United States Senator Al Franken spoke to the American Bar Association last night on the topic of antitrust laws in the US and had some interesting thoughts throughout his speech.

He started out by talking about general antitrust issues that most of us know about, like having the option to choose a cable or phone provider, and not allowing companies to grab a monopoly-esque hold on a market. But Franken is more tech savvy than this and decided to start asking some serious questions about our privacy, and how the market can control the free flow of information without us having to pay for it with our data.

If any one company were to have a stranglehold on our information, it would not only hurt other businesses, but it would hurt us too. Imagine if you were locked into only using one social service and you couldn’t pull your data out of it or leave for another platform. Being stuck on MySpace for the rest of our lives would have not only sucked for Facebook, but for us as well:

Antitrust law isn’t about protecting competing businesses from each other, it’s about protecting competition itself on behalf of the public.

The two companies that Franken used as examples were the among the biggest, Google and Facebook.

Here’s an example of the type of dominance that Franken thinks the DOJ and FTC should be aware of:

When a company is able to establish a dominant market position, consumers lose meaningful choices. You might not like that Facebook shares your political opinions with Politico, but are you really going to delete all the photos, all the posts, all the connections – the presence you’ve spent years establishing on the world’s dominant social network? The more dominant these companies become over the sectors in which they operate, the less incentive they have to respect your privacy.

Basically, he’s saying that the more we rely on services like Google and Facebook, the less we care about our privacy. It’s probably true, because even though Google has hosted all of my email for over six years, I don’t really worry about the company selling my information. The services that they provide, for free, are so important to me, that I’ve tossed up blinders. This is exactly what Franken is afraid of.

The most damning quote from Franken’s speech has to do with the reality that companies like Google and Facebook don’t always have our best intentions at the forefront, this is a business for them:

But the problem doesn’t stop there. Because accumulating data about you isn’t just a strange hobby for these corporations. It’s their whole business model. And you are not their client. You are their product.

So while it may seem obvious that companies are making a business out of storing and using our data to target ads to us, it’s wise to remember that when we’re keying in sensitive information. Franken is a watchdog, and it’s his job as a US Senator to watch out for the best interest of America. I for one, think it’s a good thing.

Read the entire speech from last night here:

120328 ABA Antitrust

Airbnb is busting at the seams in the United States, so the company is now opening six new international offices in the first quarter of this year. Barcelona, Copenhagen, Milan, Moscow, Paris & Sao Paolo will soon have an official Airbnb presence so the company can work on building communities for its service there.

Since its launch in 2008, the marketplace for room rentals has booked over five million nights in people’s homes and properties. Four million of those have come in the past twelve months. The service has become so popular that many people in major cities like San Francisco and New York have found it to be a fantastic extra source of revenue.

The most interesting trend amidst all of this growth is the fact that 70% of the listings on Airbnb are international. The international nuance of Airbnb has caused the company to expand its support team by 12x, and now does 24-hour customer service in 16 different languages via live-chat.

Here are some more stats that show the impressive, and surprisingly international, growth of Airbnb:

• Over 100,000 properties in 192 countries, and over 19,000 cities worldwide, are listed on Airbnb
• Over 75% of all reservations in 2011 were international, with either the guest, host, or both located outside the United States
• Guests have traveled over 1.2 billion miles (2 billion kilometers) through Airbnb – enough to travel round trip from the Earth to moon 2,500 times

With traction fueled by its iOS app and recent entry into the Android Market, Airbnb has become a popular, and at times cheaper, alternative to booking hotels. After a monster $112M round of funding last July, the company is poised to take more market share away from popular hotel chains. This type of disruptive shakeup is similar to what we’ve seen with taxi-replacement service Uber, which announced its intention to expand into 25 new markets last December.

Click the image below for a closer look.

It’s voting season in the United States and the Republican race is heating up. If you wanted to put your finger on the pulse of where people would vote, you’d want to go to the largest resource possible. That resource is Facebook, with over 800 million users total.

With that fact in mind, Washington-based POLITICO has partnered up with Facebook to track potential voters sentiment leading up to the 2012 campaign. The exclusive partnership includes Facebook tracking conversations taking place on the social network to monitor which way the votes might go.

Gauging sentiment on a social network that requires you to use a real identity is a far more interesting venture than say, tracking tweets on Twitter, which requires nothing of the sort.

The partnership also includes Facebook digging in with automated software tools to assess positive and negative statements about the candidates.

Here’s what Joel Kaplan, vice president of U.S. Public Policy at Facebook had to say about the partnership with POLITICO:

This highly competitive primary season has demonstrated that technologies like Facebook enhance the connections and conversations that are happening every day between voters and the presidential candidates. Whether they are voting in early primaries, or just talking about the election, the candidates, and the issues with their friends and family, millions of Americans are actively engaged in the 2012 campaign. We’re pleased those conversations are happening on Facebook and that leading news sources like POLITICO are helping drive healthy discussion and debate.

Why could information like this lead to a prediction of where U.S. votes may swing? Because Facebook says that more people in the U.S. use Facebook than voted in the last U.S. presidential election. That’s a trustworthy sampling of data if I do say so myself.

POLITICO published its first findings today, and here’s how it looks for candidates when it comes to mentions on Facebook thus far:

Even though you might not consider yourself a person interested in politics, the data that Facebook can pull out of its U.S. user base is quite fascinating. In addition to making sense of all of this information, Facebook will be performing daily polls with users old enough to vote who live in South Carolina, one of the next stops for the primaries. This way, we might actually get a look into the future of who will be challenging current President Barack Obama for control of the White House.

Twitter is getting more involved with politics as it gears up for the 2012 elections. This time, the company has announced an official involvement.

In a tweet today, the official Twitter account dedicated to politics announced that the U.S. Department of State will start answering questions it pulls in from the micro-messaging service:

U.S. @StateDept to answer questions from Twitter at weekly briefings. Use #AskState. RELEASE: state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/20…

— Twitter Government (@gov) January 4, 2012

In an official announcement from the Department, it detailed plans to pull in questions globally that use the #AskState hashtag:

Beginning this week, the Department’s Spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, will take questions from the worldwide public selected from the Department’s 10 official Twitter feeds (Arabic, Chinese, English, Farsi, French, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Urdu) and answer them at the podium during the Daily Press Briefing each Friday afternoon during the month of January.

If you’d like to ask the U.S. Department of State a question, it suggests that you direct them to the following accounts that handle various languages:

@StateDept (English)
@USAbilAraby (Arabic)
@USA_Zhongwen (Chinese)
@USAdarFarsi (Farsi)
@USAenFrancais (French)
@USAHindiMein (Hindi)
@USAemPortugues (Portuguese)
@USApoRusski (Russian)
@USAenEspanol (Spanish)
@USAUrdu (Urdu)

If you can’t catch the live press briefings every Friday, you can check out the YouTube channel that the department has set up, where it will post all of the sessions upon completion. This is a pretty cool initiative, since this type of access has only been granted to members of the press in the past.

This year might just be the year that sites like Twitter and Facebook actually make a difference in the election. Last Caucus night in Iowa yesterday, reports hit Twitter about how close voting was among the candidates, potentially swaying those who hadn’t participated yet in another direction.

I’d like to start off by saying that this particular story scares the crap out of me. Apparently, Quebec resident Martin Reisch decided to travel to the United States to deliver Christmas presents, but forgot his passport. Surely he’d be turned away and sent back home, right? Nope.

How did Reisch make his way through the US border without a passport? He had a copy of it on his trusty iPad. Since he was driving, he figured he’d give it a shot rather than just turn his car around:

After handing his iPad over to the officer, it took about six minutes to gain entrance into the country:

Reisch said:

I thought I’d at least give it a try. He took the iPad into the little border hut. He was in there a good five, six minutes. It seemed like an eternity. When he came back he took a good long pause before wishing me a Merry Christmas.

According to US law, Canadians must present original passports or enhanced driver’s licenses when trying to gain entrance. The law doesn’t include accepting copies or scans of these documents, and certainly doesn’t cover ones stored on iOS devices.

It looks like Martin Reisch got lucky and the border officer made an exception. Will presenting documentation on a mobile device be good enough in the future? Perhaps, but as it stands today, it looks like someone might lose their job.

The holidays can be a difficult time for military families. With so many fathers, mothers, husbands, and wives stationed outside of the U.S., putting their lives on the line to protect their country, social networks like Facebook can be a priceless communication tool.

The organization Blue Star Families, which was created by military families to support other military families, guides people through difficulties that come from having their loved ones be in a sometimes dangerous situation so far away.

Facebook has teamed up with Blue Star Families to publish a social media guide, to help men and women overseas navigate social networking to keep in touch with their loved ones. This is a followup to Facebook’s “A Nation Thanks You” campaign that launched on Veterans Day this year. Nearly 60,000 people have used to app the give thanks.

This is a guide that is very close to Facebook’s heart. Don Faul, Facebook’s VP of Online Operations, is a former U.S. Marine and veteran, having served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had this to say about the partnership:

As a former active duty Marine, I understand how hard it can be to be separated from family and friends, especially during the holidays. Social media services like Facebook play an important role in the lives of service members and military families and are a particularly beneficial link between those stationed around the world and their families at home. Blue Star Families’ “Social Media Guide for Military Families” gives best practices and tips to help military families stay in touch every day and celebrate the holidays together, no matter where they are located.

While the guide is part how-to on using Facebook, it also helps service men and women with what they can and can’t post on social networks. Since their jobs are to protect the country, sharing their location, pictures, and stories publicly can damage national security.

You can read the blog post announcing the partnerships, co-authored by Blue Star Families, or read the guide below for yourself:

Social Media Guide for Military Families

Read about all things Facebook on The Next Web Facebook Channel

Today, at the 3rd annual 99% Conference in New York City, which sold out 5 months in advance, 380 advertising, design and related creative professionals and enthusiasts gathered for the first of 2 days of quality speakers and potential industry connections.

This year, The 99%, a part of the Behance Network, received the Webby award for best cultural blog. The ideas and trends site was named after the famous Thomas Edison quote: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” In somewhat of a paradigm, the conference’s first speaker, Simon Sinek was 99% inspiration, and 1% watery eyes.

Sinek, a Leadership Expert and Author of Start With Why, revealed a fresh way to look at fulfillment, communities and trust that seems as natural as sex itself, but is unfortunately ignored by most modern professionals, companies and particularly big brands.

The human is a social animal, dependent on trust. And trust comes from a sense of common values and beliefs. We seek commonality, which is why we love social networks; the immediate friendships on Facebook and the instantaneous connections on Twitter. It’s why when we’re riding the Paris Metro, and we hear an American accent, we say ‘Hello.’

If a country is a community with a common set of values and beliefs, a company should be the same thing because it is community that allows trust to emerge, says Sinek.

“When we trust, we’re more willing to experiment. We have the confidence that if we fail or trip over, that those who trust us will look after us. Our very survival depends on this. We’re not good at everything and we’re not good by ourselves… The goal is to amplify your strength and surround yourself with people who can do what you can’t do…”

-Simon Sinek

Every decision we make in our lives is a piece of communication. It’s our way of saying what we believe in. If you do what you say and what you believe, you will attract people who believe what you believe because, as human beings, we naturally surround ourselves with the people, products and brands that say something about who we are. “So screw market research. Your customers don’t want to tell you how to act,” he says.

In the work place, how do human beings really reach fulfillment? “It’s all about helping inspire people to do the things that inspire them,” says Sinek. It’s the ‘spirit of generosity‘ that illuminates this idea. “If we’re willing to give to the person next to us, it’s amazing what they’ll be willing to give back to you,” he says.

“Screw self-help. What about helping the person next to you?” he asks. You can be happy because you did some great things at work, but do you know how you feel fulfilled at work? It’s when you do something for someone else. So why do 90% of people not feel fulfilled from their jobs? It’s because nobody helps anybody anymore, he says.

Generosity is doing something for someone else and expecting nothing in return, ever. Giving isn’t an equation. It’s designed to help you feel good. Sex feels good because it was designed to feel good so that we will continue to procreate. When we inspire those around us, it feels good because it’s supposed to feel good. That sense of fulfillment that we get was designed so that we’ll do it more. It’s how the human species progresses.

Today, brands are like homeless people. It’s all “me, me, me!” in an attempt to get something from someone. Brands are takers, not givers: We’re #1. We’re the best, the biggest, the most efficient. In an experiment to prove his point, Sinek asked a homeless person who makes an average of $20-$30 per day if he could just change her sign. In under two hours, she made $40 (so she decided to go home, er leave to go wherever). What did the sign say?

“If you only give once a month, please think of me next time.”

“Make the message about them, not about you. 100% of customers are people. 100% of clients are people. 100% of employees are people. I don’t care how good your design is, your marketing, etc. We are social animals…If you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business,” said Simon Sinek, closing out his speech today to a room ready to do nearly anything for the person sitting next to them.

Amazon has today announced that it is to launch its own Kindle Lending Library service. The feature will allow Kindle customers to borrow Kindle books from over 11,000 libraries in the United States.

The company says that customers will be able to check out a Kindle book from their local library and start reading on any Kindle device or app free of charge. Amazon will work with OverDrive, a digital content solution provider for libraries in the US to offer what it promises will be a “seamless library borrowing experience” for Kindle users.

An interesting feature is that  any annotations and bookmarks left by a user when they borrow a book will be preserved if they subsequently borrow it again or purchase it at a later date.

Borrowing Kindle books is something that users have been keen to do for some time, leading to the establishment of a number of unofficial solutions such as LendInk and the Kindle Lending Club, which later evolved into BookLending.com. It appears that Amazon’s service will require users to physically visit a library, however.

The scheme will launch later in the year.

The Fix is a site about addiction and recovery, but not from the superficial self-help angle. It’s a mix of crazy stories of addiction–drugs, booze and sex– with advice from therapists and doctors.

The site, which officially launches today, was created by Radar Magazine Founder Maer Roshan, who after selling Radar over two years ago, moved to LA and entered rehab for alcohol abuse. Joe Schrank, an “interventionist,” and the Founder and CEO of The Core Company, is also a Co-Founder of The Fix and its Editor-at-Large.

Because Maer is so connected, he has celebs like Courtney Love and Colin Quinn involved. The site will mix serious subjects such as addiction and rehabilitation with humor, celebrity content, feature writing, news, video and Zagat-like reviews of rehab facilities. Imagine an AA after party, hosted by TMZ.

Asked whether it’s appropriate to apply humor to such a serious subject, Roshan told The Observer, “Addiction is a serious thing, but I don’t think it has to be treated in a deadly serious manner…There’s no rule out there that sobriety is supposed to be this dull, earnest monastic exercise. There’s tons of humor in the surreal situations that we find ourselves in. The Fix is certainly not going to ignore that.”

To complement the stories on its site, The Fix created a VYou channel with 20 contributors celebs like Party Girl author and executive editor Anna David, rock mess Courtney Love, actor Tom Sizemore, comedian Colin Quinn, and former stripper Ruth Fowler, as well as counselors like Addicted expert Kristina Wandzilak, psychotherapist Carder Stout, and Transcend Sober Living general manager Justin Hewitt. This girl has to wonder, when is Charlie Sheen getting on board?

Read more about vYou in 11 NYC Startups to Watch in 2011.

Today, the Singularity, once seen as a fringe topic of discussion in science, hit mainstream. As seen on the cover of today’s issue of TIME, writer Lev Grossman defines the Singularity as, “The moment when technological change becomes so rapid and profound, it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.”

Grossman’s cover story centers around famed futurist Ray Kurzweil, who holds 39 patents, 19 honorary doctorates and is far from shy when it comes to media attention. In fact, he only just appeared in an interview with USA Today, yesterday. According to Kurzweil’s calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away.

Unfortunately, while the article is articulate and intelligent, it says nothing new for those of us who have been paying attention. It’s just one more interview with Ray Kurzweil to add to the thousands floating around the blogosphere. While not groundbreaking, Grossman successfully delivers the idea of the Singularity to a mainstream audience, particularly about how fast technology advances without having to explain Moore’s Law in great detail.

Five years ago we didn’t have 600 million humans carrying out their social lives over a single electronic network…

The difficult thing to keep sight of when you’re talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn’t, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It’s not a fringe idea; it’s a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There’s an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it’s an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.

I spent my early years as a journalist, fresh out of school, studying the Singularity, artificial intelligence, robotics and the philosophies surrounding all three. When asked to define the Singularity, I say it is the moment in time when advances in technology occur at such a pace that we are no longer able to measure it. This accelerando could have any number of effects- but Singularists generally fall into two camps.

Optimists, such as Kurzweil, look forward to living in an age in which human intelligence is enhanced by brain implants that extend our memories, enhance our senses and allow us to solve problems faster and with greater accuracy.

The pessimists, one notably is Michael Vassar, the President of the Singularity Institute, see threats to humanity from the rise of an unfriendly machine intelligence that will want to enslave humans (think The Matrix) and use our brain matter for endless computation, much as we’ve used computers in the past 60 years. If its between slave and cyborg, I’ll hope for the latter.

In fact, humans as cyborgs? Grossman writes that 30,000 patients with Parkinson’s disease have neural implants and that Google is experimenting with computers that can drive cars. But he doesn’t mention cyborg heroes like Aimee Mullins, who set world records at the 1996 Paralympics while running on prosthetics.  And have you ever lost your iPhone? Feels a lot like losing a hand or a part of your brain doesn’t it? It is that unimaginable that we may soon have a device like the iPhone implanted in our brains or Google glasses sitting infront of our eyes translating and streaming realtime information into our brains?

Grossman doesn’t explore the pessimist view of the Singularity, probably because its very scary and could instill fear rather than the inspiration his article aims to serve. He gives a general overview, introducing many of the early key players- sci-fi novelist Vernor Vinge, British mathematician I.J. Good; he touches on Moore’s Law and discusses NASA’s 3-year-old Singularity University, which offers inter disciplinary courses of study for graduate students and executives as well as The Singularity Summit, an annual event put on by the Singularity Institute which has featured some of the better-known tech soothsayers, including one of its advisers Peter Thiel, Steve Wolfram, the founder of the novel search engine Alpha and Aubrey de Grey, an expert on anti-aging science (photo right).

Grossman is at his best when he dives into the fine line between organic and artificial intelligence, asking questions such as,

If I can scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me? What are the geopolitics and the socio economics of the Singularity? Who decides who gets to be immortal? Who draws the line between sentient and nonsentient? And as we approach immortality, omniscience and omnipotence, will our lives still have meaning? By beating death, will we have lost our essential humanity?

Sadly he doesn’t reach out to more than one scholar working in this field. And intelligence is a big deal. Humanity owes its position on Earth not to any special strength of our muscles, but to the ingenuity of our brains. Our brains are responsible for the complex social structures that surround us and the accumulation of technical, economic and scientific advances that, for better and worse, undergird modern civilization. One of the root problems in the discussion surrounding the Singularity is how we define human intelligence and if it can truly ever be replicated.

The neurochemical architecture that generates the ephemeral chaos we know as human consciousness may just be too complex and analog to replicate in digital silicon. The biologist Dennis Bray was one of the few voices of dissent at last summer’s Singularity Summit. “Although biological components act in ways that are comparable to those in electronic circuits,” he argued, in a talk titled “What Cells Can Do That Robots Can’t,” “they are set apart by the huge number of different states they can adopt. Multiple biochemical processes create chemical modifications of protein molecules, further diversified by association with distinct structures at defined locations of a cell. The resulting combinatorial explosion of states endows living systems with an almost infinite capacity to store information regarding past and present conditions and a unique capacity to prepare for future events.”

Going forward, the most important issues in the field of artificial intelligence and the Singularity will be to focus on creating friendly AI, that is machines that are built with good intentions; machines that will help humans become a more advanced species. The future will undoubtedly hold both super-human cyborgs and machines wanting to make us into meatspace, but if we focus enough on why humans are uniquely special- our will power, the ability to pivot on an opinion or hold steadfast to a belief; our love; our compassion; our intuition and our very biological processes that create life in the first place, I believe the Singularity will be less an explosive moment in time but a very positive dawn of a new era, and I believe it has already started.

For more on Ray Kurzweil, I suggest Barry Ptolemy’s film Transcendent Man, which details the life and work of the futurist and inventor.