Employment

Yikes. Users of fitness and calorie tracker Fitbit may need to be more careful when creating a profile on the site. The sexual activity of many of the users of the company’s tracker and online platform can be found in Google Search results, meaning that these users’ profiles are public and searchable. You can click here to access these results. The Next Web reported this earlier this morning. As you may know, the Fitbit Tracker is an compact wearable device that clips onto clothing or slips into a pocket and captures, through accelerometer technology, information about daily health activities, such as steps taken, distance traveled, calories burned, exercise intensity levels and sleep quality. Users can also log nutrition, weight, additional activities (including sexual activity) and other health information on the site in order to gain a complete picture of their health. So why are Fitbit users’ profiles able to be searchable in Google? It’s not really Fitbit’s fault. When you cre...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg joining Google+ was a major media event, with everyone from Forbes to The Daily Mail covering the fact that the founder established a Google+ profile, building Circles that include former Facebooker Dustin Moskovitz and current Facebook CTO Bret Taylor. While many were doubtful that the real Zuckerberg would join a competing social service, tech blogger Robert Scoble texted Zuckerberg himself to confirm, tweeting out “Name drop moment. Zuckerberg just texted me back. Says “Why are people so surprised that I’d have a Google account?” In case anyone is still doubting that it is the real Zuck on there, Scoble tells me that Zuckerberg indeed meant Google+ account when he referred to Google account. But the real question is, why are people so surprised that Zuckerberg would chose to be on Google+? Perhaps the answer lies in the precedent set by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who seem to have shied away from interacting on Facebook as themsel...

Google Offers just finished its first month. Google has been testing its Groupon compete in Portland and I’ve been closely tracking the results. Doing a head-to-head comparison like this is a bit difficult because the two companies run deals differently. Groupon runs multiple deals each day. Many Groupon deals span multiple days, with some running for three days. Google Offers on weekends ran for two days. For each run, I picked a representative deal from Groupon and compared it with the deal from Google. I looked at 24 deals from each company. For these deals, the median deal value for Google was $1,987 compared with $8,900 for Groupon. In its first month, Google grossed $129,000 compared with $331,000 for Groupon.  Five of the Google Offers grossed less than $1,000; all of the Groupon offers exceeded this.  This is to be expected given Groupon’s longstanding presence in the market; Google hasn’t had the time to build a large subscriber base. Actual Groupon revenue (across all deals) ...