Liverpool's Bronze wins PFA award

Liverpool and England defender Lucy Bronze, 22, has been named as the Professional Footballers' Association's female player of the year.

The young player of the year was her Liverpool team-mate Martha Harris, 19.
Bronze helped Liverpool win the FA Women's Super League title last season.

Also nominated for the main award were Liverpool pair Natasha Dowie and Nicole Rolser, Arsenal duo Siobhan Chamberlain and Jordan Nobbs, and Seattle Reign's Kim Little.

Little, previously of Arsenal, was the first recipient of the award last year.
Harris took the young player award ahead of Liverpool team-mate Bronze, Arsenal's Nobbs and Danielle Carter, Manchester City's Isobel Christiansen and Everton's Alex Greenwood.

Harris joined Liverpool from Lincoln Ladies, now Notts County Ladies, last December but did not play in the title-winning side.
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Suarez named PFA Player of the Year

Congratulations Liverpool striker Luis Suarez has been named as the Professional Footballers' Association Player of the Year at an awards ceremony in London on Sunday.
The Uruguayan, 27, travelled down to the ceremony after the Reds' 2-0 defeat at home to Chelsea earlier in the day.

"The Premier League is full of really great players and so it is a great honour when these players recognise your work on the pitch," Suarez said.
Chelsea's Eden Hazard was voted Young Player of the Year.

Suarez's strike partner Daniel Sturridge, 24, and Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard joined him in the Premier League Team of the Year, along with three Chelsea players - goalkeeper Petr Cech, defender Gary Cahill and midfielder Eden Hazard.

The line-up was completed by Manchester City's Vincent Kompany and Yaya Toure, Southampton left-back Luke Shaw and midfielder Adam Lallana, plus Everton right-back Seamus Coleman.

Liverpool defender Lucy Bronze was named the Women's Players' Player of the Year while her team-mate Martha Harris was voted the Young Player of the Year.

The award capped a remarkable rehabilitation for Suarez who is the Premier League's top scorer this season with 30 goals, despite missing six games at the start of the season as part of a 10-match ban for biting Chelsea's Branislav Ivanovic last April.

Suarez added: "I always try my best for the team and it is nice to get awards but really this is for my team-mates and the staff at Liverpool because without their help I wouldn't have this prize."
His name was booed when it was read out at last year's ceremony as he was beaten to the award by Tottenham's Gareth Bale, just days after his ban for biting started.

Liverpool boss Brendan Rodgers stuck by him during his suspension but the Uruguayan's Anfield career appeared to be in doubt when in August he claimed that Liverpool had reneged on an agreement to let him leave if they failed to qualify for the Champions League.

Arsenal had two summer bids turned down for Suarez - the second an offer of £40m plus one pound, which was an attempt to trigger a clause the Gunners believed was in the 26-year-old's contract,
Suarez returned to the team after his ban ended and scored 19 goals in 13 games to help fire the Merseyside club into contention for their first league title in 24 years.

He signed a new four-and-a-half-year contract with Liverpool in December and admitted his close bond with Liverpool's fans was an important factor in his decision, particularly their backing during his biting ban.

Hazard, 23, who did not play against Liverpool on Sunday through injury, said of his individual prize: "It's always good to win awards because it means you've had a good season, but I prefer to win things collectively."

Premier League Team of the Year: Petr Cech (Chelsea), Luke Shaw (Southampton), Vincent Kompany (Man City), Gary Cahill (Chelsea), Seamus Coleman (Everton), Eden Hazard (Chelsea), Yaya Toure (Man City), Steven Gerrard (Liverpool), Adam Lallana (Southampton), Luis Suarez (Liverpool), Daniel Sturridge (Liverpool).

Championship Team of the Year: Kasper Schmeichel (Leicester), Kieran Trippier (Burnley), Aaron Cresswell (Ipswich), Wes Morgan (Leicester), Jason Shackell (Burnley), Danny Drinkwater (Leicester), Andy Reid, Craig Bryson (Derby), Will Hughes (Derby), Danny Ings (Burnley), Ross McCormack (Leeds).

League One Team of the Year: Carl Ikeme (Wolves), Sam Ricketts (Wolves), Danny Batth (Wolves), Harry Maguire (Sheffield United), Jake Bidwell (Brentford), Bakary Sako (Wolves), Adam Forshaw (Brentford), Kevin McDonald (Wolves), Ben Pringle (Rotherham), Britt Assombalonga (Peterborough), Callum Wilson (Coventry).

League Two Team of the Year: Tommy Lee (Chesterfield), Michael Smith (Bristol Rovers), Ian Evatt (Chesterfield), Liam Cooper (Chesterfield), Michael Rose (Rochdale), John-Joe O'Toole (Bristol Rovers), Antoni Sarcevic (Fleetwood), Gary Roberts (Chesterfield), Ian Henderson (Rochdale), Sam Winnall (Scunthorpe), Scott Hogan (Rochdale).
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Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and peers pledge support for OpenSSL

The Linux Foundation has collaborated with major tech companies for a three-year initiative called the "Core Infrastructure Initiative," which aims to prop up underfunded open-source projects. First on the list would be OpenSSL, which can be found in millions of Web servers and mobile devices. Though it's been patched, in early April we learned that it had a flaw in it that's been named the Heartbleed Bug. 

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, NetApp, Rackspace, Qualcomm, and VMWa re each pledged $100,000 per year over the next three years. The total funding for the initiative would come to about $3.9 million. While it is unlikely that the whole amount will go to OpenSSL, its newfound funding represents a significant financial jump. 

As websites scurried to implement security patches for the Heartbleed Bug, Steve Marquess, the co-founder and president of the OpenSSL Software Foundation, called for more donations for his organization. According to Marquess, the OpenSSL Software Foundation only pulls in about $2,000 a year in donations and can only afford to hire one full-time employee and a handful of part-timers. The group supports itself through support contracts. However, Marquess said that they have never raised more than $1 million in annual funding.      

"There should be at least a half dozen full time OpenSSL team members, not just one, able to concentrate on the care and feeding of OpenSSL without having to hustle commercial work," Marquess said in a blog post published on April 12. 

In his address, Marquess also called out his new benefactors, saying: "I'm looking at you, Fortune 1000 companies. The ones who include OpenSSL in your firewall/appliance/cloud/financial/security products that you sell for profit, and/or who use it to secure your internal infrastructure and communications. The ones who don't have to fund an in-house team of programmers to wrangle crypto code, and who then nag us for free consulting services when you can't figure out how to use it. The ones who have never lifted a finger to contribute to the open source community that gave you this gift. You know who you are."    

It seems Marquess' rant has struck a nerve. Top tech companies are finally opening their wallets. "Open source software is important to organizations like AWS, which deliver secure Internet experiences and services for customers," said Steve Schmidt, the chief information security officer for Amazon Web Services, in a press release. "We are pleased to be part of the Core Infrastructure Initiative and to work with the Linux Foundation to foster continued innovation and security in key open source projects that can benefit us all."

"Open source software makes today's computing infrastructure possible. Facebook is excited to support these projects and the developers who maintain them. This initiative will help ensure that these core components of internet infrastructure get the assistance they need to respond to new threats and to reach new levels of scale," said Doug Beaver, the engineering director of traffic & edge at Facebook. 

The OpenSSL security vulnerability, which plunged the Internet into a state of panic when it was first revealed on April 7, exposed the user information of about 66 percent of the world's active websites. According to Sucuri Security, about two percent of the top 1 million websites on the Internet remain susceptible to the Heartbleed Bug. If you would like to donate to the Core Infrastructure Initiative, just click here.
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Low subscriber numbers plague Beats Music

Roughly 100 days after Beats Music's entry into the cutthroat music-streaming business, the service seems to be grappling with a lagging number of subscribers in the "low six figures," according to a report by Billboard earlier this week. With Sprint nearing its debut of the "Framily" plan – the package deal resulting from a collaboration with Spotify – increased competition is on the horizon. Is it too late for Beats' Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre to bolster the service in time to remain relevant in the music-streaming game? Its investors appear to still be on board for the long haul, but the numbers don't paint a pretty picture.

Nearly two months ago Beats Music was able to shore up $100 million in funding aimed at product development, new feature integration, gaining new customers, and new PR moves – all in the name of taking on foes like Spotify. Less than three weeks later, the service was rumored to have snared a fairly low 28,000 subscribers in its debut month, according to "people with knowledge of the situation." And, most recently, the fledgling music-streamer – hoping to grab more subscribers by making the service available to iOS device users - finally acquiesced and resorted to forfeiting 30 percent of every subscription fee to Apple.

Beats Music's journey has been an uphill climb, especially considering its massive marketing launch valued in the tens of millions of dollars. Still, it seems to have no shortage of funding. According to The Verge, the company is working on another $100 million cash infusion. And while the service has gained a relatively modest number of paying subscribers since its inception, it's worth noting that Spotify's claimed 6 million U.S. subscribers took the company six years to amass. So the problem may not be Beats Music's viability, but more its timing, entering late in the game into a saturated marketplace.

It's only been around for three months, but Beats Music has a rough path ahead of it if the service wants to remain relevant and give Spotify, Rdio, TuneIn, iTunes Radio, and others a run for their money. 
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Facebook’s Q1 beats expectations thanks to successful mobile strategy

Facebook's raking it in. Financial results published Wednesday for the first three months of this year showed the company's focus on mobile ads is paying off nicely, with overall revenue hitting $2.5 billion, up 72 per cent on the same period 12 months ago.

Profit for the quarter topped $642 million, up from $219 million a year earlier. Other promising data included a growing user base, now at 1.28 billion, marking an increase of 15 percent on last year's figure. A whopping 802 million users currently log into their accounts on a daily basis, Facebook reported.

Breaking the numbers down, 59 percent of its $2.27 billion in ad revenue came via mobile ads, the company announced – a notable jump from last year's 30 percent figure and a sure sign that its mobile strategy is heading in the right direction.

Mobile daily active users hit 609 million, marking a rise of 43 percent, while a 34 percent increase in mobile monthly active users took the count past the billion mark (1.01bn) for the first time in its 10-year history.

Mobile expansion

Facebook's mobile expansion in the last quarter involved its acquisition in February of messaging app WhatsApp, as well as the launch of news reader app Paper in the same month. Two more of its mobile offerings, Instagram and Messenger, are also performing well, with data showing each now has a user base of around 200 million.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an earnings call with investors Wednesday the social networking giant intends to go on building "new apps for sharing different kinds of content with different people," a move which could potentially see revenue from mobile ads go off the scale. However, he added that for apps such as Paper and Instagram, the focus is currently on pulling in new users rather than monetization.

Just two years ago, when it was yet to run its first mobile ad, Facebook said in its pre-IPO S-1 filing it had serious concerns about its ability to make money via ads on smartphones and tablets.

"We may not be successful in our efforts to grow and further monetize the Facebook platform," the social media company said in the filing, adding that it could face grave difficulties if it was unable to balance "its efforts to provide a compelling user experience with the decisions we make with respect to the frequency, prominence, and size of ads and other commercial content that we display."

Going by today's better-than-expected financial results, those fears were not only unfounded, but also way off the mark.

[Image courtesy of Twin Design/Shutterstock]
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Facebook enters the fitness tracking market with Moves app purchase

It looks like 2014 is the year of company purchases for Facebook. After acquiring WhatsApp for $19 billion and Oculus VR for $2 billion, if you thought that Facebook would end there, we wouldn't blame you. The company behind fitness tracking app Moves announced that its been purchased by the social network, effectively thrusting Facebook into the fitness tracking market.

In a blog post, ProtoGeo Oy, the maker of Moves, made the announcement: "Since we launched Moves, we've been focused on running a simple and clean activity diary that million of people have enjoyed using. Now, we're joining Facebook's talented team to work on building and improving their products and services with a shared mission of supporting simple, efficient tools for more than a billion people."

According to the company, the app will continue to operate as a standalone app, with Facebook's press release echoing those sentiments. According to a Facebook spokeswoman, Moves will continue to operate separately from Facebook, though the company's employees will head to Facebook's offices in London and California. In addition, the Facebook spokeswoman said that the social network will not use any data from the Moves app, though that could change.

This purchase further highlights Facebook's intense focus on mobile. It joins Facebook's widening mobile portfolio, which includes Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and the recently-updated half social network, half Flipboard app, Paper. Moves seems to fit the mold nicely, given its average four-rating on both the App Store and Google Play, as well as its 4 million+ downloads.
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Comcast/Netlfix spat gets scrappier, as Comcast blames Netflix for video quality woes

Comcast responded yesterday via blog post to Netflix's recent attacks on the cable giant. Netflix claims Comcast is directly responsible for its users' slow streaming rates and poor video quality over a Comcast connection, even after Netflix's paying off Comcast two months ago in exchange for higher speeds and quality. The senior vice president of Corporate and Digital Communications for Comcast, Jennifer Khoury, asserted in yesterday's blog post that "it was not Comcast that was creating viewability issues for Netflix customers, it was Netflix's commercial transit decisions that created these issues." She went on to stress that Comcast has been the strongest supporter of the Open Internet among all Internet service providers.

This rebuttal comes after a series of back-and-forth snipes between the two companies. Earlier this week Netflix released its quarterly earnings report, and included within that report was a letter to shareholders that condemned the Comcast-Time Warner merger for its potential to allow the monopolistic ISP to increasingly "capture unprecedented fees from transit providers and services such as Netflix." Comcast fired back that same day on its blog with a laundry list of reasons explaining why "Netflix's opposition to our Time Warner Cable transaction is based on inaccurate claims and arguments."

In yesterday's riposte, Comcast's Khoury pointed to the ISP's "multiplicity of other agreements" that have not harmed customers or increased costs for content providers. In fact, Khoury claims, the agreements have decreased the costs those providers would have paid to others. Khoury cites a story from StreamingMediaBlog.com in defense of her claim that Netflix itself is actually behind the poor playback and technical issues plaguing the service: "… at least one independent commentator has pointed out" that Netflix's commercial transit decisions are really to blame. The writer points out that Netflix has unjustifiably pushed a majority of its traffic through a single transit provider – Cogent – despite the fact that the service technically buys transit from multiple providers. In other words, the assertion is that Netflix has been trying to cram most of its streaming content through just one big pipe, rather than split it up among several pipes, even though it has agreements in place to do so. 

The ongoing Netflix/Comcast saga is a messy one to pick apart, and it's hard to pin down the blame solely on one party or the other. It seems the only certainty is that this battle isn't over yet, and that neither side intends to back down.
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