to look at their social media accounts. The athletes have been required to friend a coach on Facebook and allow the coach the same access to information as the athlete allows to his or her friends. A bill recently introduced into Maryland state legislature seeks to end that practice.

“Each team must identify at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members’ social networking sites and postings,” the University of North Carolina’s policy says. “The athletics department also reserves the right to have other staff members monitor athletes’ posts.”

“Maybe it’s OK if you live in a totalitarian regime, but we still have a Constitution to protect us,” Shear said. “It’s not a far leap from reading people’s Facebook posts to reading their email. … As a society, where are we going to draw the line?”

In a DDoS attack, hackers deliberately render servers inaccessible by overloading them with traffic. Such a barrage aimed at DNS servers can make it impossible to connect users to a website when they type the address. Where as facebook said that its service was unavailable in some European countries this morning because of technical problems.

Third parties suggested a problem with Facebook's European DNS servers may have been at the root. These machines connect the address "Facebook.com" with the actual content of the website, and during the outage attempts to contact to them as normal received no response.

DownRightNow, which monitors major web services, showed Facebook having suffered ongoing intermittent service until mid-afternoon.CERT.Be, a Belgian government agency, claimed that the outage was due to a DDoS hacker attack, but this has not been confirmed.

Later Facebook announce, 'The issue has been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologise for any inconvenience.' The blackout also affected users in France, Germany, Russia and South Africa,among others.Facebook, which has about 845 million active users worldwide, last monthannounced plans to raise $5bn in an stock market flotation expected tovalue the company at between $75bn and $100bn.

Apple announced a new 4G LTE iPad featuring a 9.7-inch retina display Wednesday, following months of speculation about the company’s next big launch. The company made the reveal on stage at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, home to Apple’s previous two iPad launches. The new iPad — which starts at $499 — has retina display, a 5-megapixel camera (with the same optics sensor from the iPhone 4S) and 1080p video recording.

“[It has] text sharper than a newspaper. Photos will look incredible. Fonts look amazing,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of worldwide marketing, during the event. “[It has] the best mobile display that has ever shipped.”

The new iPad will hit stores Friday, March 16, in the U.S., as well as in Japan, the UK, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, France, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia. It will be available in both black and white.
Weighing in at 1.4 lbs and 9.4mm thick, the LTE device will work with AT&T and Verizon in the U.S., and Bell, Telus and Rogers in Canada. It will have 10 hours of battery life and 9 hours on 4G.

Pre-orders start today. Wi-Fi only iPads will cost $499 for 16 GB, $599 for 32 GB and $699 for 64 GB.

Apple customers have collectively downloaded 25 billion apps from the App Store, the company has announced on its webpage. That’s more than three apps per person in the world. People with iOS devices are downloading an increasing number of apps. One 2011 study, for instance, concluded iOS owners download about 60 apps each, which is 50 more apps that the same researcher found each iOS owner downloaded in 2008.

And as the number of apps per device has grown, so has the number of devices. In a 2011 Pew Survey, 35% of the 2,277 U.S. adults questioned in English or Spanish said that they owned a smartphone. Pew released another study this week that found this percentage has since jumped to 46%. More Americans now own smartphones than feature phones, and the world bought 37 million of them from Apple last quarter alone.
Growing app downloads and growing device sales are a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation:

Do people buy iPhones because they want to download apps or do they download apps because they have iPhones? Combined net sales for the iTunes Store, App Store and iBookstore in 2011 was $5.4 billion — just 6% of Apple’s net sales, but a 33% increase compared to 2010.

The company reported its highest revenue and earnings ever last quarter. If you go by its market cap, it is now worth more than all the tea in China. In this context, the $10,000 gift card Apple promised to give away when it hit the 25 billionth app from its App Store looks less over-the-top. Apple hasn’t yet announced the winner, but considering that to enter the contest, users were required to agree to publicly share some App Store picks with the Apple community if they won, we’ll likely be meeting the lucky winner soon.

The space agency’s computer systems were breached by hackers 13 times last year, according to Congressional testimony this week.  “These incidents spanned a wide continuum from individuals testing their skill to break into NASA systems, to well-organized criminal enterprises hacking for profit, to intrusions that may have been sponsored by foreign intelligence services seeking to further their countries’ objectives,” said Paul Martin, NASA’s inspector general, in his Congressional testimony released on Wednesday.

“Some of these intrusions have affected thousands of NASA computers, caused significant disruption to mission operations, and resulted in the theft of export-controlled and otherwise sensitive data, with an estimated cost to NASA of more than $7 million,” he continued.

Martin gave Congress detailed information about some of the attacks. In one instance, the agency discovered late last year an intrusion into its system by hackers working through a China-based IP address. Martin said that the hackers gained full access to the network of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, allowing them to view, copy, delete and otherwise tamper with classified information.

Before closing the door behind them, the hackers uploaded software allowing them access to other NASA systems and managed to adeptly hide their digital tracks. In a separate event, hackers managed to grab computer access codes from more than 150 NASA employees. According to Martin, the agency failed to move quickly enough to ensure that those hackers wouldn’t be able to use the codes to gain access to its networks.

According to Martin, the “sophistication” of cyberattacks against NASA has been steadily increasing. He added that NASA spends more than $1.5 billion annually on “IT-related activities,” which includes approximately $58 million for “IT security.”


“Some NASA systems house sensitive information which, if lost or stolen, could result in significant financial loss, adversely affect national security, or significantly impair our nation’s competitive technological advantage,” said Martin. “Even more troubling, skilled and committed cyber attackers could choose to cause significant disruption to NASA operations, as IT networks are central to all aspects of NASA’s operations.”
The news of the NASA hacks comes at a turbulent time for cybersecurity in the U.S.

Android‘s web browser Robot has overtaken Opera to become the top mobile browser, according to StatCounter’s data.

In February 2012, Android Robot had 22.67% market share, followed by Opera with 21.7% and iPhone‘s Safari with 21.06% share.

Nokia and BlackBerry remain distant fourth and fifth, with 11.24% and 6.53% share, respectively.
If you trust StatCounter’s data, Opera – which has been the top dog throughout the last 12 months – has started losing market share quite quickly in January 2012, while both iPhone Safari and Android Robot did very well in that two-month period.

Lytro just released its light-field camera to the world, a device which appear to bes as well as acts just like no several other camera ever created. Mashable got an early preview of the Lytro camera, as well as we may say it certainly delivers over its promise to change the method you think about photos. The Lytro puts every several other “intelligent” focusing solution (multiple focus points, face detection, etcetera.) to shame by overly removing focus as a variable.

Of course, the photo requirements the viewer to click as well as refocus, so sharing turns key. The entire Lytro experience — from the photos’ square shape to the software to the camera it self — is centreed around sharing. Lytro, at in the least right currently, has much method more in common goes along with creative apps just like Instagram than, say, the multi-featured DSLR photography from the just likes of Canon as well as Nikon.

The incredible refocusing effect is severalwhat muted when you don’t utilize the camera’s 8x zoom. And the instinct of most photographers is to utilize the zoom as sparingly as possible. That instinct does not serve capturing nice Lytro pics. You should zoom, as well as zoom severaltimes. Zoom still matters. You may saw the difference in the concording two photos — the first is taken goes along with a 57mm zoom, the next at 106mm.

You’ll get photos goes along with the most dramatic refocusing effects whenever you do three simple things:

1. Get up close as well as personal goes along with your subject.2. Zoom. A lot.
3. Have a “distant” background.

The “light field engine” over board the Lytro does the heavy lifting in making a photo you may refocus. It and then produces a self-contained file — an “.lfp” file — which you transfer to your Mac. Yep, your Mac. PCs aren’t invited to the Lytro regiony just yet, several nevertheless the company says Windows software is in the works.  The social aspect is as Lytro lives or dies. Whenever its early adopters start telling stories goes along with their cameras — as well as those stories are worth sharing — Lytro is about to transition from curious trick to phenomenon. Will those living images over Facebook, goes along with their oddly addictive refocusing magic, create people would like to to experience the Lytro camera as for ourselves?

There are two models of Lytro, as well as they vary in overly three methods: the numeral of storage, color as well as the price. The entry model costs $ 399, has 8GB of storage as well as comes in graphite as well as “electric blue.” There’s asides the 16GB “red hot” model which costs $ 499. 

Google wants you to help find security flaws in its browser, Chrome — and the search giant is paying a handsome reward. The company told attendees at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver next month they can get up to $1 million in cash and Chromebooks in exchange for revealing the flaws.

“The aim of our sponsorship is simple: we have a big learning opportunity when we receive full end-to-end exploits. Not only can we fix the bugs, but by studying the vulnerability and exploit techniques we can enhance our mitigations, automated testing, and sandboxing. This enables us to better protect our users,” the Google Chrome security team wrote in a blog post.

The prizes include the following categories, and multiple rewards can be issued per category:

    $60,000 – “Full Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using only bugs in Chrome itself.

    $40,000 – “Partial Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using at least one bug in Chrome itself, plus other bugs. For example, a WebKit bug combined with a Windows sandbox bug.

    $20,000 – “Consolation reward, Flash / Windows / other”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence that does not use bugs in Chrome. For example, bugs in one or more of Flash, Windows or a driver. These exploits are not specific to Chrome and will be a threat to users of any web browser. Although not specifically Chrome’s issue, we’ve decided to offer consolation prizes because these findings still help us toward our mission of making the entire web safer.

Canon announced the EOS 5D Mk III DSLR on Friday, a camera which takes its place between the hugely popular EOS 5D Mark II and Canon’s top-of-the-range professional EOS 1D X model.

This solid looking shooter packsr consist of

>> New 22.3-megapixel full-frame
>> CMOS sensor (increased from 21.1 on the Mk II)
>> High-performance DIGIC 5+ imaging processor
>> 61-point High Density Reticular Autofocus (AF) system - the last two being lifted from the 1D X.
>> Fast continuous shooting of up to six fps
>> Beating the speed of the EOS 5D Mk II by more than 50 percent.
>> Improved weather resistance
>> ISO capability stretches from 100 to 25,600 in the standard rang
>> Can also be pulled down to 50 at the lower end
>> 1,040,000-dot 3.2-inch rear LCD screen
>> Dual memory card slots
>> Accept CF and SD/SDHC/SDXC cards with various options available
>> Better noise reduction
>> Longer recording times (up to 30 minutes)
>> Built-in headphone jack for audio monitoring
>> Capture 1080p HD video at 24, 25 or 30 fps


Canon’s new camera, which incidentally has been released on the 25th anniversary of its popular EOS camera system. The 5D Mk III should be available at the end of this month with a body-only price tag of $3,499. A kit that includes the EF24-105mm f/4L IS USM zoom lens will also be available for $4,299.

Fans appear to have given Justin Bieber a special gift. While Justin Bieber rallied fans Thursday to donate to charity: water for his 18th birthday, his fans were also busy trying to break the Guinness World Records mark for most social media messages sent in a 24-hour period.

Early results from AgencyNet, the creators of Bieber’s official website, show the fans’ attempt appears to have already broken the previous record of 209,771 mentions set by the Beat Cancer Everywhere campaign in 2009.

Twitter account @JBworldrecord tweeted that Bieber fans reached 214,900 mentions at 12:53 p.m. ET with 11 hours to go at the time. The tally at 7:27 p.m. was 292,069 mentions, which included this phrase that was first sent when the clock struck midnight on March 1:

Checking email during meetings. Shopping on your smartphone in the middle of class. Texting at funerals. These are a few of the examples that MIT professor Sherry Turkle offered during her TEDTalk on Thursday, in which she argued that “technology is taking us places we don’t want to go.” A psychologist believes that while our constant communication and social media engagement does make us more connected, it’s coming at the sacrifice of real conversation.

One major issue, she said, is that when we text, email or post to a social networking site, we’re able to project ourselves as we want to be seen. “We get to edit, we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch.”  Further, with our phones at our constant disposal, Turkle says we’re only paying attention to the things we want to pay attention to. And that leaves us increasingly disconnected from our friends, family and co-workers as we simply turn to our devices when a conversation no longer interests us. This creates a situation that Turkle said makes us, “expect more from technology and less from each other.” In the long run, she thinks technology is ultimately headed towards creating a Siri-like program that can offer “companionship without the demands of friendship.”

There’s certainly plenty of data that supports Turkle’s argument. Surveys showing that we’re increasingly texting and social networking during meal time or in the bedroom have become commonplace.
But what’s to be done about it?