What The Kids Are Stealing These Days -- And What They'll Be Buying Soon

from Silicon Alley Insider by Peter Kafka

The same record labels that complain about the epidemic of file-sharing/song-stealing also pay close attention to what songs file-sharers are swapping. Why? Because song-stealers tend to have the same tastes as song-buyers, but they tend to move faster. So if you track the what songs are moving quickly on P2P file-sharing systems, you can get a good sense of what's will be selling in a few weeks' time.

Online measurement firm BigChampagne has generated a "biggest movers" chart for us, which tracks which songs have had the biggest week-to-week increases on file-sharing networks. We've published it after the jump. Note that it doesn't correlate at all to CD sales, because people who buy CDs aren't buying them because there's one good song on them. But if there's more than one good song on them, they tend to do very well. That's why we're confident that Gorilla Zoe, who we'd never heard of prior to today, will be selling a lot of copies of his album Welcome To The Zoo in the coming weeks. The album, released by Warner Music Group (WMG), has two fast-moving songs on the BigChampagne chart.

Related: Big Music "Wins" Trial Against Song-Stealer; Industry Still Screwed

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ASUS P5E3 Deluxe mobo boots in five seconds with embedded Linux

from Engadget by Joshua Topolsky

If you're an impatient individual, you're probably going to like what you hear about ASUS's newest motherboard, the P5E3 Deluxe. Sound fancy? Well, it is -- featuring Intel's X38 chipset (with an FSB running at 1600MHz), Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Extreme CPU support, plus the company's Energy Processing Unit, 8-phase power, and WiFi-AP. Of course, that won't help with your MTV-generation attention span and lack of patience, but the embedded micro-Linux variant, Express Gate, just might. You see, when you boot the system, you're given an option to immediately enter into a small Linux OS -- within five seconds, they say -- called SplashTop (developed by DeviceVM). The OS is coupled with a stripped-down version of Firefox and Skype, allowing you to update your Facebook profile almost instantly. The whole shebang is available right now for three-hundred and sixty of your precious dollars.

[Via Phoronix]

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Ontario's privacy commissioner to geeks: design for privacy!

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Here's a one-hour video of a magnificent lecture from Canada's Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dr Ann Cavoukian, to the University of Waterloo's Computer Science Club. The talk is called "Privacy by Design," and it charges technologists to build tools that minimize the collection and retention of personally identifying information, and to consider a complete, end-to-end, comprehensive framework for protecting user privacy. As Mitch Kapor said when he founded EFF, "architecture is politics" -- when you design tools that have wiretappable elements, you invite wiretapping. When you design tools that retain user data, you invite identity thieves and overreaching subpoenas.

Cavoukian argues that privacy and security are not zero-sum, that privacy is just as important in the "post-9/11 world" as it was before, and that you don't need to give up one to get the other. She addresses specific privacy-protection computer science techniques, and cites Kim Cameron's wonderful Seven Laws of Identity (I wish Kim would approach trusted computing with the same skepticism that he brought to identity issues, but that doesn't take away from his excellent work there).

There's something incredibly refreshing about hearing a high-ranking government official say things like, "Privacy is integral to freedom. You cannot have a free and democratic society without privacy. When a state morphs from a democracy into a totalitarian regime, the first thread to unravel is privacy." Link (via /.)

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Mint Rakes It In

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

Since launching and winning the top spot at our TechCrunch40 conference three weeks ago, personal-finance startup Mint has been on a roll. On Friday, Mint was named Best of Show at the 2007 Financial Innovations conference (along with peer-to-peer lender Prosper and mortgage-finder Mortgagebot).

CEO Aaron Patzer reports to us that, in just the past three weeks, Mint has already helped organize more than $2 billion worth of people's personal financial accounts, and identified more than $40 million in potential savings for those members. (Mint helps you find better interest rates on bank accounts, credit cards, and other financial products). Interest in the site spiked right after TC40. At one point, Mint was signing up a new member every five seconds. Not bad for a service from a previously-unknown startup that asks for access to all of your private financial data, including your bank and credit-card accounts.

Apparently, getting consumers to give up that level of privacy, has not been an issue so far. (The old axiom is true: people really will do anything to save a buck). Now comes the hard part. Getting all those people to keep coming back past the initial stage of curiosity.

Update: I asked Mint CEO Patzer for some more details on how many people are using Mint, and he responded with the following data. Keep in mind, this is only 18 days worth of data and thus should be treated as extremely preliminary (these are early adopters, so they may be more likely to embrace such a service and use it more often than a mainstream user):

—That $2 billion is spread across 50,000 registered users.
—About 70 percent (or 35,000) have come back more than once.
—Those who have been in the system at least a week (including beta testers), visit Mint.com 2-3 times a week.
—About 10 percent (or 5,000) come to the site every day.
—And 10 percent have signed up for mobile alerts.

(See also his comments below about the lengths Mint goes to secure customer data).

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Adult Alternative: Facebook and iTunes Teaming Up?

from Gizmodo by Mark Wilson

To fight off the evil empire that is MySpace, tiny entities Facebook and iTunes may be teaming up to bring a musical component to Facebook's offerings (while offering Apple another venue to sell their music).

According to the unconfirmed rumblings, Facebook is working on expanding their interface. Musical artists will now have special pages with integrated widgets for promoting band events. The upcoming iTunes widget will allow users to sample and even eventually buy music through Facebook (in support beyond the current iLike software). iPod owners who use Facebook will surely take glee in this new integration, but honestly, many of us avoid MySpace like the plague because it's full of a bunch of losers with crappy bands. Now all those losers with crappy bands are going to set up pages on Facebook, find their way into our networks and infiltrate our clean social networking. Not that we're paranoid or anything. [paidContent via macworld]

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