Poor Mojo's Newswire

The SceneTap Apple and Android apps gather information from cameras that SceneTap has placed in participating bars and clubs. SceneTap claims to have already tracked over 8.5 million people. Their cameras combine what they see with facial detection software and SceneTap’s app - to provide SceneTap app users a specific, real-time data set on bar patrons. . . . SceneTap’s name can be interpreted in many ways, but its modus operandi, and the way the startup’s PR is framed - as a “hookup hotspot app” - the app doesn’t seem very female-friendly. For venue owners, it’s a gender measuring tool; for the target market it’s a “tap that ass” app, plain and simple. But it’s not just any bro-app, it’s flavor-enhanced by video cameras, sure to make women feel a little more like hunted prey as we imagine a bunch of tech scene brotards getting liquored up in the Marina (or Marina lite, aka SOMA), skimming Mission bars for ones with the most chicks in them, and then showing up as if on an exotic safari. One where we women are the game animals. . . .

Among other problems, it wouldn't let you upload several photos at once, you had to go in manually submit them one at a time. It was downscaling photos to 450 x 600, murdering image quality. Users had to log in via Safari rather than in the app itself. It was striping EXIF data from photos as they uploaded—precisely the kind of thing Flickr's photo nerds wanted to see. People. Fucking. Hated it. The app landed like a pile of mud on a wedding gown. As one App Store reviewer put it, "For uploading to Flickr, this is really the worst app I've tried; you're better off just emailing photos direct from the phone in that respect." It somehow managed to get Flickr's two key strengths—photo sharing and storage—completely wrong. Possibly worst of all—at least from a business perspective—you couldn't sign up for a Flickr account from the app. (In fact, you still can't. It kicks you over to the Web to sign up with Yahoo if you want to register as a new user.) While other apps draw users into their Web services (think Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, and notably Instagram) the Flickr app that Yahoo Mobile rolled out had no mechanism for that. It was not a recruitment tool. It was just for existing users. "That was a big oversight," says Fake. That's an understatement. It was the mother of all fuckups.

A Russian company has developed software it says can disrupt and prevent people from downloading pirated content. Pirate Pay has been backed by Microsoft and has so far worked with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures to stop "thousands" of downloads. The tool poses as real bit torrent users but then "confuses" peer-to-peer networks, causing disconnections. Critics argue that the method will be ineffective in the long term. The entertainment industry claims that the downloading of pirated material costs copyright holders billions of pounds in lost revenue every year.