Aleks Grynis

Former President of Facebook, Sean Parker, did an interview with CNBC today in which he discussed Facebook’s “inevitable” IPO and applauded Mark Zuckerberg for keeping the company private for as long as he has. While Parker didn’t provide any insight as to when the public offering would be made or at what valuation, he did admit that the public push for Facebook shares can’t be ignored:

To the extent that there is any bubble in technology at all, it is really a bubble around Facebook in the sense that there is a huge amount of pent-up demand among retail investors for access to Facebook equity.

Our sources say that the IPO could happen as early as next Monday, but it’s anyone’s guess at this point.

In the interview below, Parker discusses how ironic it is that Zynga, which has found success with its games by piggybacking Facebook’s social graph, went public before Facebook did.

Notice that the interview started to go south when questions about Justin Timberlake’s portrayal of him in “The Social Network” started being asked. Let’s keep it to tech folks, shall we?

CBS finally let go its sports blogger Adam Jacobi following the Paterno debacle, Jacobi himself announced today on his Twitter account:

As you may remember, CBS Sports wrongly announced the death of the ex-Penn State American football coach Joe Paterno – who had recently been accused of covering child sex abuse.

As Paterno’s sons soon pointed out, the information was incorrect – although terminally ill, their father only passed away hours later.

Following the misstep, it emerged that Jacobi’s report was based on a sole source he initially didn’t bother to name: the Onward State. A local online news outlet run by students targeted at Penn State College community, it had erroneously reported JoPa’s death on Twitter.

This is how CBS ended up sharing the blame with Onward State’s managing editor Devon Edwards. According to Poynter, the student’s wrong information was itself based on a false email and other incorrect allegations.

Had Jacobi mentioned his source, he may had kept his job following public apologies. Instead, CBS seems to have hesitated for a few days before deciding to let him go. Jacobi had been working for CBS Sports for the past 17 months; according to his LinkedIn profile, his job title was College Football Blogger.

Jacobi himself insists he’s not bitter about CBS’ decision – not only with the above-mentioned apologetic messages, but also with this clarification an hour later:

Jacobi and Edwards know it too: source attribution and fact-checking are mandatory for quality reporting. These are two tasks anyone involved in print and news has to perform, no matter if they call themselves ‘journalist’ or ‘blogger’, ‘student’ or ‘senior’.

Still, some consider CBS’ decision to be harsh on Jacobi. Says US blogger Erik Wemple:

CBSSports.com could easily have kept Jacobi right where he was. Just issue a statement expressing commitment to further training and be done with the issue. But a firing sends a message that CBSSports.com cares more about its credibility than it does about one employee’s job security.

Not only does CBSSports.com put on notice its employees that multiple sourcing matters, it puts on notice the entire industry.

For journalists and bloggers alike, Jacobi’s sacking is certainly frightful: one article goes wrong, and we could lose our jobs. Yet, this whole debacle also serves as a reminder that we should always maintain our standards. Despite deadlines and newsroom pressure for scoops, let’s keep in mind the damage bad reporting can do.

Do you think CBS’ decision was fair?

At first it may sound strange for a designer to keep their icons in a font file, let alone use them Online. CSS3 and @font-face are just now emerging as a viable option for display and text fonts, so why depend on it more for icons as well?

The thing is, pictograph and icons packed into a font file are already a very reasonable way to keep track of an entire series of graphics. All you need to do is install the font for safe keeping, start typing and you’ll automatically have access to scalable icons straight from your system’s font library. Now, with CSS3, we can style them in tons of impressive ways Online with little effort.

Pictos, a user interface icon font that has been out for a while now, has just recently created what I can only call “Typekit for your user interface.” Pictos Server is out to get designers off of image sprites and onto icon fonts (sans JavaScript), and will host them on-the-cheap too.

According to the creator:

The entire purpose of using icon fonts is to replace the need to render icons on a web page using images. Icons fonts can be styled dynamically using CSS. They are smaller in file size than an image sprite. Being vector in nature, they are infinitely scaleable.

If your interest is peaked, you’ll want to check out the guide to using the font, as well as the explanations for accessibility and compatibility problems.

There are definitely issues involved in the process. If you rely on the font for all of your navigation and your site is viewed in an incompatible browser, your entire site is doomed. The service also costs $19+ per year, and you could instead use other fonts like Modern Pictograms or IcoMoon for free with the @font-face tag, but you’d have to host that yourself.

All in all, this is definitely worth the experiment. If you feel like living on the edge then go for it. Icon fonts may be the way of the future, along with actual CSS drawings. If you’re stuck supporting old versions of IE, then you’ll unfortunately have to stick with images for now, but otherwise, why not give it a try?

> Pictos Server ($19+ / year)

Check out our full Design and Dev channel for more inspiration! Also, you can exclusively view typography articles here.

I’m a big fan of simplicity, because it shouldn’t take rocket science to explain a service or product. One of the masters of simplicity is Philip Kaplan aka Pud, who has made some fun products that even your mom can understand.

One of his most recent creations, TinyLetter, allows people to start an email newsletter in just a few clicks. It was purchased by MailChimp in August.

Kaplan’s latest app, Bellbot, might not get acquired, but it’s yet another interesting creation from a guy who has seen it all in Silicon Valley.

The service allows you to drop a single line of code on any page of your site, and a bell will ring when someone hits it. In a TinyLetter email today, Kaplan explains the service:

I came up with the idea a long time ago when I read a story about how Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) in the early days rigged a bell to play every time Amazon had a new customer. Also I think it’s fairly common for sales people to ring a bell (or smash a gong) every time they have a sale. So this is a virtual version of that.

All you have to do is sign up for Bellbot, and you’ll get a unique code to drop on any page of your site. To go along with the usage Kaplan suggests, you should put the code on a “Thank You” page that happens after someone signs up for your site or buys something.

After you’ve placed the code on your page, just keep your Bellbot page open, sit back and relax. As soon as people start hitting your chosen page, the app will ring. It sounds goofy, but if you’re just getting started, this type of incentive will definitely keep you and your team in the know and pushing forward to keep going.

This could be great for a charity who is having an event and wants to let everyone in attendance know when a new donation is made. As donations come through and Bellbot starts sounding off, more people will be excited to donate too. This one falls under the “Why didn’t I think of that?” category, and Kaplan is a master at churning these types of apps out.

➤ Bellbot

On the Yahoo! Search Blog, the company has announced a focus on “mobile first” and the related discontinuation of several of its mobile apps for iPad, iPhone, Android, and Blackberry, citing the fast pace of change in the mobile space. “Our plan is to keep moving, to keep innovating, and to continuously measure and scrutinize what’s working and what isn’t,” says the post, “so we can make room for great new products.”

Here’s the list of apps that will no longer be supported:

• Yahoo! Meme (iPad and iPhone)
• Yahoo! Mim (iPad)
• Yahoo! Answers (Android)
• Yahoo! AppSpot (Android and iPhone)
• Yahoo! Deals (iPhone)
• Yahoo! Finance (BlackBerry)
• Yahoo! Movies (Android)
• Yahoo! News (Android)
• Yahoo! Shopping (iPhone)
• Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search (iPad and iPhone)

Features from certain apps including AppSpot and Sketch-a-Search have been integrated into the main Yahoo! Search app, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see other features from these apps make their way into the search app too.

Despite the end of these apps, Yahoo says it is “moving forward with a ‘mobile first’ mindset.” This echoes comments made by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who said in early 2010 that Google would be following a “mobile first” strategy. Schmidt predicted that smartphones would eventually overtake PCs in popularity, and that prediction seems to be coming closer to reality every day, as the popularity and ubiquity of smartphones continues to increase.

Yahoo’s post gives some hints as to where in mobile the company will be focusing this year:

You can expect to see more new Yahoo! mobile products in 2012, especially in areas ripe for innovation that build on Yahoo!’s strengths, such as companion experiences for TV like IntoNow, new ways to experience personalized media like Livestand, and some of our most popular and useful mobile apps like Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Sportacular and Flickr, which are already being used by millions of people around the world.

The company hopes its products will “change the mobile game well beyond Yahoo!”

Since Larry Page took over as CEO at Google, a similar reexamination of priorities and focus has occurred, with many products that don’t fit into Google’s core mission being discontinued or open sourced.

There’s word blasting through the tech world today that Facebook is readying an S-1 filing for its IPO next week. With a valuation expected to be as high as $100 billion, the company is reportedly aiming to raise as much as $10 billion. But the timeline that we’re hearing now doesn’t quite match up to what other sources are saying.

A Facebook employee, who has asked to not be named (for obvious reasons) has forewarned some insiders to prepare for an announcement on Monday, rather than Wednesday, which is the current conventional wisdom. While being a bit coy about any details, the advice was to have bankers on hold for a Monday filing.

Update: We’ve gotten word that the Monday event will be of private shares, rather than the S-1. The title of the article has been updated accordingly.

There’s not much known about anything else surrounding Facebook’s IPO and the S-1 just yet. Though you can bet that we’ll be digging into the filing as soon as it drops to scrounge up any juicy details. What you can almost bet is that the round will be led by and collaboration with Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley as the two powerhouses vie for the prestige that would come with one of tech’s most long-awaited filings.

We’re no experts, and this isn’t to be considered financial advice, but Mondays are typically quiet in the technology world. If Facebook is looking to make the biggest splash possible, that’s most certainly the day to do it. I may be dead wrong on this one, but everything seems to line up.

The real question is this – Will the newly-minted millionaires of Facebook be our next crop of Silicon Valley investors? And if so, will they be any good at it?

During an interview with The Telegraph, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates disclosed that he had written a letter to Steve Jobs as he was dying.

Apparently the letter meant quite a bit to Jobs, as he kept it by his bedside in the final days of his life. According to Gates, the letter wasn’t to make peace, as the two had gotten along quite well:

There was no peace to make. We were not at war. We made great products, and competition was always a positive thing. There was no [cause for] forgiveness.

After Jobs passed away, his wife Laurene called Gates:

She said; ‘Look, this biography really doesn’t paint a picture of the mutual respect you had.’ And she said he’d appreciated my letter and kept it by his bed.

While Gates didn’t share exactly what was in the letter, he did touch on some of the things he wrote to Jobs about:

I told Steve about how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know.

Bill Gates has become quite the humantiarian since leaving his post at Microsoft, giving 48% of his net-worth to charity through the Gates Foundation.

It’s sad to think about what type of dent Steve Jobs could have made in the way health is managed in third-world countries after his days at Apple. I’m sure that the accomplishments Bill Gates has made would have fueled him to do the same in his older age.

In 2007, comedian and actor Rob Corddry left his full-time gig as the funniest correspondent to grace The Daily Show, uprooted his family and dragged them out to Los Angles, a move that he had known was a long time coming. He was there to film a new TV show and was ready to get to work.

Six episodes later, the show was canceled and Corddry was left to his own devices, with no plans and the 2007 writer’s strike cutting a swath through any potential products in the pipeline.

So Corddry decided to do something a bit out of the ordinary for someone in an industry that only rewards constant exposure: he took a year off to figure out how to work more productively.

Corddry, a self-confessed Mac nerd, was at Macworld 2012, participating in a live Mac Power User Podcast panel with productivity philosophizer Merlin Mann. during the panel he talked a bit about his workflow, what Mac apps he uses and how taking the time to learn to be productive led to the success he’s had with his hilarious new show Children’s Hospital.

Corddry says that his love of the Mac as a platform started on a Mac Classic where he had his first awakening when it came to how great the Mac OS GUI made using a computer. “I was a ‘command prompt’ user,” said Corddry, “but when I first saw that I could drag this icon over to replace that one…I was like, this is great!”

In the 8 or so months that he spent to re-think the way that he was working Corddry’s love of Macs served him well as he really began learning and using a variety of productivity tools in an earnest way. Merlin Mann says that Corddy’s time was well spent because instead of just ‘learning tools’ “he actually spent that year getting productive.”

Corddry is a big fan of Omni Labs’ Omnifocus, which he uses on the Mac to plug in everything that he says he “doesn’t want to have to remember later.” A granular attention to detail when entering tasks and reminders into the tool when beginning a project has served him well due to the hectic nature of a TV production once it actually gets rolling.

Being thorough about setting up the projects ahead of time makes it easier to trust that anything that needs to be done will be surfaced by the software while he can concentrate on the broader and more timely issues he faces during production.

Another tool that Corddry says is invaluable is PearNote, an app for the Mac that records a full audio stream that tracks along with written notes during the sometimes 3-hour long pitch meetings. You can reference a transcript of the meeting’s notes and click on a line or word and hear the audio recorded at that moment in order to get context. This replaces a person taking the minutes at a meeting and someone taking written notes, allowing these to be combined in an easily referential way.

Google Docs is also a huge part of the show’s collaboration framework, with notes given by Corddry added in his trademark dark blue color. Many of his common notes are preset in TextExpander so that frequently used phrases like “Lets take the air out of…” can be entered in just one or two keystrokes.

The actor didn’t have much nice to say about the screenwriting tool Final Draft, calling it “buggy, ugly and not very intuitive,” adding, “some things just don’t work.”

He said that he has thought about “going to the company and just talking to the developers to ask them what their plans are for the product. It’s just so crufty, instead of features being rebuilt, it’s just band aids being added on top.”

Of much interest to Corddry was the fact that developer Brett Terpstra Jonathan Poritsky, Stu Maschwitz andMartin Vilcans on bringing Stu’s Screenplay Markdown proposal to his popular Markdown editor Marked. Terpstra announced, in a quick back-and-forth with Corddry that they were also working on getting a Markdown exporter working for Final Draft.

As far as iOS goes, Corddry says that he mostly uses the companion apps to his favorite Mac productivity software, although he does use Notesy on the iPhone. He also said that the iPhone and iPad, for him, were mostly ways to have fun rather than work. He mentioned reading on the iPad with Instapaper as one of the ways that he winds down.

“It’s taught me how to work and just made me a clearer thinker,” Corddry said of his foray into Mac productivity software and the entire process of getting more productive. He said that Children’s Hospital—originally aired as a web series and now in ongoing and increasingly brilliant seasons at Adult Swim—would absolutely not exist today if he hadn’t taken the time to “learn how to work.”

Mann backed up his statement with a comment about finding the right productive process for you specifically, which doesn’t always mean something incredibly involved, “get something that is just enough scaffolding to let you build the building. That way you don’t have to think about ‘walking and chewing’.”

Corddry also waxed enthusiastic about Mac developers making cool stuff, often times in small teams and for very specific purposes. “I come here as a layperson who uses many of the tools that you have made and continue to make,” he said, “I get a lot of creative gas from listening to Merlin and Dan Benjamin talk about coders and the way that they work. These are the kind of people that excite me right now, not other comedy writers. It’s people that like work and like making things and getting things done.”

When asked for advice for those looking to be productive, Corddry said “Be comfortable with not being satisfied. If you are a true creator then use that to drive yourself along.”

With exactly one year having passed since the uprising in Egypt began, unseating former president Hosny Mubarak, the streets of Cairo, and beyond, have seen a renewal of the movement’s energy and momentum.

With millions of Egyptians participating in protests in Tahrir Square, and marches throughout the city and country, Egypt’s protesters have shown that the fight is far from over. In the past few days, it has been hard not to get swept up in the remembrance of the first 18 days, which culminated in the end of Mubarak’s 30-year rule.

In the lead up to January 28, rumours that Egyptians were about to lose Internet and mobile connectivity were whizzing around the city, as friends and colleagues exchanged land line numbers, something they had never done before. It was a sobering moment, realizing our dependance on corporations for keeping us in touch with our loved ones. Conversations ended far more often with “stay safe”, words which suddenly took on a much more grave meaning than ever before.

On January 28, Egyptian Internet and mobile activity dropped to zero, with the exception of one small and somewhat unknown Internet provider, Noor. Whether it was overlooked or was intentionally spared by authorities is cause for speculation. Following the blackout, the companies stated that they had no choice but to comply, as Egyptian law placed the power in the hands of the authorities.

Some activists on Twitter have been calling for a one-day boycott of the mobile operators, while others have also added Internet service providers into the mix.

I’m gonna take advantage of the #vodafone#mobinil#etisalat#linkdsl boycott tomorrow to read a novel, haven’t done that in months#boycottornot

— Ahmed El Lozy (@ellozy) January 27, 2012

Egyptian mobile operators Vodafone, Etisalat and Mobinil came under harsh criticism, a backlash that continued to grow over the past year. Vodafone, in particular, has born the brunt of the attacks, which included having its Facebook page hacked.

Not only was Vodafone among the mobile operators who pulled the plug on January 28, it was also forced to send out a pro-government message to its subscribers. Worst of all, it came out with an advertisement in June which appeared to be taking credit for sparking the January 25 protests, unleashing a torrent of rage on the corporation.

While mobile users in Egypt realise they have no alternative than to stick with one of the three mobile operators, the move to unplug Egypt’s cell phones is not one that will be easily forgotten. Activists are planning a boycott for tomorrow, January 28, exactly one year after Egypt was plunged into mobile and Internet darkness.

Not all Egyptians are siding with the boycott, saying that it will do more harm than good, with a small discussion taking place under the hashtag #boycottornot.

Impractical & may be harmful to demonstrations & sit-ins at the moment. We can teach them a lesson on any give date we decide. #boycottornot

— Sherif Saadani سعدني (@ssaadani) January 27, 2012

The planned boycott in Egypt coincides with a call for a global boycott of Twitter tomorrow, in protest to its latest announcement that it will be censoring content based on user location, if it receives a valid claim from a governmental authority.

The Twitter boycott itself has been rejected by some Egyptians, including journalist Mona El Tahawy who tweeted that January 28 is not a good day for an Egyptian boycott of Twitter as it marks the one year anniversary of far too many deaths of Egyptian protesters.