Webby News

Ski season is rapidly approaching, and resorts will soon be releasing their lift ticket prices (if they haven’t already). But this year, some skiers will have a new option when it comes to buying their tickets: discounted pricing for off-peak days, thanks to a startup called Liftopia. Today the company has annouced that it closed a $1 million Series B funding round led by Erik Blachford (CEO of Terrapass, Former CEO of Expedia) and Amicus Capital, with a number of investors from the company’s Series A round also participating.

Liftopia allows ski resorts to offer variable pricing for tickets based on much how traffic they anticipate seeing on the slopes — in other words, resorts can lower their prices if they think they’re going to have a slow day the same way an airline does if a flight might not fill up.

Wow. I’m impressed. For the past few days, Gmail has been hanging when I try to attach a file. It doesn’t matter what type of file it is or how big it is. More times than not, it hangs. The hang happens as soon as Gmail shows the bar that displays the percent loaded. I have to force-quit. This is with the latest version of FF and of Snow Leopard. (I use Gmail as part of Google Accounts, and I have https turned on.)

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Bing is beginning to find its way onto the iPhone through apps that build on top of its APIs. One that just hit the iTunes Store is an augmented reality app called Robotvision (iTunes link). Like other AR apps, it uses the video camera on the iPhone 3GS, as well as the GPS and the compass to bring up data about nearby restaurants and shops, including reviews. It gets this local business data from Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Once you find a place nearby, you can call it the business from within the app. A lot of this functionality is already in the current Yelp iPhone app hidden as an Easter Egg, but Robotvision has some nice extra features. For instance, a feature is triggered by looking down at the screen, which shows the business and others like it as pins on a map. You can toggle back and forth between augmented reality view and map view depending on how the phone is positioned. (see video demo below).

Security, or lack thereof, can make or break a cloud computing choice. According to the survey, 61 percent of respondents said they are holding off on cloud computing solutions until they can be reasonably sure that there are no significant security risks to their networks as a result. A smaller group - 27 percent - said that security concerns might cause them to take a second look but the benefits of cloud computing outweigh security issues, and it won’t cause them to delay or cancel plans to implement a new cloud computing solution.

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Given my recent rants about Silicon Valley’s ratio of stinginess-to-wealth and the current trend against “changing the world,” it’s not a huge surprise that more blog posts and tweets were coming from Demo or the B-list-celebrity-studded 140-The Twitter Conference than at the Clinton Global Initiative summit that was also held this week in New York.

Techies who did follow the conference likely did so through the tweets and TwitPics of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. After founding one of the biggest successes in Silicon Valley history Omidyar bucked the serial entrepreneur trend and turned to angel investing and do-gooding. At the conference he announced another big move: His philanthropic investment firm, The Omidyar Network, is committing $30 million towards backing high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets, specifically Sub-Saharan Africa and India.

It’s an interesting fill-the-gap strategy between mainstream venture capitalists looking to benefit from the emerging world’s booming demographics but frequently stymied by cultural and logistical challenges and micro-loans, which the Omidyar Network has already done a good deal of in these regions.

href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http://mashable.com/2009/09/25/idaho-spam-capital/&service=bit.ly">Ever wondered which US state receives the most spam? According to href="http://go.symantec.com/MessageLabs">Symantec’s MessageLabs, it’s Idaho, where 93.8 percent of all email is spam, followed by Kentucky, New Jersey, Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Massachussetts, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Maryland.

Don’t get us wrong, there’s spam everywhere; the global spam rate for September 2009 is 86.4 percent. But Idaho’s eerily high rate is also a surprise because it jumped 43 spots since 2008; back then it was ranked the 44th most spammed state. We can only guess as to whether spammers have developed some special relationship with Idaho, or it’s all pure coincidence.

If spam drives you mad, the best US state to be living in is the US territory of Puerto Rico, with (just?) 83.1 percent of spam, followed by Montana, Alaska, Kansas, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and Florida.

As far as the global spam numbers go, they’re flabbergasting as usual. Four to six million computers accross the globe are parts of botnets that spew out some 151 billion emails a day. Remind me again, why do we still use email?

Tags: href="http://mashable.com/tag/idaho/">Idaho, href="http://mashable.com/tag/spam/">spam, href="http://mashable.com/tag/symantec/">Symantec

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href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http://mashable.com/2009/09/24/bank-sues-google-identity/&service=bit.ly">Here’s an example of how you can get caught up in a lawsuit, and possibly have your identity revealed, without doing anything wrong; more precisely, without doing href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/23/google_sued_for_gmail_user_identity/">anything at all.

An employee of Wyoming-based Rocky Mountain Bank accidentally sent a file that included the names, addresses, tax IDs, and loan info for over 1,300 of the bank’s customers, to the wrong (Gmail) address.

The same employee then sent another email to that same address, requesting that the email be deleted before it was opened (which wouldn’t have helped matters much, as it would be impossible for the bank to know whether the recipient had indeed deleted the email). After receiving no response, the bank contacted Google, asking for information on that Gmail account; Google refused to provide the info without a court order, so the bank sued.

While it’s definitely understandable that a bank wants to do everything to protect such sensitive data, put yourself in the place of that Gmail user. He received an email without asking for it – perhaps to a dormant account – and now he might find himself in the middle of a lawsuit, and have his identity revealed. Unpleasant, at the very least.

This situation is somewhat reminiscent to the recent lawsuit, in which Google was forced to reveal the identity of an href="http://mashable.com/2009/08/19/google-identity-blogger/">offensive blogger. The main difference, however, is that the Gmail user in this new case has done absolutely nothing to deserve the “attention” – except perhaps not checking their email account very often.

Image courtesy of href="http://www.istockphoto.com/mashableoffer.php">iStockphoto, href="http://www.istockphoto.com/user_view.php?id=761942">Henrik5000

Tags: href="http://mashable.com/tag/bank/">bank, href="http://mashable.com/tag/gmail/">gmail, href="http://mashable.com/tag/google/">Google, href="http://mashable.com/tag/identity/">identity, href="http://mashable.com/tag/lawsuit/">lawsuit

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