The best elevator pitch is true, stunning, brief and it leaves the listener eager (no, desperate) to hear the rest of it. It's not a practiced, polished turd of prose that pleases everyone on the board and your marketing team, it's a little fractal of the entire story, something real.

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The worse the platform performs, the more advertisers need to use Sponsored Stories. In a way, it means that Facebook is broken, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users. In the case of Sponsored Stories, it has meant raking in nearly $1M a day.

At Dangerous Minds, we post anywhere from 10 to 16 items per day, fewer on the weekends. To reach 100% of of our 50k+ Facebook fans they’d charge us $200 per post. That would cost us between $2000 and $3200 per day—but let’s go with the lower, easier to multiply number. We post seven days a week, that would be about $14,000 per week, $56,000 per month… a grand total of $672,000 for what we got for free before Facebook started turning the traffic spigot down in Spring of this year—wouldn’t you know it—right around the time of their badly managed IPO.

Ashkan Soltani introduces MobileScope, an innovative approach to online privacy.

According to the Wall Street Journal,

Marketers are tracking smartphone users through "apps" - games and other software on their phones. Some apps collect information including location, unique serial-number-like identifiers for the phone, and personal details such as age and sex. Apps routinely send the information to marketing companies that use it to compile dossiers on phone users.

More, including a data visualization animation, here.

Now one of the researchers involved has announced MobileScope.

MobileScope is implemented as a web service - not as an app on your phone - I'm liking this approach.

Why is this kind of service necessary at all?

First off, most users probably do not realize their information is being transmitted to third parties — who they’ve never heard of or had a relationship with. Since there’s little transparency on these platforms, it’s unlikely anyone would know.

Second, these third parties often receive extremely sensitive information, such as your precise location information (latitude/longitude) and your device identifier, which is persistent for the life of your device and can often be tied to your actual identity.

I'll be signing up - see link below - and we'll see what turns up.

(Via Bruce Schneier.)

Signup Page

Here's a chart summarizing Nielsen's recent findings on OS and device share in the US market.

So how does this compare to the worldwide scene? We're not sure yet, but (again according to Nielsen) apparently we're to look for a massive growth in smartphone use in Asia, Real Soon Now.

Nielsen Post

GE has this very intriguing Tumblr blog, with pix of various cool stuff from their labs. I have to admit just spending twenty minutes on this site totally changed my attitude about GE. Maybe they do have something going on after all...

In the early 1900s, electric cars outsold gas cars. We found this electric car charger in our archives - it was used in both parking and home garages.

A pulse-detonation actuator from our Energy & Propulsion lab. It produces high-pressure, pulsating supersonic jets, which help with airflow control in high-speed travel. Active airflow control reduces the drag, noise, and fuel consumption of an aircraft, making for smoother and more efficient flight.

An X-ray control panel from 1921. It was built by Victor, which was owned by GE and became GE Medical Systems.

This was one of our very early solar demonstrations - light would shine on a single photovoltaic cell, supplying enough electricity to power a motor. In 1939, GE went on to unveil the “Sun Motor” at The World’s Fair, a slightly larger version of the demo, that signaled GE’s vision for solar as a viable energy source.

Looks like the Chinese government is pushing internet controls a lot harder - and perhaps testing to see how much Chinese citizens can tolerate. I'll bet several Middle East governments wish they had this level of control right about now. But the question of when this sort of thing ultimately backfires is a fascinating one. So far in China's case the answer may be, "Not soon, if ever".

A host of evidence over the past several weeks shows that Chinese authorities are more determined than ever to police cellphone calls, electronic messages, e-mail and access to the Internet in order to smother any hint of antigovernment sentiment. In the cat-and-mouse game that characterizes electronic communications here, analysts suggest that the cat is getting bigger, especially since revolts began to ricochet through the Middle East and North Africa, and homegrown efforts to organize protests in China began to circulate on the Internet about a month ago.

BSPCN has a gallery of 20 interesting Facebook fan pages, with brief commentary.

Our experience - especially with Covered in Cathair and Kitten Associates- has been that a Facebook fan page can be a great way of keeping your community involved and engaged - much better than a forum or blog, though those are great too. CiCH's fan page has become a key location for Robin's readership, and the Kitten Associates page has been invaluable especially in fundraising for the fosters. Read more »

In case you missed it, Chinese protesters have been calling for "Jasmine Revolution" for the last week, while Internet censors, predictably, try to stop the idea from spreading. See recent events in Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia, etc. for comparison. Read more »

Here's a fascinating look at how the Libyan opposition in Benghazi have been hacking their internet access and other means of communication, in spite of the regime's efforts to create a blackout across the country. Read more »

From AdLab comes this news about eCoupled's wirelessly-powered on-package lightup graphics. Read more »