Bits Blog: Photos Take the Spotlight in Updates to Google’s Social Network

Users of Google’s photo service will get a one-click option to enhance photos.

Google may dominate Web search, but when it comes to social networks, the company’s Google Plus service is an underdog against Facebook and Twitter. As of December, Google Plus users were spending about 12 minutes a month on the service, according to the company, a smidgen of time compared with the hours that Facebook users spend on that site every month.

But Google has one unique weapon in its quest to build traffic for Google Plus: it is increasingly tying all of its services, from search and maps to video chats and photo sharing, to the social network. Google doesn’t consider Plus a social network in the Facebook sense, but views it more as a connective layer personalizing and connecting Google’s myriad of services together for each user.

The company said on Wednesday at its developer conference in San Francisco that about 390 million people a month used the network of services, with slightly less than half using the core service, called the stream, which features updates and posts from a user’s social network.

To increase the time spent on the service and make it more useful, the company unveiled a redesign of the stream and related apps at the conference.

The most striking improvements are to Google’s photo sharing service. When users upload a batch of photos to Google’s online photo album via Picasa or mobile devices, Google’s algorithms will sort through them and attempt to choose the best of the bunch — eliminating blurry shots, duplicates and bad exposures and favoring photos of smiling people, landmarks and those that are aesthetically pleasing

“Photography is very labor-intensive,” with all the editing and uploading that comes along with shooting photos, said Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president of engineering. “At Google, we think we can give you some of your time back.”

Users will also get a one-click option to automatically enhance photos to fix red eye, adjust exposure, soften the look of human skin and correct other flaws.

The quirkiest new photo feature, which Google calls “auto awesome,” can stitch together a series of snapshots — a child blowing out birthday candles and cutting a cake, for example — into a short animation, or merge multiple photos shot at different exposures into a single image with high dynamic range.

To encourage users to make Google their principal place for photo storage, the company will allow users to set up their mobile devices to automatically upload all photos to Google, with unlimited free storage at standard resolution and 15 GB of storage at full resolution for high-quality prints.

All of the new photo features are scheduled to be rolled out later on Wednesday and will be available on existing Google Photo albums as well as new ones.

The Google Plus stream of updates has been given a new multi-column format.

The more familiar part of Google Plus, the page showing the stream of updates from your social networks, has been given a new multicolumn format. It creates a busier look, but also offers a view of more updates, including photos, at one glance.

Google’s Hangouts service is getting easier access from mobile devices.

Leveraging Google’s strength in search, the stream will also feature automatic hash-tagging of topics mentioned in a post and use those to provide links to more information from a user’s social network or the broader Web. For example, a friend’s comment about an event like the Boston Marathon bombing could pull up other comments and related news articles.

Hangouts, Google’s text and video chatroom service, will also receive some new features, including easier access from mobile devices and other Google services like Gmail and archiving features that can keep a permanent history of a conversation within a group, whether it’s a business discussion about the merits of various strategic plans, the evolution of a romance or family debates about where to go on vacation.

Coverage of the annual Google I/O conference for developers, May 15-16, 2013.

Bombings Trip Up Reddit in Its Turn in Spotlight

After site members, known as Redditors, turned into amateur sleuths and ended up wrongly identifying several people as possible suspects, Reddit went from a font of crowdsourced information to a purveyor of false accusations, to the subject of a reprimand by the president of the United States himself, to the center of another furious debate about the responsibilities of digital media.

Last Monday, Erik Martin, the site’s general manager, posted an apology, saying, “Activity on Reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties. The Reddit staff and the millions of people on Reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened.”

In a subsequent interview, however, Mr. Martin was unclear about how it might play out differently in the future.  “We could have reminded people about our rules on the disclosure of personal information; we could have shut down the subReddit earlier than the moderators shut it down,” he suggested. (SubReddit is a name for a subject forum where a thread or threads of conversation develop on the site.)

But, he added, except for higher vigilance and a moderation of discussion “tone,” the site was not ready to institute new rules of behavior. “Reddit is a sort of attention aggregator,” he said. “It can tell you what to pay attention to, but it is certainly not a replacement for news reporting.”

While Reddit has never pretended to be a news organization, it is learning that as it grows bigger and more influential, the rest of the world expects it to exercise judgment — judgment that is often at odds with the freewheeling culture it and its members prize. (Internet host sites are shielded by federal law from liability for the speech of their users.)

Other sites have felt the need to police themselves after being scrutinized in similar situations. Craigslist, which carries classified ads of all kinds, suspended its sex-related offerings in 2010 after more than a dozen state attorneys general threatened action against it, complaining that it was promoting prostitution. Last year Google, the owner of YouTube, blocked a video that mocked Islam in Libya and Egypt as violent reaction to the video spread in those countries.

This is not the first time Reddit has found itself in an embarrassing situation, and by some accounts the timing now could not be worse.

“They are sort of a subculture ready to break into the mainstream, and it is too bad this was the moment,” said Robert Quigley, a senior lecturer for the College of Communication at the University of Texas, Austin.

Started in 2005 by two University of Virginia graduates, Reddit is essentially an updated version of the electronic bulletin board in which registered users, anonymous or otherwise, can post a comment or a link on a topic deemed worthy (subjects vary from pornography to cat tricks to science). Users can then vote the posts up or down as they add their own commentary.

The most popular posts appear on Reddit’s home page. A recent example is a bizarre picture of the teenage idol Justin Bieber in a ski mask with a bodyguard in a zippered one-piece sweatsuit.

The site’s traffic has more than doubled in the last 12 months, and it currently reports some 62 million unique visitors a month. It was acquired by Condé Nast Publications in 2006, but in 2012 was spun off as a separate entity. Advance Publications, Condé Nast’s parent company, remains the largest stockholder.

Although it is not a news organization, Reddit is used by young people as a place where they can tap into trends that do not appear on mainstream sites. It has also become an in-the-know stop for celebrities and politicians looking to gain traction with that age group. President Obama made Reddit his last official campaign stop in the waning hours of the 2012 election.

Like many digital operations, Reddit, which is based in San Francisco, keeps its staff mean and lean. It has 25 employees, and uses volunteers to police its Web site to make sure rules are obeyed. Among Reddit’s basic rules are a prohibition against vote manipulation, spam, child pornography and revealing other people’s personal information.

Still, anyone who starts a subReddit essentially becomes its dictator, deciding who can moderate and who has access. This has not always turned out so well.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 29, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the year of a CNN investigation into content on Reddit posted under the title Jailbait. It was 2011, not 2010. An earlier correction misstated the year as 2012. In that year CNN conducted an interview with Michael Brutsch, who previously moderated Jailbait.

Pogue's Posts: The HTC One Deserves Its Place in the Spotlight

The Android-based HTC One phone.

Remember HTC? For a long time, this Taiwanese phone maker seemed to be on a roll. Its Android phones kept making gadget headlines.

Then, all of a sudden, Samsung came along, all technological and marketing guns blazing, and that was that. It became an Apple-versus-Samsung world. Everyone sort of forgot about HTC.

Its latest phone, arriving at Sprint and AT&T next week, and T-Mobile shortly thereafter, will give HTC at least a few more weeks in the spotlight. The phone will cost $200 with a two-year contract for the model with 32 gigabytes of memory, $300 for 64 gigs.

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It’s an Android phone — the most beautiful one you’ve ever seen. Seriously. It makes you feel happy and calm just holding this thing in your hands. There’s a picture of the HTC One next to “gorgeous” in the dictionary.

It’s sculptured from a thin, solid block of aluminum, with a gently curved back that adds to that soothing, worry-stone effect. The aluminum grille, above and below the black, black screen, houses the unbelievably powerful, crisp stereo speakers.

The screen is like nothing you’ve ever seen; with 468 pixels crammed into every inch, it’s the sharpest screen ever set into a phone. It’s a bit unnecessary — you stopped being able to detect individual pixels back on the iPhone 4S — but at least you can sleep well at night, satisfied that nobody’s screen is sharper. We’re talking 1080 resolution, the highest HD video there is.

This screen is bright, vivid and huge — 4.7 inches diagonal. A screen that size makes the One much bigger than, say, the iPhone, but not as unwieldy as some Android jumbophones. It weighs a satisfying 5.1 ounces.

The camera is something special. Technically, the resulting photos have 4 megapixels, but HTC correctly points out that megapixel count isn’t everything. The company claims that these are big pixels that soak in more light — and indeed, the low-light pictures from this camera put other phones to shame.

There are some disappointments, though. There’s no memory-card slot, so the built-in storage is all you get. You can’t pop out the battery, either. Battery life is typical 4G LTE Android; you’ll get one day of use on a charge. The usual set of three buttons on an Android phone — Back, Home and Menu — are down to two; HTC has eliminated the Menu button. These buttons are supposed to light up, but they don’t always.

Weirdest of all, HTC once again insists on replacing the mature, polished Android software design, the year-old “Jelly Bean” version, with an interface of its own. This software places, on the first of your Home screens, a series of tiles showing photos and headlines from news sources of your choosing, much like the popular Flipboard app. It’s great, although optional. But in many other areas, HTC didn’t improve Google’s original design.

The phone’s power button doubles, intriguingly enough, as an infrared lens for controlling your TV, but the accompanying app is fairly inelegant. The camera app is not only full-fledged, it may be overly fledged; it offers Still mode, Video mode, and Zoe mode (three-second clips, whose purpose escape me). There’s no physical shutter button.

A crying shame that Verizon is the only carrier holdout; this thing would wipe the floor with its rivals if it had that kind of ubiquitous, superfast LTE network behind it.

Otherwise — wow, is this phone packed. It’s ridiculously fast. Its camera, screen and speakers take first place in smartphones. And hey — did I mention how beautiful it is?

HTC has put all of its 2013 eggs into the One basket, and in general, that was a good call. You could quibble with the software overlays, but it would be hard to imagine a more impressive piece of phone hardware.

At an Annual Tech Show, It’s Hardware’s Turn in the Spotlight

But this year, it might be a piece of hardware that steals the show. The most talked-about start-ups this year include the maker of a camera that automatically takes a photo every 30 seconds, a new game console and a gadget that lets people control their computers and devices by waving their hands. Hugh Forrest, the director of the technology portion of South by Southwest, estimated that at least two dozen panels, talks and presentations involve some sort of new device or gadget at this year’s event — a much higher portion than he could recall from previous years.

“We always hope to be a showcase for new products and ideas in technology and that is reflected this year,” he said.

The new emphasis on devices over software reflects a much larger shift in the start-up and tech world, driven by tools like crowdfunding and 3-D printing that make it cheaper, faster and easier to create prototypes. The trend is accelerating partly because of the popularity of and excitement around small companies making items like wearable fitness devices as well as smartwatches developed by Pebble and smart thermostats created by Nest.

And now the devices are taking over the halls and convention center of South by Southwest, which has historically been known as a launchpad for new software services; Twitter, Foursquare, GroupMe and Highlight all got their inaugural push on those convention center grounds.

“This is where software development is going,” said Oskar Kalmaru, one of the founders of Memoto, a company that makes a Kickstarter-financed wearable automatic camera that takes pictures at 30-second intervals, creating a kind of personal photographic memory. “The innovating new technology is hardware that has a software component.”

The dropping costs of designing and building inventive new hardware products has prompted a wave of creativity and innovation that echoes the software boom a decade or two ago in Silicon Valley.

Mr. Kalmaru and his team, who are traveling from Stockholm to attend the weeklong conference, are among the hardware companies eager to dazzle and impress the throngs of early adopters, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who arrive thirsty for the latest in start-ups and innovative ideas.

“It’s the same thing that happened with software development over the past 10 to 15 years is now happening to hardware,” said Mr. Kalmaru. “It’s much easier now.”

In some ways, the arrival of artisanal hardware at South by Southwest, said Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst at Altimeter Group, can be seen as an indication that the world of mobile applications and “me-too” social networks has become oversaturated and crowded.

“For mobile start-ups it can be very frustrating and difficult to fight your way through the noise,” she said.

Not to mention that the crush of 27,000 conference-goers expected to descend on Austin will most likely strain cellular and data networks and make it difficult to get a signal on smartphones, let alone successfully use and try out a new app there.

“It’s just too hard for a small start-up to get noticed there,” said Jen Grenz, a vice president of a mobile company called Lango that is releasing a messaging application this week. But it is not attending the event to do so. Snapchat, one of the most talked-about apps in the tech world, is also skipping the event.

But chief executives of the hardware companies Nest and Jawbone will be there for the first time, although other executives from their companies have attended in years past.

Julie Uhrman, the founder and chief executive behind Ouya, a Kickstarter-financed Android gaming machine, is a keynote speaker. The company recently announced that its consoles would begin shipping in late March.

Bre Pettis, the founder of the Makerbot 3-D printers, is delivering the opening remarks of the festival and speaks again at a presentation by Supermechanical, a hardware company based in Austin that makes Wi-Fi-enabled sensors that can be used to detect things like moisture. Such a device could alert its owner by text message that the basement is flooding.

Like the software companies, hardware makers want to capture the attention of influential people who are inclined to tell their friends about a hot new device. It is also likely that the type of people attending South by Southwest will be interested in purchasing a “lifelogging” camera or a gesture-based controller.

“The right kind of social experience can take off there,” said Kira Wampler, a vice president at Lytro, which makes a sleek, rectangular camera that lets users refocus photographs after they are taken. “It is a group of people who are really interested in exploring what is new.”

Ms. Wampler said SXSW was the company’s first major event. Lytro has set up an area where curious attendees can sign up for photo walks or try out and buy Lytro cameras, which start at $400.

The company will also have 100 devices available for people to borrow for a day.

The makers of the Leap Motion Controller, a gadget that lets people control their computers and devices by waving their hands — not unlike those seen in the movie “Minority Report” — are setting up a dozen demonstration tents in the parking lot of a barbecue restaurant and inviting attendees to try out the device.

Michael Buckwald, a founder and the chief executive of Leap Motion, said the company’s goal was to create a way for people to “walk up and walk into what we see as the future.”

Joining the little start-ups are some behemoth device makers. Samsung, which had a large presence at both the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January and the Mobile World Congress cellphone trade show in Barcelona last week, is setting up shop at South by Southwest too. One of the biggest companies in the world, Samsung is giving away free rides in Uber cabs and snacks like ice cream and pizza, and is hosting a panel with “Arrested Development” cast members to try to drum up some attention for its line of Galaxy smartphones.

DealBook: Michael Dell’s Empire in a Buyout Spotlight

Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesMichael Dell’s decision to diversify beyond the tech world was a lucrative one.

The computer empire of Michael S. Dell spreads across a campus of low-slung buildings in Round Rock, Tex.

But his financial empire — estimated at $16 billion — occupies the 21st floor of a dark glass skyscraper on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

It is there that MSD Capital, started by Mr. Dell 15 years ago to manage his fortune, has quietly built a reputation as one of the smartest investors on Wall Street. By amassing a prodigious portfolio of stocks, companies, real estate and timberland, Mr. Dell has reduced his exposure to the volatile technology sector and branched out into businesses as diverse as dentistry and landscaping.

Now, Mr. Dell is on the verge of making one of the biggest investments of his life. The 47-year-old billionaire and his private equity backers are locked in talks to acquire Dell, the company he started with $1,000 as a teenager three decades ago, in a leveraged buyout worth more than $20 billion. MSD could play a role in the Dell takeover, according to people briefed on the deal.

The private equity firm Silver Lake has been in negotiations to join with Mr. Dell on a transaction, along with other potential partners like wealthy Asian investors or foreign funds. Mr. Dell would be expected to roll his nearly 16 percent ownership of the company into the buyout, a stake valued at about $3.5 billion. He could also contribute additional personal money as part of the buyout.

That money is managed by MSD, among the more prominent so-called family offices that are set up to handle the personal investments of the wealthy. Others with large family offices include Bill Gates, whose Microsoft wealth financed the firm Cascade Investment, and New York’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, who set up his firm, Willett Advisors, in 2010 to manage his personal and philanthropic assets.

“Some of these family offices are among the world’s most sophisticated investors and have the capital and talent to compete with the largest private equity firms and hedge funds,” said John P. Rompon, managing partner of McNally Capital, which helps structure private equity deals for family offices.

A spokesman for MSD declined to comment for this article. The buyout talks could still fall apart.

In 1998, Mr. Dell, then just 33 years old — and his company’s stock worth three times what it is today — decided to diversify his wealth and set up MSD. He staked the firm with $400 million of his own money, effectively starting his own personal money-management business.

To head the operation, Mr. Dell hired Glenn R. Fuhrman, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, and John C. Phelan, a principal at ESL Investments, the hedge fund run by Edward S. Lampert. He knew both men from his previous dealings with Wall Street. Mr. Fuhrman led a group at Goldman that marketed specialized investments like private equity and real estate to wealthy families like the Dells. And Mr. Dell was an early investor in Mr. Lampert’s fund.

Mr. Fuhrman and Mr. Phelan still run MSD and preside over a staff of more than 100 overseeing Mr. Dell’s billions and the assets in his family foundation. MSD investments include a stock portfolio, with positions in the apparel company PVH, owner of the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands, and DineEquity, the parent of IHOP and Applebee’s.

Among its real estate holdings are the Four Seasons Resort Maui in Hawaii and a stake in the New York-based developer Related Companies.

MSD also has investments in several private businesses, including ValleyCrest, which bills itself as the country’s largest landscape design company, and DentalOne Partners, a collection of dental practices.

Perhaps MSD’s most prominent deal came in 2008, in the middle of the financial crisis, when it joined a consortium that acquired the assets of the collapsed mortgage lender IndyMac Bank from the federal government for about $13.9 billion and renamed it OneWest Bank.

The OneWest purchase has been wildly successful. Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman executive who led the OneWest deal, has said that the bank is expected to consider an initial public offering this year. An I.P.O. would generate big profits for Mr. Dell and his co-investors, according to people briefed on the deal.

Another arm of MSD makes select investments in outside hedge funds. Mr. Dell invested in the first fund raised by Silver Lake, the technology-focused private equity firm that might now become his partner in taking Dell private.
MSD’s principals have already made tidy fortunes. In 2009, Mr. Fuhrman, 47, paid $26 million for the Park Avenue apartment of the former Lehman Brothers chief executive Richard S. Fuld. Mr. Phelan, 48, and his wife, Amy, a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, also live in a Park Avenue co-op and built a home in Aspen, Colo.

Both are influential players on the contemporary art scene, with ARTNews magazine last year naming each of them among the world’s top 200 collectors. MSD, too, has dabbled in the visual arts. In 2010, MSD bought an archive of vintage photos from Magnum, including portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Mahatma Gandhi, and has put the collection on display at the University of Texas, Mr. Dell’s alma mater.

Just as the investment firms Rockefeller & Company (the Rockefellers, diversifying their oil fortune) and Bessemer Trust (the Phippses, using the name of the steelmaking process that formed the basis of their wealth) started out as investment vehicles for a single family, MSD has recently shown signs of morphing into a traditional money management business with clients beside Mr. Dell.

Last year, for the fourth time, an MSD affiliate raised money from outside investors when it collected about $1 billion for a stock-focused hedge fund, MSD Torchlight Partners. A 2010 fund investing in distressed European assets also manages about $1 billion. The Dell family is the anchor investor in each of the funds, according to people briefed on the investments.

MSD has largely remained below the radar, though its name emerged a decade ago in the criminal trial of the technology banker Frank Quattrone on obstruction of justice charges. Prosecutors introduced an e-mail that Mr. Fuhrman sent to Mr. Quattrone during the peak of the dot-com boom in which he pleaded for a large allotment of a popular Internet initial public offering.

“We know this is a tough one, but we wanted to ask for a little help with our Corvis allocation,” Mr. Fuhrman wrote. “We are looking forward to making you our ‘go to’ banker.”

The e-mail, which was not illegal, was meant to show the quid pro quo deals that were believed to have been struck between Mr. Quattrone and corporate chieftains like Mr. Dell — the bankers would give executives hot I.P.O.’s and the executives, in exchange, would hold out the possibility of giving business to the bankers. (Mr. Quattrone’s conviction was reversed on appeal.)

The MSD team has also shown itself to be loyal to its patron in other ways.

On the MSD Web site, in the frequently asked questions section, the firm asks and answers queries like “how many employees do you have” and “what kind of investments do you make.”

In the last question on the list, MSD asks itself, “Do you use Dell computer equipment?” The answer: “Exclusively!”

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 19, 2013

An article on Friday about MSD Capital, an investment firm started by Michael S. Dell to manage his fortune, misstated, in some editions, the year its energy hedge fund raised $1 billion from outside investors. It was in 2011, not earlier this year.