The company is preparing a mobile app that will allow users to get unlimited access to a library of books for one monthly price. The app will combine discovery with access and reading, so users will be able to get recommendations and immediately begin reading. The app was designed from the ground up to optimize the reading experience on mobile devices.

The app will feature a growing catalog of books, from national best sellers to classics, both fiction and non-fiction.  Oyster is looking at working directly with publishers, not with authors. The app is being tested right now with a small number of users.

In addition to Founders Fund, Oyster’s new funding comes from SV Angel, Chris Dixon, Founder Collective, Shari Redstone’s Advancit Capital, Sam Altman of Loopt.

The company was founded this past summer by Eric Stromberg, a former business development and product guy at Hunch; Andrew Brown, who worked at Google and Microsoft; and Willem Van Lancker, a former user experience designer for Google Maps. Stromberg told me the idea sprang from his fascination with the transformation of books and what they will ultimately look like in digital form. He said he wants to create a tool for helping people find and read a lot more books than they’re doing today.

“We want to create a product that fits into people’s lives and lets them find books and read all the books they wished they had read,” said Stromberg.

Stromberg said there’s no date for the launch of the app and no price yet. He said he wants to create a social environment that lets people recommend books to each other, similar to how Spotify users can share their tastes with others. And Oyster will also work in the background to learn from a user’s tastes and habits to suggest other books. Stromberg will be relying on his experience at Hunch, which provided personalization and recommendation services to companies.

For publishers, Stromberg said Oyster gives them another way to generate revenue and get their content in front of users. He said Amazon’s Kindle best seller list drives a lot of sales for publishers but it prevents other works from being discovered. Amazon’s lending library also plays in this market but it’s limited to Amazon Prime customers and only allows for one book to be borrowed a month.

There are still a lot of questions about Oyster and whether it can compete against Amazon and other competitors. A lot will come down to its book selection and how Oyster’s talks go with publishers. Stromberg said Oyster will try to focus on quality over quantity. With the success of access-related media providers like Spotify and Netflix, this might be a chance for publishers to test out a paid library model and also lessen their reliance on Amazon.

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Facebook is testing new features that would give children under 13 access to the giant social network, according to a report published Monday in the Wall Street Journal. Although one version of this new program would require children to have accounts that are linked to an adult so that supervision is easier, some parents have raised concerns about allowing pre-teens access the network at all due to Facebook’s past handling of privacy-related issues. Others, however, argue that plenty of younger children already access Facebook anyway despite the 13-year-old age limit, and that Facebook is wise to make it official.

In fact, the widespread flouting of the 13-year-old limit — a survey by Consumer Reports found that more than 7 million children under that age are on the network — is described as one of the primary motivations behind the proposed changes. The Journal quotes sources “familiar with the matter” as saying that Facebook is afraid it could face governmental scrutiny because of the large numbers of younger users who access the network, in many cases with the help or knowledge of their parents. The company has already been criticized and sanctioned by regulators a number of times over its handling of privacy.

Zuckerberg has said he wants to appeal to younger users

Facebook didn’t confirm that it is working on the kind of features described by the Wall Street Journal, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said in the past that the issue of allowing younger users access to the network was “a fight we [will] take on at some point.” And a comment from the company suggested that it is aware of — and concerned about — the problem of unauthorized access by kids. As a spokesman told the newspaper:

Recent reports have highlighted just how difficult it is to enforce age restrictions on the Internet, especially when parents want their children to access online content and services. We are in continuous dialogue with stakeholders, regulators and other policy makers about how best to help parents keep their kids safe in an evolving online environment.

When I asked the people who follow me on Twitter for their thoughts on the proposed changes, one of the main arguments for not allowing children under 13 to access the social network was that they aren’t old enough to make appropriate decisions for themselves — about what to share with others, what content they should comment on, what kind of behavior is appropriate, and so on — and that many parents might not supervise them properly. Some said they were concerned children would find ways around any restrictions Facebook might impose, such as requiring parental approval for friending other users or posting content.

@mathewi Some adults struggle with privacy settings; under 13s could run into problems in that regard

—
Gary Hilson (@GaryInToronto) June 04, 2012

On a related point, some parents said they were worried about the permanence of Facebook content, and the impact that over-sharing or other bad decisions by younger children might have on their lives as they get older. Just as some university-age users have found that their behavior on the social network can cause problems for them as they apply for jobs, some parents say they don’t want the questionable choices their children might make as 10-year-olds to impact the way their families or friends or others see them. As one child advocacy group told the Journal:

The idea that you would go after this segment of the audience when there are concerns about the current audience is mind boggling.

Is it better to train kids early for online life?

The opposing argument is that social networks and the way they affect our lives are things that children are going to have to come to grips with sooner or later, and therefore it’s better to introduce them to the concept gradually rather than blocking them from it until a pre-determined age like 13. Provided Facebook gives parents enough controls over what their children see and do, this theory goes, allowing kids access to the network not only has positive benefits — since it allows them to connect with family and friends more easily — but can provide a good training ground for broader lessons about internet behavior.

Supporters of this viewpoint point out that most children are already capable of accessing plenty of other much more questionable internet sites without their parents’ knowledge, and that this can cause far bigger problems than Facebook ever could. Allowing kids access to the social network would be a better alternative in many ways, they argue.

On a personal note, I allowed my youngest daughter — now 14 — to set up a Facebook account before she turned 13, even though I knew that this was against the site’s terms of service. At the time, I felt that she was more than capable of handling the responsibilities of being on the network, and I thought it was important that she develop the skills of doing so in a relatively safe environment like Facebook. She also knew that I would be friending her and would be able to see her behavior online (and she has two older sisters who I knew would help me keep an eye on her as well, which made a big difference).

Is it better to try and stop younger users from joining networks like Facebook until they reach a certain age, even if we know that large numbers of them are going to do so anyway? Or is Facebook better off making it easy for them and then requiring certain restrictions on what they do, so that they — and their parents — can get ahead of the problem? Let us know what you think in the comments, or by taking the poll below:

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users James Emery and Dutchmassive

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Should Internet access be seen as a fundamental human right, in the same category as the right to free speech or clean drinking water? The United Nations says it should, but in a New York Times  op-ed, one of the fathers of the Internet argues it shouldn’t. Vint Cerf is the co-creator of the TCP/IP standard the global computer network is built on, so when he says something about the impact of the Internet, it’s probably worth paying attention to. But is he right? And what are the implications if he’s wrong?

Cerf’s position is somewhat surprising because, as even he acknowledges in his piece for the NYT, the events of the “Arab Spring” in 2011 reinforced just how powerful internet access can be when it comes to enabling dissidents in places like Egypt and Tunisia to co-ordinate their efforts and bring down authoritarian governments — despite attempts by dictators in those countries to shut down their access. Cerf is also the “chief Internet evangelist” at Google, so it seems a little odd he would be downplaying the need for widespread internet access and the benefits that it brings to society.

Cerf: Access is not a right, but it enables other rights

In a nutshell, Cerf’s argument seems to be that if we define Internet access itself as a right, we are placing the focus on the wrong thing. The ‘Net, he says, is just a technological tool that enables us to exercise other fundamental rights, such as the right to free speech or access to information — and rights should not be awarded to tools, but to the ends that they enable us to reach. As he puts it:

[T]echnology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things.

In the past, says Cerf, we might have seen access to a horse as being a fundamental right in some way, since horses were a requirement for making a living. But the important thing to protect in that equation would be the right to make a living, he says, not necessarily the right to own a horse. Later in his essay, Cerf says a case could be made for seeing access to the Internet as a civil right — that is, a right awarded to us by governments, rather than one that exists inherently in us as human beings — but he shies away from arguing that this should be protected by governments.

One of the arguments against seeing Internet access as a fundamental right is that doing this places all kinds of potential burdens on society — including the potential costs of delivering access to millions or potentially billions of people. Although Cerf doesn’t raise this point, author and former Cato Institute director Adam Thierer makes that case in a post at the Technology Liberation Front, saying anyone who supports Internet access as a right has to answer two important questions: “Who or what pays the bill for classifying the Internet or broadband as a birthright entitlement? [and] what are the potential downsides for competition and innovation from such a move?”

What does seeing access as a right mean?

Thierer argues that not only could ensuring that kind of fundamental right bankrupt governments or societies if followed to its logical conclusion (and should it be just simple access, or is high-speed a right as well?) but that areas where things are determined to be “essential” services often suffer from a lack of competition. In other words, Thierer says, by promoting Internet access for all as a right, governments could actually wind up retarding progress by making it difficult for new entrants to compete:

[C]ompetition often doesn’t develop — or is sometimes prohibited outright — in sectors or for networks that are declared “essential” facilities or technological entitlements. That’s not because they are natural monopolies, rather, it’s because the policies that lawmakers and regulators put in place to ensure universal service ultimately have the counter-productive impact of retarding new entry.

But whether we define Internet access as a fundamental human right or simply a civil right, aren’t we taking a risk by not calling it a right at all? I think we are — and the risk is that it makes it easier for governments to place restrictions on access or even shut it down entirely (a point the United Nations made in its recent report). As JD Rucker notes in a blog post, seeing Internet access as a right is no different from seeing access to medical treatment or clean drinking water as a right. Cars may not be a right, but the ability to move about freely certainly is — and the internet is more like the highway system than it is a car or a horse.

That’s not to say governments have to bankrupt themselves to ensure that everyone has fiber to the curb by their house, only that protections and principles need to be in place that make it available wherever possible — just as we try to make housing and food available to all, not necessarily mansions and high-end restaurants. The Internet is a fundamental method of communication and connection, and is becoming more fundamental all the time, as we’ve seen in the Middle East and elsewhere. Seeing it as a right is an important step towards making it available to as many people as possible.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Ryan Franklin and Ray Dehler

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NSN's headquarters

Nokia Siemens Networks said it will sell its wireline broadband assets to ADTRAN for an undisclosed amount. The deal is the second in as many months for NSN, which had previously been hoping for a buyer for its entire business. The company, which is a joint venture between Siemens and Nokia, says it is planning to exit lines of business that fall outside the bustling mobile broadband industry, but it may also be an effort to slim down to find a buyer.

Nokia said it expected to close the sale of its fixed line broadband access business and associated professional services to ADTRAN, a wireline gear provider, in April 2012. NSN in November had sold its microwave packet business to DragonWave in a cash and stock deal.

NSN has had a rocky time along with the rest of the telecommunications gear industry as consolidation among customers and competition from Huawei and ZTE have put the squeeze on vendors such as Nortel (it filed for bankruptcy), Motorola (it split its businesses), Ericsson (it has decided to focus on mobile broadband as well) and Alcatel-Lucent (it is trying to worm into the cloud market). The company has attempted to find a private equity buyer, but gave up and announced a restructuring in November.

Image of NSN’s HQ courtesy of NSN.

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The Archiving Option

Brian Casel uses Basecamp for his web design business, CasJam Media. Basecamp uses a per-project pricing scheme, basing the price you pay each month on the number of active projects you have. That creates an incentive to archive old projects as soon as possible, making them inactive and therefore keeping your price for project management software from increasing. Casel notes, “Projects stay active as long as long as they’re still being worked on. As a web designer, my projects usually last one to three months and sometimes go longer.”

He hasn’t seen a need to delete archived projects: the system doesn’t remove data from archived projects, making it possible to go back and check details if necessary. “I haven’t seen a need to clean out my archived projects. My main concern is keeping my active projects up-to-date and organized,” says Casel.

The Question of Access

How you handle old projects, however, can and should be influenced by who has access to them. Depending on the software you use, you may be able to control exactly what information an individual has access to. That approach may require more work on your part, however. Casel’s system is based on what his sub-contractors need access to: “I generally use Basecamp for my own internal use and communication with sub-contractors. I rarely give Basecamp access to my clients. First, many clients aren’t familiar with how Basecamp works, so I like to keep it simple. But I also separate the two to avoid confusion. There are lots of messages between me and my sub-contractors that are more production-oriented and not intended for the client to see. When projects are completed and archived, I sometimes remove sub-contractors access and grant access only to those who are currently part of my team, which tends to change month-to-month. “

If you aren’t in a position to closely control which projects a client or contractor has access to, it may be necessary to remove past projects from your online archives. Of course, you’ll want to keep a file that you can check back on, but removing the temptation for a contractor to look back at what clients you’ve worked with and other, similarly valuable information, can be an important decision for an organization.

How do you decide when to delete or archive past projects?

Image by Flickr user Brett Kelly

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