Pakistan‘s rambunctious Twitter users have been briefly silenced after the government closed the site amid fears blasphemous pictures might be circulated.

Muhammad Yaseen, chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, said the micro-blogging site had been shut down on Sunday after it refused to remove tweets promoting a Facebook page encouraging people to post images of the prophet Muhammad.

He said Facebook agreed to address Pakistan’s concerns but officials had failed to persuade Twitter to do the same. “We have been negotiating with them until last night, but they did not agree to remove the stuff, so we had to block it,” Yaseen said.

Officials from Facebook and Twitter were not immediately available for comment.

The ban was made largely irrelevant by tech-savvy users. Twitter members, many aided by online articles in the Pakistani media explaining how to circumvent the curbs, installed proxy servers to shield their web browsing. Once back online, many posted angry tweets about the shutdown.

One poster wondered how a known terrorist “can roam and operate freely in Pakistan whilst social media is banned!”

Farieha Aziz, of the Bolo Bhi advocacy group, said the government was repeating the mistake of 2010, when Facebook was blocked for two weeks because of a group page called Everybody Draw Mohammed. Although there had been protests in the runup to the event last year, Aziz said the ban gave the group more publicity, particularly in Islamic countries outside Pakistan.

“This year, however, everyone had been completely oblivious to this,” she added. “Shutting down Twitter will just drive more traffic to them.”

According to the government, about 20% of Pakistan’s 180 million people have access to the internet, while 64% have connections through their mobile phone.

The web is increasingly important among the country’s fast-growing urban middle class. A campaign run by Imran Khan, the former cricketer turned politician, who has more than 270,000 followers on Twitter, has been particularly popular.

In addition to blocking Facebook and Twitter, the government has in the past tried to control derogatory text messages insulting government figures and has considered a national firewall to potentially screen all web traffic.

Emrys Schoemaker, director of iMedia, a research organisation that studies social media in Pakistan, said attempts to control the internet reflected a shift from the media freedoms introduced by the former president Pervez Musharraf.

“This is a very defensive, dated response to politics in the digital era,” Schoemaker said. “Closing down debate simply makes the voices louder.”

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/20/pakistan-blocks-twitter-blasphemy-fears

It may have taken Nasdaq (possibly borrowing the London mayoral computer systems) a couple of hours to work out how much Facebook shares cost. But it took the market less than 60 minutes to test the will of Facebook’s underwriters, pulling the shares down to the opening $38 to see if there was somebody prepared to save Mark Zuckerberg’s face. There was, of course – how else does one earn one’s 7% fee? – and the stock ticked back up, because, make no mistake, a Facebook first-morning discount would be little short of a calamity. A point not lost on shareholders of the Facebook games company Zynga, whose shares tumbled 13% on Facebook’s so-so debut.

There is no shortage of debate on whether Facebook can justify its inflated $106bn valuation (at the time of writing). It has been well noted that its revenues fell in the first quarter of 2012 to $1.06bn, compared with the $1.131bn achieved in the fourth quarter last year. In the United States, where Facebook is clearly more mature, the company’s ad revenue an hour is in line with the take for the proven and mature market of television, according to Enders Research. People in the US already spend 14% of their online time on Facebook (can there really be more growth in that?), which may explain why Facebook wins an estimated 14% of US online display spend. Perhaps in the world’s largest economy Facebook is already mature.

Hold tight, though: there are plenty of arguments to keep the bulls happy too. Facebook’s real prospects are to spread globally in the way that a single commercial broadcaster would never be allowed to do, not least in China, and to see if the company can develop a new line of business, hence all the speculation about getting into phones. Even on today’s numbers, Facebook’s revenues imply that each monthly active user generated just $4.11 last year; each daily active user $7.68. Compare that to ITV, to which about two-thirds of British people tune in every week; they are worth £43 a year to advertisers.

So given the difficulty of making predictions, it is possible to take whatever numbers you need to justify your position. What’s interesting, though, is that most people argue that Facebook looks overvalued, yet we would not know what to do if that prediction came true. We have more invested in Facebook succeeding – because it is a more worrying question if it doesn’t. The essential narrative of our times rests on the notion that technology is a constant motor of change, which brings with it great wealth.

Facebook, in this sense, is the heir to Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and above all Google, an extraordinary pipeline of companies. But it is also our lodestar for the next direction in media: if Facebook does not succeed, then perhaps all this talk of navigating the web through the medium of our friends was overrated; referrals to news websites, after all, still primarily come from Google.

Yet while Google’s remarkable commercial success helps sustain the notion that there is a viable digital future out there for the rest of us, the failure of Netscape or the dotcom crash ought to lead us to consider that not every good idea becomes a global hit. And if Facebook falters on the stock market, there is no fresh company to take its place. MySpace et al have gone, and Twitter is a long way from generating the kind of cash that would allow it to excite.

Arguably, it would be more frustrating still if Facebook did quite well – growing by 50% a year rather than doubling, or whatever is required by the elevated valuation set by Wall Street. The credibility of social media would be dented, with a vocal group of frustrated investors – while those who pushed the valuation up to this level, and particularly those who sold out today, will have generated quite a return.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/20/facebook-future-more-than-money

This week on Science Weekly we look at science communication and public engagement.

FameLab is an international competition to find the next generation of David Attenboroughs, Brian Coxes and Robert Winstons, in which contestants make short presentations on a subject of their choice in front of a panel of judges. The competition seeks to nurture and advance young scientists who want to be effective and engaging communicators.

Alok Jha meets the UK winner of this year’s FameLab competition Andrew Steele and UK finalist Lucy Thorne.

The international FameLab final will take place at the Cheltenham Science Festival next month.

We also feature an interview with another scientist who has become one of the UK’s most highly regarded science communicators, Alice Roberts. Alice was appointed Professor of Public Engagement in Science by the University of Birmingham and last week, in an interview with the Guardian’s Comment is Free section, advocated that more scientists take part in public debate.

Alok is joined by Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample to discuss some of last week’s big science news including a new dawn for commercial space exploration with the SpaceX mission and a breakthrough in brain-controlled robotics.

Science Weekly was recorded before the aborted launch of the SpaceX Falcon rocket. The next launch window is at 8.44am BST (3.44am EDT) on Tuesday.

Subscribe for free via iTunes to ensure every episode gets delivered. (Here is the non-iTunes URL feed).

Follow the podcast on our Science Weekly Twitter feed and receive updates on all breaking science news stories from Guardian Science.

Email scienceweeklypodcast@gmail.com.

Guardian Science is now on Facebook. You can also join our Science Weekly Facebook group.

We’re always here when you need us. Listen back through our archive.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2012/may/21/science-weekly-podcast-x-factor-famelab

Reports came in this morning that Twitter has been blocked in Pakistan due to tweets regarding a competition to post depictions of the Prophet Muhammad — an act that many believe to be blasphemous. According to BBC News the country’s Ministry of Information Technology directed internet service providers to block access to the site, and there’s no word when the service will come back online. The competition itself was apparently hosted on Facebook, and the Associated Press reports that social network “agreed to address Pakistan’s concerns,” while the same cannot be said for Twitter. Mohammad Yaseen, chairman of the country’s Telecommunication’s Authority said that “We have been negotiating with them until last night, but they did not agree to remove the stuff, so we had to block it.”

It’s not clear why it ultimately came to the point that the Pakistani government needed to instruct ISPs to block access to Twitter across the country. The social network announced back in January that it had a new system that enabled the ability to censor tweets on a country-by-country basis, allowing it to comply with local laws. However, Twitter made clear at the time that it would only take advantage of the feature when it receives what it believes to be a “valid and applicable legal request.” The Interior Minister of Pakistan apparently thought that a deal would be struck, as he (rather ironically) tweeted out an assurance to the country’s people that neither Twitter nor Facebook would be blocked. We’ll update the story when we hear more on the situation, though it may take a while for the block to be lifted — the government prevented access to Facebook on a similar claim for two weeks back in 2010.

Dear all, I assure u that Twitter and FB will continue in our countryand it will not be blocked. Pl do not believe in rumors.

— Rehman Malik (@SenRehmanMalik) May 19, 2012

Thanks Waqas Ali, androidsucks, and Muhammad Umar!

Article source: http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/20/3032223/twitter-blocked-by-pakistani-government

ATT and Nokia went all-out for the launch of the Lumia 900 last month, but if you’re looking for another white, LTE-enabled Windows Phone with a 4-inch screen on ATT, you’ll want to know that the Samsung Focus 2 is available now. ATT is selling the phone for $49.99 with a two-year contract — a price that appears to undercut the Lumia 900, though if you look around it isn’t hard to find Nokia’s option for the same price or cheaper. If you’d rather purchase the device outright, it’ll cost you $399.99. We had a chance to play with the 11mm-thick Focus 2 at ATT’s CTIA event a couple of weeks ago, so be sure to check that out if you can’t wait for our full review, which we’ll be posting soon.

Article source: http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/20/3030858/att-focus-2-availability-pricing

If you’d like to see today’s annular eclipse, a rare event that makes the sun loo like a ring of fire, iO9 has assembled a handy guide on how to view it safely. According to the National Geographic, the eclipse will be visible from China to the midwest, and will make landfall in North America starting in California at 6:26PM PT. National Geographic says that the eclipse will then move across the Western states, and will end in Lubbock, Texas around 8:36PM CT.

Article source: http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/20/3032386/annular-eclipse-2012

Max Payne is looking pretty good for his age. Well, Max himself is looking awful; older, fatter, drunker, and sporting a beard that only serves to highlight his more than passing resemblance to Humphrey Bogart. But Max Payne 3 looks absolutely amazing.

Buy it from

1. PS3
2. PC
3. XBox 360

2. Max Payne 3

3. Rockstar

It plays like a dream too – albeit a pretty dark one. Max shoots baddies. He shoots them in São Paulo, New Jersey, football stadiums, favelas, speedboats, helicopters, in the arm, the chest, the groin, the head … and, of course, in “bullet time”.

Bullet time is not new. But the flawless way the new game engine handles the slow-motion combat that is the essence of all Max Payne games is something to behold. And because it’s a Rockstar title, this potentially gimmicky glue holds great big chunks of story, double-cross and humour together beautifully. Never leave a TV set unwatched: the effort that has been put into the news reports, ads, offbeat cartoons and crazy Brazilian soap operas has to be enjoyed, whether or not you speak Portuguese.

You’ll be hooked from the moment Max’s gravelly voice starts moaning about a succession of very bad days at the office, and want to play it again even before you’ve finished it. Not least because you will miss some of the clues and dismantled golden guns hidden in every level. These not only bling up your arsenal (Max can now carry a mere two handguns or submachine guns and one rifle or shotgun) but do significantly more damage.

Just as Red Dead Revolver was completely eclipsed by Red Dead Redemption, it seems that Rockstar has done it again, this time with a significantly better-known and better-loved hero. They have taken the essence of Max Payne and added a better story, better targetting, improved enemy AI, an arcade mode that ramps up the already relentless shooting still further, plus multiplayer and workable multi-person bullet time. Oh, and gangs that you can take with you to Grand Theft Auto 5.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/20/max-payne-3-review

Davor Hebel, a Croatian-born and US-educated partner at Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, a £100m fund, is explaining where venture capital (VC) investors fit into London’s technology ecosystem. It all boils down to the question of whether you back the jockey or the horse. Angel, “seed” or early-stage investors tend to back the jockey – the entrepreneurs themselves – in the knowledge that their idea will undergo a number of iterations before a winning formula is found.

A VC, by contrast, usually takes a rather more cool-headed approach. Yes, he or she will assess the team’s credibility, but ultimately they will back the horse. “Not every company needs venture capital investment, of course,” says Hebel. “They can grow at a certain rate without us.” He leans forward, flashing a Colgate smile, to emphasise his next point. “But when you raise VC investment, the VC will want you to go for a huge exit – that’s an exit of £100m plus. They will want you to hit the ball out of the park.”

There are three things you get used to if you spend time talking deals with VCs such as the affable Hebel. First, they talk in telephone-number sums. Even the European minnows (by comparison with Silicon Valley’s breed of great whites) run funds comprising breathtaking amounts of cash. A fund of less than £100m is considered small – or in the words of one investor, “boutique” – while the biggest European players, such as Accel Partners, a global powerhouse that has backed both Facebook and Groupon, has a kitty of $1.5bn (£946m) to invest in entrepreneurs on this side of the Atlantic.

Second, technology venture capital in Europe is a very small world. Most of the VCs, who raise their own cash from pension funds and wealthy individuals or families, seem to know each other well. This is because they’ve often scoped the same deals and worked the same rooms at events packed with twentysomething techies with promising businesses.

Third, they pepper conversation with the word “disrupt” – as in: “This company is going to disrupt the social gaming/alternative finance/pedigree pet-grooming world.” And by “disrupt” they don’t mean “mildly unsettle” or “interrupt”. They mean “turn upside down”.

Arguably, however, it is the VCs themselves, alongside other investors, who are currently doing much of the disrupting. Eighteen months after the prime minister expounded, at a venue in Brick Lane, his vision for east London’s transformation into a global technology hub, “Tech City”, as it is known to some, (“Silicon Roundabout” to others), is the scene of increasingly cut-throat competition between investors. The once familiar refrain that, compared with the US, talented startups with a breakout idea struggle to get capital investment in the UK is increasingly rarely heard. Indeed, the (bespoke, hand-sewn) shoe is now very much on the other foot: it is frequently the investors who must do much of the fawning and pitching.

“The best startups not only always get funded, but there is real competition to fund them from a growing number of angels, accelerators [growth hothouses] and VCs,” says Robin Klein, venture partner at Index Ventures, whose out-of-the-ballpark UK investments include Lovefilm (acquired by Amazon for “close to £200m”), Mind Candy and TweetDeck (sold to Twitter for around £25m). “The availability of capital here far exceeds that of any other European centre. London is now the European technology hub.”

Indeed, so intense is the competition for the outstanding startup ideas that VC investors are having to elbow their way in much earlier in the game. Where once they could leave the early stage or “seed” investing to friends and family (often derided as “fools and family”), tech incubators/accelerators and angels, today they have to scour tech networking events, meet-ups and demo days (at which startups pitch their businesses) to catch entrepreneurs before they have proven business models – or else risk missing out on the next Facebook or Wonga.

“This is because the costs to get tech companies up and running are decreasing,” explains Tom Hulme, design director of IDEO and angel investor in GoCardless and retail “gamification” platform Fantasy Shopper. “Startups can use cloud services to scale [up] or can tap into social networks to market [themselves]. So whereas VCs used to have to wait until businesses were bigger, you see a lot starting to invest at an earlier stage.”

One such firm is Mangrove Capital Partners, a Luxembourg-based €100m (£80m) fund, which focuses on Europe and emerging markets. Its VCs invest before a product launch and, if viable, follow up with further backing (totalling €15-€20m) later.

“We want to build up a reasonable stake in companies at an early stage because that allows us to have success in our funds,” says Mangrove partner Michael Jackson, formerly chief operating officer of Skype. “The mathematics of our funds mean we need generally large companies to be created reasonably fast. Typically, we invest in between 30 and 50 companies per fund, of which we’re hoping one will be fantastic.”

Jackson explains that the best small funds (“typically €50-€200m”) have all had one or two large successes. “If one company is going to pay back, say, a €100m fund, which is what we all dream of, it means the VC has to have 10% of a billion-dollar company when it’s sold for it to work. What tends to happen if you have 30 companies is that you have one success, if you’re lucky, which puts the whole thing into profit and then you have two or three others that do pretty well as well, which delivers some solid extra returns for people who invest in us.”

The investors vying for a slice of the action, high valuations and acquisitions such as Facebook’s $1bn (as yet uncompleted) purchase of photo-sharing service Instagram – especially when set against Europe’s struggling “real” economies – have led some to speculate that we are in the throes of another dotcom bubble. But that theory finds little sympathy from VCs such as Klein, who says that, unlike 2000 – the year of the last dotcom crash – the fundamentals of the tech boom are very strong indeed.

“Internet adoption continues to grow and smartphones accessing the web means that many more people have access for longer periods and in different situations. Building companies has never been cheaper. Platforms such as Facebook, iPhone and Android are facilitating wide, global distribution; Google gives consumers easy access via search to goods and services; and technology becomes simpler and more intuitive every day.”

Pointing to his portfolio of companies, he says: “We are seeing 50%-plus year-on-year growth. Clearly this is not happening in other parts of the economy.”

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/20/venture-investors-british-facebook-london

Mark Zuckerberg, the newly enriched Facebook founder, has updated his status to “married”.

Zuckerberg and 27-year-old Priscilla Chan wed at a small ceremony at his home in Palo Alto, California, on Saturday, capping a week during which the social network he founded listed on the share market for more than $100bn.

Multi-billionaire Zuckerberg took his company public on the Nasdaq stock exchange in one of the most anticipated moves in Wall Street history on Friday. Chan graduated from medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, on Monday, the same day Zuckerberg turned 28.

The couple met at Harvard and have been together for more than nine years.

A company spokeswoman said Zuckerberg designed the ring – featuring “a very simple ruby” – himself.

The ceremony took place in Zuckerberg’s backyard before fewer than 100 guests, who all thought they were there to celebrate Chan’s graduation.

Tens of thousands of people “liked” his status change, which was accompanied by a photo of the couple in wedding attire.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/20/mark-zuckerberg-facebook

The tech industry — and especially startup community — has a reputation for not holding too much regard for the corporate hierarchies of old (just look at Valve, a company that says it doesn’t have a single manager), and one place where that shows are the titles that companies hand out. According to job search website Indeed.com, listings containing the word “ninja” have increased by about 2756 percent since May 2006 (up from just 18 to a current total of 469). Other terms like “Jedi” and “rockstar” have also seen a large bump. The whole thing is just a way for companies to show that they have got some attitude and pizazz, instead of just posting a listing asking for a boing old coder. Of course, with such an increase in the usage of these terms, these “fun” titles are losing all of their meaning (e.g. we’ve met representatives from cellphone companies with the title “Press Ninja” on their business cards), so what’s next? Here are a few ideas: “swamp monster,” “cyborg,” “bounty hunter,” “fembot,” “troll,” and “alien” — all of which you’ll find conspicuously missing from our very own job listings.

Article source: http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/19/3030708/tech-companies-are-looking-for-ninjas-jedis-and-rockstars-whats-next