Webware

If you're like most people, you give yourself high ratings when it comes to figuring out when someone's trying to con you. Problem is, most people aren't actually good at it--at least as far as detecting fake positive consumer reviews.

Fortunately, technology is poised to make up for this all-too-human failing. Cornell University researchers have developed software that they say can detect fake reviews (PDF). The researchers tested the system with reviews of Chicago hotels. They pooled 400 truthful reviews with 400 deceptive reviews produced for the study, then trained their software to spot the difference.

The software got it right about 90 percent of the time. This is a big improvement over the average person, who can detect fake reviews only about 50 percent of the time, according to the researchers.

They say people fall into two camps. One type accepts too much at face value and doesn't reject enough fake reviews. The second type is overly skeptical and rejects too many real McCoys. Despite their very different approaches, each camp is right about half the time.… Read more

When Ronald McDonald House in Cincinnati needed a nine-page English document translated to Arabic, the children's advocacy organization turned to Sparked. Someone living in Jordan logged on and translated the prose in a few hours. Then someone from California confirmed the accuracy of the piece. Crowdsourcing skills and bite-size volunteering is what Sparked is all about.

Sparked connects corporate employees with nonprofits via the Internet, giving employees a way to volunteer right from their cubicles. Sparked co-founder Jacob Colker calls this micro-volunteering, a term he's trying to coin.

When I visited the small, barren Sparked office in San Francisco's hip SOMA neighborhood, Colker showed me the company's volunteering platform, which it licenses to major corporations. Employees from companies including new client LinkedIn or Google, Frog Design, Kraft, and SAP can sign in and volunteer during their lunch breaks--and people can focus on certain regions or specific issues. But the volunteer work is not limited to corporate partnerships. Individuals can also sign up at their leisure to help nonprofits with all things digital, from branding issues to blogging advice.

Originally, Colker thought people would volunteer their time while sitting on the bus or lounging by the pool. As it turns out, people out and about are probably not going to be able to help a nonprofit with a branding issue, Colker said. Instead, he maintains, people would much rather help others from their office, right at their desktop, during the free time they have between work-related tasks. The company started as The Extraordinaries in 2008 and within the past eight months rebranded itself to switch its mobile focus more to the Web. … Read more

If a house of cards makes you think of old-fashioned aces, jacks, and diamonds, you obviously haven't heard of B-Squares.

A pair of Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates has developed a unique electronics construction kit comprised of the palm-size squares, which snap together via magnets embedded in the corners. There are a number of different types of B-Squares, including one that's a rechargeable battery. There's also a solar energy collector, a square lit by LEDs, and an Arduino microcontroller. A speaker square is in the works)

Like a rave-tastic deck of electric cards, B-Squares in combination can be used by creative types to make modular sound, light, or other structures or installations, with the electricity flowing through the entire array. The squares can be connected in any combination, and the constructions can be flat or three-dimensional.

B-Squares are the creation of Shawn Frayne, founder of Humdinger Wind Energy, and Jordan McRae, founder of Octo23 Technologies. This week, the pair put their project on peer-to-peer funding site Kickstarter.

The founders hope hobbyists and artists looking for new ways to incorporate unique power supplies into their lives or artwork will adopt B-Squares.

"We think that B-Squares will be a great tool for promoting the use of rechargeable batteries and solar energy to students, artists and all makers," McRae says. They cost $15 for a single Solar Square or up to $250 for a kit containing a mix of 15 squares.

Each B-Square has magnetic contacts on the corners so the squares easily connect to each other. The magnets also transmit electronic signals between squares, and how they're snapped together makes a difference: Depending on how the power squares touch neighbors, either the current or the voltage is increased. If you need more power, simply add more squares. Normally, hobbyists and builders need to custom-fit a battery into a solar array and then solder or wire the pieces together. … Read more

Yahoo's overall revenue is still declining, but its fourth-quarter numbers were in line with expectations as the company continues to tread water.

For the period ending December 31, Yahoo reported gross revenue of $1.5 billion, which when traffic-acquisition costs are factored out results in net revenue of $1.2 billion, just ahead of analyst estimates. It's a 4 percent decline from last year's fourth quarter, and can be mostly blamed on the loss of search advertising revenue as Yahoo transitioned its search technology to Microsoft under their 2009 agreement.

Net earnings, however, rose 104 percent to $… Read more

Google's going to do its part to reduce the unemployment rate in 2011, declaring plans to hire more people this year than it ever has before.

Worrying about the economy is so 2008, said Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research, in a blog post today outlining plans for "our biggest hiring year in company history." Like most companies, Google scaled back its hiring after hitting a high-water mark in 2007 with slightly more than 6,000 new employees, but after adding 4,500 people in 2010 it vowed to get back to those pre-bust … Read more

High-speed Internet is the technology that's had the greatest impact on society and the one that people say they can't live without, according to survey results from Zogby Interactive.

Released this week, Zogby's study found that 28 percent of those polled tagged broadband Internet as the one technology they can't live without; e-mail came in second at 18 percent. Facebook was lower on the overall list at only 3 percent, but among the younger crowd (18-24), 15 percent said they can't live without Facebook.

Looking at technologies that have had the greatest impact on society … Read more

Craigslist's adult services section is now out of business around the world.

The ouster of the controversial section was confirmed by Craigslist to the office of Connecticut Attorney General General Richard Blumenthal yesterday, according to the Associated Press. The removal of the section from dozens of countries follows a similar action that saw it taken down in the U.S. four months ago.

Responding to the global takedown, Blumenthal called it "another another important step in the ongoing fight to more effectively screen and stop pernicious prostitution ads," the AP reported.

No date was specified as to … Read more

Over the years, we've worked hard to cover products and services as they've launched and well into their successes and failures. And like any business venture, there's risk involved.

The Web is no different, leaving many sites to close up shop--sometimes just a few months after what their creators had hoped would be a successful launch. In other cases, it's a slow death march, stretched out with the occasional change in strategy, or a last-ditch re-branding effort.

2010 brought the closure of quite a few sites. Some names on this list you'll recognize right away. … Read more

Google gave all of its employees raises earlier this week, but it saved the best raises for its senior management team.

Four of Google's seven named executive officers--Patrick Pichette, Nikesh Arora, Alan Eustace, and Jonathan Rosenberg--are getting 30 percent raises for 2011, bringing each of their base salaries to $650,000 from $500,000, Google announced in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission late Friday. Earlier in the week, Google gave everybody else a 10 percent raise, along with a $1,000 bonus, as it tries to hang on to employees amid a talent war … Read more