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Once launched, the Littlest Pet Shop site aims to offer preteens the ability to customize their favorite pets, participate in games and events on the site, and dive into social networking with friends.

Those tiny, plastic creatures with the larger-than-life googly eyes are set to come to life in the virtual world this fall, with manufacturer Hasbro and gaming giant Electronic Arts teaming up to launch the site, the companies said Thursday.

Awwwwwwwww!

Littlest Pet Shop is going virtual.

The site, which will be banking on the popularity of the 2-inch idols, will be jumping into a tween market that is already heavily populated with the likes of the Webkinz, Disney’s Club Penguin, and start-up Dizzywood.

(Credit:
LPS)

EA’s partnership with Hasbro on the project follows its release last year of five video games for the pets. About 2.8 million copies of the games have sold worldwide.

The new Asus Eee Box B203 is powered by the Intel Celeron processor instead of the Intel Atom featured in previous versions.

Asus has beefed up its Eee Box line with the addition of a Celeron-based B203.

(Credit:
Asus)

As expected, Asus’ new Nettop is largely unchanged from the B202, but it features a budget-minded Intel Celeron 220 CPU, instead of the Intel Atom found in earlier versions. Asus also increased the hard-drive options in the new model, offering a 120GB and 160GB version in addition to the 80GB offered in previous versions.

The B203 comes with four USB ports, a flash card reader, a DVI output, and Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity. The Nettop runs Windows XP Home, but Asus recommends
Windows Vista.

Pricing wasn’t available on Asus’ Web site on Sunday night, but the processor change is expected to drop the cost of the Eee Box from $350 to $240, allowing the small form-factor desktop to better compete with similarly low-cost desktops and laptops.

reporter’s notebook PARK CITY, Utah–Maybe I’m just easily impressed or I need to get out of the newsroom more often, but I was pretty excited about getting some face-to-face time with MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe Friday at the Sundance Film Festival here. After all, he’s a relative celebrity in the technology realm, and I had tons of questions to ask him in the 20 minutes I was allotted.

And no, even given that I’m here at Sundance, where celebrity gossip abounds, I just couldn’t bring myself to ask DeWolfe about rumors of his Paris Hilton romance. Some entertainment reporter I am! Hey, at least I got this money shot of Brinkley (makes up for the bad lighting in the DeWolfe photo). And for those wondering why Brinkley’s campaign launched here, the National Milk Mustache “Got milk?” campaign is a festival sponsor.

“The pledges will live on MySpace,” DeWolfe said. “The hope is it will inspire everyday users to also make a Presidential Pledge of service and upload it.”

Sundance “is a place where cultural and creative communities come together…actors, actresses, directors, and producers,” he said, adding that MySpace is much the same kind of place.

MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe Friday at the MySpace Cafe, a VIP venue at the Sundance Film Festival.

Christie Brinkley, who launched her third "Got Milk" advertising campaign Friday at Sundance, is followed outside the MySpace Cafe by a media entourage (which I join).

Click here for more stories from Sundance.

Speaking of competition, DeWolfe doesn’t fear Facebook domination, even given its recent spike in users. He sees Facebook more as an “efficient messaging system” and cited recent ComScore data that showed MySpace well above Facebook in terms of numbers of unique users.

But in the last three months, financial markets have been hit “harder than ever in my life,” he said, bracing himself for some “small softening” for the second half of the year.

As for the newly launched MySpace Music and its place in the digital music marketplace, DeWolfe doesn’t see it as an iTunes competitor and seemed unfazed by Apple’s recent DRM-free music announcements.

A timely such offshoot is called Presidential Pledge, spearheaded by actor Ashton Kutcher, who has a film here and is also leading a live Web show here with Digg founder Kevin Rose. Under Presidential Pledge, DeWolfe said, celebrities are encouraged to record a pledge of service for President-elect Obama. The videos, edited by Demi Moore, will be posted on MySpace Celebrity, but will also be delivered to Obama on Inauguration Day.

On the horizon, he says to look for a huge increase in the use of MySpace’s mobile platform.

Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. division that encompasses MySpace, Photobucket, and other digital properties, was declared the top destination for display ads on the Web several months ago. But display ads are expected to be hit harder than other digital advertising, and DeWolfe admitted that presents a challenge for MySpace.

That segued nicely into a couple of the initiatives DeWolfe was pitching. First, the just-launched MySpace Celebrity, described as a global community focused on Hollywood culture and news that’s meant to connect celebrities with their fans to raise awareness for special projects and causes. Right now, more than 600 celebrities are taking part, according to MySpace.

(Credit:
Michelle Meyers/CNET News)

(Credit:
Michelle Meyers/CNET News)

Moving on to non-celebrity business, I decided to focus on the gray economic clouds–even if we were surrounded by glorious blue skies and snow-packed mountains. DeWolfe maintained his “cautiously optimistic” economic outlook for MySpace, and touted the company’s strong revenue growth in the first half of the fiscal year even as the economy was souring.

“MySpace Music is much more of a social site,” he said, adding that it helps people discover new music through trusted sources and shared communities. “I see iTunes and MySpace as complementary. If anything, we’re driving
iPod sales.”

Luckily, he said, the company doesn’t rely so heavily on the financial and auto sectors.

Then, however, Christie Brinkley–following the launch of her third “Got Milk” ad campaign–walked by outside the MySpace Cafe where DeWolfe and I had been sitting. Brinkley, surrounded by a media entourage and star-struck festivalgoers, offered some perspective on true celebrity and also served as an illustration for DeWolfe’s explanation of why the company is here.

My taste in music is about as eclectic as it gets. I love Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, but I also enjoy Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Buffett. I’ve been known to rock out to “Womanizer” by Britney Spears and Bing Crosby is just as welcome on my playlists as Toby Keith. Suffice it to say that I enjoy almost every type of music.

MySpace Music makes buying songs on Amazon easy.

The reasons why are numerous, but I should first note that I’ve got some issue with the service. First off, it’s inundated with ads, and no matter where you go, you can bet that any MySpace Music page will be flanked by blinking advertisements or other unwelcome additions that detract somewhat from an otherwise outstanding service.

(Credit:
Don Reisinger/CNET Networks)

Other than that, though, I simply love MySpace Music. It’s the single reason why my love affair with Pandora is over and it’s my first destination when I want to listen to music while I work. Simply put, it’s outstanding.

Although it lacks the ability to share playlists with others, and stream tracks to portable devices, I find it to be the most appealing alternative on the market. It gives me a huge library of songs, the ability to pick what I listen to, and a level of usability that’s unparalleled. That’s why it’s my ideal service.

Search for it!
A huge library of songs is great, but it’s worth nothing unless there’s a good way to search through them. That’s where MySpace Music really shines.

(Credit:
Don Reisinger/CNET Networks)

Thinking it must be a fluke, I tried searching “Last Mango in Paris” by Jimmy Buffett by inputting “mango” into the search field. I was impressed by how many relevant results it returned. Searching for well-known artists like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan returned even better results, including hundreds of different songs from albums throughout their careers. Not once did I have any trouble trying to find what I was looking for.

For years, I used Pandora, the song-discovery service powered by the Music Genome Project, and loved every minute of it. But over the past couple months, things have changed and I’ve quickly started to dedicate all my music time to MySpace Music.

Unless I’ve heard a song I like on the radio, a 30-second preview on iTunes won’t help me figure out if I want to purchase a song or not. That’s where MySpace Music comes in. Since I can listen to a song in its entirety for as long as I’d like, I know which version of the song I want before I buy it. Now, I could go to iTunes and buy it, but since some songs, like “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen, are available in multiple versions, I can’t guarantee I’ll be buying the track I want. MySpace Music eliminates that fear.

Intuition is key
An intuitive interface is important to me and based on my testing, MySpace Music does the best job of bringing intuition into the world of online music engines.

With the help of MySpace Music, I can create playlists that feature songs from all those artists, and I can listen to them in any way I wish–as many times as I wish. There are no restrictions on me when I play these songs, and for once the music industry is fine with the fact that I’m listening to these tracks each day for free. How things have changed.

The total package
Is MySpace Music perfect? Of course not. But one thing is certain: it offers the total package that the competition simply doesn’t.

Searching for a song couldn’t be any easier in MySpace Music. Whether you’re looking for Billy Joel, Britney Spears, or “Margaritaville,” the site will deliver it in a matter of seconds. In fact, when I search for obscure titles from artists I don’t know, the site even finds close matches to my query and delivers hundreds of results.

Songs, songs, songs
As much as I enjoy the discovery engine on Pandora, I’d much rather have the option to build my own playlist of songs and listen to only those titles I want to hear. That’s a luxury I really don’t have on Pandora, but it’s the backbone of what makes MySpace Music great.

I should also mention that MySpace Music doesn’t allow its users to share playlists, which is a bit annoying. You also can’t have it “on-the-go” nearly as easily as you can with a site like Pandora, which offers a mobile app for those who want to hear music while away from their computer.

Search couldn't be better in MySpace Music.

As a Pandora user, I’ve grown accustomed to a solid interface. But when I started using MySpace Music, I was shocked by how easy it was to use. In a matter of seconds, I was able to search for songs, add them to my playlist in just two clicks, and listen to them through a player in a pop-up window. I never got lost trying to figure out what to do next, and whenever I came back to the page, opening my saved playlist and listening to songs took seconds.

MySpace Music currently offers millions (yes, millions) of songs from artists ranging from the popular, like Britney Spears and Bruce Springsteen, to the obscure, like Deerhunter. And unlike most services in the space, you can listen to those titles as often as you’d like and create a slew of playlists.

As someone who spends most of his day on the computer, I need to do everything I can to keep myself entertained. Sometimes, that manifests itself in games and other times I find entertainment on the Web through online music services.

When I consider using an online music service, I want good music, an easy interface, and the ability to do what I want, when I want. And when I started using different services in the space, I found that MySpace Music was the only option that both met and surpassed those needs.

In every playlist, an Amazon icon is waiting for me, and in a matter of seconds the song is being downloaded onto my computer. Once complete, I can add it to my iTunes library (which the Amazon MP3 download software can do for you automatically) and I’m all set. Granted, I could do that with other online music services, but MySpace Music makes it simple and convenient.

Amazon integration
MySpace Music has inked a deal with Amazon that allows users to buy any track they enjoy on Amazon’s MP3 DRM-free store. And although I’m an
iPhone user who still buys some songs on iTunes, I’ve found it more convenient to use Amazon’s MP3 Store on MySpace Music.

The wild card is the wild man on Yahoo’s board. Now that Carl Icahn’s on the inside, thanks to his campaign to win board representation, what’s to stop him if the Justice Department puts the kibosh on the proposed Yahoo-Google ad arrangement? If the DOJ kills the Google deal, Icahn can go to the mattresses again–this time as a oh so respectable insider.

But here’s why it makes sense. Increasingly, word is that Google is going to have trouble upholding its advertising deal with Yahoo, because antitrust regulators are concerned about the market dominance the deal gives to Google and there’s a very strong chance they’ll reject it…That would make Yahoo even more desperate to do a deal with another company.

After watching the demise of U.S. capitalism in the last couple of weeks, nothing shocks me any more. So I’m the last person to dismiss the veracity of M&A rumors one might ordinarily classify in the “No way, Jose” category.

So it is that the latest buzz centers on a post from Matt Marshall at VentureBeat, who reports renewed rumblings of a Microsoft-Yahoo marriage–but this time with a twist: the deal would follow Yahoo’s acquisition of AOL.

As a dear college professor of mine used to say, yes, but. Yes, Yahoo conceivably would want to do another advertising deal. But would it be that keen on going all the way with Microsoft? I’m not sure there’s much ardor on the Yahoo side. After four months of foreplay and no consummation, both sides were left hot and very bothered.

That’s not to say they don’t still have a yen for each other. A lot’s going to depend on how far south the Internet advertising business falls. Earlier today, an analyst with Collins Stewart put out a note arguing that Yahoo’s “fundamentals are deteriorating.” Yahoo earlier in the week gave the world its first public viewing of the company’s new APT ad platform. Jerry Yang and Sue Decker still want to prove the naysayers wrong.

Google’s vice president of search and user experience, Marissa Mayer, is pretty high-ranking and cares a lot about design. But it’s not hard to see how her philosophy might rankle. Here’s one thing she said about design in a 2008 speech: “On the Web in general, (creating sites) is much more a design than an art…You can find small differences and mathematically learn which is right.”

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4, or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions…

Douglas Bowman, Google’s visual design leader, is leaving the company after finding the company’s reliance on detailed Web page performance data too confining.

I’ll miss working with the incredibly smart and talented people I got to know there. But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.

Bowman clearly had mixed feelings about departing, but he wasn’t shy with his opinion about what he didn’t like. From Bowman’s blog post Friday on the matter:

I can’t speak for Bowman’s experience, though I can see how a classical designer might feel stifled by code monkeys. There are plenty of considerations that go into design in general, and pragmatism can be at odds sometimes with passion, boldness, and innovation. And Bowman earlier was a designer at Wired, which is definitely at the bold end of the spectrum.

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data…that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions…

Bowman also gripes that Google’s designers came from a background of computer science and human-computer interaction rather than classical design, and that none of them rank high in the pecking order.

Overall, however, I find Google’s approach to design refreshing and radical in its own way. Choosing color shades and pixel widths on the basis of the behavior of millions of Web page users is a fascinating development to the form-follows-function school of design.

The API enables users to look at overall donation figures as well as donations broken down by state or ZIP code. Users can also search for contributors either by first name, last name, or ZIP code.

The Times promises to update the campaign financing tool, and it is working on other APIs as well, including ones for restaurant listings, congressional votes, and movie reviews.

Politicians are still slowly learning how to reach out to their constituents on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean citizens can’t keep tabs on Washington online. The latest new-media tool from The New York Times provides an embeddable widget that allows people to analyze campaign contributions made to the presidential candidates.

The campaign finance tool is one of the application program interfaces the Times is developing to let its readers dissect the data it uses in its reporting. The data for this API comes straight from the Federal Election Commission, though the campaigns are only required to report contributions of more than $200. As the campaigns file their last three FEC reports, the API data will be updated.

This graph is an example of the type of analysis possible with the New York Times' new API. Click graphic for larger version.

(Credit: New York Times)

(edited at 10:40 PM PT 1/29/09 to add link to Collier post)

The new study (PDF), from the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use (CSRIU), challenges recent assertions by several state attorneys general that young people are at significant risk from online predators on social-networking sites. It specifically analyzes press releases from the Pennsylvania attorney general about cases in the Keystone State. Attorneys general from Connecticut, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania criticized the task force report, arguing that it understated the problem of online predators in social-network services such as MySpace and Facebook.

Willard said “the overwhelming majority of the stings occurred in chat rooms, with the others initiated through instant messaging.” Chat rooms and instant-messaging services have long been considered the most high-risk online places for teens. Chat rooms are generally unsupervised; communication takes place in real time, and some chat rooms are set up and used primarily for the purpose of meeting potential sexual partners.

To put this issue into context, in April 2008, the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape reported (PDF) that last year the state’s rape crisis centers and sexual assault programs provided services to 9,934 children who were sexually abused.

The arrest of 183 Pennsylvania Internet predators in the past four years is indeed troubling, but the CSRIU study analyzed reports about those cases and concluded that “only eight incidents involved actual teen victims with whom the Internet was used to form a relationship.” Five of the cases lead to inappropriate contact and in four of the incidents the teen or parents reported the contact.

North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper told The Wall Street Journal that he believed the “research was outdated and doesn’t take into account the explosion of social-networking sites.” Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal told the Journal “the report may be read as downplaying the threat of predators.” In a letter, South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster said the report’s findings were “as disturbing as they are wrong,” adding that “the conclusions in this report create a troubling false sense of security on the issue of child Internet safety.”

There’s a war of words brewing, with several Internet safety organizations, researchers, and social-networking companies on one side and some state attorneys general on the other.

Disclosure: I served as a member of the Berkman Task Force, representing ConnectSafely.org, a nonprofit Internet safety organization I co-founded. ConnectSafely receives financial support from MySpace, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, AOL, and other Internet and social-networking companies.

Kevin Harley, spokesperson for Attorney General Corbett, said, “We are a pre-emptive investigative unit. What we have done is capture predators who are soliciting before they ever meet a real adolescent or commit the act the first time.” He said that cases where victims are identified are typically turned over to local police and prosecutors and not handled by the state Attorney General. Harley said that the Internet Safety Technical Task Force “totally minimized the existence of a problem.”

The only connections between the predators and social networks, according to Willard, was one incident involving an actual teen victim where communications took place on MySpace and another case in which a police officer who was arrested for sexual abuse of many teens with whom he had interacted in the line of duty through his MySpace account. Willard said that “in five cases the predators reportedly looked at the fake teen’s MySpace profile or suggested that the agent look at their profile.”

For more perspective on this issue, see Anne Collier’s post in NetFamilyNews.org

In a press release, Pennsylvania AG Tom Corbett called the report “incredibly misleading” and said it “significantly lessens the progress we have made in implementing safety techniques for children using the Internet.” “The threat is real,” he added, saying, “In the last four years, my office has arrested 183 predators, all of whom have used the Internet for the purpose of contacting minors to engage in sexual activity.” He also said that “outdated statistics and academic projections are of little comfort to the minors who have been sexually victimized by online predators.”

One predator in a sting provided the agent with a link to his Facebook page and, “in five of the stings that took place in a chat room, reference was made to the fact that the predator had either looked at the teen’s MySpace account or suggested the teen look at his profile,” said the CSRIU study. But, again, the initial contact was made in a chat room, not on MySpace or Facebook.

The task force report stated that the likelihood of youth being harmed by online predators on social-networking sites is sometimes exaggerated by media, law enforcement, and politicians, especially compared to dangers such as cyberbullying that kids face from other kids. It was based on analysis from all available refereed research studies conducted in the United States during the past nine years. The task force was created as a result of an agreement between 49 state attorneys general and MySpace.

Earlier this month, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, run out of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, issued a report stating that Internet predator danger to kids is not as high as some have claimed. The report was immediately criticized by a number of attorneys general including Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania. And on Monday, an Internet safety organization in Oregon published a study that claims that data from press releases on Corbett’s own Web site fail to back up his claims about Internet dangers.

One hundred sixty-six of the arrests were based on sting operations where the alleged predator contacted an undercover police officer posing, in most cases, as a 12- to 14-year-old girl. Others were for possession of child pornography.
Perhaps most significant in terms of the danger of social-networking sites, according to study author CSRIU Executive Director Nancy Willard is that “despite the fact that the Pennsylvania child predator unit posted fake teen profiles on MySpace for over two years, no successful stings originated through MySpace.”

The CSRIU study also found that “there were only 12 reports of predators being deceptive about their age,” which is consistent with the research cited by the Task Force.

Next in the series: A contractor’s roller-coaster ride in Redmond.

(Credit:
McAfee)

“It’s a ripe economy to take advantage of people,” she said.

Warren had a similar meeting with a U.S. government agency last week to discuss strategies for dealing with public employees using Web apps at work and mobile devices, which can introduce viruses and other security problems into a corporate network. And she’s been preparing for the launch early next year of McAfee’s Cybercrime Response Unit, a site where consumers can go when they think they’ve been victimized by online scams.

“I was never the kind of person, like my dad or brother, that wants to walk around with a gun every day and go after that kind of criminal, so I chose the intelligence business path,” she said. “The core of the entire Warren family is about helping other people. We are just driven by that.”

Consumers are being scammed in a variety of ways. People are receiving phishing e-mails asking them to provide their bank account information so as to avoid having their bank account closed in a merger. They provide their bank information and their account balance is plundered.

People who get involved in the schemes don’t always realize that they can be arrested for using their bank accounts in this manner, although most arrests so far seem to have been made outside the U.S. Money mules are much more likely to get caught than the operators of the scheme.

An example of a cybermule ad.

“If this happened five years ago, it would have been different. But today we share so much information online. We are much more comfortable with sharing personal information. We are more susceptible,” Warren said. “Then you add the concept of a down economy where people need money. It’s like a perfect storm brewing up.”

She worked in the U.S. intelligence community for about 10 years, primarily with the National Security Agency looking at threats against the U.S. “I had to understand the security of networks to help track down governments or individuals who were trying to harm the U.S.” she said, declining to elaborate due to the sensitivity of the work. Before joining McAfee in January, Warren worked on security programs and consulting at Nortel Networks and security of chipsets at Intel.

Last month, McAfee cybercrime strategist Pamela Warren sat down with a senior executive at a Sydney bank to discuss the risks to the corporate network from workers using social networking.

“Our prediction is it is going to get worse,” Warren said, echoing what experts are saying about the economy in general.

Now, Warren, who spends her free time running with her dog, a Shiba Inu named Joey, in the mornings and volunteering at a marine mammal rehabilitation center in Sausalito, Calif., is helping “track the bad guys” on behalf of consumers and private companies.

After going over the trade-offs associated with allowing insiders to use social networks at work, his team confirmed that they would use data leak prevention technology to monitor the network traffic–balancing the desire to benefit from such new technologies while ensuring company secrets remain protected.

“Getting to see my nephew when he’s in the middle of Iraq fighting in a war zone and I get snippets of his life on Facebook…it all helps motivate me on a daily basis,” she said.

Warren’s strong sense of right and wrong and her desire to protect the innocent are in her blood; her father and her younger brother are police officers.

Malware that aims to steal personal data has risen from 130,000 pieces last year to 1.3 million this year, while suspicious money mule solicitations rose 33 percent in the first half of 2008 over all of last year, according to McAfee.

People also are getting e-mails and seeing ads on the Web for work-from-home “jobs” where all they have to do to become an “international sales rep” is open a bank account to receive money in and then wire the money to some international third party. In reality, the transaction is nothing more than a money-laundering move, known as a “cyber mule operation,” to transfer money to another country and hide the trail in an illegal deal. Typically, the transaction is a payment for some kind of illegal activity such as the exchange of lists of credit card information or personal data that can be used for identity fraud. (McAfee published a report about the rise in cybercrime earlier this week.)

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of stories about the recession’s effect on the tech industry.

Click for complete special report

The recent rise in threats aimed at financially downtrodden consumers offends her moral sensibilities. “You see the growth in identity theft and online fraud and you see what’s happening to us worldwide in terms of the economic situation and it makes everything we do here more urgent,” she said. “I think it’s important to help people day to day around the world protect their privacy and protect themselves from loss.

Warren is adamant that people should not let the security risks associated with Internet applications keep them from taking advantage of what the technology has to offer. For instance, she relies on the Internet to keep connected with her nephew fighting in Iraq and would suffer if she were at a job where access to certain Web applications was restricted.

(Credit:
Daniel Q. McDowell)

Pamela Warren, cybercrime strategist at McAfee

The 43-year-old grew up in Williamsburg, Va., and studied international affairs at Florida State University before getting a master’s in telecommunications from George Washington University. She’s also a certified information system security professional and certified information privacy professional.

She’s sharpening her focus on protecting Internet users because malware attacks are up now that economic times are tough. Online scammers have been going into overdrive with phishing and other online schemes aimed at people confused about the banking consolidation or who are desperate because of a layoff or foreclosure. In fact, there are direct correlations between targeted cyberattacks on consumers and the stock market decline over the past few months.