garykoelling

Ewan Spence / Social Media:
Path's Privacy Issues and the UK's Data Protection Act  —  Social network Path has a bit of a problem - they've been caught uploading user's address books to their servers without explicit permission.  While it might make finding friends easier for the user, the fact it was ‘hidden’ has not gone down well.

Sarah Lacy / PandoDaily:
Yammer Closing Monster $50M+ Funding Round Imminently  —  We hear that the paperwork has just been signed on a monster new funding round for Yammer.  There was more than $100 million in interest, and the company took just north of $50 million, last we heard, although that may still creep up as the deal closes.

Scott Moritz / Bloomberg:
Sprint Reports Wider-Than-Estimated Loss on Costs for Subsidizing IPhone  —  Sprint Nextel Corp., the third- largest U.S. wireless carrier, reported a wider fourth-quarter loss after demand for Apple Inc. (AAPL)'s iPhone boosted costs to subsidize the device.

Rip Empson / TechCrunch:
From T-Pain To $6 Million In New Funding: Viddy Attempts To Become The “Instagram Of Video”  —  People really like Instagram.  Founder Kevin Systrom recently appeared in a Best Buy Super Bowl ad paying tribute to mobile innovators, a testament to how far its come with a team of six.

Reuters:
CalSTRS wants Facebook board to expand, add women  —  (Reuters) - The California State Teachers' Retirement System, the second-largest largest pension fund in the United States, wants Facebook Inc (FB.N) to expand its board of directors and diversify a panel that has no women.

Anita Hamilton / Time:
Will Car-Sharing Networks Change the Way We Travel?  —  Why would the world's largest car company partner with a tiny, little-known startup that could cannibalize its business by promoting car sharing instead of new-car buying?  —  According to General Motors Vice Chairman Steve Girsky …

Nokia confirmed plans to shift the heart of its manufacturing operation to Asia, cutting 4,000 jobs from existing factories and moving their roles to China and South Korea.

Employees at three major plants in Finland, Hungary and Mexico had been waiting anxiously for the announcement, which becomes the latest in a series of massive cuts to the company’s staff as it tries to find around $1 billion in savings to bolster the bottom line. Over the last year as Nokia tries to reorganize around its Windows Mobile strategy, the struggling mobile giant has slashed jobs, outsourced its Symbian development and closed a factory in Romania.

The company said that it reviewed its smartphone manufacturing operations and come to the conclusion that it made sense to move its manufacturing centers closer to the component suppliers, who are largely located in China. Instead, the remaining staff at the three locations would focus on receiving phones made in Asia and customizing them for the European or American market.

In a statement, executive vice president of Markets, Niklas Savander, said it would allow Nokia to act faster and be more responsive — two weaknesses that have been severely criticized as the business struggles to cope with the rise of rivals like Apple and Google’s Android.

“Shifting device assembly to Asia is targeted at improving our time to market. By working more closely with our suppliers, we believe that we will be able to introduce innovations into the market more quickly and ultimately be more competitive.”

Nokia hasn’t actually said how much money it hopes to save through the changes, but it is clearly hoping to squeeze more out of its relationships with suppliers and get products out without the extensive delays they seem to have been subjected to.

In many ways, the move has been a very long time coming — the vast majority of the electronics industry has already moved manufacturing to China, either in-house or outsourced to companies like Foxconn, and Nokia’s decision will add an extra layer to the ongoing question of whether Western factories can compete at all with the Asian market.

That was one of the subjects explored in a recent New York Times series focusing on Apple’s manufacturing operations, which have shifted from American factories to China over the years.

Of course, the job losses will sting — and cuts in Finland will hardly boost its standing at home. But the reality is that the company had few options: inside a generation, China has become not only one of the cheapest electronic manufacturing markets in the world, but also the one that sports the greatest amount of expertise.

Could Nokia have done anything else?

Photograph of Nokia plant in Salo, Finland, used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user uncle-leo

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• U.S. Wireless Data Market: Q4 and Year-End 2008
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• The rise of tablets in the enterprise

Drew Olanoff / The Next Web:
Flickr wasn't a fan of Snapjoy's Flickraft importing service, cuts off its API access  —  Earlier, we told you about a new feature from photo hosting site Snapjoy called “Flickraft”.  The premise is simple: get all of your photos off of Flickr and onto Snapjoy's platform.

Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch:
Rice University And OpenStax Announce First Open-Source Textbooks  —  When we think about the distribution industry being disrupted, we tend to think about music and movies, whose physical media and vast shipment infrastructure have been rendered mostly obsolete over the last decade.

Sean Gallagher / Ars Technica:
Researchers boost processor performance by getting CPU and GPU to collaborate  —  Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a technique to take advantage of the “fused architecture” emerging on multicore CPUs that puts central processing units and graphics processing units on the same chip.

Brian Anthony Hernandez / Mashable!:
Lady Gaga's New Social Network Resembles Pinterest, Reddit [PICS]  —  LittleMonsters.com  —  Pop megastar Lady Gaga has pierced her powerful, digitally-willing paws deeper into the online world with the closed beta launch of her new social network.  —  LittleMonsters.com …

Enigmax / TorrentFreak:
Elite Anti-Terror Police Went After Megaupload's Kim Dotcom  —  Even after taking in the details of today's 3Newz report several times, it is harder than ever to comprehend what happened at the Dotcom mansion last month.  —  We knew that dozens of police swooped on the location in helicopters and we knew they were armed.

Matt Brian / The Next Web:
Nokia to cut 4,000 smartphone production jobs in Hungary, Mexico and Finland  —  Nokia has said up to 4,000 jobs could be cut from its smartphone production plants in Mexico, Hungary and Finland, shifting them to Asia as it continues to adapt its market strategy and cut company costs associated with manufacturing.

Michael Arrington / Uncrunched:
Hey Path, Just Nuke All The Data  —  The story of the day is definitely about Path (a CrunchFund portfolio company).  The company has been copying address book information to their servers without user knowledge.  —  The company was apparently already aware of the issue and was taking steps …

Kashmir Hill / The Not-So Private Parts:
Max Schrems: The Austrian Thorn In Facebook's Side  —  Max Schrems, a 24-year-old law student from Austria, has become one of Facebook's most prominent critics  —  There are likely many things about Facebook that annoy you.  Wouldn't it be nice if you could sit down for six hours …

Evan Blass / pocketnow.com:
LG Miracle Windows Phone Revealed (Image)  —  LG is preparing a mid-range Windows Phone codenamed LG Miracle — it's actually the same handset we saw in the wild back in December; at the time we speculated that it was another rumored WP7 known as the Fantasy.

Emil Protalinski / Friending Facebook Blog:
Facebook rolls out new photo viewer, similar to Google+  —  Summary: Facebook has started rolling out a new photo viewer that looks like what Google+ currently offers: image on the left and everything else on the right.  Do you have it yet?  —  Last week, Facebook started testing …

The Supreme Court of the United States has held only one criminal trial in its history: United States v. Shipp.

The Famous Trials project has an excellent page on United States v. Shipp, including primary sources, trial transcript excerpts, and contemporary newspaper accounts.

The case produced two opinions: United States v. Shipp, 203 U.S. 563 (1906) (addressing preliminary matters and holding that the trial could proceed) and United States v. Shipp, 214 U.S. 386 (1909) (delivering the result in the trial).

It's not addressed clearly in the case, so in case you're wondering: the reason that the Supreme Court had original jurisdiction in the case despite the limits of Article Three, Section 2 is that the Court had appellate jurisdiction over Ed Johnson's habeas corpus case, and thus had the power to issue necessary orders in aid of its jurisdiction, including holding state officials—such as Shipp—in contempt. Ex parte Young, 209 U.S. 123 (1908); Act of Sept. 24, 1789, ch. 20, § 14 (the Judiciary Act of 1789).

Jon Russell / The Next Web:
Apple seeks industry-wide principles for patent licensing in Europe  —  Apple has asked the telecom standards body responsible for patent licensing across Europe to lay down a set of basic principles to define how companies license patents, according to a letter written in November that has emerged today.

THE HISTORY (AND MYSTERY!) behind Action 52 and Cheetahmen, FINALLY REVEALED! And, if you have five hundred bucks to spare, NES cartridges of the newly unearthed(?) CHEETAHMEN: THE CREATION is available for sale! VINCE PERRI AT HIS DESIGN BEST, the web site proclaims, though it's unclear what this is expected to mean to us!