Syria experienced a near total Internet blackout for 19 hours yesterday, and today the government said the outage stemmed from a cut cable, an explanation that security company CloudFlare called “highly unlikely.”
Vine has added sound and motion to the popular microblogging website, Twitter. Learn how to bring your information to life in our Vine webcast on Wednesday, June 19 from 4-5 pm ET. In this one-hour webcast, Gemma Craven (left), EVP, New York group director at Social@Ogilvy will discuss best practices for using the visual social platform and share some of her team's successful vine videos. Register here. 
As the United States and Russia gear up to a summit to discuss their options for handling the ongoing civil conflict in Syria, the country has dropped 79 percent of its Internet connections, according to monitoring company Renesys.
By middle school, children spend more time with digital media than they do with their teachers or even with their parents, according to a recent study. Is the internet a good teacher? Apparently not.
Over the past year, memes have exploded. An awesome new infographic from MDG Advertising analyzes the power of memes, focusing on the life cycle of four of the most popular memes from 2012—Kony 2012, McKayla Is Not Impressed, Binders Full Of Women and Gangnam Style.
BlackRock Offers to Buy Twitter Stock (The Wall Street Journal)
Investment-management giant BlackRock has offered to buy around $80 million of Twitter stock in a transaction that would value the short-messaging service at more than $9 billion, according to people familiar with the deal. Some of the people said BlackRock’s offer is to purchase Twitter stock from some of the company’s early employees, and perhaps from others.
Will Foursquare Dodge User Backlash as it Changes Privacy Policies? (SocialTimes)
Foursquare announced plans over the holiday weekend to change its privacy policies effective at the end of the month, which, while unlikely to cause the kind of brouhaha that Instagram’s proposed changes did, may not take effect without controversy. “As our product evolves, one of the things we do is update our policies to match it. And a big aspect of that is privacy (something we think about a lot),” the company said in an email to users.
Bullying, sleep deprivation, and relationship stress are just a few of the dangers of spending too much time online. This infographic shows some surprising statistics on the toll the internet has taken on our health and how much worse things could be in the future.
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Google Outsells, but Apple Cultivates Loyalty of App Developers (The New York Times)
Apple will seek to strengthen its ties to mobile developers with a series of product announcements today, the opening day of its developer conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, Calif., an annual ritual where the company tries to stimulate the creative juices of this important constituency. The company is expected to introduce a new version of the iOS operating system that powers iPhones and iPads, according to people familiar with Apple’s plans who were not authorized to speak about them publicly. NBC Los Angeles There have also been reports that a seven-inch iPad tablet will make an appearance at the conference. There has even been some rumbling that Sir Jony Ive will pull the curtain back on his secretive lab and unveil a 46-inch Apple-powered television screen. Those things could happen, but they most likely won’t. ars technica The Macbook Pro is also due for a body and spec update, and there’s a maelstrom of rumors insisting that it will morph into a more svelte form factor. USB 3.0 is a likely addition alongside Thunderbolt. The 15-inch model specifically is rumored to be getting a pixel-doubled 2800 x 1800 display. CNET The Apple TV App Store is on its way, opening up the floodgates for developers to create killer apps for people’s living rooms. The new TV app store will be part of iOS 6, I’m told, which already powers the operating systems of the iPhone, the iPad and the iPod Touch. With a TV app store, the technology titan is laying the groundwork for the fabled Apple television set. Computerworld Fueled by the increasing popularity of the iPhone, the iPad and Apple’s laptop line-up, WWDC has become a hot ticket. Every year, the limited-capacity event fills even faster. Two years ago, it sold out in eight days. Last year, it sold out within 12 hours and scalpers pushed ticket prices to $4,600. This year, WWDC tickets were gone in two hours. Read more
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In Facebook Deal, Board Was All But Out of Picture (The Wall Street Journal)
On the morning of Sunday, April 8, Facebook Inc.’s youthful chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, alerted his board of directors that he intended to buy Instagram, the hot photo-sharing service. It was the first the board heard of what, later that day, would become Facebook’s largest acquisition ever, according to several people familiar with the matter. AllFacebook Zuckerberg negotiated with his Instagram counterpart down from an original $2 billion offer, asking Systrom whether he thought Facebook could one day be worth more than $200 billion, roughly the size of Google. Systrom agreed to the one percent or roughly $1 billion in stock. SocialTimes Normally a deal like this takes several days, if not weeks, to complete, and usually involves more lawyers and bankers than were present during the negotiations. Gizmodo It was a bold strategy, and one that smacks of the kind of approach a small start-up might take. It’s not, however, the way most people might expect a multi-million dollar public organization to conduct business. TechCrunch This just in: According to multiple sources close to the company, Facebook is eying an IPO on May 17th — depending on whether the SEC agrees that all the reams of paperwork (including those concerning its recent acquisition of Instagram) are in order. PRNewser The Ad Age Digital Conference continued Wednesday with a presentation from David Fischer, Facebook’s VP of business and marketing partnerships, whose presentation could be boiled down to this: “Your brand needs an always-on strategy.” Read more
Almost 80 percent of American adults are online, but what exactly are they doing? A new infographic from Flowtown and Column Five reveals the percentage of adult Internet users who are doing everything from social networking to shopping, banking, blogging, chatting, gaming and more.
