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Study: Major Brands Cling to Instagram

Internet News, Your Brand 116 Responses »

May 132013

About 67 percent of Interbrands Top 100 Brands use Instagram, according to a recent study by Simply Measured.

Interbrands Top 100 ranks the top global brands each year. Brands in the top 100 include Starbucks, Nike, and MTV. According to Simply Measured, those three brands also have over one million Instagram followers.

The study found that Nike was the most popular brand to use Instagram. Simply Measured found the firm had 1,315,051 followers. Nikes followers reportedly grew over 50 percent on a quarter-by-quarter basis.

MTV was the second most popular brand to use Instagram. The study found that MTV had 1,290,237 followers. The music channels followers reportedly jumped 13 percent quarter-over-quarter.

Starbucks came in third for most popular brand on Instagram. Simply Measured found that the coffee shop had 1,205,752 Instagram followers. On a quarter-over-quarter basis the brands amount of followers grew 12 percent.

Simply Measured reported that Instagrams integration with Facebook has led it to gain ground on competing social networks. According to the study, brands on Instagram have more followers than those on Pinterest.

MORE: Study: Major Brands Cling to Instagram | ClickZ.

Attack hitting Apache sites goes mainstream, hacks nginx, Lighttpd, too

Internet News 302 Responses »

May 082013

Security researchers have uncovered an ongoing and widespread attack that causes sites running three of the Internet’s most popular Web servers to push potent malware exploits on visitors.

Linux/Cdorked.A, as the malicious backdoor behind the attacks is known, has been observed infecting at least 400 Web servers, 50 of them from the Alexa top 100,000 ranking, researchers from antivirus provider Eset said. The backdoor infects sites running the Apache, nginx, and Lighttpd Web servers and has already exposed almost 100,000 end users running Eset software to attack (the AV apps protect them from infection). Because Eset sees only a small percentage of overall Internet users, the actual number of people affected is presumed to be much higher.

“This is the first time I’ve seen an attack that will actually target different Web servers, meaning the attacker is willing to create the backdoor for Apache, Lightttp, and nginx,” Pierre-Marc Bureau, Eset’s security intelligence program manager, told Ars. “Somebody is running an operation that can victimize various Web servers and in my opinion this is the first time that has ever happened. This is a stealthy, sophisticated, and streamlined distribution mechanism for getting malware on end users computers.”

Previously, Cdorked was known to infect only sites that ran on Apache, which remains by far the Internet’s most popular Web server application.

MORE: Attack hitting Apache sites goes mainstream, hacks nginx, Lighttpd, too | Ars Technica.

How to Be a Successful Marketer Without Being a Jerk

Marketing 214 Responses »

May 082013

The era of successful jerks in business and marketing is over, according to Peter Shankman. The founder of Help a Reporter Out HARO and now VP and small business evangelist for Vocus, which acquired HARO in 2010, has dealt with a fair amount of jerks throughout his career. ClickZ caught up with Shankman following the release of his latest book, “Nice Companies Finish First: Why Cutthroat Management is Over – and Collaboration Is In,” to learn more about his positive vibrations in marketing and how marketers can be effective without being a jerk.

As Shankman prepares to launch a new consultancy next month based on the teachings in his book, he describes how business leaders can generate more revenue by empowering their entire workforce to simply do what is right.

ClickZ: How does one become a successful marketer without being a jerk?

Peter Shankman: When you look at 50 years ago, no one really cared how you acted. You could do pretty much whatever you wanted and you didnt get in trouble because it was really hard to catch you, as it were. But, the problem is now you have everything out there. Everyone you meet, everyone you talk to, everyone you know has some sort of 24-hour connection to the Internet and the ability to grab anything – audio, video, or otherwise – anytime they want. That, fortunately, winds up resulting in the ability to lie disappearing. It used to be when you would screw up at some capacity at a company, there was nothing they could do about it. They were upset, they told their friends maybe. Now its everywhere and its very easy. So with this 24-hour connected world that were in, the easiest way to keep the clients you have and gain new ones is simply to be 1 percent nicer than what we always expect, which lets face it is crap.

MORE: How to Be a Successful Marketer Without Being a Jerk | ClickZ.

Adobe’s Creative Suite is dead, long live the Creative Cloud

Design, Tech News 438 Responses »

May 072013

Adobe’s Creative Suite and the applications that make it up—Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Premiere, and a host of others—have been staples of many professional toolboxes for almost a decade now. The full suite itself has been available since September of 2003, and many of its applications have a history that reach back even further. Today at its MAX conference, however, Adobe announced a major shift in strategy for the software: boxed versions, along with their perpetual licenses, will no longer be available for any Adobe software newer than CS6. Going forward, subscribing to Adobe’s Creative Cloud service will be the only way to upgrade your software.

As with the boxed versions of the software, Adobe offers several different pricing options for Creative Cloud subscriptions: new users can buy a subscription at $50 a month with an annual commitment (or $75 month-to-month), which gets you access to the full suite of software plus, all of Adobe’s Edge services, 20GB of cloud storage. Users of Creative Suite versions 3 to 5.5 can get their first year of service at a reduced rate of $30 a month for the first year, while current CS6 users can subscribe for $20 a month for the first year. For individuals, these subscriptions buy you the right to use the software on up to two different computers, same as the boxed versions.

MORE: Adobe’s Creative Suite is dead, long live the Creative Cloud | Ars Technica.

Googles Chief Internet Evangelist on Creating the Interplanetary Internet

Internet News, Tech News 207 Responses »

May 072013

When some future Mars colonist is able to open his browser and watch a cat in a shark suit chasing a duck while riding a roomba, they will have Vint Cerf to thank.

In his role as Google’s chief internet evangelist, Cerf has spent much of his time thinking about the future of the computer networks that connect us all. And he should know. Along with Bob Kahn, he was responsible for developing the internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, that underlies the workings of the net. Not content with just being a founding father of the internet on this planet, Cerf has spent years taking the world wide web out of this world.

Working with NASA and JPL, Cerf has helped develop a new set of protocols that can stand up to the unique environment of space, where orbital mechanics and the speed of light make traditional networking extremely difficult. Though this space-based network is still in its early stages and has few nodes, he said that we are now at “the front end of what could be an evolving and expanding interplanetary backbone.”Wired talked to Cerf about the interplanetary internet’s role in space exploration, the frustrations of network management on the final frontier, and the future headline he never wants to see.

MORE: Googles Chief Internet Evangelist on Creating the Interplanetary Internet | Wired Science | Wired.com.

Secret Bitcoin mining code added to e-sports software sparks outrage

Internet News, Law, Tech News 1 Response »

May 012013

Competitive video gaming community E-Sports Entertainment Association secretly updated its client software with Bitcoin-mining code that tapped players computers to mint more than $3,600 worth of the digital currency, one of its top officials said Wednesday.

The admission by co-founder and league administrator Eric ‘lpkane’ Thunberg came amid complaints from users that their ESEA-supplied software was generating antivirus warnings, computer crashes, and other problems. On Tuesday, one user reported usage of his power-hungry graphics processor was hovering in the 90-percent range even when his PC was idle. In addition to consuming electricity, the unauthorized Bitcoin code could have placed undue strain on the users hardware since the mining process causes GPUs to run at high temperatures.

“Turns out for the past 2 days, my computer has been farming bitcoins for someone in the esea community,” the person with the screen name ENJOY ESEA SHEEP wrote. “Luckily I have family in the software forensics industry.”

About five hours later, a separate user posted evidence of the ESEA software client included the Bitcoin code. The user also provided instructions showing how other ESEA players can check to see if their computers are running the secret program.

MORE: Secret Bitcoin mining code added to e-sports software sparks outrage | Ars Technica.

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