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Like we told you earlier this month: Google has invested in Machinima, one of the most popular networks/channels on Google’s YouTube. Google — that’s Google Inc., not Google Ventures — now confirms that it led the $35 million round, along with previous investors Redpoint Ventures and MK Capital. My sources previously told me the deal would value Machinima at around $190 million.

It’s been revealed by a Wall Street Journal report this week that Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was the highest payed person in his position throughout 2011 in the USA. The amount of cash he actually received in annual salary from Apple was 90 cents, this along with his annual incentives equaled out to be just $180 cents. So where does the massive $378 million stack of cash come from, this $300 million more than the next highest paid CEO in the USA?

Tim Cook is payed by Apple with one dollar and eighty cents each year plus a bit more massive an amount in restricted stock grants. The amount $376 million USD is based on Apple’s stock prices at the time, with the next highest-payed CEO in the country being Larry Ellison, the head of Oracle with $76 million a year. Next in line after that was CBS head Leslie Moonves with $69 million a year.

The WSJ study was conducted by the Hay Group and conducted the study on the top 300 US public companies based on revenue. Down the list after third you have JCPenny’s Ronald Johnson, the CEO of Citigroup, hand in fifth was Motorola Mobility’s CEO Sanjay Jha with $47 million for the year. In the last Apple earnings call it was made clear that the company’s shares had grown 29 percent year-on-year, this setting Cook up for another unheard-of cash-in for 2012.

[via AFP]

Apple’s Tim Cook top-paid CEO in 2011 by a long shot is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear. © 2005 - 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Good news for those who preordered or want to purchase the HTC EVO 4G LTE. Your long national nightmare is over as the smartphones have finally cleared customs and Sprint says that customers should st...

Security is one of those hard-to-define aspects of the IT business. Threats are always changing, and no matter how much work you’ve done to ensure that your systems are secure, you’re never done because, well, see the beginning of this sentence. There’s a certain Sisyphean logic to it all.

But even a task that never ends has to have a beginning, and more often than not it goes something like this: What do I have that needs to be protected, and how well or not is it protected now? Sometimes the best thing to do is call in someone from the outside to look at it all with fresh eyes. And sometimes the answers can be shocking.

It’s the sort of thing that Rapid7, a fast-growing security firm based in Boston, specializes in. While some security firms are more the cops on the beat, hired to keep things in check based on established rules and policies, Rapid7 is one you call when you want to know how the bad guys will try — and try they will — to get through whatever security measures are already in place.

The firm also owns Metasploit, an open source service that’s essentially an early-warning system about new vulnerabilities. Twice in the last year, new research by Rapid7 — released to the wider world through Metasploit — has caught my attention: Once it was about Java, and the other item was about how the methods employed in Stuxnet could be used to create new ways to attack public infrastructure.

I recently had a chance to ask Rapid7 CEO Mike Tuchen some questions about hi company and the interesting role it’s playing in trying to clear up a lot of ambiguity about IT security that so many CIOs find frustrating. My first question was to ask Tuchen to explain from a high level what Rapid7 does.

AllThingsD: Mike, the thing I always think of when I talk to security companies is that the scope of the problem is constantly moving. If I were to use a football metaphor, it would be that the goalposts are always changing. And yet there’s even another metaphor that fits as well: That of a medical triage, because once you know you have problems, there’s the matter of determining which one to fix first. What does Rapid7 do to help companies sort all this out?

Tuchen: We think of the security market as breaking out into “front-end” and “back-end” activities. Front-end activities are the assessments we do to proactively answer questions like: What’s my security posture? Where am I strong, and where am I vulnerable? What should I do to become more secure? That’s where we fit. 

Back-end activities are the enforcement and remediation efforts to protect data or networks that typically act in real time in response to threats detected including firewalls, anti-virus applications and so on.

We’re finding that as the threats are constantly growing and changing, there’s a lot of interest in assessment. The reality is that we’re seeing a new breach on average of once per day for the last 18 months or so. So when things are moving that fast, who wouldn’t want to know where their weaknesses are and what are the most important things they need to do to lower the chance of a being one of those companies breached? Our customers are telling us that once they’ve done the assessment, they’re able to set their priorities for the next 12 to 24 months. If you haven’t done an assessment, there’s a good chance you’ll buy a back-end product that doesn’t solve all your problems because you never knew what all the problems were in the first place. That’s how budgets tend to spin out of control.

So one big question around security is around the shift to the cloud. There are still a lot of people who don’t trust systems they can’t touch, but with the cost savings, the shift is looking more real every day. What does that shift mean for you and for your clients?

The first question you have to ask is “what do I have”? It’s kind of self-evident: You can’t secure what you don’t know about. Cloud services can make this trickier by adding another question into the mix: “Where is it?” And it gets even dicier when you take into consideration all the virtual machines that can be turned on and off at will and moved from one physical machine to another. The boundaries get a lot less well-defined. So the first step is discovery: What do you have, where is it, and what controls are in place? 

The next step is determining what types of threats you’re likely to face and figuring out what’s working to head them off and what’s not. After that you put together a strategy for improvement. 

Generally speaking, the best approaches we’ve seen start with basic hardening techniques. You take some concrete actions that are designed to make it more costly and difficult for attackers to establish a beachhead on your systems. Next, you lock down the perimeter as tightly as possible, and train employees to recognize and resist social engineering attacks.

When it comes to assessing the security of cloud offerings and software-as-a-service applications, it’s a matter of getting comfortable with the security that the vendor has in place. Our own experience with this has been pretty bleak. It’s clear that the industry as a whole has work to do there. 

Like what?

Attackers have the advantage right now. Even the largest and most sophisticated companies are getting breached on a regular basis. I think there are three things that need to happen: We need to do a better job of information-sharing about risks, methods, and actors so that companies don’t have to start from scratch. We also need to make security simpler. Right now it’s way too complex, and there are too many products that target specific problems that tend to be important to only the biggest of companies. And even those companies can barely stitch them all together into a coherent solution. For everyone else in the world it’s pretty much impossible to do that.

We’re working on a lot of this. We run an annual conference called UNITED to bring together innovative defenders to share ideas. It stands for “Using New Ideas To Enhance Defense.” We’ve committed $100,000 to sponsor some projects we like to call the “Magnificent7″ and there will be no strings attached to the funding.

Washington seems to have finally awakened to the wider IT security threats. We hear a lot of talk coming out of Congress about cybersecurity. What, if anything, do you expect to come out of these efforts?

There are two security bills, SOPA and CISPA, that have gained a fair amount of attention lately. SOPA focuses on the illegal downloading of music, videos, software and other counterfeit goods that affect a wide variety of industries. These are the low-hanging fruit when it comes to online crime.

CISPA focuses on sharing private sector consumer data with the government to protect national security interests. The intent with CISPA is to legally protect private companies when they share consumer information with government and law enforcement entities. This information would not be available to the public at large and is highly scrutinized by privacy advocates. The information would be used to try to protect the country’s critical infrastructure. But if it were to become law, it won’t change the status quo of organizations and consumers fending for themselves when it comes to information security.

Also if they’re passed, they only affect U.S. citizens. These laws will not prevent foreign entities from engaging in piracy or breaching U.S. corporate or civilian assets. Companies will still be under non-stop attacks from persistent adversaries.

You raised a big bunch of funding last fall with a $50 million investment led by TCV. What are you going to do with all that money?

We’ll use it for three major initiatives: First, we’re doubling down on expanding our existing engineering teams.  We doubled the team in 2010, nearly doubled it in 2011, and plan to double it again in 2012. Second, we’re accelerating our international expansion. We just hired a regional VP for Europe and are expanding our European and Asia-Pacific operations with new offices in Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Sydney. Finally, we’re looking to acquire terrific companies with passionate teams that want to join forces with Rapid7 to change the security world.

You acquired the Metasploit Project in 2009. How has that deal worked out and what does it say about the companies you may yet acquire? What are your plans for future acquisitions?

Metasploit has been great for Rapid7. We first started thinking about Metasploit when Chad Loder, one of our co-founders, came up with the idea of integrating an existing product with Metasploit. We discussed it with HD Moore, the founder of Metasploit, and he was equally excited about the idea of integrating the products together. In a week or two we had a working prototype. Right then we realized that we’d found something special: A passionate, driven entrepreneur who shared a lot of our vision and values, a product that logically works together with our existing product, a huge and engaged community of expert security insiders and a business that was ready to be commercialized. We asked HD if he’d like to join forces with us, and he agreed. We were able to build a team around HD, and together we’ve built the Metasploit business into a leader in its category. 

In that case we learned that founder and team are critical. It also made it easier to build the rest of the team around HD from the bottom up. Now we’re actively looking for companies that play in markets that make sense for us, and products that have a solid foundation for the future. We haven’t yet found another opportunity that fits all of these areas.

I get that Rapid7 is growing; you’ve got an impressive list of customers that includes Anadarko Petroleum, Teradyne, Liz Claiborne and the U.S. Postal Service. Can you share some basic metric that shows how much you’re growing?

Our revenue for the last seven years is over 90 percent per year, and we’ve grown more than 70 percent in each of the last two years. And we have more than 2,000 customers. We’ve been lucky to be in a market where the demand is increasing because threats are escalating.

King.com, one of the fastest-growing social games companies on Facebook, has opened a new game studio in London that will be led by Electronics Arts and Playfish veteran Catharina Lavers Mallet. While an executive producer at EA, Lavers Mallet worked on major titles like The Sims Social. The London studio is expected to hire about 40 employees and to work with the company’s headquarters there in addition to other offices in Hamburg, Stockholm, Milan, Romania, Malta and San Francisco.

The friendly neighborhood of Cupertino, California have just been sent a brochure from Apple which details their possible future structure by the name of “Apple Campus 2.” This new headquarters for Apple would have space for 13,000 workers and looks to be a massive ring with more than a few future-looking aspects inside and out. This structure will prospectively replace 300,000 square feet of existing buildings in the area East of North Tantau Avenue and will be built up as 300,000 square feet of new research facilities for Apple.

The main building will be set back from the street and will be surrounded by trees, with thousands of new trees also set to be planted along the perimeter of the building and inside it as well. One of the greatest aspects of this campus is Apple’s plans to make it not a new structure that’s in any way an eyesore, but a revitalizing element for the community: “What’s currently a sea of asphalt will be transformed into nearly 120 acres of green space.” Have a peek at some pointed words from Apple to the Cupertino neighborhood here:

“The new campus site is bound to the west by Wolfe Road, to the north by Homestead Road, to the east by North Tantau Avenue, and to the south by Interstate 280. Today there are 26 aging buildings totaling approximately 2.65 million square feet on this 176-acre site. We plan to replace them with a single ring-shaped, four-story building of approximately 2.8 million square feet. We also plan to replace nearly 300,000 square feet of existing buildings east of North Tantau Avenue with 300,000 square feet of new research buildings. …

Respect for our neighbors was a priority as we designed Apple Campus 2. The main building will be set back from the street. By keeping the majority of existing trees along the perimeter — and planting additional perimeter trees and thousands of new ones throughout the interior — the building will fade into the landscape. What’s currently a sea of asphalt will be transformed into nearly 120 acres of green space.”

“We are also committed to protecting the environment. Apple Campus 2 will attain LEED certification, and we are confident it will exceed the City of Cupertino’s standards for environmental sustainability. The campus will be clean, with no manufacturing or heavy industrial activity onsite.

Apple Campus 2 will also include a restaurant, a fitness center, and other amenities to serve Apple employees and reduce automobile trips. As with the current site, Apple Campus 2 will not be open to the public. Infinite Loop will remain our corporate headquarters, and we will continue to occupy many of our existing buildings in Cupertino.” – Apple’s SVP and Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer

We’ve had a couple of glances at this facility as far back as a couple of years ago, with Steve Jobs himself speaking with Cupertino on how it might be built. Have a peek at our timeline below on the subject to see how far this project has come. The pamphlet you see above and below comes from MacRumors where a tipster by the name of Hansen has provided the world with pics.

Apple teases “Campus 2″ to Cupertino is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear. © 2005 - 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The mouse may be a piece of technology that children born today won't need in future, but if the new 3D motion-control technology from Leap Motion is any indication, fingers may become obsolete as wel...

Users pinning away for tiny computers like the FXI Cotton Candy or Raspberry Pi have another option, albeit one that is now also hard to come by. Last week a Chinese retailer called Aliexpress began s...

Now that the HTC EVO 4G LTE and the HTC One X have been released from customs – or so we’ve heard – we can start deciding which one we really want when we head to the store this week. What we’ve got here are two devices of the same mind, each with a 4.7-inch display, the same Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor, and what very much appears the be the same camera on the back as well. The big difference then lies not in the hardware, but in the carrier – and with LTE on both devices, it might be a tough call – right?

Wrong – at the moment the AT&T 4G LTE network is spreading at a relatively high rate while the HTC EVO 4G LTE has just Baltimore and Kansas City to call its own for 4G – and that’s it. AT&T’s LTE, not to mention the rest of its data network on 3G and below, have worked a whole lot more reliably than any connection on the EVO 4G LTE – have a peek at our reviews of both devices we’re looking at at this point to get an idea of what the carriers have provided us as far as data coverage across the nation:

• HTC EVO 4G LTE Review • HTC One X (AT&T) Review

Then make sure to keep up with the HTC One S as well, if you’re up for it. This smartphone contains a whole lot of the same awesome specifications that these other two titans do, but it’s a bit smaller for those of you with human sized hands. Consider the fit!

• HTC One S (T-Mobile) Review

Then back to the main competition – the HTC EVO 4G LTE has a 1280 x 720 pixel resolution display, that being the same as the HTC One X, both of them with a fabulous 312 PPI in the end. The difference between these two in their displays though is the Super LCD technology in the EVO with just LCD tech in the X. Have a peek at the difference in the straight-on photos above and below (they’re all taken with full brightness on all screens.)

The EVO has the ability to carry microSD cards in its one slot with 32GB capacity, while the X has no storage and 32GB built-in. The EVO then has 16GB built-in which allows it to have up to 48GB of storage in all. The HTC One X weighs a bit less than the EVO (though both sit right around the X’s 130g, light!) To keep up with its slightly brighter display (we must assume,) the EVO has a bigger battery, with 2,000mAh instead of the X’s 1,800mAh.

Hands-on with the HTC EVO 4G LTE:

Hands-on with the HTC One X with AT&T:

Both devices run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, both run HTC’s own Sense 4.0, and both are extremely well put together. The EVO has a dedicated camera button where the X does not, the X comes in white while the EVO just comes in red/black, and both devices will end up costing you a bit over $150 if you can grab the right weekend deal. In this battle now more than ever you’re going to have to consider the data speed. If we had to choose solely based on data, we’d choose the HTC One X without question.

On the other hand, if we had to choose based solely on the amount of kickstand either device had, we’d have to go with the EVO – last kickstand in the west!

HTC EVO 4G LTE vs HTC One X is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear. © 2005 - 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

In a not all that surprising move from Spotify, they’ve continued their global assault on our eardrums with an invasion of a couple new spaces: Australia and New Zealand! Right here in these two new locations you’ll find a wholly unique experience as, Australia gets its own launch of a Triple J app for access to a swath of new hits on the Triple J Hitlist as well as local Hottest 100 countdowns. Both new regions also have their very own welcome playlists that’ll usher in this new Spotify age in style.

To access the G’day Australia playlist, head over to Spotify’s Australia jump-off spot, then for the New Zealand playlist hit up Kia Ora! There’s also a unique application for New Zealand as well, NZ Top 40, made for and by New Zealanders on Spotify for music sharing galore. Then hear this – pricing plans have been revealed as well. They’re not exactly the same as they are in the UK or in the USA of course, so have a peek:

Spotify Free: No cost! Spotify Unlimited: (ad free on your computer) $7.49 a month Spotify Premium: (complete with mobile access) $12.99 a month

Australians have both Unlimited and Premium options as well as $6.99 and $11.99 – just a bit cheaper there, better move!

“Spotify is a music lover’s heaven. It’s a great destination to legally discover and enjoy new artists and music.” Mark Poston, Chairman, EMI Music Australasia

Have a peek at our hands-on posts and reviews galore in the timeline below to see what Spotify is all about, and expect more from both countries soon!

Spotify now available in New Zealand and Australia is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear. © 2005 - 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Now that it's vacation season, you're going to want to nail down an efficient method for editing all the photos you've been taking on your summer trips. In the past, this might have meant lu...

Spotify opened for business in Australia and New Zealand today. The move broadens the streaming music service’s reach as it raises a new round of funding that should value the company at $4 billion by the time it closes. Last month rival service MOG announced an Australian expansion but hasn’t launched yet.

Microsoft has taken the covers off of their brand new “social searching” network in collaboration with Bing to bring you results that the whole social web generates. This is not a social network, nor is it a search engine – instead what you’ve got is a way to post news bits for your friends – or whatever you like, but mostly news bits we’re going to go ahead and guess, and Bing will power it all. What makes this engine different from any other news sharing service out there, then?

The reason So.cl exists, from what we’ve seen thus far, is to promote Bing search results in as visually appealing a manner as possible. What it does is to have you using Bing entirely exclusively to share whatever it is you’ve got to share, focusing on grabbing you what Bing suggests is the best source for your news tip. You can also read news feeds, of course, and you’ve got your own profile and can make your own posts – and there are Video Parties, too!

The Video Party is essentially what you’d be doing at a real party if you didn’t have the ability to physically speak with one another and had a TV in front of you with YouTube – only and it uses YouTube videos to do it, too. And you can chat by typing only – for now. The main idea here though isn’t to interact with your friends and colleagues like you have been doing on Facebook, Google+, and the like, it’s to use Bing.

Much in the same way you look for a topic of interest right now with whatever search engine you like to use most, click in to a link that brings you what you want, and share with your friends, So.cl cuts down the process. Now you’ve only got to search for what you like and hit the Share button from the story itself – but wait, you say, you can do that already in Google?

The whole So.cl platform is essentially a reformatting of what we currently do to share topics of interest with one another. Have a peek at the first official launch video to get a better idea of Microsoft’s aims with the platform, and sign up at So.cl soon!

SlashGear 101: What is So.cl? is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear. © 2005 - 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Google's Chrome is officially the most popular browser on the Internet and with good reason. Chrome has several unique features, the best of which is its ability to sync your personal settings across multiple devices.

This week the folks at Ubisoft are bringing their upcoming hit Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, to the world of heavy-duty gaming – but before that, they’re bringing the series of Facebook. The newest game on the social networking platform is Ghost Recon: Commander, and it hits your senses like a small plastic bat. Of course this game is made in preparation for the big wallop of a club that is Future Soldier, so feel free to get your ammo stocked up here a day early!

This game is available for you, the Facebook user, to play here a full day before the real game in this epic series is released. In the real Future Soldier game you’ll be first-person shooting your way into the hearts of all your enemies with full deadly force and next-level tactics requirements galore. In this “Commander” entry into the series, you’re in a world that’s a whole lot closer to Pokemon than it is to the shooter’s natural form.

That said, it’s actually pretty fun, and you do indeed get to shoot, bomb, or otherwise annihilate your enemies in low-level graphics fashion. You can also team up with your Facebook fans and earn all kinds of loot, trade it in for advancements int he game or your own NPCs to follow you along. It’s all about teamwork and it’s out right now – how could you possibly resist?! Head to Facebook right this instant and start unloading.

Ghost Recon Commander hits Facebook early is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear. © 2005 - 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Shares of Facebook stock sank 4.2 points in their second day of trading on the Nasdaq, ending the day at $34.03, a somewhat expected downturn after a lackluster start last Friday. The stock opened at around ten percent under where it closed on Friday, most likely due to lack of underwriter support in propping prices up by exercising the “greenshoe” option.

Uberconference debuts today as a new interface for conference calls — you know, those terrifically annoying occurrences that people in business deal with on a daily basis.

What’s notable about the product is it comes from Craig Walker, the founder and CEO of GrandCentral, which became Google Voice. Walker was also formerly CEO of Dialpad, which became Yahoo Voice.

The Uberconference interface doesn’t require PINs, as individual participants automatically authenticate when they dial in from their own phone numbers. Each participant can see a visual dashboard that shows who is speaking at any time, and can click on each person’s face to get a personal backgrounder based on public social media info.

One neat feature: You know how conference calls are frequently interrupted from background noise coming from one of the callers, but nobody knows who’s the culprit? Uberconference makes it simple for the conference organizer to identify and mute that person.

Uberconference is free, though users who sign up won’t necessarily get access immediately. It’s on the Web and in the U.S. at first, with iPhone and iPad apps coming. Premium services will include local dial-ins, outbound calls and larger conference groups, Walker said today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City.

It’s made by Firespotter Labs, which is Walker’s Google Ventures-funded incubator.

Here’s a funny video Firespotter made about the current state of conference calls:

Avail-TVN, a company that helps process and manage video for cable systems and other services, has raised $100 million in a round led by the Carlyle Group, along with previous investors including Columbia Capital, Valhalla Partners, Novak Biddle and Pioneer Ventures. Avail-TVN used $27 million of the round to buy UK-based On Demand Group, which provides video-on-demand services outside the U.S. Last year, it generated more than $200 million in revenue.

Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. faced the fallout for mishandling Facebook Inc.’s initial public offering, as irate brokers and traders demanded the exchange company make up losses they blamed on Friday’s technical glitches.

Some investors waited until Monday morning to hear whether their Facebook trades were ever completed, while others remained in the dark.

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