Jennifer Sultan Pleads Guilty to Selling Prescription Drugs

At the height of dot-com mania 13 years ago, Jennifer Sultan and a few colleagues sold their small technology company for $70 million in stock and cash. She and her boyfriend rented a large house in the Hamptons for the summer and bought a spacious loft near Union Square.

John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times

Jennifer Sultan faced 15 years to life on the top charge against her, and a potential for more prison time on other counts.

In the years since, that temporary flush of wealth evaporated and Ms. Sultan, 38, developed an addiction to prescription painkillers.

On Friday, she sat handcuffed in a courtroom at State Supreme Court in Manhattan. In exchange for a promise of a four-year prison sentence, she pleaded guilty to selling prescription painkillers and conspiring to sell a firearm.

She was arrested last July and accused of being part of a ring that sold prescription drugs and guns. Four others arrested with Ms. Sultan had already pleaded guilty. One, Nicholas Mina, a former New York City police officer, agreed to serve more than 15 years in prison as part of a plea bargain under which he admitted stealing guns from his colleagues’ precinct house lockers and selling them. Mr. Mina was also addicted to prescription painkillers.

Though Ms. Sultan’s lawyer said she had hoped for less than four years, she faced 15 years to life in prison on the top count against her and the potential for more prison time on other charges. She said little in court but smiled broadly several times as she spoke quietly with her lawyer, Frank Rothman.

“She was happy to be done with it, but she was not happy with the sentence,” Mr. Rothman said afterward.

Ms. Sultan grew up in West Long Branch, N.J., five miles north of Asbury Park, and graduated from New York University in 1996. She and her boyfriend at the time, Adam Cohen, worked at a company, Live Online, that was an early pioneer in live streaming events on the Internet.

After the sale of Live Online, efforts by Ms. Sultan and Mr. Cohen to start other technology companies failed. Ms. Sultan explored other interests, including acupuncture and holistic health.

Early last year, a city narcotics investigator discovered an advertisement Ms. Sultan had placed on Craigslist offering prescription painkillers for sale. She and Mr. Cohen were still living in the penthouse loft near Union Square that they bought after the sale of Live Online.

Five times from February through June, she sold pills to an undercover officer, according to her indictment. One sale took place at the Starbucks on Union Square. In another, she sold 183 oxycodone tablets to the officer for $4,400 at a Starbucks in the Flatiron district near the school where she was studying acupuncture.

A separate investigation into the ring that sold stolen guns and pain medication picked up Ms. Sultan sending a text message to the man accused of being the ringleader, Ivan Chavez, saying she wanted to sell him a .357 Magnum handgun for $850, according to a separate indictment obtained by the Manhattan district attorney.

Mr. Chavez was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Ms. Sultan and Mr. Cohen, who was not accused of participating in the drug and guns ring, filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Last August, the bankruptcy judge ordered them to vacate the loft to allow a bankruptcy trustee to sell it. The 5,600-square-foot loft is still listed for sale at just under $6 million.

She has been incarcerated since her arrest in July because she was unable to raise $85,000 for bail. With credit for good behavior and time served since her arrest, Ms. Sultan could be released from prison in about two years.

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Gadgetwise Blog: How to Beat Some Facebook Scammers

You’ve probably seen those wildly popular Facebook postings that entice you to share something — like a photo of a bear sneaking up on a man — with the instructions, “Press Like and type the number 1 and see what happens.” These posts often list hundreds of thousands of responses.

If you’ve tried it, here’s what you saw happen: nothing. Behind the scenes something is happening, though. With each click, a scammer gets a little closer to cashing in.

The most thorough explanation I’ve seen of how this deception works comes from Daylan Pearce, whose job title is Search Lead at Next Digital, described as Australia’s largest independent digital agency, in Melbourne.

Somewhat simplified, here’s how it works. There is a thriving business in selling Facebook pages. The idea is that a page builds an audience, then essentially sells that audience to someone else. It’s a practice Facebook opposes, but has limited control over.

If a company can buy that audience, its “edge rank” will increase. Edge rank — a term people like Mr. Pearce use, but which Facebook doesn’t officially acknowledge — measures how often someone’s posts show up in other people’s news feeds. “So,” Mr. Pearce said, “a page that has 50,000 likes will have greater exposure on people’s news feeds than a page with only 10,000.”

Edge rank is based on several factors, chief among them affinity, weight and decay, Mr. Pearce said. Affinity is largely based on the number of likes. Weight is based on what accompanies those likes. “A ‘like’ isn’t worth as much as a comment and a comment isn’t worth as much as a ‘share,’” he said.

Decay relates to the age of the post. More views, likes and shares over more time increases edge rank.

Facebook did not quarrel with the basics of Mr. Pearce’s explanation, but said it’s more complicated.

These scam posts are designed to do three things. Get you to like, comment and share the post. It’s a recipe to make it go viral, which takes care of decay.

To hook you, the posts make an intriguing promise, or ask you to support a worthy cause – “like this and share it if you know of someone who has suffered from cancer.”

While you can’t stop people from such postings, you can keep them off your page and reduce the potential profit. You lower their edge rank when you report or at least hide the post.

To do that, hold your cursor over the post and an arrow should appear in the upper right corner. Click it and a drop-down menu offers you the option of hiding or reporting the post.

The more often you report or hide these kinds of posts, the less often they will show up in your news feed.

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Bits Blog: Senator John D. Rockefeller IV Introduces 'Do Not Track' Bill

Before his planned retirement from Congress at the end of next year, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat, intends to give American consumers more meaningful control over personal data collected about them online.

To that end, Mr. Rockefeller on Thursday introduced a bill called the “Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2013.”

The bill would require the Federal Trade Commission to establish standardized mechanisms for people to use their Internet browsers to tell Web sites, advertising networks, data brokers and other online entities whether or not they were willing to submit to data-mining.

The bill would also require the F.T.C. to develop rules to prohibit online services from amassing personal details about users who had opted out of such tracking.

Mr. Rockefeller proposed the same bill two years ago. But he did not push it in the Senate at the time because industry groups had pledged to voluntarily develop systems to honor the browser-based don’t-track-me flags. Last year, however, negotiations between industry groups and consumer advocates over how to execute these mechanisms essentially broke down and have since made little progress.

The new Rockefeller bill indicates that the senator believes the industry has not acted in good faith.

“The privacy of Americans is increasingly under assault as more and more of their daily lives are conducted online,” Mr. Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, wrote on Thursday in an e-mail sent to a reporter. “Industry made a public pledge to develop do-not-track standards that will truly protect consumer privacy — and it has failed to live up to that commitment. They have dragged their feet long enough.”

Industry representatives said that legislation was unnecessary because advertising networks and data brokers several years ago voluntarily introduced their own opt-out program for consumers, called Your AdChoices. Unlike the Do Not Track signals which would allow users to make a one-time decision about all online tracking from their own browsers, the industry program requires people to go to a site and individually select the companies, among several hundred, from whom they prefer not to receive marketing offers based on data-mining.

Stuart Ingis, a lawyer for the Digital Advertising Alliance, an industry consortium, said the program, which involves consumers installing individual cookies on their browsers, demonstrates that users already have choices about data collection.

“It’s a lot easier to use a system that is already built and works,” Mr. Ingis said.

Over the last few years, the number of companies that collect information about the reading habits, health concerns, financial capacity, search queries, purchasing patterns and other activities of online consumers has skyrocketed. Industry representatives argue that this benefits people because it enables companies to show them relevant ads, and that the ads themselves finance online sites and services that are free to consumers. Moreover, they say, the data collection is “anonymous” because online services typically use numerical customer codes, not real names or e-mail addresses, to track the behavior of individuals.

But consumer advocates warn that such profiling systems, which can collect thousands of details on nearly every adult in the United States, can be used to segment some people for preferential offers while relegating others to inferior treatment. Despite industry claims that online tracking is anonymous, a few computer scientists have reported that sites often leak information that can identify individuals, including names, addresses and other details, to third parties.

“Nowadays, there is an incredible proliferation of tracking,” said Dan Auerbach, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group in San Francisco. “Data brokers, companies that you never heard of, are collecting massive dossiers about you as you browse around the Web and, right now, there are no limitations on the collection or use of those dossiers.”

To give people greater control over their own surveillance online, the Federal Trade Commission in a report on consumer privacy last March urged industry groups to adopt Do Not Track mechanisms by the end of 2012. In fact, the major browsers — Firefox from Mozilla, Google’s Chrome, and the more recent iterations of Internet Explorer — already offer the don’t-track-me buttons. When these options are turned on, they send out signals to sites, and third parties like ad networks operating on those sites, that certain users do not want to have their information collected.

But industry groups and consumer advocates have been at odds for more than a year over how “Do Not Track” mechanisms should be presented to users and how online services should respond to the signals. In the absence of legislation or industry consensus, companies are free to ignore those user preferences.

Some browsers have responded to this standstill by taking matters into their own hands and blocking third-party tracking cookies, as my colleague Somini Sengupta reported this week.

But Mr. Rockefeller’s bill indicates that legislative action could pre-empt voluntary industry measures.

“This is a signal that Senator Rockefeller is serious about getting Do Not Track done,” said David C. Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown Law. Until last month, Mr. Vladeck served as director of the bureau of consumer protection at the F.T.C. “I think industry writ large – browser companies, advertising networks, data brokers – are going to understand that he is serious about getting across the finish line.”

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Bits Blog: Yahoo Issues a Statement on Work-at-Home Ban

In a front-page article in The New York Times on Tuesday morning, Catherine Rampell and I wrote about Yahoo’s new policy banning employees from working remotely. The company declined to comment for that article, but on Tuesday afternoon, it issued a statement about the ban against work-at-home arrangements.

“This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home,” the statement said. “This is about what is right for Yahoo right now.”

A company spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the statement, saying, “We don’t discuss internal matters.”

But based on information from several Yahoo employees, what that statement means is that Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s new chief executive, is in crisis mode, and she believes the policy is necessary to get Yahoo back into shape.

The employees spoke anonymously because they are not allowed to discuss internal matters.

The company also seems to be trying to distance itself from the broader national debate over workplace flexibility, and from criticism that the new policy is disruptive for employees who have family responsibilities outside work.

The work ethic at Yahoo among some workers has deteriorated over time, the Yahoo employees said, and requiring people to show up is a way to keep an eye on them and re-energize the troops. If some of the least productive workers leave as a result, the thinking goes, all the better.

Some employees have abused the former policy permitting work at home to the point of founding start-ups while being on salary at Yahoo, said the Yahoo employees and others who have worked at the company.

Several business analysts said that if work-at-home arrangements don’t work, it is generally a management problem.

Yahoo’s culture and employee morale have dissolved as it has fallen behind hotter tech companies. And, business analysts say, those are two things that are difficult to repair without having employees present in the same place.

Still, Ms. Mayer has said many times that one of her top priorities for the company is to recruit the most talented engineers and other employees. Even if requiring people to show up is the only way to repair Yahoo’s culture, it could result in losing valuable employees.

And even if Yahoo’s broader work-at-home policy needed revision, the internal memo announcing the new policy struck some as tone-deaf by implying that employees should avoid staying at home even once in a while when there are extenuating circumstances.

“For the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration,” it said.

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Gadgetwise Blog: App Smart Extra: More Slide Show Apps

Last week in App Smart I talked about the many apps that promise to turn photos from your smartphone or tablet’s digital photo album into an attractive photo slide show. These apps make looking at digital photos of a vacation, or perhaps an event like a wedding, into the modern equivalent of flipping through a photo album.

On iOS, one powerful app for creating dynamic photo slide shows is ProShow (free on iTunes). The interface is easy to use, and the app tries to do much of the fiddly stuff involved in creating a new slide show by offering you themes. These themes automatically adjust settings like special effects between slides and background images. You can manually change these settings later if you prefer. The app can even include video clips. The app does require that you sign up for the company’s services, free, but this minor inconvenience gives you access to its Web site. There you can edit your slide shows and also view them online — a great option for sharing your slide show efforts with friends.

One neat option for Android is the $1 app Slideshow 5000. This app creates an unusual kind of slide show: the photos look as if they are being tossed onto a table while a camera pans above the table’s surface. Each photo is animated as if it were really falling, and even casts a shadow. You can adjust the background image and turn each of your images into a faux Polaroid snap, and it’s easy to select the photos you want. You can even turn the photo slide show into your device’s live Android wallpaper. But the show it produces is more for casual fun; it’s not really ideal for sharing treasured memories.

A simpler option for Android is the free app Slideshow Bob. This app is limited to showing photos from folders on your device, and you can’t organize them inside the app because you’re limited to sorting the photos by parameters like date or title. It does, however, have some transition options, and when it’s displaying the slide shows, it does so elegantly.

Many apps for smartphones and tablets can create photo slide shows, but their quality varies widely. I found it hard to find sophisticated apps that offer a lot of slide show control on Android devices. Luckily, many have a free or “lite” edition, meaning you could try out several before you buy.

Quick call: Lego Galaxy Squad Bug Battle is a new free game for iOS devices. It’s a 2-D scrolling space shooter that combines all the gaming fun of this genre with Lego’s cute imagery. The mission is to save humans by squashing the alien bugs. It will keep you amused when you have the odd five minutes to spare.

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HTC Settles F.T.C. Charges Over Security Flaws in Devices

WASHINGTON — More than 18 million smartphones and other mobile devices made by HTC, a Taiwanese company that is one of the largest sellers of smartphones in the United States, had security flaws that could allow location tracking of users against their will and the theft of personal information stored on their phones, federal officials said Friday.

The Federal Trade Commission charged HTC with customizing the software on its Android- and Windows-based phones in ways that let third-party applications install software that could steal personal information, surreptitiously send text messages or enable the device’s microphone to record the user’s phone calls.

The action is the first attempt by the commission to police a manufacturer of mobile devices. As smartphones and tablets become a common way for consumers to shop, bank and chat online, personal information and privacy will need to be guarded.

HTC America, based in Bellevue, Wash., agreed to settle the civil suit with the commission by issuing software patches that close the security holes, and by creating a security program that will be monitored by an independent party for the next 20 years. The F.T.C. does not have the authority to assess fines in consumer protection cases.

“The company didn’t design its products with security in mind,” Lesley Fair, a senior lawyer in the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, wrote in a blog post. “HTC didn’t test the software on its mobile devices for potential security vulnerabilities, didn’t follow commonly accepted secure coding practices and didn’t even respond when warned about the flaws in its devices.”

An HTC official said Friday that the company had already started to update its software and distribute it to users of some, but not all, of the affected phones.

“Working with our carrier partners, we have addressed the identified security vulnerabilities on the majority of devices in the U.S. released after December 2010,” Sally Julien, an HTC spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We’re working to roll out the remaining software updates now and recommend customers download them once available.”

“Privacy and security are important,” the statement added, “and we are committed to improving practices that help safeguard our customers’ devices and data.”

The trade commission charged that the security flaws resulted from HTC’s modifying the operating system software used on most of the affected phones. In the case of Android, created by Google, the system is designed to protect sensitive information and phone functions through what is known as a permission-based security model.

That requires a user, when installing an application that is not a standard part of the operating system, to be notified and to agree that the application could gain access to certain information or functions.

HTC, however, preinstalled certain apps on its phones in a way that, in addition to preventing consumers from removing them, disabled the permission-based model and allowed newly installed apps to have immediate access to personal data.

“The analogy isn’t exact,” wrote Ms. Fair of the F.T.C., “but it’s like giving a friend the combination to a safe only to find out he’s handing it over to anyone who asks.”

That security hole could, for example, let the rogue software secretly record users’ phone conversations or track their location.

Flaws in the security system could also give third-party apps access to phone numbers, contents of text messages, browsing history and information like credit card numbers and banking transactions. Those flaws also affected HTC phones that used Windows-based operating systems.

While HTC’s actions introduced numerous security vulnerabilities to its phones, a commission official said it was not clear how many users experienced illegal incursions into their phones and personal information.

The flaw in the company’s phones has been known since at least 2011. HTC acknowledged the problems at that time and developed software patches for at least some of the deficiencies that year.

But the problems were far from minor. The F.T.C. said that text-message toll fraud, in which a hacker causes a phone to send text messages to a number that charges the user for delivery of the message, “is one of the most common types of Android malware,” or malicious software.

HTC’s user manuals either said or implied that a user was protected against malware because of the permission-based security, the commission said.

The commission will collect public comments on the proposed remedies for 30 days, after which it will decide whether to formally carry out the order. If HTC subsequently violates the order’s restrictions and requirements, it faces civil penalties of up to $16,000 a violation.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

A picture with an earlier version of this article was published in error. The settlement between HTC and the F.T.C. involves phones running Windows Mobile; it did not involve the later operating system Windows 8, which the phone in the picture was running.

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Bits: Online Gambling Heats Up

The two big casino states, Nevada and New Jersey, are racing into online gambling as a way of protecting their turf. They will in essence become laboratories for what is and is not feasible in Internet wagering.

Nevada legislators, who previously authorized online poker, hurriedly passed a new bill this week that allows the state to enter into deals with other states to essentially pool their gambling populations. “This is the day we usher Nevada into the next frontier of gaming,” Brian Sandoval, Nevada’s governor, said on Thursday as he signed the bill.

In the year since online poker became a theoretical possibility in Nevada, no company has yet offered it. One problem: It’s too small a market, especially in a state where it is not exactly hard to gamble the old-fashioned way — by plunking your body down in a casino or, for that matter, just about anywhere else.

“We don’t have a universe of players,” Pete Ernaut, a Nevada political consultant, told The Las Vegas Review-Journal. “So for us, what we get to offer to a state like California or Texas is that we have the most mature regulatory infrastructure. We have the most mature financial, auditing and collection capabilities, much greater than some of those states, and they have the players.”

Meanwhile, New Jersey is also barreling ahead. Chris Christie, the governor, is likely to sign a revised bill permitting a variety of online gambling as soon as next week. All online ventures will be under the tight control of the Atlantic City casinos. Delaware, the smallest of the three states that are moving ahead with online gambling, also has ambitious plans.

In a harbinger of the new age, gamblers at the Borgata casino in Atlantic City will, as USA Today put it, “be able to lose their shirts without wearing one.” Gamblers staying in one of the casino’s 2,000 rooms can now place their bets right there without venturing onto the casino floor. From there it is only a small step to just staying home and gambling from the hammock.

Internet companies that make online games are watching all this with considerable interest. “Is 2013 going to be a game-changer?” asked Paul Thelen of Big Fish Studios, which began offering a gambling app in Britain last fall. “No. But in 2014, it starts getting interesting.”

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The Boss: Stephen Kaufer of TripAdvisor is an Average Traveler

I WAS born in Hollywood, Calif. — truly a shocking notion if you know how unstruck I am by stars.

Ken Richardson

Stephen Kaufer is the president and C.E.O. of TripAdvisor in Needham, Mass.

AGE 50

FAVORITE QUOTATION 'The harder you practice, the luckier you get' — Gary Player, golfer

PREFERRED MODE OF TRANSPORTATION Tandem bicycle with his wife

My father was a trial lawyer. He taught me the power of articulate persuasion. We’d sit at the dining room table and take sides of a debate. He would argue me into a corner, then at some point say, “Switch,” and I’d have to defend the opposite position. He would then deftly argue himself out of the corner he had just painted me into.

My mother had multiple sclerosis. By the time I was 13 she was in a wheelchair, and she was bedridden when I went to college. She passed away in 1986. A huge responsibility fell to me at an early age as the oldest of three kids. I balanced the household checkbook at 13. I had a special driver’s license at the age of 15 to take my siblings around.

I picked up fencing in high school partly because it attracted the craziest bunch of people. I helped start my high school team, recruiting students with the pitch, “Wouldn’t it be fun if you learned how to stab your friends?” I went to the Junior Olympics when I was 16 or so and lost every one of my bouts. But I got better. When I went to Harvard I made the varsity team, was later elected captain, and in 1983 won a slot on the collegiate All-American team. In fencing, you have to think three moves ahead. It turned out to be good training for corporate life.

I went to Harvard thinking I would major in physics. I liked the pulleys-and-levers part but not the extensive math. Computer science was a bit of a backwater of academia then, but I liked the game of solving programming problems. I’d be pumped at 3 in the morning when I found bugs in programs.

In 1985, after I had graduated from college, I was co-founder of a company called CenterLine Software, which made programming and testing tools that we sold to software developers. In 1998 the other owners and I sold half the assets, and the other half became CenterLine Development Systems, which was headed by my wife, Caroline.

That same year, Caroline and I were planning a vacation in Mexico, and I started looking online for unbiased opinions about a particular hotel. What I got was a thousand sites showcasing exactly the same gorgeous picture and the very same descriptive paragraphs.

It took a lot of time, and some advanced Boolean logic in my search queries, but eventually I found a write-up from a couple who’d stayed at the hotel I had in mind, with pictures that showed rusted chairs and a beach not up to our expectations. I had dodged a bullet.

Later Caroline suggested I build a Web site to help other travelers in similar situations. “Just keep it easy to use and honest,” she said. TripAdvisor and its other Web sites now attract more than 75 million monthly visitors.

Unfortunately, Caroline did not live to see how large we would grow. She passed away from pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer in 2005 at the age of 42. I was left to raise our four children — ages 5, 7, 12 and 13 at the time. It was difficult, to say the least, but today we are a happy and healthy family. In 2012, I married a wonderful friend and an amazing mom with four kids of her own. With eight kids, a dog and a turtle, we take “full house” literally. Through the Stephen and Caroline Kaufer Fund for Neuroendocrine Research, we’ve supported medical research at several leading scientific institutions, as well as through our efforts with a great cancer charity called the Caring for Carcinoid Foundation.

Most people assume I am an avid traveler who would like nothing more than to roam the world for three months. Not true. The company was born of an average traveler’s desire to plan a great trip for a precious week or two of vacation time.

As told to Perry Garfinkel.

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Media Decoder: Nielsen Adjusts Its Ratings to Add Web-Linked TVs

9:04 p.m. | Updated

For media executives, there may be nothing worse than a viewer or listener who is not counted.

On Thursday, in a move that might help ease those concerns, Nielsen said that it would start considering Americans who have spurned cable, but who have a television set hooked up to the Internet, as “television households,” potentially adding to the sample of homes that are rated by the company, the standard for television ratings. In front of skeptical network officials, the company pledged to measure TV viewership on iPads and other mobile devices in the future.

Those executives have a gnawing feeling that their consumers are being missed more and more often. As new pipelines open up for viewers and listeners through social media, mobile apps and game consoles, advertisers fret that they don’t know how many people are really seeing their ads, television networks fear they’re not getting credit for getting those people to tune in and record companies wonder how they can keep up with all the ways their customers consume music.

These problems will only worsen in the years to come as new technologies further erase the boundaries that once existed between television and Internet; newspaper and cable news network; video and article.

Nielsen’s move was announced a day after Billboard said it would start including YouTube streams in its calculation of the most popular songs of the week. That shift immediately vaulted “Harlem Shake,” a modestly selling hip-hop single that has become a viral video sensation, to the top of the charts.

Nielsen’s decision was the culmination of two years of thinking, a painfully long time for media executives. Their collective sense of urgency has increased as new Web services like Aereo have allowed people to watch TV channels, ads and all, without a cable subscription or an antenna.

The new definition “will include those households who are receiving broadband Internet and putting it onto a television set,” said Pat McDonough, the senior vice president for insights and analysis at Nielsen. Currently a “television set” is the flat-screen kind, but in the future a tablet computer like an iPad could also be considered a TV set.

Nielsen’s decision won’t have an immediate impact on the ratings system that governs billions of dollars in advertising decisions, because just 0.6 percent of households in the United States meet the new description.

As that statistic shows, a large majority of households have chosen not to cut the cable TV cord to date. But predictions of “cord-cutting” continue to resonate; the Dish Network chief Charles Ergen said earlier this week that “I think cord-cutting is here to stay and will accelerate over time” as customers reject increases to their monthly bills. By beginning to count Internet-only homes, Nielsen is trying to get ahead of the change.

In some media corners on Thursday, the reaction was summarized in a word: Finally. Television executives who have long prodded Nielsen to evolve — and been disappointed before — said they would wait and see how far the company actually goes in counting online views.

Right now, most Internet views of their shows are not counted in the TV ratings that serve as a kind of nationwide popularity contest, either because there are no ads attached (see Netflix) or because the ads are not exactly the same as the ones that appeared on the original TV broadcast (see Hulu). But new services are popping up that stream TV shows and ads without the need for cable.

Aereo, which is available in New York and is expanding to other cities, is one. NimbleTV, which is in a test phase, is another. Further into the future, Intel is planning to start a cablelike subscription service that will be delivered over the Internet, and a bevy of other companies are interested in doing the same thing. If and when these services steal customers away from cable, advertisers will need to know if their spots are being seen and Nielsen will need to track it.

Alternatively, cable companies and the owners of cable channels are trying to keep customers by streaming shows in a manner known as TV Everywhere. In some cases, these services need to be rated, too.

Ms. McDonough said in a telephone interview on Thursday that viewing on Aereo would now be included in the Nielsen ratings sample. Theoretically, a cablelike service from Intel would be included, too.

The new definition also applies to homes that have cable but also have extra TV sets that are hooked up only to PlayStations, Rokus or other Internet devices.

The changes emanated from a measurement committee comprising Nielsen executives and two dozen representatives from networks and advertising firms. The committee met in New York on Tuesday and discussed Nielsen’s proposals. They were subsequently obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.

The proposals, Nielsen said in a statement, were necessary to “more completely reflect media consumption.”

There is intense anxiety about the ratings at the major television networks because, in some cases, their ratings are evaporating before their eyes. The culprits include digital video recorder use, delayed viewership thanks to the existence of Netflix and other online sources, and increased competition from other channels and the Internet. Counting the small sliver of homes that have Internet-connected TVs, but not cable, will not make a big difference in the short term.

Then again, as Ms. McDonough put it, “It’s up to the networks to decide how best they want to monetize their content.”

If a network like ABC decided to run the same commercials with “Modern Family” on TV and on Hulu and on ABC.com and on its app, Nielsen would count all those views equally.

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/22/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Nielsen Adjusts Ratings to Include Web-Linked TVs .

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Gadgetwise: A New Music Experience: Let Your Shower Head Sing to You

Kohler has brought a whole new meaning to “streaming audio.”

The company, which makes bathroom fixtures, has introduced a shower head with a built-in wireless speaker system called the Moxie.

Although it might seem simple to put a speaker in a shower head, there were a number of design challenges. The speaker displaces a lot of spray nozzles, and Kohler had to maintain a 2.5-gallon-a-minute water flow through a normal-size shower head. It accomplished the task by carefully sizing and re-aiming nozzles to provide a good dousing.

Kohler also had to ensure that the small speaker and amplifier could be removed for charging. It used a strong magnet to mount the cone-shaped module so it can be plucked easily from the shower head.

The shower head itself, which lists for $200, is plastic with a silicone face to make it easier to remove calcium deposits. The mounting hardware is chromed brass. The company says to expect up to seven hours of play time, but you will want to turn the speaker off when it is not in use. There is a surface mounted button for that purpose.

In a test, the shower head provided a strong, steady stream, and the sound quality was good for such a tiny speaker in a poor acoustical environment. Those hard tile surfaces create an echo, which improves the sound of your singing in the shower but degrades the music.

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Bits Blog: Marissa Mayer Puts Her Stamp on Yahoo.com

8:39 a.m. | Updated On Wednesday, Yahoo introduced a fresh new home page with Marissa Mayer’s stamp all over it.

Yahoo’s home page has long been a sort of sad reflection of the company. A jazzed-up Craigslist of sorts, the site was often cluttered with low-quality ads and irrelevant content and in no way reflected the fact that Yahoo is one of the most visited sites on the Web. With more than 700 million monthly visitors, Yahoo is still a leading source of information for sports, finance and entertainment.

Ms. Mayer took the reins as Yahoo’s chief executive last July. Before that she was a long-time executive at Google, where she was widely credited with the simple look of the Google search page. Now she seeks to apply that same, clean aesthetic to one of the most chaotic sites on the Web.

In an interview Tuesday, Ms. Mayer said she wanted to make Yahoo’s site “fresh and dynamic and add an element of surprise and serendipity.”

Gone are the low-quality ads. She has added an infinite, Twitter-like news feed and a stream of content recommended by users’ Facebook friends. Instead of trying to jam every Yahoo feature onto the site, the new design gives special prominence to Yahoo’s most popular Web properties: Yahoo’s e-mail and news service, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, its movie listing site and OMG, its popular entertainment site.

Users can now easily share content they see on the home page via e-mail, Twitter or Facebook with one click. They also have limited ability to customize the site to their liking. They can turn off home page features like horoscopes, stock quotes and sports stats. Ms. Mayer pointed out that the more items users switch on and off, the smarter the Yahoo algorithm gets and the more relevant content Yahoo will serve up.

Yahoo’s redesigned home page is the third major aesthetic improvement Ms. Mayer has introduced since joining the company. In December, she redesigned Yahoo’s e-mail service and its once-popular photo-sharing service Flickr.

In the interview, Ms. Mayer said these would be the “first of many releases” and she would turn her focus to a dozen or more Yahoo products. Her next priority for the home page, she said, will be adding content sources. In December, Yahoo signed three deals, with CBS Television, NBC Sports and ABC News. In each case, the media companies will work with Yahoo to promote each other’s content and produce original video content for the Web.

“We’re introducing a new way to welcome people to Yahoo,” Ms. Mayer said.

But it’s more than aesthetics. Ms. Mayer is betting that the renewed focus on Yahoo’s products will turn around the company’s ailing display ad revenue. Yahoo, once the biggest seller of display ads in the United States, went from a leading 15.5 percent share of all digital ad revenues in the United States in 2009, to an 8.4 percent share last year, even as total digital ad spending grew, according to eMarketer. Meanwhile, its competitor, Google, increased its share to 41 percent.

Last month, she told analysts, “More personalized content and increased product innovation will be key to getting us back to the path for display revenue growth.”

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Disruptions: Disruptions: 3-D Printing Is on the Fast Track

Will the future be printed in 3-D?

At first glance, looking at past predictions about the future of technology, prognosticators got a whole lot wrong. The Web is a garbage dump of inaccurate guesses about the year 2000, 2010 and beyond. Flying cars, robotic maids and jet packs still are nowhere near a reality.

Yet the prediction that 3-D printers will become a part of our daily lives is happening much sooner than anyone anticipated. These printers can produce objects, even rather intricate ones, by printing thin layer after layer of plastic, metal, ceramics or other materials. And the products they make can be highly customized.

Last week, President Obama cited this nascent technology during his State of the Union address — as if everyone already knew what the technology was.

He expressed hope that it was a way to rejuvenate American manufacturing. “A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3-D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything,” Mr. Obama said. He has pushed new technologies before, like solar and wind power, as remedies for our nation’s problems, and those attempts have only revived the debate about the limitations of government industrial policy.

But this one shows more promise. The question is, can the United States get a foothold in manufacturing one 3-D printer at a time?

Hod Lipson, an associate professor and the director of the Creative Machines Lab at Cornell, said “3-D printing is worming its way into almost every industry, from entertainment, to food, to bio- and medical-applications.”

It won’t necessarily directly create manufacturing jobs, except perhaps for the printers themselves. Dr. Lipson, the co-author of “Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing,” said that the technology “is not going to simply replace existing manufacturing anytime soon.” But he said he believed that it would give rise to new businesses. “The bigger opportunity in the U.S. is that it opens and creates new business models that are based on this idea of customization.”

In addition to the lab that the president mentioned, a federally financed manufacturing innovation institute in Youngstown, Ohio, schools are embracing the technology. The University of Virginia has been working to introduce 3-D printers into some programs from kindergarten through 12th grade in Charlottesville to prepare students for a new future in manufacturing.

“We have 3-D printers in classrooms, and in one example, we’re teaching kids how to design and print catapults that they then analyze for efficiency,” said Glen L. Bull, professor and co-director of the Center for Technology and Teacher Education. “We believe that every school in America could have a 3-D printer in the classroom in the next few years.”

The education system may want to speed things up. The time between predictions for 3-D printers and the reality of what they can accomplish is compressing rapidly.

For example, in 2010, researchers at the University of Southern California said that another decade would pass before we could build a home using a 3-D printer. Yet last week, Softkill Design, a London architecture collective, announced that it planned to make the first such home — which it will assemble in a single day — later this year. The home isn’t that pretty, and will look more like a calcified spider web than a cozy house, but it will show it can be done. The price of 3-D printers has also dropped sharply over the last two years, with machines that once cost $20,000, now at $1,000 or less. That’s partly because Chinese companies are driving down prices. Yes, China sees the opportunity in these things, even though the technology may undermine some of its manufacturing advantages.

“When it costs you the same amount of manufacturing effort to make advanced robotic parts as it does to manufacture a paperweight, that really changes things in a profound way,” Dr. Lipson said.

This leaves us with one more question about the future: When will these 3-D printers be able to make us flying cars, robotic maids and jet packs?

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

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The Media Equation: In Omaha Manhole Fire Photo, Logging Off in Search of Some Clues

Stephanie Sands

This image, which was taken after an underground fire cut power in half of downtown Omaha, captivated the Web last month.

When photographs of spontaneous events miraculously appear on the Web, it generally prompts two responses: wonder and skepticism.

Matt Miller/Omaha World-Herald

Matthew Hansen, a columnist at The Omaha World-Herald, showed how to follow a trail. 

So it was with an image of exploding manhole covers in Omaha that took over the Web last month. On Sunday, Jan. 27, an underground fire cut power in half of downtown. A vivid photograph of unknown provenance, showing fire shooting out of manholes on a city street, began popping up on Reddit, where it had 1.5 million views, and Gawker.

The photo — an indifferently composed shot of an event that looks very far away — would not win any Pulitzers, but something incredible seems to be under way at the precise moment it was taken. You can almost hear the sequential explosions emanating below the street: boom, boom, boom as flames appear to shoot up from hell itself.

In this age of Photoshop, it wasn’t long before the debates cropped up, on the Web and in Omaha, about the picture’s authenticity.

Matthew Hansen, a columnist at The Omaha World-Herald, wondered the same thing, and one night found himself in a bar engaged in the real-versus-fake debate. Like many photos on the Web, this one came from everywhere — forwarded, tweeted and blogged — and nowhere — there was no name on the image nor any text to indicate its origin.

Mr. Hansen, intrepid journalist that he is, solved the mystery and wrote a column about it. The photo was real, it turned out, but not in the way people thought. (More on that later.) So, did Mr. Hansen use deep photo analytics or examine metadata to peel back the truth?

Nope. There was a notebook involved, a lawyer, some phone calls, a cursory digital investigation and some street reporting, which included an interview with a man with no pants.

Shoe leather never looked or smelled so good.

Mr. Hansen’s first step in solving what he called the “Great Omaha Manhole Fire Photo of 2013” was to determine from the angle of the photo that it could have been taken from only one apartment building — called the Kensington Tower. He then used an architectural detail to conclude that it was shot from the top floor, on the west side.

He managed to gain entry to the building — that is, he sneaked in — and made his way to the top floor, where he began knocking on doors.

Mr. Hansen found a man named Kenneth who would not let Mr. Hansen in because he was indisposed — he became “Pantsless Kenneth” in the column — but said that he knew the photo in question and thought his neighbor had taken it.

But the neighbor wasn’t home, so Mr. Hansen stuck his business card in the door jamb and left.

When he returned to the office, Mr. Hansen jumped onto Reddit, found the person who had originally posted the photo there and through him found the person, Gwendolyn Olney, who had posted the photo on her Facebook page, the source for the Reddit posting.

Ms. Olney happened to be the associate counsel for The World-Herald. “Omaha is indeed a small town,” Mr. Hansen wrote in his column. He began to follow the pixilated bread crumbs.

“Gwen didn’t take the photo,” he added. “She got it from Rebecca, who didn’t take the photo. She got it from Brandon, who didn’t take the photo. They led me to Gwen’s friend Andrea, who didn’t take the photo, who led me to ... well, she couldn’t remember who she had gotten the photo from.”

Reading the column, you could almost hear his sigh when he wrote, “Dead end.”

Then his phone rang. “I took that photo,” the voice said.

The caller was Stephanie Sands, a graduate student at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She said that the day after she took the photo, which she had no idea had become a sensation, she learned from her friends that a reporter was asking about it.

“I was impressed that he had sneaked upstairs and put a card in my door, so I called him,” she said in an interview by phone.

Ms. Sands agreed to meet Mr. Hansen and told him that she had heard the explosion and took two photos with her phone. She sent one to friends and thought nothing more of it.

“I was actually disappointed in how it turned out,” she told me. “Because I was shooting at a distance with an iPhone, it didn’t really capture the severity of what I saw and heard.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 17, 2013

An earlier version of this column misquoted Matthew Hansen, a columnist at The Omaha World-Herald, about the author of a profile on Edna Buchanan, a crime writer. Mr. Hansen said the writer of the profile was Calvin Trillin, not Gay Talese. 

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A Game Aims to Draw Attention to Women’s Issues

Social cause gaming, or the use of games to promote awareness of societal problems, has been growing as a result of online projects like Food Force, the United Nations World Food Program’s 2005 game about confronting famine, and Darfur Is Dying, MTV’s 2006 offering in which players navigate the terrors of a Sudanese refugee camp.

Subsequent games have raised awareness of subjects like H.I.V., sex trafficking and political conflicts, among others.

On March 4, a new game on Facebook, inspired by the book “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,” will be introduced, with a focus on raising awareness of female genital mutilation and child prostitution.

Half the Sky Movement: The Game, more than three years in the making, is one of the most ambitious efforts yet to entice a mass audience to social media games with the goal of social change. It is a concept, however, that even its supporters say is largely untested.

The game seeks to engage new audiences not reached by the 2009 book, written by the married team of Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, and Sheryl WuDunn, a former Times journalist. A spinoff four-hour documentary was broadcast on PBS in October, drawing 5.1 million viewers over two nights, with a four-hour sequel coming in fall 2014.

Even more directly than is possible with the book and television program, the game’s producers hope to draw in the public — in particular, women with an average age of 39 who play Facebook games.

The central character, an Indian woman named Radhika, faces various challenges with the assistance of players, who can help out with donations of virtual goods, for example. The players can then make equivalent real-world donations to seven nonprofit organizations woven into the game. Ten dollars, for example, will buy a goat for Heifer International; $20 will help support United Nations Foundation immunization efforts.

To further engage players, those who reach predesignated levels unlock donations from Johnson & Johnson and Pearson, which have each contributed $250,000 to buy real-world operations from the Fistula Foundation and books for Room to Read, respectively.

If the Half the Sky game takes off and the money is claimed quickly, the producers hope other sponsors will step in, said Michelle Byrd, co-president of Games for Change, a nonprofit that promotes the creation of so-called social impact games and is the game’s executive producer, along with Show of Force Productions.

Asi Burak, also co-president of Games for Change, said the hope is to draw two million to five million players, persuading 5 percent or more to donate. Players can play at no charge, but they will make faster progress through donations.

Those usage figures would put the game in the top rungs of social cause gaming. Recently, developers of games like the virtual city-building WeTopia have shifted to a Facebook platform, to encourage social sharing, and linked the games to player-controlled real-world donations.

The genre is still new enough that “I think it’s an open question as to whether or not and to what degree people want to play a game that’s focused on a social issue,” said Ken Weber, executive director of Zynga.org, the nonprofit arm of Zynga, the company behind Facebook’s FarmVille game.

Zynga, which has raised $15 million for about 50 causes like Japanese earthquake relief through FarmVille, signed on to support the Half the Sky game, helping in its development and committing to promote it to the nearly 300 million Zynga users.

Zynga felt the game had “a fighting chance,” Mr. Weber said, because the content was compelling, there was already an established book and television property, financing was in hand — producers have raised $1 million — and Games for Change had hired “a commercial-grade developer,” the Canadian company Frima Studio of Quebec City.

Other supporters include the Ford, Rockefeller and United Nations foundations; Intel; and the National Endowment for the Arts, which last spring shifted grant money away from public television to an array of untested games.

The Half the Sky game starts out simply, as Radhika ponders how to afford a doctor visit for her sick daughter (the answer is to harvest mangoes, which players do for her). Each step requires players to answer a question — for example, should Radhika confront her husband or stay silent? Neither answer is wrong, but each takes players on a different route.

As Radhika moves across the globe to Kenya, Vietnam and Afghanistan, her empowerment grows. But many of the game choices get progressively darker. One leads to a mother living and her baby dying, and sometimes Radhika fails.

Still, some of the game’s nonprofit partners have pushed for even more verisimilitude, Ms. Byrd and Mr. Burak said, questioning, for one, why Radhika can read when many women in her situation would be illiterate.

Finding that balance — how much to simplify complicated issues, how much fun to include and how much to focus on positive solutions versus grave challenges — has consumed much of the development process, the producers said.

“It’ll be a very interesting test as to what people’s thresholds are,” said Mr. Weber, of Zynga.

Players who reach the final level learn about sex trafficking in the United States and can donate to an organization in New York called GEMS, or Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, which helps young women leave the commercial sex industry.

Rachel Lloyd, the organization’s founder, said that games were “a brave new world for us, too. We’re watching and seeing how this works, if people really do engage in the way that we’d like them to.”

She says she hopes users will be moved to call for more economic opportunities for women, or become a mentor. “I do think we have to push people to step outside their comfort zone,” she said, “and move outside online into the real world.”

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Bits Blog: Facebook Says Hackers Breached Its Computers

Facebook admitted that it was breached by sophisticated hackers in recent weeks, two weeks after Twitter made a similar admission. Both Facebook and Twitter were breached through a well-publicized vulnerability in Oracle’s Java software.

In a blog post late Friday afternoon, Facebook said it was attacked when a handful of its employees visited a compromised site for mobile developers. Simply by visiting the site, their computers were infected with malware. The company said that as soon as it discovered the malware, it cleaned up the infected machines and tipped off law enforcement.

“We have found no evidence that Facebook user data was compromised,” Facebook said.

On Feb. 1, Twitter said hackers had breached its systems and potentially accessed the data of 250,000 Twitter users. The company suggested at that time that it was one of several companies and organizations to be have been similarly attacked.

Facebook has known about its own breach for at least a month, according to people close to the investigation, but it was unclear why the company waited this long to announce it. Fred Wolens, a Facebook spokesman, declined to comment.

Like Twitter, Facebook said it believed that it was one of several organizations that were targeted by the same group of attackers.

“Facebook was not alone in this attack,” the company said in its blog post. “It is clear that others were attacked and infiltrated recently as well.”

The attacks add to the mounting evidence that hackers were able to use the security hole in Oracle’s Java software to steal information from a broad range of companies. Java, a widely used programming language, is installed on more than three billion devices. It has long been hounded by security problems.

Last month, after a security researcher exposed a serious vulnerability in the software, the Department of Homeland Security issued a rare alert that warned users to disable Java on their computers. The vulnerability was particularly disconcerting because it let attackers download a malicious program onto its victims’ machines without any prompting. Users did not even have to click on a malicious link for their computers to be infected. The program simply downloaded itself.

After Oracle initially patched the security hole in January, the Department of Homeland Security said that the fix was not sufficient and recommended that, unless “absolutely necessary”, users should disable it on their computers completely. Oracle did not issue another fix until Feb. 1.

Social networks are a prime target for hackers, who look to use people’s personal data and social connections in what are known as “spearphishing” attacks. In this type of attack, a target is sent an e-mail, ostensibly from a connection, containing a malicious link or attachment. Once the link is clicked or attachment opened, attackers take control of a user’s computer. If the infected computer is inside a company’s system, the attackers are able to gain a foothold. In many cases, they then extract passwords and gain access to sensitive data.

Facebook said in its blog post that the updated patch addressed the vulnerability that allowed hackers to access its employees’ computers.

Hackers have been attacking organizations inside the United States at an alarming rate. The number of attacks reported by government agencies last year topped 48,500 — a ninefold jump from the 5,500 attacks reported in 2006, according to the Government Accountability Office.

In the last month alone, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post all confirmed that they were targets of sophisticated hackers. But security experts say that these attacks are just the tip of the iceberg.

A common saying among security experts is that there are now only two types of American companies: Those that have been hacked and those that don’t know they’ve been hacked.

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Amazon to Investigate Claims of Worker Intimidation at German Centers

BERLIN — The workers came from across Europe to pack boxes for the online retailer Amazon at distribution centers in Germany during the Christmas rush. They did not expect to be watched over — some say intimidated — by thugs in neo-Nazi-style clothing and jackboots.

On Friday, Amazon said it was investigating claims made in a documentary that a subcontractor employed security guards with neo-Nazi ties to oversee the immigrant workers.

The documentary, broadcast Wednesday on the ARD public television network, showed guards in black uniforms with H.E.S.S., after Hensel European Security Services, but also the last name of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, emblazoned on their chests.

According to the film, security guards employed by the subcontractor scared and intimidated hundreds of temporary workers from Hungary, Poland, Spain and other European countries.

The accusations ignited an outcry on social media and calls for consumers to think twice about placing their next order on Amazon. The company responded by pledging to investigate the claims, saying that it was in its own interest to provide a safe and secure working environment for all of its employees, temporary as well as permanent.

“Amazon does not tolerate discrimination or intimidation, and we will act swiftly to eliminate any such behavior,” Ulrike Stöcker, a spokeswoman for the company in Germany, said in a statement.

Germany is Amazon’s most important market after the United States. It recorded revenues of $8.7 billion here last year, part of the $61 billion it generated worldwide. The company, based in Seattle, employs tens of thousands of people around the world.

Heiner Reimann of the Ver.di union, which represents employee interests at a plant in Bad Hersfeld in central Germany where the filmmakers recorded the security guards, said that the young men, sporting black bomber jackets, jackboots and short, military-style haircuts, made invasive spot-checks at the temporary residences where the workers were stayed.

In the documentary, a woman from Spain who gave her name only as Silvinia, told the filmmakers that the guards kept them under constant observation.

“They go into the house when the people are not there,” she said. “And also when they are there, sleeping or taking a shower.”

Mr. Reimann said some of the men were wearing clothing made by the company Thor Steinar, a brand popular among Germany’s far-right extremists, whose clothes have been banned from the country’s Parliament building, and several German soccer stadiums.

Patrick Hensel, who heads the security company, rejected the claims that its employees had intimidated immigrant workers, as shown in the documentary. He said the security guards in question would be confronted about the accusations and that appropriate action would be taken.

Mr. Reimann said Amazon should seek to set a good example in Germany of how to combine the use of temporary workers with high standards, and should be aware of certain historical sensitivities.

“We are talking about Polish workers who were kept in a holiday camp with a fence around it and were being watched by guards,” Mr. Reimann said in a telephone interview.

“We are in Germany,” he said. “We have a certain history to respect.”

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Media Decoder Blog: Indian Music Service, Taking Page From Spotify, Goes Pro

Western music fans have no shortage of digital music services to choose from, and that abundance is spreading around the world. Apple’s iTunes is now in 119 countries, and others are racing to plant their digital flags everywhere. This week, for example, Spotify opened in Italy, Poland and Portugal, bringing its reach to 23 countries.

But just as interesting, and in the long run perhaps as significant to competition, is the rise of services that serve regional markets intensely. One is Saavn, a Spotify-like streaming service that specializes in Indian music, and has garnered 10.5 million monthly users with advertising-supported free listening. This week it will announce that it has taken another page from Spotify’s book, by offering a premium version at $4 a month that eliminates the ads, lets users listen to songs offline and will eventually add other features like higher quality audio.

Saavn, which has offices in New York, India and Mountain View, Calif., has a catalog of 1.1 million songs in nine languages and is available in more than 200 countries, with about 70 percent of its consumption within India, said Rishi Malhotra, one of its founders. Like Spotify, iHeartRadio and other Western services, it is an official partner of Facebook. About 80 percent of its use is on mobile devices, Mr. Malhotra said, and when the premium service, Saavn Pro, is opened in March, it will at first be available only for Apple devices.

The pricing is significantly lower than Western services. “We wanted to make it globally acceptable,” said Mr. Malhotra, who is based in New York. “The $10 price point that you see from a lot of music services we use here is way out of reach from what would fly in India or a lot of other emerging markets.”

Saavn believes it can succeed in India not only through its catalog of Bollywood hits, but through technological touches that may be meaningful only to Indian listeners. One example is the ability to search for a Bollywood song based on the actor who lip-synchs it — often more memorable to fans than the “playback” singer who actually provided the voice.

If successful, Saavn Pro could give the company an advantage in India’s quickly developing digital music market, which already has a handful of streaming services, like Dhingana, as well as a strong presence in downloads from Nokia. Yet that market is still tiny for a country of India’s size and overall media spending. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, recorded music had only $141 million in trade (or wholesale) value in 2011. A recent report by Ernst & Young said that music and radio combined count for only 2.4 percent of India’s media and entertainment spending, which for 2011 it estimated at $18 billion.

Part of the reason for music’s small proportion of India’s media economy is that popular music in India is dominated by the film industry. But a greater reason is piracy; the federation estimates that 55 percent of Internet users in India go to unlicensed music services on a monthly basis. That is slowly starting to change, music executives say, as courts there crack down on infringement and legitimate digital services proliferate. Apple’s iTunes opened there in December, and Nokia says it sells 1.4 million songs a day at its download store in India.

And Indian record companies are approaching digital business without the baggage that has been complicating deals with Western labels and services for more than a decade, Mr. Malhotra added.

“The labels in India are not reluctant about digital,” he said. “It’s not like they are protecting against some established, older revenue stream. It’s all found revenue for them.”

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Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

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App Smart: Apps Let You Take Karaoke With You

Singing has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, partly because I love it and partly thanks to my Welsh heritage (we’re traditionally belting vocalists). But it’s been years since I last sang in a choir, and my singing is now confined to the shower and the occasional family game of SingStar on the PlayStation.

If karaoke is your thing, though, you don’t need to own a game console with fancy microphones or make a trip to a bar; the smartphone app stores are full of karaoke apps. Red Karaoke, free on iOS and Android, has a slick and easy-to-use interface, with clear navigation thanks to its icon-style buttons and smart graphics. The backing music has a professional quality, which adds to the fun.

When singing along, you can adjust the key of the backing track to match your voice, and change the font size of the lyrics. With the iOS edition, you can use Apple’s built-in system to broadcast the phone’s display to an Apple TV for a more realistic karaoke feel on the home TV screen. The app can also make a video of you as you sing. You can watch the video later or see recordings made by other people around the world.

The app has two slight drawbacks: you have to sign up for a free account to use it, a minor annoyance even if it does give you access to your account from different devices. More important, it is not entirely free. Songs cost “credits,” and after the free 250 credits you get for signing up (enough for two popular songs), you need an in-app subscription at $6.99 a month or $39.99 a year to get more.

Karaoke Anywhere, also free on iOS and Android, has a familiar user interface and display that may even remind you of signing up to sing karaoke in a bar. But its design is slightly pedestrian, and its occasionally confusing menus make interaction a little clunky. The pixelated text of the lyrics that scroll on screen as you sing may also surprise you with an occasional typo.

But Karaoke Anywhere does have a reasonable catalog of free songs. The app also uses a “credits” purchase system for songs, and there is a complex set of options, from unlocking a song for $2 to a monthly subscription costing $9.99. This app’s backing tracks can sometimes sound cheap and electronic, but so does typical real-life karaoke. This app works especially well if you turn on its reverb and echo options to add special effects to your voice — though you probably need to wire your phone to an audio amplifier to get the full effect.

For a more sophisticated karaoke experience, with an option of singing live with someone halfway across the globe, there is Smule’s Sing! Karaoke app (free on Android and iOS).

This app is very much about karaoke, but it also functions like a game because it listens to your singing and scores how accurately you hit each note in a performance.

To get access to more than the short list of free songs, you have to amass credits, as with other karaoke apps. But in this app a user can add credits by paying for a subscription, volunteering to watch a short advertising video or signing up for other online services; for example, joining an online video site and buying credits there will also earn a few hundred credits for Sing! Karaoke, while joining mailing lists will get you a handful.

The app is polished graphically and it has some up-to-date songs. You can also add several audio effects to your voice as you perform. But trying to earn credits can be frustrating.

This same kind of voice recognition can also turn your phone into a singing coach. The Voice Tutor app, for iOS or Android, measures how well you do singing exercises, focusing on vocal training to keep your voice fit, improve your breathing and so on.

While this sounds as if Voice Tutor is aimed at professionals, its interface is so straightforward and its instructions so clear that it may help singers of all stripes improve their voices, from warm-ups through vocal exercises to cool-downs. It costs $5 for iOS and $3 for Android.

A final note for all those shower singers out there: Remember that your expensive device isn’t waterproof.

Quick Calls

Qwiki has a new, free iOS app that automatically turns smartphone-recorded videos and snapshots into short, beautiful movies that can be shared through its social network. Think of it as Instagram for video. ... Spotify has released a free Windows Phone 8 edition of its popular music streaming app, compatible with Microsoft’s clean interface design. It has the same basic functions as the app does on other devices, including the ability to gain access to thousands of albums stored in the cloud, all of which can be streamed to your phone.

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Bits: Where the Singles Are: A Dating Guide by ZIP Code

At Trulia, a residential real estate Web site, the analysts are constantly crunching data — home and apartment listings, prices, school ratings, crime rates and other numbers.

With Valentine’s Day coming this week, Jed Kolko, Trulia’s chief economist and head of analytics, decided to sift through household, gender, city and neighborhood data in America. If you’re looking for someone single of the opposite sex, where are your chances best and worst, statistically speaking?

He posted his findings on the Trulia Trends site on Monday.

According to Trulia’s analysis, men living alone most outnumber women living alone in Las Vegas; Honolulu; Palm Bay, Fla.; Gary, Ind.; and San Jose, Calif.

Women most outnumber men in Bethesda, Md.; Washington; Boston; New York; and Raleigh, N.C.

At the broader metropolitan level, Mr. Kolko said in an interview, labor markets are typically the determining factor. Men outnumber women in regions that have a higher proportion of technology, manufacturing and construction jobs. Women outnumber men most in places with more professional services jobs and in bigger cities.

The data sets for many thousands of ZIP codes, Mr. Kolko explained, all came from the 2010 census and were downloaded onto a laptop, then sliced, diced and manipulated using Stata data analysis and statistical software.

The data was massaged a bit. Only people living alone were counted; an earlier survey showed singles prefer to date someone who lives alone. And this time, Mr. Kolko factored out the gay and lesbian population, using the assumption that the share of gay or lesbian singles in neighborhoods would be roughly equal to same-sex couples living in those neighborhoods. (Last year, Mr. Kolko did an analysis of the ZIP code neighborhoods with the highest shares of gays and lesbians.)

Local industries may play a large role in gender populations for cities as a whole. But neighborhoods, Mr. Kolko said, are a more genuine reflection of where people want to live. So for each of the 10 largest metropolitan areas, he calculated the ZIP codes with the highest ratio of men to women, and women to men.

Men, Mr. Kolko observed, tend to settle near downtown or in recently redeveloped neighborhoods like the Waterfront in Boston or Long Island City in New York. Women are more likely to live in residential areas, including the Marina in San Francisco and Queen Anne in Seattle, and neighborhoods that are seen as safe and are more affluent, like the Upper East Side of New York and Upper Connecticut Avenue in Washington.

More women in high-income neighborhoods? Is this another sign of the much-discussed trend of women doing better than men? Mr. Kolko did not push the data that far. “It probably says more about where men and women choose to live in a given city rather than which gender is more successful,” he said.

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DealBook: Alternatives to Dell Deal Come With Too Little Certainty

Objectors to Michael S. Dell‘s $24.4 billion leveraged buyout of Dell are in a tight corner. The likes of Southeastern Asset Management are right that Mr. Dell, the company’s founder, and Silver Lake Partners have made a low-ball offer. Yet, it’s at a respectable 25 percent premium, and the company’s shares haven’t topped the $13.65-a-share deal price in months or Southeastern’s $23.72-a-share valuation in years.

Dell’s net cash, its finance business at book value and the cost of recent acquisitions, which Dell says are doing well, add up to almost $13 a share, as Southeastern points out. That’s practically the whole of the buyout price, yet it ignores the value of Dell’s server and PC business and most of its I.T. consulting. Those businesses may be in decline, but they are not worthless.

Or look at it this way. Analysts expect Dell to generate $4.6 billion of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, in the coming year. After capital expenditure, estimated interest costs following the buyout and taxes, the company will probably churn out more than $2 billion in free cash flow. That’s an impressive return on the buyers’ roughly $6 billion of equity — much more than sufficient to compensate for the risk of a continued slide in the P.C. business.

Southeastern is justified in worrying that the role of the founder and largest shareholder will deter rival bids, despite the board’s efforts to use independent advisers and allow a period to find a buyer at a higher price. Industry rivals might want to pick off some Dell units, but most likely not the whole. And without Mr. Dell’s willing involvement, it is probably too big a bite for private equity firms. Moreover, short-term investors betting on the sale — who perhaps now hold a quarter of all Dell’s shares — will mostly vote for the bird in hand if the alternative is the stock returning to earth with a thud.

Southeastern’s other ideas require patience. For instance, a big special dividend financed by debt would still leave shareholders with a period of high leverage and potential earnings volatility before they have as much in their pockets as the buyout price. Yet, returning about $4 billion to investors over the past two years via buybacks and a recent dividend has not done anything to persuade public investors of Dell’s charms.

Investors have had time to understand Mr. Dell’s turnaround plan, but Dell’s shares traded at no more than about $11 apiece in the months before buyout rumors surfaced in early January. Not enough shareholders seem to be persuaded that it’s worth waiting around. More optimistic owners like Southeastern, with its 8.5 percent stake, could be in a position to force the price higher. But barring a major surprise, it looks as though alternatives to the buyout provide too little certainty to match up.

Robert Cyran is a columnist and Richard Beales is assistant editor at Reuters Breakingviews. For more independent commentary and analysis, visit breakingviews.com.

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