BRADLEY MANNING TURNS CHELSEA MANNING,plans to live as woman

REUTERS

Bradley Manning wants to now be referred to as Chelsea Manning

Bradley Manning told the Today Show via a letter that he plans to eventually get hormone therapy and live as a woman. Manning's sexuality and gender identity came up frequently during the WikiLeaks trial.
From Today:

During his trial, Manning’s defense team suggested his struggles with gender identity as a gay soldier were a factor in his decision to leak. His attorneys presented an email to a former supervisor from April 2010 in which he said he was transgender and joined the Army to “get rid of it.”

His whole letter from Today:

Subject: The Next Stage of My Life

I want to thank everybody who has supported me over the last three years. Throughout this long ordeal, your letters of support and encouragement have helped keep me strong. I am forever indebted to those who wrote to me, made a donation to my defense fund, or came to watch a portion of the trial. I would especially like to thank Courage to Resist and the Bradley Manning Support Network for their tireless efforts in raising awareness for my case and providing for my legal representation.

As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. I hope that you will support me in this transition. I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun (except in official mail to the confinement facility). I look forward to receiving letters from supporters and having the opportunity to write back.

Thank you,

Chelsea E. Manning

Chat logs — uncovered by Wired years ago — between Manning and hacker Adrian Lamo revealed that Manning suffered at the hands of an alocoholic father, references to the website Queerty, and hints at his transgender identity.
Then BoingBoing published a little more of the logs, and allegedly outed Manning.
From the chat logs [emphasis ours]:

(1:11:54 PM) bradass87: and... its important that it gets out... i feel, for some bizarre reason
(1:12:02 PM) bradass87: it might actually change something
(1:13:10 PM) bradass87: i just... dont wish to be a part of it... at least not now... im not ready... i wouldn't mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn't for the possibility of having pictures of me... plastered all over the world press... as boy...
(1:14:11 PM) bradass87: i've totally lost my mind... i make no sense... the CPU is not made for this motherboard...
(1:14:42 PM) bradass87: s/as boy/as a boy
(1:30:32 PM) bradass87: >sigh<
(1:31:40 PM) bradass87: i just wanted enough time to figure myself out... to be myself... and be running around all the time, trying to meet someone else's expectations
(1:32:01 PM) bradass87: *and not be
(1:33:03 PM) bradass87: im just kind of drifting now...
(1:34:11 PM) bradass87: waiting to redeploy to the US, be discharged... and figure out how on earth im going to transition
(1:34:45 PM) bradass87: all while witnessing the world freak out as its most intimate secrets are revealed
(1:35:06 PM) bradass87: its such an awkward place to be in, emotionally and psychologically

Manning joins another recent high-profile military gender reassignment; Kristin Beck was a member of the most elite special operations unit in the world — SEAL TEAM6

Coffee Meets Bagel Takes Its Online Dating Service National With Its New iOS App

Coffee Meets Bagel, an online dating site that provides a friend-of-a-friend match every day, is now making matches nationwide. Launched in New York City in 2012, the startup is also today releasing its iOS app, which includes the same features as the free web service.
Co-founder Dawoon Kang says that with the new iOS app, Coffee Meets Bagel is looking for the happy medium between traditional subscription services and newer, casual dating apps. ”We want to deliver you a very good-quality match, one that you would expect from subscription services, but with the fun of mobile apps,” Kang says.
For those unfamiliar, Coffee Meets Bagel works like this: After signing up through Facebook, you can specify such information as religion, ethnicity, height and personal details about yourself, as well as what you look for in a date. At noon each day, you then receive one match, or “bagel” as the company calls them, that has some sort of connection to you. You then have a time limit to either “Pass” or “Like.” If two people mutually like each other, they are put in touch through a private company texting line. Kang says the one-match-a-day approach is meant to keep users from feeling overwhelmed and to keep them engaged.
The service is designed to be as gamified as possible. Users earn coffee beans in the app by inviting friends, filling out information or similar actions. They can then use beans to buy special features. Sixty-five beans reveals your match’s mutual friends, 265 lets you go back to a missed match and 500 beans gives you a score and ranking. Coffee Meets Bagel also sells coffee beans, which Kang tells me are bought by 3 to 5 percent of  their users.
One notable feature was Coffee Meets Bagel’s partnership with local businesses in New York City and Boston to offer free gifts to use on a first date. However, Kang says the company abandoned this in other cities in favor of quicker expansion. After New York, the startup added Boston and San Francisco and, in March, expanded to Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Now they are releasing the service to everyone.
Coffee Meets Bagel could run into some initial issues in smaller cities with fewer users, and there might be days when the app is unable to provide a bagel. Kang tells me the service has mainly expanded through word-of-mouth, which means the user base is densely connected and leaves some outliers.
“As we grow, our member base is going to become a lot more diverse,” she says. “[We'll] have to refine the algorithm very quickly … to be able to deliver a personal, relevant match.”
While the company shares some similarities with other popular dating services, Kang says most services are usually at one end of the spectrum or the other. Sites like Match.com and eHarmony require browsing through strangers’ profiles, which can be very time-consuming. On the other hand, dating apps like Tinder are more geared towards quick matches and hookups.
Coffee Meets Bagel is more like Are You Interested or Hinge, which match users with people their friends might know. The difference with Coffee Meets Bagel is it slows the flood of matches, and is monetizing its free app by selling “coffee beans.”
Coffee Meets Bagel has raised $600,000 from Lightbank and has accumulated about 80,000 users. The startup has made more than 1.5 million matches, with 70 percent of members checking the service daily.

With $1.1M In Seed Funding, Mobile Commerce App Boxed Launches To Ship Wholesale Goods To Your Door

When it comes to getting good deals on staples, it’s hard to beat going to big club retailers like Sam’s Club or Costco or whatever other retailers there are where you can buy a 64-pack of bathroom tissue for a highly discounted rate. But you know, not everyone has one of those stores just a few miles away.
A new startup called Boxed, founded by former gaming execs from places like Zynga, hopes to change that, with a mobile app for having wholesale goods delivered to your door. The app launches today, and at first will solve this problem for users on the eastern half of the U.S. with free two-day shipping for orders of $75 or more.
The idea behind the app is to save customers time by shipping the same type of goods they would get at a warehouse club to customers directly to their doors. It accomplishes that by stocking its own warehouse with the most popular items that customers tend to buy at those retail outlets. Unlike Costco, which might have 4,000 or 5,000 items in its stores, Boxed keeps about 500 SKUs available for users in its own warehouse, according to CEO and co-founder Chieh Huang.
That’s right, its own warehouse. While a number of services — like eBay Now or Google Shopping Express are working to partner with retail outlets to provide low-priced same-day shipping, Boxed is taking the contrarian approach of actually holding inventory and fulfilling shipments from its own facility. After the failure of Web 1.0 stalwarts like Kozmo.com, that’s become a no-no for the new generation of local delivery startups.
That said, Boxed isn’t promising same-day delivery, or even next-day delivery. It’s shipping wholesale staples out via regular ground mail, with the expectation that goods will arrive at their destination within two-days of shipping. That’s one of the reasons that for now, the service is only available on the east coast.
By holding its own inventory and shipping in bulk, Boxed believes it can keep margins high and offer lower prices than what one could find online elsewhere. The free shipping on orders of $75 helps, but Boxed believes it can also save its customers time. That’s because the average warehouse club trip lasts more than 100 minutes on average, while an order from its mobile app can be placed in a fraction of that time.
Boxed was founded by former Zynga execs Huang, William Fong, Christopher Cheung, and Jared Yaman, who had joined the gaming company through the acquisition of their startup Astro Ape in 2011. Now the group is looking to switch from mobile gaming to mobile commerce, with the launch of the new app.
The startup has raised a seed round of $1.1 million from ENIAC Ventures, Social Starts, and Bessemer angel group 15 Angels. Former Zynga COO David Ko is also a Boxed investor and will lead the company’s board of advisors.

Tech More: Apple Apple Poaches Exec From Levi's For A New High-Level Retail Job Steve Kovach Aug. 22, 2013, 6:26 AM 1,170 apple store palo alto Apple AAPLAug 22 09:19AM 505.32 Change +2.96 % Change +0.59% Apple has poached away a senior executive from clothing company Levi Strauss to serve as director of sales in the U.S., Mark Gurman 9to5Mac first reported. The exec's name is Enrique Atienza and he'll be in charge of retail operations on the west coast. However, Apple still doesn't have a senior vice president in charge of all retail. That position has been left open since Apple let go John Browett last fall after less than a year on the job. Gurman reports that Apple is still on the hunt for a new retail boss, and is looking to hire someone from outside the U.S.

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Google Exploring Location-Dependent Security Settings For Smartphone Unlock

Darrell Etherington

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Google has a patent application published today (via Engadget) that would make the standard system of unlocking a device much more intelligent, using a smartphone’s built-in sensor to change your security settings on a sliding basis depending on where the phone finds itself. This would allow a user to make it easier to unlock a phone while in the comfort of their own home, while making it more difficult when the device is in a public place.
The invention is clearly designed to make it harder for a stranger or unwanted intruder to access your phone and its data when it may be easily lifted from your pocket or bag while in transit or at a public location like a cafe. In the end it’s a convenience feature, more than a security one, since the most secure option would be to use the most intrustion-resistant method of screen locking available at all times. But making things easier to access at home makes a lot of sense, in terms of decreasing friction and potential displeasure with the general user experience.
The patent as described also contains a provision that would allow for a third authentication method to be set for a second so-called “familiar area.” This would allow for a number of different possibilities, like setting different levels of security for home, work and the rest of the world, for instance. It’s a handy and noteworthy wrinkle in the patent app, since it could also make it possible to essentially set up a specific security profile required in professions where on-site security of data and mobile devices is paramount.
There are a lot of ways this could potentially be useful, in fact, and it’s one of those context-based features that Google seems to be focusing on with Google Now and recent updates to apps like Keep. In the future, you have a different phone depending on where you go, and that’s something most of the tech giants seem to be working on.

Apple Poaches Exec From Levi's For A New High-Level Retail Job

Apple

AAPLAug 22 09:19AM
505.32	Change +2.96	% Change +0.59%

Apple has poached away a senior executive from clothing company Levi Strauss to serve as director of sales in the U.S., Mark Gurman 9to5Mac first reported. The exec's name is Enrique Atienza and he'll be in charge of retail operations on the west coast. However, Apple still doesn't have a senior vice president in charge of all retail. That position has been left open since Apple let go John Browett last fall after less than a year on the job.
Gurman reports that Apple is still on the hunt for a new retail boss, and is looking to hire someone from outside the U.S.

Restaurant Recommendation Service Nara Expands To Hotels

Nara, a Cambridge, Mass.-based recommendation service, today announced that it is expanding its service from restaurant recommendations to also include hotels in about 50 cities in the U.S. and Canada.
Nara, which calls itself a “computational neuroscience company that analyzes and personalizes Web data,” always had the ambition to be much more than just a restaurant recommendation services, as its CEO Thomas Copeman told me when the company announced its $4 million Series A round last year. Its aim is to create a fully personalized web for its users and its current recommendation systems are essentially just a proof-of-concept for the company.

The company, which recently landed Singapore’s SingTel as its first telco customer, uses the Expedia Affiliate Network to power its online bookings engine and TripAdvisor ratings and review to give its users more information about hotels. At the core, however, Nara uses its neural networking-based recommendation engine to learn about its user’s tastes and create what the company calls a “Digital DNA” profile for each one of its users.
“From its inception, Nara.me was built to be a 21st century personal Internet portal,” said Thomas Copeman, chief executive officer and founder of Nara in a statement today. “Today’s announcement demonstrates our commitment to delivering more personalized and relevant content to our users across essential consumer lifestyle categories on the web. Our initial foray into restaurants and, now, hotels is just the beginning of Nara’s capabilities. We are excited to bring the next generation of search to the hospitality, travel, and leisure markets.”

Kamcord Nabs Another $1M In Seed Funding To Help Build A Community Around Mobile Game Recordings

These days it seems like mobile gaming is entering a sort of golden age — developers are getting ambitious about the experiences they want to create, and hardware has grown powerful enough to help bring those lofty visions to life in your pocket.
And all the while, a YC-backed startup called Kamcord has been working to help players record and share video of their in-game exploits. The team has already accrued just north of $1.5 million of capital, and they announced today that Kamcord has locked down another $1 million in seed funding from Tencent and InnovationWorks (among others).
But with this latest infusion of capital comes a peculiar change in direction — according to co-founder and CEO Matt Zitzmann the team is working to flesh out its SDK with social features like profiles and commenting in the hopes of turning Kamcord.com into a destination for mobile gaming content.
“We’ve seen what Twitch.tv and Machinima have been able to do and we’ve gotten a lot of email from users who just want to see more video content,” Zitzmann pointed out. “So we’re building a solution that’s more of a one-stop shop and rolling it out later this week.”
It certainly seems like a weird shift for the small San Francisco startup to take at first glance, but Zitzmann says the 11-person team has been mulling the move for a while. In its current state, players of Kamcord-enabled games can share their content through the usual spate of social channels and email. This approach has been serving the team (not to mention developers antsy for userbase expansion) pretty well so far, and Zitzmann wants amp up engagement by giving players the ability to more easily see how their remote opponents are doing too.
In the year or so since Kamcord first popped up at a Y Combinator Demo Day, Zitzmann has liked to skirt around the topic of monetization. It’s a common refrain from some early stage startups — they’ll try to focus on solely on building and proving the value of their products and chug along on the backs of seed investors until they figure out how to make their own money. With its new social push, it’s not hard to see how Kamcord may be gunning for some new revenue streams. Zitzmann noted in our conversation that he wants to build up a community of players who watch this sort of content and “provide access to those eyeballs” — perhaps a subtle nod to future ad revenue or brand interactions.
Of course, Kamcord’s new trajectory as a destination for video content all depends on its ability to convince game developers to fold the recording feature into their works. Fortunately for the time, things still seem to be going well on that front — Kamcord in-game recording has been built into over 115 games, and users have recorded one billion game sessions since the startup launched last year. I suspect the team could blow up those figures in a huge way if they ever get around to pushing out an Android version of their dev tools, which Zitzmann says is still in the works.

NakedWines.com, the customer-funded online wine retailer, has raised $10 million in a third round of investment from WIV Wein International AG, a German group of direct wine-selling companies and founder shareholder. NakedWines.com will use its new funding to accelerate the company’s expansion into the U.S. and Australia.
Based in Norwich, England, NakedWines.com’s business model allows customers to sponsor independent winemakers in return for about 25% to 50% off a wine’s retail price and exclusive promotions. The site currently has 150,000 Angels (customers who fund winemakers) who have invested over $40 million in 130 winemakers around the world and ships over 10 million bottles of wine each year.
Sales grew to over $50 million in 2012, the year the company declared its maiden profit of $1.5 million (which it says was distributed to staff “as a thank you for working their nuts off.”)
Naked Wines was launched in Britain in 2008 by Rowan Gormley (the former CEO of Virgin Money and Virgin Wines) and became available to buyers in the U.S. and Australia last year.
In a statement, Gormley said: “WIV’s latest investment will really help us step up the quality of our wines in a way that our customers can taste. Winemakers don’t get the recognition or the rewards they deserve, and we want to see that change. In the restaurant industry, individual chefs have become much more famous than the restaurant. We’re helping to do the same thing for the wine business.”

Abercrombie Is Getting Punished (ANF)

REUTERS/Mike Segar

Job seekers speak with recruiters from retailer Abercrombie and Fitch at a career fair at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, January 6, 2011.

Teen clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch just reported second quarter earnings this morning, and shares are already down 18% in pre-market trading. The company reported earnings of $0.16 per share (down 20% from last year) versus the $0.31 EPS predicted by analysts. Revenues also came in below expectations, at $945.7 million (down 1% from last year) versus $1.01 billion.
Same-store sales fell 10% in Q2 – down 11% in the United States and down 7% in international business.
Meanwhile, guidance was lousy: Abercrombie expects third quarter earnings per share to come in a range of $0.40 to $0.45, well below the $1.06 EPS predicted by analysts.
"The second quarter was more difficult than expected due to weaker traffic and continued softness in the female business, consistent with what others have reported. In that context we are planning sales, inventory and expenses conservatively for the remainder of the year," said Abercrombie CEO Mike Jeffries in the release. "Despite the challenging environment, we are very pleased by strong growth in our direct-to-consumer business and continued strong growth in China. We have also made excellent progress on our profit improvement initiative during the quarter, and we now expect savings from this initiative to exceed $100 million annually. In addition, we are nearing completion of our long-term strategic review, and we are confident that this will provide us with a clear roadmap for sustainable growth in sales, profitability and return on invested capital."
Click here for the full release »

Apple Seeks Patent For Skype-Style Away Status For Phone Calls, But Set Automatically

In a new patent filing published by the USPTO today (via AppleInsider), Apple describes a system for setting essentially an “Away/Available/Busy” style status for receiving phone calls on a smartphone device, but one that updates said status intelligently and automatically using data gathered about the device and its settings.
So the basic premise is this: Just like you can on Skype and most IM services, you’d be able to display a status to contacts that would indicate whether you’re available to field a call or not, which could avoid embarrassing moments like having your phone either ring or buzz loudly while in a meeting.
The system would take into account user preferences, determining what information it can share as set by a user, and filter inbound calls against a phone’s contact list to help preserve privacy before sharing any information. But then it could do things like send the inbound caller information about whether the user has the ringer turned on or set to vibrate, their current location, the strength of their current signal and their device’s remaining battery life.
The patent isn’t so much about letting a user set their own universal status for all inbound calls (which seems quite useful), but instead about letting them set and forget preferences around just how much they’re willing to share and with who, and letting the automated system do the rest.
This is one of a number of patents that Apple has filed detailing changes to the essential phone operations of a smartphone device, which would change the calling experience in a significant way. Combined with iMessage, you could see how Apple could further modify basic in and outbound communication experiences with inventions like these.
On the other hand, allowing your phone to automatically send out information about you would be a big pill to swallow for most in terms of privacy concerns. Apple could introduce this system, but it would be far more useful to invent a system that essentially just allows a user to set a status instant messenger style to automatically be displayed in the Contacts app of other users.

Facebook Embedded Posts Now Available To Everyone

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Facebook Embedded Posts Now Available To Everyone (Facebook Blog)Now anyone can take a public Facebook post and embed it directly into their website or blog.  Embedded posts are Facebook's big push to become a primary source of real-time news. Twitter has had a lot of success with its embedded tweets feature, as journalists will often cite what people say via Twitter; now, they can do the same with Facebook. Read >
J.Crew Previews Fall Collection On Pinterest (Businessweek) J.Crew gained nearly 65,000 followers on Pinterest because the retailer posted its entire fall collection on the social network. Read >
The Top Brands On Tumblr (Simply Measured) 

Simply Measured

According to a recent study (see right) by Simply Measured, Sprite, MTV, and Disney generate more engagement on Tumblr than other top brands. Read > mark zuckerberg plans to get billions of people onto the internet(Business Insider) Mark Zuckerberg has a plan to get billions of more people onto the Internet, and it revolved around three important levers:
1) Making Internet access affordable by making it more efficient to deliver data.
2) Using less data by improving the efficiency of the apps and experiences we use.
3) Helping businesses drive Internet access by developing a new model to get people online. Read >
Facebook Hacker Awarded $11,000 (Mashable)The man who exposed a flaw in Facebook's code by posting on Mark Zuckerberg's wall has raised more than $11,000 from a fundraiser launched by security firm BeyondTrust. The campaign was launched because Facebook refused to reward the hacker because he exposed the code flaw by demonstrating it on the site, rather than reporting it (even though he was ignored initially when he did try to bring it Facebook's attention). Read >
20% Of Online Consumers Shared Brand Content In Past Month (Ipsos)According to a recent study by Ipsos, two in ten online consumers indicate that in the past month, they have forwarded a link to an article about a brand or a product page. Additionally, 15% have forwarded a link to a brand or product video. Read >

Omate, A Smartwatch That’s Also A Phone & Sports Tracker, Passes $100K Kickstarter Funding Goal In A Day

Pebble not meeting your needs? The Basis knows just a little too much about you for your comfort? Is the Metawatch too meta?
Well then meet the Hot Watch, out of Dallas. The company just launched the product on Kickstarter, and though the campaign is mostly bull shit (with arguments like: “your phone is too expensive to risk taking out of your pocket”), the product seems to be pretty fly for a new guy… in the smartwatch space. I’m funny, dammit. Laugh!
Anyways, the Hot Watch claims to be different from any of its competitors by offering more full-featured functionality when it comes to making calls, sending and receiving messages and emails, and checking up on your social world.
Like the Pebble, the Hot Watch has a 1.26-inch E-paper multi-touch projected capacitive display from Sharp, with a Cortex M3 processor running the show and a secondary DSP processor to handle things like Bluetooth, call control and various audio features. It uses Bluetooth 4.0 to connect to any Bluetooth-enabled phone, but the founders say it works best with Android and iOS phones.
You’ll also find an accelerometer, gyroscope, pedometer and vibration motor in there, and if that weren’t enough, the Hot Watch is water-resistant. Plus, it can detect when your phone is out of reach and will send you alerts that it may be lost or stolen.
But perhaps more interesting than the specs themselves is the fact that the Hot Watch allows for private calling. When you hold the Hot Watch up to your ear, the cup of your hand as it naturally holds up the watch will amplify the call into your ear.
This allows for entirely private calling, the same way it would be on a smartphone. Of course, the Hot Watch covers all the bases when it comes to calling functionality, allowing you to use speakerphone as well. Users can also receive and reply to messages, social feeds, and emails.
Also like the Pebble, the Hot Watch comes with customizable watch faces, as well as an SDK for third-party developers who want to build snazzy apps for the forthcoming watch.
The Hot Watch also has a number of gestures for answering calls, rejecting them, dialing, muting, ending a call, or even calling your favorite number. In fact, the sensors built in can detect when you’ve fallen down and will dial an emergency number if you haven’t responded in 30 seconds.
Plus, there are Hot Gestures that let you get straight to a feature from the lockscreen. For example, write a D on the screen and go directly from the lock screen to the dial menu.
The Hot Watch has just launched its Kickstarter campaign and already received $42,000 of its $150,000 goal. Head on over to the Kickstarter page to check it out.
It’s getting hot in here, so put down all your phones.
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