George C. Dimitriou

  In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency and Google Ventures are investing in Recorded Future, a company whose technology monitors the Web in real time and develops predictions of future events from the content, according to reports.

Recorded Future scours tens of thousands of Web sites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still to come. The company’s “temporal analytics engine” goes beyond search by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

When the data reveals a possible future event, Recorded Future can — so it claims — trace the online “momentum” for the event and predict where and when it might actually happen.

Thirty nine years ago, President Nixon picked up his Sunday New York Times on June 13, 1971 to see the wedding picture of his daughter Tricia and himself in the Rose Garden, leading the left-hand side of the front page.  Next to that picture, on the right, was the headline over Neil Sheehan’s first story on the Pentagon Papers, “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement”  (See documentation from the Pentagon Papers case ). 
 And Wikileaks today using modern techniques:

NYTimes: A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.
The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.
The New York Times, the British newspaper «The Guardian» and the German magazine «Der Spiegel» were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.
The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001. …

In May and June 2010, the Oriella PR Network carried out a survey of over 750 journalists in 15 countries to see how digital media has changed the nature of news-gathering.

This third survey uncovers growing uncertainty over the future of print titles and increased interest in paid-content models. Over 50% of the journalists surveyed believe their titles will shift to online-only.

“Concerns about the viability of journalist’s traditional media channels (print, radio or television) have intensified,” the report reads.

The Internet is poised to overtake newspapers as the second-largest U.S. advertising medium by revenue behind television, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook for 2010 to 2014.

The online ad business, excluding mobile ads, is set to expand to $34.4 billion in 2014 from $24.2 billion in 2009, according to the report.

The mobile advertising market also is poised for growth as wireless networks are upgraded and more Internet-enabled smart phones hit the market. Mobile advertising in North America is predicted to quadruple from $414 million in 2009 to $1.6 billion in 2014, according to the report.

Newspapers, meanwhile, continue to suffer from a decline in advertising revenue. According to numbers released by the Newspaper Association of America earlier this year, print advertising revenue dropped 28.6 percent in 2009 to $24.82 billion. The PwC report estimates that print advertising in newspapers will hit $22.3 billion by 2014.

Google, like other technology and telecommunications companies, regularly receives demands from government agencies to remove content from their services.
To give people information about the requests for user data or content removal they receive from government agencies around the world, Google launched a new Government Requests tool.

According to Google’s AdPlanner stats, Facebook is the no 1 most-visited destination on the web. With 570 billion page views and 540 million users, the ubiquitous social network outranks every other non-Google site, taking more than 35% of all web traffic measured.

The stats, which do not include data from Google.com and YouTube, detail the categories, users and page views for each of the top 1,000 sites on the Internet. They also tell which sites have advertising. Wikipedia and Mozilla.com are the only two sites in the top 10 that remain ad-free.

When it comes to non-Facebook social media properties, Twitter ranks 18th with 5.4 billion page views, Flickr is 31st with 1.8 billion views and LinkedIn sits in 56th place at 1.7 billion views.

Study Reveals Sources of Spam
India and South Korea were the top Asian sources of global junk mail in the first quarter of the year, while China has pulled itself out of the “dirty dozen” list, a study revealed. The United States remained the number one source of junk, or spam, emails accounting for 13.1 percent of the total sent during the three-month period, the survey by computer security firm Sophos said.
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China: Cyber-Spying Network Targeting India
Reports of a China-based cyber spy network targeting the Indian military and the consequent alert sounded by Army authorities may be only the tip of the iceberg – investigations have revealed a fully dedicated India- specific espionage system aimed at business, diplomatic, strategic and academic interests.
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Internet Users in China Reaches 404 Million
The number of Internet users in China, already the largest in the world, has surpassed 400 million and accounts for almost a third of the country’s population, state media reported on Saturday. The online population in the world’s most populous nation has reached 404 million, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing the State Council Information Office.
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Cellphone Payments – An Alternative to Paying with Cash
You have won a bet, but the loser does not have enough cash on him to settle it. If he has a credit card, and most people usually do, there is finally a solution. A number of big and small companies – including eBay’s PayPal unit, Intuit, VeriFone and Square – are creating innovative ways for individuals to avoid cash and checks and settle all debts, public and private, using their cell phones.
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Most Young Adults Routinely Engage in Risky Online Behavior
Despite possessing a high level of awareness about threats lurking on the Internet, young adults routinely engage in risky online behavior, says a report from RSA, the security division of EMC, based on a TRU Research survey of 1,000 18- to 24-year-olds.
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