Facebook Now Lets You Download More of Your Account History

Ever wonder what information Facebook is collecting about you? Well, you’ve been able to find out since 2010, when Facebook first introduced the Download Your Information feature.

Now the company has announced that it’s making the downloads even more thorough. On top of the photos, posts, messages and list of friends that you could download before, now you can get information on things like previous Facebook names, friend requests and the IP addresses you’ve logged in from.

(MORE: Dear Facebook: Here’s How to Not Screw Up Instagram)

The process is pretty simple. Go to Account Settings and at the bottom of the page should be a link that says “Download a copy of your Facebook data.” (The feature is rolling out gradually, so it might not be available for you yet.) Click it and your report will be emailed it you. My 26.3 MB file took more than an hour to reach me.  Was it useful? If you have the time to search through a huge folder filled with jpegs and HTML files, sure.

Of course, this won’t stop Facebook from using your photos in embarrassing ads or make its privacy settings any less confusing, but it’s still nice to know what information it has on you. In a blog post, Facebook said “more categories of information will be available for download in the future.”

As for those new categories, may I suggest the following: people who have tagged you in pictures and the number of times a user has been featured in Sponsored Stories. Also, if they could somehow organize and sum up the information, that would be nice too.

In other Facebook news, the site announced that it’s making addresses consistent across the site, meaning the address that people use to send you email on Facebook is the same one they’ll use to find your Timeline. This will both make you easier to find and, Facebook hopes, make you more likely to use its email product.

Apple's Textbooks: Undeniably Cool, But Will They Help Students?

Apple debuted the holy grail of textbooks on Thursday in New York City. The books are undeniably cool: they will integrate videos, photos and interactive graphics, make taking notes a breeze and be easy to navigate — all features that will undoubtedly make Apple’s textbooks more enjoyable and engaging to students than the current dead tree versions. But the problem Apple ignored in their announcement is how to actually get their reinvented textbooks into the hands of students.

For the majority of schools, having cutting-edge technology in the classroom is still a far-flung dream. While ed-tech is a booming industry, if you’ve paid any amount of attention to education in the past few years, you’ll recall budgets have been slashed, teachers are losing their jobs and no amount of cookies sold at a bake sale will buy every kid an iPad.

(MORE: Apple Rolls Out iPad Textbooks, Publishing Software for Teachers)

At the announcement Apple noted that there are currently 1.5 million iPads in use in educational institutions and schools today. That’s great, but they left out the fact that there are more than 49 million students enrolled in public schools in the U.S., so their penetration is still quite small. In fact, according to textbook distributor MBS Direct Digital, only 6% of textbook sales will be digital this year.

Part of that, of course, is because while textbook publishers have been producing electronic versions for years, they’ve lacked a strong technology platform to call home. Let’s pretend for a moment that a school district is somehow able to buy every student an iPad. One great thing about the textbooks is the cost: Apple says the books will be available for $14.99, a large discount from the average cost of the paper versions, which range from $75 to $100. With that low cost, it’s a wonder they have the big three textbook publishers — McGraw Hill, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who together make up 90% of the industry — on board. But, as Peter Kafka writes on All Things D, publishers expect to make up the difference in terms of volume.

(MORE: Four Industries Apple Can Disrupt in the Near Future)

That’s because rather than schools buying the books for the students as is the model today, under Apple’s arrangement with McGraw-Hill, the students will foot the bill for the books themselves. At the end of the year they’ll keep the books, but will not be allowed to resell them or give them to another student. So when new students enroll the following year they will be required to purchase the book, too. This is vastly different from the practice today where school districts purchase books for a larger cost upfront, but hang onto them for five to 10 years, passing them from student to student.

But let’s get back to the fact that without a program to offer iPads at discounted rates to students, teachers and schools — which Apple conveniently left out of its announcement — in reality most students will still be using the same old textbooks for years to come. In the past few years since their debut, some school districts have indeed been able to buy iPads for all their students, but those districts are still in the vast minority. Thus in the most frightening scenario, one could imagine a world where Apple’s textbooks serve only to increase the digital divide, and thus the achievement gap. In this scenario, there will be some students who are able to use the new textbooks, likely those at wealthy suburban schools where either the school or their parents can afford to buy them an iPad, while other students, most likely those in impoverished urban schools, are stuck using paper textbooks that have been handed down for years.

That said, I consider Apple’s textbooks to be aspirational. Like many products Apple comes out with, they are well ahead of their time, and in this case, well ahead of the reality on the ground. If Apple’s textbook is the future, then the future of textbooks is a very exciting one—it’s just a question of how long it will take our schools to get there.

Up Close with Nikiski, Intel’s Concept Laptop of Tomorrow

Although Intel doesn’t build laptops, the chip maker showed off a bit of design flare at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with Nikiski, a concept notebook that folds up into a touchscreen virtual assistant.

Nikiski uses a dual-sided touch panel that comes into play when the laptop is both open and closed. In the open position, it acts like an ultra-wide track pad and knows to ignore palms when they’re resting on the laptop to type. When closed, a slice of Nikiski’s display shows through from the other side of the touch screen, with e-mails, calendar appointments and RSS feeds that the user can interact with.

“When you close your PC and you’re running to another meeting … now you need to get your iPhone or your Android phone in order to get an immediate response,” Mooly Eden, Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s PC Client Group, said in an interview. “I say, why can’t we deliver it on the same device?”

Intel tried to develop a similar concept four years ago, but it was too complicated and expensive, Eden said. Now, Intel has the computing power and technology, and Eden thinks device makers could execute on the concept in a year to a year and a half. “There’s nothing over here, like transparent touch screens, that cannot be implemented in the near future,” he said.

Despite the Metro-style look of the secondary display, Intel didn’t work with Microsoft on the concept. Eden said Intel is working with Microsoft on ways to innovate with Windows 8, but not specifically on Nikiski.

No surprises here, but Intel has no plans to monetize the Nikiski concept or sell it as an Intel PC, Eden said. Instead, Intel’s hoping to inspire the companies who manufacture Intel-based laptops. “Many of them will innovate on top of it,” Eden said, “and at the end of the day they’ll deliver something to the market that is very jazzy, very interesting.”

Four Industries Apple Can Disrupt in the Near Future

Over the last 10 years, Apple has done a rather amazing job of disrupting quite a few industries. By my account, it has dramatically impacted the PC, tablet, consumer electronics, telecom, music and TV industries in a big way. And I believe that Apple is on the cusp of disrupting at least four more major industries in the next three to five years.

The first industry I believe Apple will shake up is the TV industry. Just about every major PC and consumer electronics company is trying to break into interactive TV (or “ITV” as it is called) and be the first to own this market. To date, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony and even Apple have tried desperately to create the next big thing in TVs and, perhaps more importantly, find a way to integrate the internet and internet video channels into their new visions for the TV.

(MORE: Apple TV: 5 Rumored Features)

In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, Steve tells Isaacson that he has “cracked the code” for ITV and, of course, everyone is wondering what this means. The most logical answer is that Apple will apply Siri voice comprehension technology to the TV user interface and then tie it to the iCloud service, marrying all of your digital content together for viewing on multiple screens–with the TV being the one focused on entertainment. Whether it will be delivered in an Apple TV-like box outside the TV or an actual TV itself is still a big question, but Apple’s attempt at creating a new approach to the TV interface and linking it to unified personal content, if done right, could be revolutionary.

Imagine being able to just tell your TV, “Find Big Bang Theory,” and it goes right to all available versions on broadcast, cable, your digital video recorder or online. Or ask it about a football player you just saw make a touchdown, and on the bottom of the screen it shows you his stats. Or if you want to find out about Yosemite, just ask Siri and it will find all related video and web content available and give you exact answers to your query on the TV. But perhaps its greatest feat will most likely be to instantly decipher the plethora of web-based video content that is online, and neatly show what is available for a given topic right on your TV screen.

For example, let’s say you want to see something about how to roast a turkey. Siri could search its database and find out all of the best shows on TV, your DVR or the web and then post them on your screen for you to pick. And I mean any database, including things you’ve bookmarked about roasting turkeys on any of your Macs or Apple devices that are connected via iCloud. Those results could be added to the list of available shows to watch on that topic.

(LIST: The 10 Most Memorable Apple Commercials)

This could be the most disruptive thing in the television industry to happen since the introduction of color, eventually burying the remote control by putting the entire TV industry on a course to use voice as the new remote instead. It will find ways to marry broadcast, cable, satellite, DVR and internet content into manageable channels that bring all of it together in the cloud and display it via voice command on the TV screens throughout the home. And it looks like Apple could be the company to take the TV industry into this new century.