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Gender inequality in Silicon Valley is no secret. The tech scene is often criticized for its gender gap in pay — research shows that men with graduate or professional degrees earn 73% more than women with the same credentials.

But it extends beyond salary — women are drastically underrepresented in Silicon Valley leadership positions, too.

According to the recent Gender Diversity in Silicon Valley [PDF] report, published by law firm Fenwick & West, women make up a measly 11% of executives within the Silicon Valley 150, the Bay Area's top tech companies. That's compared to 16% in the S&P 100, the leading U.S. companies across various industries.

In Silicon Valley, women also make up only 10% of directors, 10% of committee members and 8% of committee chairs — all less than half of what's seen in the S&P 100. A dismal 9% of women are named executive officers in both the Silicon Valley 150 and the S&P 100.

"We hope this survey of gender diversity in Silicon Valley will stimulate more discussion and serve as a resource for measuring how well women are faring at the senior levels of leadership in the Silicon Valley workplace," the report states.

The following chart, created by statistics portal Statista, compares the percentages of women in leadership positions in Silicon Valley and the leading U.S. companies [Mashable].

Facebook is considering ways users can express their feelings beyond the Like button, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a Q&A at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park Thursday. "We're thinking about it," Zuckerberg said when asked whether the social network would ever add the long-requested dislike button.

He quickly clarified that such a button likely wouldn't say "dislike" on it. Instead, he said, people often want to react to posts they see on Facebook with sentiments other than "like."

"Everyone feels like they can just push the Like button, and that's an important way to sympathize or empathize with someone," Zuckerberg told the audience. But there are times when you may want the simplicity of a one-click response but a "like" doesn't feel appropriate, he added.

"We need to figure out the right way to do it so it ends up being a force for good, not a force for bad," he said — because a "dislike" or other negative sentiment could easily be used for the wrong reasons. It's worth noting this isn't the first time Zuckerberg has claimed to be "thinking about" a dislike button— he's made similar comments as far back as 2010.

The Facebook CEO also defended the social network's recent controversial real names policy, which requires Facebook users to identify themselves by their legal names, saying it encourages accountability among users.

"It's part of building a safe community," he said. "On Facebook, most people refer to themselves by their real name and that's a very important part of our culture." "On Facebook, most people refer to themselves by their real name and that's a very important part of our culture."

The goal, Zuckerberg added, is to make the social network a "reflection of real world relationships" and that the real name policy "grounds everyone in that reality." He also addressed another recent controversy: Facebook's experiments. Specifically, the highly cited emotional manipulation study that experimented with hiding various posts on users' news feeds to see whether it would affect their mood.

"Testing is a really important part of how Facebook works overall," Zukerberg explained. He initially defended the test saying the company thought it "had a responsibility to the community" to investigate issues that could affect the "emotional or psychological wellbeing" of users. "We could have done it a lot better," he said.

Zuckerberg was also asked about his New Year's resolutions, which included becoming fluent in Mandarin. He revealed his goal for 2014 was to send one thank-you note a day, and said he's still not sure about his 2015 goal [Mashable].

When Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in April 2012, the price tag came as a shock to many. A little more than two years later, Citigroup said Instagram is worth $35 billion, a number that the bank called "conservative" in a research note on Facebook issued Friday.

It is another piece of good news in what has been a stellar 2014 for Instagram. The photo-sharing app recently hit 300 million active users, putting it ahead of Twitter. At $35 billion, Instagram would also be worth more than Twitter, which currently has a market cap around $23.3 billion.

Citi's analysts added, however, that the valuation is speculative and dependent on efforts to generate more money from the app.

"While Instagram is still early in monetizing its audience and data assets, and its financial contribution to [Facebook] is minimal today, we believe that it is quickly gaining monetization traction, and would contribute more than $2bn in high-margin revenue at current user and engagement levels if fully monetized," Citi analysts wrote in the note.

Facebook has not been in a rush to fully monetize Instagram, rolling out its first ads in late 2013, and recently adding video ads. While Facebook has not disclosed how much money Instagram is generating, Citi's analysts said it could conceivably bring in $2.7 billion in 2015.

A Forrester Research study found that users are far more engaged on Instagram than other social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. Facebook has become a particularly frustrating platform for marketers, as the site has scaled back how much reach brands can have on the site's News Feed [Mashable].

Hiding photos on Facebook may not actually work as well as you think it does. Picturebook, a browser extension now available in the Chrome web store, claims to allow you to "view hidden photos of anyone on Facebook"— even if you aren't friends with them.

Sounds like a Facebook creeper's dream, right? But though Picturebook's description is technically true, it is also misleading. No app or browser extension — this one included — is able to change the privacy settings of someone else's photo. What Picturebook is really doing: surfacing photos that you could have seen anyway, even if a user tagged in them hid them from their timeline.

Say a friend tags you in an unflattering photo. You can make it go away by selecting "hide from my timeline." But this only prevents people from viewing the photo within your timeline; it doesn't actually remove or block the photo in any way. If the photo's privacy setting was set to "public", anyone could have found it anyway.

Other users will still be able to see the photo by visiting your friend's timeline, or simply by searching for it.Picturebook takes advantage of this loophole and surfaces photos you've been tagged in, regardless of whether you've hidden them.

In short, Picturebook makes it just a little easier to find what you could have found anyway. It's worth pointing out that Facebook reminds users every time they hide a photo that it is still viewable from others' news feed, from search, and from other places on Facebook.

The only way to really hide your hidden photos from this tool is by untagging yourself. First, select "hidden from timeline" from the drop down menu under the photo's date. From there, select "Report/remove tag" from the popup window that appears, then select "remove tag."

This removes the tag, which will prevent photos from appearing on your timeline, or on the Picturebook extension. The photo itself will still appear elsewhere on Facebook; only the person who posted it can remove it.

If you're still worried about old photos showing up, now may be a good time to revisit your privacy settings, to make sure you're only sharing what you want. The social network recently made privacy settings more accessible with a new Privacy Basics page, intended to make this process easier [Mashable].

This is an example of a Blogger post, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many posts as you like in order to share with your readers what is on your mind.

This is an example of a Blogger post, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many posts as you like in order to share with your readers what is on your mind.

This is an example of a Blogger post, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many posts as you like in order to share with your readers what is on your mind.

This is an example of a Blogger post, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many posts as you like in order to share with your readers what is on your mind.

This is an example of a Blogger post, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many posts as you like in order to share with your readers what is on your mind.

Back in November, I had a chance to visit Google’s Mountain View headquarters to chat with Astro Teller, the head of Google X’s so-called “moonshot” projects, about the past, present, and future of wearables.

I opened the interview with a blunt question: “Which do you want to talk about first, the wrist or glasses?” He immediately called me out: “That presupposes that the only interesting things we’re working on are watches and glasses.”

Teller made it clear that just because Android Wear and Google Glass are prominent in Google’s public efforts, they’re not the only thing the search giant is looking at when it thinks of putting gadgets on our bodies.

“[Humans] have spent that last several thousand years working on wearbles. We’ve got rings, glasses, we wear things for armor, for protection from the elements, to signal our status to other people. And we’re going to co-opt a lot of those things, where wearables are going to end up being the interface between us in the world,” he told me during our 30 minute chat. One interesting line of research Google has looked at includes using rings to “train” our brains for things like navigation using slight vibrations whenever you face a certain direction.

I see the current wearables ecosystem as a spectrum. At one end, there’s single-purpose gadgets that are essentially pedometers, heart rate trackers, and blood-oxygen sensors that have existed for decades — only now, they’re sending all that data to the cloud via Bluetooth connections to our smartphones. At the other end, there’s Google Glass, Android Wear, the Apple Watch, and their ilk: general-purpose devices that Google has said could one day replace the metal and glass slabs we keep in our pockets.

When I asked Teller where he thinks the successful wearables of the future will fall on that spectrum, he said that there’s likely going to be an evolution in the space from one use case that initially takes off to more general-purpose devices in the years to come.


He compared the process to the decades-long adoption of desktop computing. “VisiCalc and WordPerfect were the killer apps of their day, but Google and Facebook make them look small in comparison.” The way Teller sees it, those applications were what made computers a reasonable purchase for the first tens of millions of customers — but you couldn’t look at them and predict the applications valuable to billions today.

So what are the Visicalc and Wordperfect of wearables? Teller says that there’s a few uses that seem like they could bring in the mass of users necessary for wearables to become a meaningful platform. In the very near term, there’s fitness and health: from fitness trackers to the fashion-focuses bands, every major player in wearables has at the very least included things like step-tracking or heart-rate measurement (with varying degrees of accuracy).

Fitness has the advantage of being something that becomes habitual: if exercise is a big portion of your life, you’ll keep using that smart band with some regularity. The biggest hurdle for this category is the tendency for people to try out gadgets like the Nike FuelBand or a Fitbit and one day decide to just leave it on the desk or in a drawer — it’s a category that’s in a constant struggle against human laziness.

Another option is information security and environmental personalization — in terms of both our physical and digital spaces.

“I think wearables in general have as their best calling, to better understand our current state and needs and to express those back to the world. It’s crazy that you have to tell your phone or your computer or your house or your car “It’s me!” hundreds of times a day. Wearables will solve that problem. They haven’t yet, but they will.”

Regarding the current appreciation (or, more accurately, lack thereof) of Google Glass in popular culture, Teller isn’t phased by the haters. “There’s about a 0% chance that in 10-20 years we don’t access our digital world through our glasses, but I would be shocked if we don’t also have watches,” he says, though he acknowledges that the consumer market might not be where Google finds the killer app for its eye wear [TechCrunch].

If you missed out on getting a new iPad during the Black Friday sales, here’s another chance to bag one with a serious discount. For a limited time only, Best Buy is slashing up to $100 off the new iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3.

The more you spend on your new iPad, the more you’ll save. For instance, a 16GB iPad mini 3 with Wi-Fi will cost you $349.99 after a $50 reduction, while a 64GB model will cost you $424.99 after a $75 reduction. The high-end 128GB model is $499.99 after a $100 reduction.

The same applies to the iPad Air 2; 16GB models have $50, 64GB models have $75 off, and 128GB models have $100 off — regardless of whether you buy a Wi-Fi only variant or one with 4G LTE connectivity built-in. All models are available with free shipping.

It’s unclear how long Best Buy’s discounts will last, so if you’re looking to pick up an iPad for yourself or a loved one, you should probably take advantage of this deal as soon as you can. We’ll surely see more reductions on Apple gadgets as the holiday season gets closer, but not all of them will be this good.

It’s raining in San Francisco. Hard. Trees have already fallen, and the skeletons of cast-off umbrellas are tumbling down the street. This is the kind of storm that drives a girl to social media to watch the drama unfold. And while Twitter historically has been the best place to unearth real-time updates and descriptions, it’s not nearly as compelling as the stream of images flooding Instagram today.

Don’t believe me? Go ahead. Try it. Pull up your app and hit the magnifying glass on the bottom left. That’s the explore tab. Now search for rain in San Francisco, or better yet, try searching for the hashtag #Hellastorm. There’s a photo of cars driving down a road so flooded their wheels are invisible beneath the water. There’s a photo of a sign on the door of Santa Rosa Junior College, announcing it’s closing at noon. And there’s the one I just posted of my friend Carla throwing sandbags into the back of her station wagon to stop the water currently gushing into her garage.

Embedded in the captions, many of which are dense with information, is the kind of local news I’ve seen before—in tweets. The puddle at 9th and Irving went up to mid-calf. This section of Highway 1 in Pacifica near Manor Drive is flooded. Instagram has become a visual version of the real-time news stream that Twitter invented. And with 300 million monthly active users, it’s beating out the little blue bird to become the dominant mass messaging platform.

Consider each company’s growth rate: It took Instagram just nine months to boost its user base by 50 percent. By contrast, the number of monthly active users on Twitter has remained nearly stagnant over the past year. At 284 million, the figure rose just 4.8 percent last quarter. More troubling, this pace of growth is slower than the previous quarter even though Twitter overhauled the new user experience to make it easier to understand how it works.

Instagram owes its growing role as a news service to the rise of photos as a form of communication. They’re faster to take and often easier to decode. “I think we’re at the stage right now where exchanging simple text-based messages on a social platform seems antiquated,” says Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst with eMarketer who has been covering social media and realtime marketing for more than a decade. Twitter of course carries photos, too, but, she says, “The platform is st-ill very heavily text.”

And Instagram is a heck of a lot easier to use than Twitter, even after its user experience tweaks. Instagram is simple: sign up, choose a few people to follow, and snap a photo. Twitter is complicated and not always intuitive for new users. It requires them to learn conventions like “RT” (retweet) and “MT” (modified tweet) and that pesky period you place before the @ symbol to ensure that everyone in your feed can read a response you post to another tweeter. (Have I already lost you? Then you know what I mean.)

Despite this, Twitter remains a better tool for discovering new information — for now. It has a more robust search engine and product features like “lists” that allow users to lump feeds together by topic and follow them. Users can search from the desktop as well as the mobile app. And the service allows tweeters to link to outside information. What’s more, users — including government agencies and media companies — have created accounts that can serve as emergency alert systems. When I needed to figure out whether street cleaning was canceled this morning, I tweeted at @SF311 and got an answer fairly quickly.

Yesterday I called up Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger to get his thoughts on how Instagram might evolve to become a better tool for news junkies like me. He says that in 2015, the service will be focused on helping users figure out what’s going on.

I asked him if he considered Instagram to be a news service. “Of course!” he said. “A lot of the photos people post are things that are breaking news.” He talked about the posts that emerged in the runup to Hurricane Sandy in New York City in October 2012. “We saw people getting ready for the storm, and it made the experience more human,” he said. “I remember one Instagrammer who posted, ‘It’s time to turn off the electricity in the house so from now on I’ll be instagramming in the dark.’”

So far, search isn’t all that good on the app (and it doesn’t exist on the desktop version). You can look for users or you can guess at hashtags–subject headings–that might summarize an event. You pretty much have to think up the hashtags yourself, though. In other words, Instagram remains as opaque as Mary Poppins’ carpet bag: it contains many useful and surprising items, but you can’t reliably find or organize them.

Another shortcoming is that Instagram’s algorithms to help users discover photos on its explore page only surface content based on pictures users have posted in the past. “We tend to put things up there based on what you like, versus what you’re interested in,” Krieger explained, adding, “It’s a subtle difference, but important.” Case in point: I’m very interested in the Ferguson riots. But I don’t like riots at all. Instagram would not have surfaced photos of the event for me, had I not searched them out.

Krieger assures me that search will improve in 2015. “We’ll keep developing the real-time current events angle,” he says. The company has built up a data team over the past year. A couple of weeks ago, Instagram started suggesting people that a user might want to follow. It’s a start, and it will certainly make Instagram even more alluring to the people who now turn to Twitter for news.

Even without top-notch tools, Instagram is awash in interesting news. With ever more creative approaches to hashtagging, we’ll all get better at finding what we’re looking for. #hellastorm #stormwatch #californiapocalypse [Wired].

Spammers may be using your photo for the fake profiles they set up on LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and other social networks. Here’s how I found out, and what you can do about it. While working on another post on how to avoid connecting with fake LinkedIn profiles, I took a closer look at a connection request I had received through LinkedIn, which I had identified as spam.

I knew it was a fake profile and a spammy request because the profile had a small number of connections, had only one company listed under experience, the title “Manager” was mispelled as “mangar,” and the first name on the profile was “Myrtle.” Any one of those items might be understandable by itself, but add them all up and it was easy to spot this as a fake profile. Normally all I would do in this situation would be to click the “X” and ignore the request. But I got curious and did a little more research, and that’s where things got interesting.

I knew the photo was of a real person, because I could see the photo. But whose photo was it? And what would they think of it being used by spammers? Google’s Chrome browser has a handy feature that allows you to right click on an image on a website, and then “Search Google for this Image.” The search can find matching images even if the file name, size, and dimensions have been changed. If Myrtle’s photo were being used by a spammer, I thought it might show up on other fake profiles. I’ve blurred details from the screenshot below and intentionally blocked the image to protect the identity of its owner.

Sure enough, the results I got from Google showed that the same photo was being used on other website profiles. The photo was used on a multi-level marketing message board profile page, a Google+ profile, and on a Facebook profile. The names associated with the photo were different on each website, and every profile but one appeared to be fake.

In one instance the photo appeared on a staff profile page for the employee of a law firm. The website, and the profile, appeared to be legitimate. I emailed the staff member, whose name was not Myrtle (although we’ll continue to use it to protect the innocent), and she confirmed the photo was hers. However, she knew nothing about her photo being used on these other websites and was understandably perplexed as to how and why it might have happened.

I explained to her that someone had found her photo, probably on the law firm website where she works, and had decided it was nice looking and would work well for their illegitimate uses. As to why, I’m less certain, although I did a bit of investigating to try and find out. I noticed the Facebook page with Myrtle’s photo linked to three websites, which I was able to track to the same owner. I contacted him via email, but he denied any knowledge of these fake profiles.

However, within 24 hours the Facebook and Google+ profile pages had disappeared. That was several months ago. Today, the LinkedIn profile is still active, and there are several other new social media profiles where Myrtle’s photo is being used under a host of pseudonyms. Whether they are being used by one person or many I can’t tell. In every case, I suspect this is part of someone’s online marketing strategy. But I’m an SEO expert, and I’m stumped as to how this could be an effective marketing strategy in any way.

Using Google’s “Search Google for this Image” feature you can search for your own image to see if it’s being used by someone else. What should you do if your photo is being used without your permission? Contact the website or the profile using it and chances are they’ll get scared and remove it. If it matters enough to you to pursue legal action, make sure you take screenshots of all the evidence, because the next time you come back they may be gone.

“We have systems in place to identify and remove fake or inappropriate profiles and we also make it easy for members to report a profile they believe to be fake,” said Crystal Braswell, Manager, Corporate Communications at LinkedIn. “To report a profile that you suspect is fake, just click on the black arrow at the top of the profile in question, just to the right of their photo and select ‘block or report’ from the drop down menu. This action triggers a review of the profile. Additional information around reporting a fake profile or filing a formal complaint can be found in our help center.” Other social networks offer similar functionality or you may report the matter to them through their support channels.

As far as preventing the infringement in the first place, there isn’t much you can do, short of being ugly. I was somewhat disappointed nothing turned up when I did a Google search for my own profile photos. You could also opt to never use a photo of yourself online. But excluding those two options, using Google’s image search to find photos and contacting the offender is the best way to assure your photo shows up where you want it to, and only where you want it to [Forbes].

Image source from wired.com.

Twitter is finally learning a lesson from Facebook: If you can’t buy it, build it. In the coming months, Twitter plans to update its mobile applications to introduce filters for photos that will allow people to share altered images on Twitter and bypass Instagram, the popular mobilecentric photo-sharing network, according to people who work at the company but asked not to be named as they are not allowed to discuss unannounced projects.

The filters on Instagram make photos look like they were shot with 1960s Kodachrome or with 1890s sepia tone film. Although adding photo filters to Twitter may seem like a trivial addition to a social network that processes nearly a billion 140-character missives every two days, it could prove to be an important part of the company’s business.

As most smartphones are now equipped with high-resolution cameras, photography and mobile devices go together like peas and carrots. Flickr, which was once the go-to photo-sharing site on the Web, has since seen an exodus of people who have opted for Facebook or Instagram. Twitter has proved to be very popular among advertisers who want to reach people on smartphones, where the company’s audience tends to flock.

Carolyn Penner, a Twitter spokeswomen, declined to comment. According to one Twitter employee, the company’s V.I.T.’s, or Very Important Tweeters, as they are known internally, usually celebrities and media personalities, would be especially happy to see filters in the Twitter mobile apps. Most V.I.T.’s now use Instagram to take photos, and then share them on Twitter, where they often have a larger following.

Although Twitter considered a photocentric product acquisition for some time, the move to build its own filters was hastened after Facebook said it would buy Instagram for $1 billion. (The deal ended up closing at $715 million after Facebook’s precipitous stock drop.)

After the Instagram acquisition was announced, Twitter executives explored buying a competing photo service or application. Jack Dorsey, the company’s co-founder and executive chairman, and Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, both led the search, people close to the executives said. After meeting with and appraising some companies, Twitter’s executives decided the price tags were not worth the goods, and decided the company could build its own filters instead.

Although Twitter inked a deal with the photo-storage site Photobucket in June, the company has since started storing images on its own servers. Twitter is exploring adding other tools to its mobile applications, one employee said, including the ability to upload and possibly edit videos without having to go through a third-party application or service, like YouTube. Sadly, the Twitter-centric photo filters are not expected to be named after birds [NYTimes].