Security specialist Ron Bowes has once again proven how easy it is to glean valuable user information from Facebook, by spidering Facebook’s online directory and compiling it all into one neat little torrent that could be downloaded off his site, SkullSecurity.com.

Bowes created a torrent containing over 171 million entries with links to profiles that provide access to the names, addresses and phone numbers of 100 million users, one fifth of Facebook.  Bowes accessed Facebook’s directory, which has the default dictum “Anyone can opt out of appearing here by changing their Search privacy settings.” Yeah, but should they have to?

These kinds of security breaches will only encourage more hackers desperate for attention. Now would be a good time for Facebook to set their default search to “Friends Only.” Why? Because most people are aren’t quite aware that check mark next to “Everyone” includes a hacker who can grab your personal info, package it up and sell it to the highest bidder.

According to Bowes the torrent contains (at 2.8 GB, our torrent is “still downloading”) …

• The URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile.
• The name of every searchable Facebook user, both unique and by count (perfect for post-processing, datamining, etc).
• Processed lists, including first names with count, last names with count, potential usernames with count, etc.
• The programs [Bowes] used to generate everything [which makes it easy for other hackers to replicate the process]

While the advice to an individual user to change your privacy settings may be moot at this point, the suggestion that Facebook make it profiles unindexable by default isn’t. Especially when you read the more ominous statement from Bowes further on in his post on the breach, “So far, I have only indexed the searchable users, not their friends … I’d like to tackle that in the future.”

Photo: Bejealousofme/Flickr

We’re releasing our final batch of 100 tickets now to our July 30 summer party at August Capital.

Before that party we’re also hosting an all day event – the Social Currency CrunchUp. You can see the full agenda here. Ron Conway and Paul Graham kick off the morning, and then lots of great product discussions will follow. We’ve also lined up a half dozen different local retailers to share their own experiences using social currency in the wild. Combo tickets for the conference and the party are here.

Here’s a sneak preview of this year’s artwork for attendees generously provided by Hugh Macleod, the artist known as Gaping Void. We have lots of other great surprises in store as well. SecondMarket is hosting margaritas. PlacePop is organizing our photowall. Pandora will be spinning tunes, also our 5th year running. We’re live streaming the day with Ustream. Zong and Payvment have exhibits and treats to share with you. Engrave your phone with Coveroo. Thanks also to Adobe and Katalyst Media, Cannonball wine, Eventbrite, DesignAboutTown and BuildASign for support.

There’s still time to grab a table, host beer or run a game. Contact Heather Harde or Jeanne Logozzo for sponsorships.

See who’s going to the Social Currency CrunchUp and August Capital party via Plancast as well.

Contact Laura Boychenko to request a press pass.

Adobe announced today that Josh James, chief executive of its acquisition Omniture, is leaving at the end of July.

It’s normal for CEOs to leave eventually when their companies are acquired, but the speed of the departure is a bit unusual — usually those CEOs are contracted to stay with the acquirer for a year or two as part of the deal. And Adobe only announced in September that it was acquiring the analytics company for $1.8 billion.

I’ve asked Adobe for the reason behind James’ departure and will update if I hear back. Sometimes a departure can suggest trouble, but in the press release Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said Omniture is doing well for Adobe and is already accounting for 10 percent of the company’s revenue. (Its total revenue in the most recent quarter was $943 million.)

“With Omniture, Josh built the industry’s first integrated online marketing suite as an intelligent platform to optimize online business initiatives,” Narayen said. “Further, he provided the leadership to ensure that we exceeded our timelines and milestones for the integration of Omniture into Adob.”

Adobe also announced a number of other executive changes. The most significant may be the creation of a new Creative and Interactive Solutions business unit, which will include Adobe Creative Suite, its Flash technology, and publishing and media products. The unit will be led by David Wadhwani, formerly vice president and general manager of Adobe’s Platform Business Unit.

“By combining these products and solutions in one business unit, we can deliver faster on our vision of multi-screen publishing, and drive innovation and support for both Flash and HTML5 authoring,” Narayen said.

The move comes at an critical time for Adobe’s mobile strategy, as Flash’s significance as a mobile platform has been criticized, most notably by Apple.

[via Business Insider]

Companies: Adobe

People: Josh James, Shantanu Narayen

Jalak Jobanputra is senior vice president of the New York City Investment Fund.

Historically the fashion industry has been slow to adopt technology, so most venture investors have stayed away from investments in the sector. But that’s begun to change. Entrepreneurs are focusing on fashion-related online services, and more customers are willing to buy fashion items over the Internet, and investors are following.

Members-only fashion site Gilt Groupe managed to convince buyers to do their luxury shopping online. And Zappos, which sells shoes and other clothing, has shown online shoppers what strong global customer service and rich product assortment look like. It’s companies like these that have made investors take notice of the size of this market.

On the supply chain backend we’ve seen companies like H&M, Topshop and Zara move away from seasonal offerings to a higher velocity in new offerings, to serve the notoriously fickle fashion consumer, and enabled by more real-time inventory and flexible global manufacturing arrangement. In the next iteration, technology has enabled offline behaviors to be replicated online and to reach even larger, more global audiences than ever before.

The last bastion of exclusively offline retail, the luxury fashion industry, has historically prided itself on its high touch approach with customers and a notion of scarcity, which it considered at odds with the democratization provided on the web. This part of the industry believed in the tactile approach to clothes — they needed to be felt, tried on, with a sales consultant curating them in order to be fully appreciated. But as we continue to recover from the recession and these brands target the younger consumer, we are seeing a fundamental shift in the way fashion is curated and purchased. Market research Bain & Co. estimates that the online luxury market will grow 20% in 2010, despite the economy.

Over the past year in NYC, I have witnessed many veterans of the fashion industry joining forces with technologists to create the next generation of fashion companies. They are building upon lessons learned from the first generation of online commerce as well as years of experience in the offline sector. Some of these are tools and others are highly curated catalogs but they are all changing the landscape of the industry.

Let’s take a look at three different categories of companies in this field.

E-commerce
In the late 1990s, we first saw Bluefly and Overstock sell discounted, off-season wares online. Flat-rate shipping and free returns coaxed Internet newbies to make purchases online. Gilt Groupe emerged a few years ago to bring luxury sample sales online, democratizing these designers by offering them to people across the web, while also maintaining an aura of exclusivity — members had to be invited by affiliates or other members and had to be online when the goods went on sale, as they would sell out in minutes.

From day one, Gilt has been focused on providing excellent customer service, typified by the “handwritten” notes from the founders in every package and easy returns for credit. It has also refined data collection on its customers to the point of offering special sales to subsections of customers, including shoes in certain sizes. A couple of months ago, I was invited to the first offline Gilt sale, which was the most organized sample sale I have been too. The company offered invites by time window, and each customer was allowed a limited number of items. Gilt has refined the notion of mass exclusivity.

Gilt has recently leveraged its large consumer base to expand verticals and product offerings (including Jetsetter, for travel, Gilt City, for local deals, and Gilt After Hours, for those who are more likely to be online in the evenings than the traditional noon sale slot). As its product offerings and customer database continues to expand, I can see Gilt transitioning to more granular, customized sales and even potentially white labeling to department stores like Saks and Neiman (who have also recently started mid-day “dash” sales for select customers).

HauteLook, RueLaLa and ideeli have also received venture funding in the sample-sale space. They target slightly different demographics and have varying approaches to customer service and shipping (ie, drop shipping directly from the vendor vs. Gilt’s central warehouse). Additionally, MyNines recently received seed funding to build out an aggregation platform for the mid-long tail of sample-sale sites.

And we are beginning to see more geographic and vertical specialization as the potential audience size continues to grow: Exclusively.in just launched a site for hard-to-find, high-fashion Indian designers.

On the other end of the spectrum among these exclusive sites, Brooklyn-based Etsy provides a platform for mom and pop operations to sell their goods, ranging from jewelry to apparel to art, to a broad audience. The site has seen significant growth on both sides of the marketplace, with over 600,000 members and 120,000 sellers in close to 130 countries.

Meanwhile, Rent the Runway, founded by classmates at Harvard Business School, offers rentals for designer apparel, providing an option to those who can’t spend thousands of dollars on a dress they will only wear once.

Crowdsourcing
The New York Times recently wrote a great piece highlighting two New York City startups, Go Try It On and Fashism, that let users take a picture of themselves and get fashion advice in near real time from the broader community. When I spoke to Marissa Evans, founder of Go Try It On shortly after the launch a few months ago, she communicated the highly viral, global nature of the service. People from Brazil were commenting instantaneously on someone’s outfit in the Midwest, for example. The power of this data and preferences would no doubt be useful to brands as they plan their assortments.

Styletrek, recently founded by Cecilia Pagkalinawan, an e-commerce and fashion industry veteran, plans to offer a platform for emerging designers with input on design and fabric from customers. This is a similar approach to what Quirky is doing with consumer product design, but bringing it to higher-end apparel. Modcloth, which started out offering vintage wares online, is also expanding to a crowdsourced model.

Curation/Recommendation
Having spent a good part of my venture career looking at recommendation engines, I was intrigued by this concept in fashion when I first saw Like.com on a trip to San Francisco a few years ago. A user would “train” the engine on his/her particular fashion sensibility by choosing between pictures of celebrities. At the end of the quiz, the site would tell you what fashion type you were (eg, Urban Sophisticate, Bohemian, etc) and then push special deals to you based on that fashion type.

But as more data is collected behind the scenes, from clickstream behavior and purchase patterns to Twitter streams, we are seeing recommendations that do not necessarily require direct user input.

West Coast-based Polyvore, which recently appointed tech industry veteran Sukhinder Singh Cassidy as CEO, provides a one-stop site for style advice, links to buy outfits and styles featured on the site, and the ability to drag and drop items to create customized outfits that you can then buy. Other sites, including Refinery29, provide aggregation of fashion blogs combined with product recommendations and links to purchase.

Giff Constable, who is launching Aprizzi, a commerce discovery engine with a machine-learning back end, believes it is important to create an online browsing experience similar to offline discovery. When launched, his site will replicate the browsing experience by offering a range of products (including apparel), but in an even more customized way than walking through a department store.

So what’s next?
More customization, more diverse product selection and discovery, better targeting, more brands experimenting with mobile marketing (for example, we’ve seen upscale shoemaker Jimmy Choo partner with the location-based game service Foursquare to test out new types of marketing) — resulting in a win for customers globally and brands that serve their customers more efficiently. No doubt this will also create a new generation of commerce companies and attractive returns for investors if they bet on the right team.

Since we’re only in the second or third inning here, there will be shakeouts, consolidation and a few companies that emerge as winners. Several issues, including shipping, sizing and supply-chain logistics need to be addressed and executed upon properly to provide a seamless customer experience. And any online company must think globally. Even as consumer spending has slowed in the US, China and India are projecting near double digit growth, particularly in the luxury sector. Fashion has always been a fickle industry, but technology can help provide greater efficiencies if applied properly. As an investor, I find this sector one that offers great promise given its nascency and the amount of innovation we’re seeing.

Jalak Jobanputra has over 16 years experience in venture capital, media and technology, most recently with the NYC Investment Fund. She spearheaded the formation of NYCSeed in 2008, a seed fund dedicated to funding early stage tech entrepreneurs in NYC. She was previously a principal at New Venture Partners, a $300 million early stage venture fund that incubated technology at corporate labs. Prior to that, whe was at Intel Capital in Silicon Valley and was on the launch team of online financial information startup Horsesmouth in 1997, during which time she first discovered the NYC sample sale scene in Nolita. You can find her at @jalak and www.nothingventuredblog.com.

Tags: fashion

Companies: Gilt Groupe, Zappos

People: Exclusively.in, Fashism, Go Try It On, HauteLook, Ideeli, Jalak Jobanputra, ModCloth, MyNines, Polyvore, Refinery29, Rent the Runway, RueLaLa, Styletrek

I thought I was a fanboy. I’ve got nothing on Jonathan Mann.

Regular readers may recall that Mann is the guy behind the Bing jingle (which we didn’t like – but students did, or were forced to), the song about me (which we did like), and most recently, the iPhone 4 antenna song (which not only did we love, but apparently Apple did too). Mann, touched by the fact that Apple decided to play his song at their press conference last Friday, decided to follow it up with a serenade for CEO Steve Jobs.

Warning: if some of my posts about Apple drive you crazy, this song is going to make your head explode.

We have lyrics like:

• “If that sounds like Moses, it’s no accident. The cult of Macintosh is a religion.”
• “We bow down to products that make us weep. The beauty of simplicity. The shepherd and his sheep.”
• “In his guarded temple, there’s a beating drum. And it’s made of glass and of aluminum.”

But the craziest thing about this song is that it’s good. Seriously. It’s so damn catchy. Mann continues to impress.

I thought I was a fanboy. I’ve got nothing on Jonathan Mann.

Regular readers may recall that Mann is the guy behind the Bing jingle (which we didn’t like – but students did, or were forced to), the song about me (which we did like), and most recently, the iPhone 4 antenna song (which not only did we love, but apparently Apple did too). Mann, touched by the fact that Apple decided to play his song at their press conference last Friday, decided to follow it up with a serenade for CEO Steve Jobs.

Warning: if some of my posts about Apple drive you crazy, this song is going to make your head explode.

We have lyrics like:

• “If that sounds like Moses, it’s no accident. The cult of Macintosh is a religion.”
• “We bow down to products that make us weep. The beauty of simplicity. The shepherd and his sheep.”
• “In his guarded temple, there’s a beating drum. And it’s made of glass and of aluminum.”

But the craziest thing about this song is that it’s good. Seriously. It’s so damn catchy. Mann continues to impress.

Marriott International today unveiled a prototype that will help it build more green, LEED-certified hotels.

The prototype is the first of its kind for the U.S. hotel industry, the company says.

LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a voluntary rating system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

LEED-certified buildings are designed to meet environmental goals including reducing landfill waste and greenhouse gas emissions, conserving energy and water and lowering operating costs.

The Courtyard Charleston/Summerville is the first of Marriott hotels following the new, green design. It is expected to open for business in South Carolina in 2012.

Using the prototype will save the hotel giant six months of design time on each hotel. That’s about what the company says it would usually take to design a LEED-certificate worth new property. Marriott plans to roll out similar prototypes for its other brands in the future, including Residence Inn by Marriott and Towne Place Suites.

The company also expects to save about $100,000, and up to 25% in energy and water savings on each hotel built following this prototype.

Going green is nothing new to Marriott. It currently owns close to 50 LEED-certified hotels and aims to raise that number to 300 by 2015.

According to the USGBC, there are currently 937 LEED registered and certified hotels in the U.S.

The environmental bug has hit the economy segment of the industry, too.

A Motel 6 in Northlake, Texas became the country’s first LEED-certified motel property earlier this month.

And Motel 6 is using a prototype approach to increase its number of LEED-certified motels as well.

Amazon.com released a disappointing earnings report today — revenue and profit climbed, but not as much as analysts expected. As a result, the company’s stock has fallen sharply, in after-hours trading, falling more than 11 percent as of 4:40pm Pacific.

The company said it brought in $6.57 billion in net sales, up 41 percent compared to the second quarter of 2009. Net income increased 45 percent year-over-year, to $207 million and 45 cents per share. Analysts, however, had predicted Amazon would earn 54 cents per share. Falling international currencies and Amazon’s decision to cut the price on its Kindle e-book reader as it faces competition from Apple’s new iPad are two likely culprits for the disappointment, according to Bloomberg.

Still, Amazon is highlighting the positive numbers about the Kindle, namely the fact that it’s now selling more Kindle books than hardcover books, and that it sold three times as many Kindle books in the first six months of this year as it did during the first six months of 2009. In the earnings report, chief executive Jeff Bezos (pictured) also noted that in the last year, customers have ordered more than $1 billion worth of products on Amazon from a mobile device.

Tags: kindle

Companies: Amazon.com

People: Jeff Bezos

Terra-Gen Power, a major developer of wind, solar and geothermal energy projects in the U.S., is $1.2 billion closer to building the country’s largest wind farm. This new capital, announced today, will help the company aggregate 570 megawatts-worth of power at its Alta Wind Energy Center site in Kern County, Calif.

This new capacity, composed of four separate projects, will be added to existing installations at the Center (150 megawatts-worth of turbines built by General Electric), which is expected to reach 3,000 megawatts — the largest amount produced at any one wind facility in the U.S. Terra-Gen will be buying 190 new turbines from Vestas-American Wind Technology.

Terra-Gen already has a power purchase agreement in line for the Alta Wind Energy Center, with Southern California Edison pledging to feed the power generated into its grid. The utility made the deal in 2006 to buy up to 1,550 megawatts of capacity provided. Just 720 megawatts of this power will increase California’s wind generation by more than 25 percent.

The new capital is a hodge-podge, including $580 million in pass-through certificates, a $499 million bridge loan, and $127 million in ancillary credit facilities.

The four new projects are being continuously financed by Citibank as part of a leveraged lease. Basically, the bank has committed to purchasing the products when they begin their commercial operations, and lease them back to Terra-Gen. This sort of deal is the first of its kind in the wind energy industry, according to the company.

Altogether, the five wind farms making up the Alta Center will create 1,500 domestic manufacturing, construction, operation and maintenance jobs, and infuse the local economy with an estimated $600 million. The four new farms are expected to break ground immediately and come online within the first two quarters of 2011.

Based in New York, Terra-gen has taken funds from ArcLight Capital Partners and Global Infrastructure Partners. It says it already has 21 renewable energy projects — including solar and geothermal developments — currently operating across six states, with 5,000 megawatts-worth of projects still in its pipeline.

Tags: wind

Companies: Southern California Edison, Terra-Gen Power

Grid Net, the smart grid communications provider known for championing WiMAX as the best option for transmitting energy data between meters, utilities and consumers, announced that it is partnering with Oracle’s utilities division to sell network and meter management software.

Oracle delved deep into the smart grid software space last year, when it launched an end-to-end solution for utilities integrating smart grid systems into their offerings. This bundle includes Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management and Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing. Essentially, it offers software to help utilities parse all the data flowing in from smart meters into actionable information, and to help them more efficiently serve their customers.

Grid Net will be selling these products to complement its own software offerings: the PolicyNet SmartGrid Network Management System and Smart Network Operating System. Basically, its landed a plum alliance with this Oracle deal, buddying up with one of the companies that has been serving utilities for years.

That said, Grid Net is not the only firm that Oracle has formed this kind of relationship with. It is also working with other smart grid software providers eMeter and AMX International, as well as smart meter builder Sensus.

Software is an increasingly vital component of the electrical grid. Updating hardware, like meters, substations and the like only happens once every couple decades. Now that many of these have been revamped with modern technology, software can be used to update them in the interim.

The deal between Grid Net and Oracle is advantageous for both parties for several reasons. It will allow Grid Net to quickly expand and diversify its relationships in the utility industry, and to move outward from its core WiMAX strategy before it gets pigeonholed. It will also give Oracle another valuable startup partner in the pursuit of providing utilities with all the tools they need to further their smart grid strategies.

Grid Net has been on a roll lately, recruiting its new chief strategy officer, Andres Carvallo, fresh off a successful run at Austin Energy, one of the first utilities in the U.S. to deploy smart meters. In March, Cisco Systems took a large stage in the company, taking an obvious interest in its WiMAX technology.

Based in San Francisco, Grid Net has raised several rounds of funding from Intel Capital, GE Capital, Catamount Ventures, and Braemar Energy Ventures.

Tags: Smart Grid

Companies: Grid Net, Oracle