You hear it on TV everyday India and China, India and China and how they are going to kick everyone’s behind. China, yes. But India is a joke. Everyone knows it but nobody says. Except for Hillary Clinton, as it was revealed in the Wikileaks documents. She said, paraphrasing here, [They are so delusional only they believe it]. Think about it, India does less trade with the U.S. than tiny Switzerland. Its embarrassing, yet India is of the opinion that they are the same as China, which is the U.S. largest trading partner and pretty much every other country’s.

Today, India passed a new internet law that requires 21 internet companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and others to removed content from some Indian domain websites to protect religious sensibilities. It is a “China” like crackdown. More on Reuters.

The companies have been ordered to develop a mechanism to block material considered religiously offensive after citizens took them to court over images deemed offensive to Hindus, Muslims and Christians. Its complete garbage in my opinion.

Why copy China, on backward matters. Copy China on things that will move India forward not backward. It’s already 5,000 years backward.

Over a 20 billionaires and 1,000 multi-millionaires are going to be minted when Facebook does its IPO. Here is diagram of who is making what.

Here are some awesome stats from Facebook’s IPO documents filed with the SEC. The data was put together by comScore & Miniwatts Marketing Group for Reuters.

Mark Zuckerberg is the next Rupert Murdoch, and given internet time he might get there in a couple of years not decades, says Rob Cox of Reuters.

He says that users and investors are ceding so much control over to Zuckerberg that it is bound to stop being in their best interest.

Due to proxies, Zuckerberg’s shares have 10 times the votes of ordinary shares. That wields him 57 percent of the votes despite controlling 28 percent of the shares. That lets him overrule the majority.

He says investors have allowed Zuckerberg to maintain an iron grip on Facebook (FB) because his dorm-room project is about to fetch them $75 billion, more than the combined market capitalizations of Viacom, News Corp and The New York Times.

Cox says that Murdoch’s News Corp, Sumner Redstone’s Viacom and the Sulzberger family’s NY Times are among the myriad companies controlled by individuals or families whose ambitions no longer fully align with those of a majority of their shareholders and users if I might add.

This absolute power was on display when Murdoch nominated his two sons to the News Corp board. The other 88 percent of News Corp shareholders that did not share his name opposed the move but Murdoch was able ignore their votes due to the voting structure that gives him absolute power.

Facebook is not the only company with such a structure, the founders of Zynga, Google have wield similar power.

Halliburton (HAL), the oilfield services company, once a bastion for the Blackberry (RIMM), is dumping RIM’s platform and switching Apple’s (AAPL) iOS.

“Over the next year, we will begin expanding the use of our mobile technology by transitioning from the BlackBerry (RIMM) platform that we currently use to smartphone technology via the iPhone,” the firm told employees in an internal newsletter.

Halliburton is taking the same path for it 70,000 employees as Clorox (CLX) did last year, when it ditched the BlackBerry for the iPhone.

The company once relied heavily on RIM’s platform, but after evaluating RIM, Windows Phone, Android, and iOS, Halliburton has settled on switching to Apple’s platform.

RIM’s platform was once synonymous with business communications, but that status has slowly eroded since the iPhone’s introduction. While corporate IT spent the first few years after the iPhone’s introduction scoffing at the device, quarterly reports from analysis firms like Good Technology show that iOS has penetrated enterprise markets in a way that even the stodgiest of companies can no longer afford to ignore.

As such, Halliburton is looking to iOS devices to provide employees with secure access to many of its internal applications from outside the company’s network, exclusively through their iPhones. The demand for such flexibility was driven in part Halliburton’s customers, who desire mobile data-access apps for their own iPhone platforms, according to people familiar with the matter.

Halliburton, said it is actively working with Apple on the transition to iOS.

Groupon (GRPN) has purchased Mertado, a member access shopping site, that offers its members exclusive deals.

Mertado is similar to Groupon Goods, which offers discounted items and the supplier ships the goods directly to you. You can also deal directly with the supplier to purchase directly with your Groupon discount code.

From what I can gather, the thinking behind the purchase is to create communities around Groupon Goods.

Eileen Brown from ZDNet summed it up best:

Lots of us are loyal to Groupon itself — but we are not loyal to the brand making the offer. We go from Groupon deal to Groupon deal. We rarely go back to the brand again — unless there’s another offer from the brand itself.

To get brand loyalty, brands will need to work with Groupon Goods / Mertado to encourage loyalty amongst their social shoppers. Encouraging deals to be shared widely brings in more revenue for the brand offering the loss leader.

Groupon has redefined how local advertising works. The grouping of like-minded people drives pricing down. The brand benefits, we all benefit.

Groupon has been increasing its social commerce offerings. It acquired social messaging and engagement platform Campfire Labs whilst it was still in stealth startup mode last month. Groupon want to capitalize on the shift in how consumers will shop in the future.

Used to be, that the Super Bowl ads were something special. Something people would talk about the next day. I am pretty sure nobody will be talking about them this year. They were a bore. This year, the ads were full of dogs, which is good, washed out old 80′s stars like John Stamos, Ferris Bulher, Bruce Willis, Betty White, Jerry Seinfeld and 80′s music like Lionel Ritchie’s “All Nite Long”. The ads sucked to put it diplomatically. There were no ads featuring bikini clad women, I mean this is Super Bowl after all. The Kia ad came close but it too sucked. I would think the audience is predominately male, it would only make sense to target the ads to the audience. With advertisers paying $3.5 million for 30 seconds, I would have thought they would have targeted their ads better. You can watch all the Super Bowl ads in Hulu’s Super Bowl Adzone.

The Super Bowl XLVI on Sunday Feb 5, 2012 will be streamed live on:

• NBCSports.com.  The entire game online starting with some of the pregame action at 2pm ET (11am PT). The kickoff is at 6:30pm ET (3:30pm PT), and the game will feature HD-quality streams from multiple camera angles, DVR-like functionality to pause and replay the action and a number of social features.
• NFL.com. Although, it website does mention LIVE Streaming, I could not find the linked to the game viewer. The NFL website has some great stats and tidbits about the game, the teams, the half-time entertainment and much more.
• Verizon subscribers subscribers will also be able to stream the game on their phones through the NFL Mobile app, which is available for both iOS and Android.
• Viewers in Canada will be able to watch the game via Bell’s mobile apps.
• Hulu will have all the Super Bowl ads in its Adzone.

VeriSign’s Domain Name System, had been hacked repeatedly by outsiders who stole undisclosed information reports Reuters. The unreported breaches occurred in 2010 and were discovered in its SEC filing. It is not know what the damages are Verisign has not comment on the matter. Verisign is responsible for the integrity of Web addresses ending in .com, .net and .gov.

Here is the report as per Reuters:

VeriSign executives told Reuters “we do not believe these attacks breached the servers that support our Domain Name System network,” which ensures people land at the right numeric Internet Protocol address when they type in a name such as Apple.com, but it did not rule anything out.

VeriSign’s domain-name system processes as many as 50 billion queries daily. Pilfered information from it could let hackers direct people to faked sites and intercept email from federal employees or corporate executives, though classified government data moves through more secure channels.

“Oh my God,” said Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and before that the top lawyer at the National Security Agency. “That could allow people to imitate almost any company on the Net.”

The VeriSign attacks were revealed in a quarterly U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing in October that followed new guidelines on reporting security breaches to investors. It was the most striking disclosure to emerge in a review by Reuters of more than 2,000 documents mentioning breach risks since the SEC guidance was published.

Even if the name system is safe, VeriSign offers a number of other services where security is paramount. The company defends customers’ websites from attacks and manages their traffic, and it researches international cybercrime groups.

VeriSign would possess sensitive information on customers, and its registry services that dispense website addresses would also be a natural target.

Ken Silva, who was VeriSign’s chief technology officer for three years until November 2010, said he had not learned of the intrusion until contacted by Reuters. Given the time elapsed since the attack and the vague language in the SEC filing, he said VeriSign “probably can’t draw an accurate assessment” of the damage.

Baker said VeriSign’s description will lead people to “assume that it was a nation-state attack that is persistent, very difficult to eradicate and very difficult to put your hands around, so you can’t tell where they went undetected.”

VeriSign declined multiple interview requests, and senior employees said privately that they had not been given any more details than were in the filing. One said it was impossible to tell if the breach was the result of a concerted effort by a national power, though that was a possibility. “It’s an ugly, slim sliver of facts. It’s not enough,” he said.

The 10-Q said that security staff responded to the attack soon afterward but failed to alert top management until September 2011. It says nothing about a continuing investigation, and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about an inquiry or recommendations for VeriSign customers.

Until August 2010, VeriSign was one of the largest providers of Secure Sockets Layer certificates, which Web browsers look for when connecting users to sites that begin “https,” including most financial sites and some email and other communications portals.

If the SSL process were corrupted, “you could create a Bank of America certificate or Google certificate that is trusted by every browser in the world,” said prominent security consultant Dmitri Alperovich, president of Asymmetric Cyber Operations.

VeriSign sold its certificate business in the summer of 2010 to Symantec Corp, which has kept the VeriSign brand name on those products.

Symantec spokeswoman Nicole Kenyon said “there is no indication that the 2010 corporate network security breach mentioned by VeriSign Inc was related to the acquired SSL product production systems.”

Some smaller issuers of such validation certificates have been compromised in the past, and false certificates have been used to spread the most sophisticated malicious software yet detected, including Stuxnet, which attacked the Iranian nuclear program.

In written Senate testimony on Tuesday, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called the known certificate breaches of 2011 “a threat to one of the most fundamental technologies used to secure online communications and sensitive transactions, such as online banking.” Others have said SSL as a whole is no longer trustworthy and effective.

In a section of its filing devoted to risk factors, VeriSign said it was a frequent subject of “the most sophisticated form of attacks,” including some that are “virtually impossible to anticipate and defend against.”

Security experts said the breach reminded them of last year’s attack on RSA, an authentication company owned by storage maker EMC Corp. RSA’s SecurID tokens authorize remote access and have been in wide use by government agencies and military contractors including Lockheed Martin Corp, which said it was probed on the heels of the RSA breach.

“This breach, along with the RSA breach, puts the authentication mechanisms that are currently being used by businesses at risk,” said Melissa Hathaway, a former intelligence official who led U.S. President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity policy review and later pushed for the SEC guidance. “There appears to be a structured process of hunting those who provide authentication services.”

Even if VeriSign’s certificates were not compromised, a significant breach “means that prevention is futile,” Alperovich said. He said he hoped new legislation on cybersecurity, expected to reach the Senate floor this month, would call for more disclosures and bring more aid to companies under attack.

David Choe, the graffiti artist that painted the walls at Facebook’s first headquarters ended up taking stock instead of cash. When Facebook IPOs, his stock could be worth over $200 million according to SEC filings.

The payout to Mr. Choe, the graffiti artist, could provide more money from his paintings than Sotheby’s attracted for its record-breaking $200.7 million auction in 2008 for work by Damien Hirst.

In 2005, Facebook was a tiny start-up and it needed every penny. Mr. Choe’s was owed a few thousand dollars for this work. Mr. Choe, who said at the time that he thought the idea of Facebook was “ridiculous and pointless,” nevertheless chose the stock.

Mr.Choe is classified as an “adviser” to the company in the filings. According to a former Facebook employee, advisers were getting 0.1 to 0.25 percent of the company. Based on Facebook’s proposed market value of $100 billion, that translates into roughly $200 million for Mr. Choe.

Mr. Choe, is now a very successful artist with gallery shows and pieces exhibited in major museums. He has published an elaborate book titled “David Choe”, featuring his “multimillion-dollar” artwork, which includes the Facebook paintings.

It wasn’t always peaches and roses for Mr. Choe, he had a very hard life, including run-ins with the law, but now he is wealthy. On his Facebook wall, Mr. Choe’s can be seen living the life of a rockstar, partying with scantily clad women and spending large amounts of money on alcohol. In recent weeks, Mr. Choe promoted photos of a $40,000 bottle of alcohol; a single shot, he boasted, costs $888.

Mr. Choe is declining interview requests saying he wants to maintain his privacy.

However, he has a word of advise: “Always double down on 11. Always.”