Blippy's experiment of broadcasting credit card and online purchases across social networks is coming to an end, according to a report.

The Palo Alto company, which was backed by the likes of Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and at one time valued at more than $46 million, is shutting down its social network, which also shared purchases to Twitter and Facebook, according to the website TechCrunch.

The service never really caught on, with about 100,000 registered users -- only 30% of whom actually shared a purchase through the social network, TechCrunch said.

"According to CEO Ashvin Kumar, and depending on what analytics service you're using, Blippy traffic would spike whenever press would cover it and then subsequently die down to levels that showed no signs of growth," the report said.

Kumar himself hasn't shared a purchase on Blippy in about a month.

During its life as a social network, Blippy did run into some security snarls, exposing credit card numbers of a few users before rolling out updated security plans.

After launching in December 2009, Blippy added the ability for users to review their purchases in July  2010 in a move to drum up more engagement and grow traffic -- but that failed to bring the growth that Blippy investors and employees had hoped for, TechCrunch said.

"The service never had a clear business model, just an attitude of 'get user adoption and we'll figure it out later.' But later never came," the report said.

Now Blippy is looking into offering a new product, one that the company isn't ready to talk about just yet but is still likely to be called Blippy, TechCrunch said.

"We're basically taking the things that we learned from Blippy and applying it to a new set of projects. All of them which are in the early stages," Kumar said in the report.

Officials at Blippy were unavailable Friday to comment further.

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Image: A screenshot of Blippy CEO Ashvin Kumar's profile page on Blippy.com. Credit: Blippy

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency tasked with preventing pandemics and pushing flu shots, is now preparing the living for a zombie apocalypse.

You heard right. In a Monday blog post, the normally staid agency has put together a straight-faced list of recommendations on how to survive a massive invasion of the flesh-eating undead.

"In such a scenario zombies would take over entire countries, roaming city streets eating anything living that got in their way," the post said. "So what do you need to do before zombies ... or hurricanes or pandemics for example, actually happen?"

Dave Daigle, a CDC spokesman and self-described member of the Zombie Task Force, said the idea for the post arose during a brainstorming session on how to interest Americans in the agency's annual campaign on hurricane preparedness.

"I worry we try the same thing every year and I didn't know how many people we were actually engaging," Daigle said. "Let's face it -- preparedness and public health are not sexy topics."

A coworker mentioned that following the earthquake in Japan, the CDC saw a big traffic spike on its Twitter account after someone tweeted the agency asking if radiation emissions could set off a zombie attack, Daigle said. That got him thinking.

"That phrase popped into my head: zombie preparedness," he said. He took the idea to the CDC's director of preparedness, Dr. Ali S. Khan, who gave a thumbs up to the project.

Daigle said a normal blog post gets maybe 1,000 hits in a week. By Wednesday, two days after the post went up, the zombie primer had racked up 30,000 hits. Then the server crashed.

Now with extra server space, the CDC is hoping that their tongue-in-cheek advice will inspire people to make even basic preparations for a real emergency. "This includes things like water, food, and other supplies to get you through the first couple of days before you can locate a zombie-free camp (or in the event of a natural disaster, it will buy you some time until you are able to make your way to an evacuation shelter or utility lines are restored)," the post said.

Daigle said his colleagues at the CDC are delighted with the response so far. And they are already kicking around ideas for next year. Alien invasion, perhaps. Or vampires?

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Photos, from top: Man leads a parade zombies in San Francisco in 2006 (credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid at laughingsquid.com); art from a hurricane preparedness campaign with the CDC (credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

LinkedIn shattered expectations Thursday as its shares soared nearly 100% just minutes after its first day of trading began, creating the kind of excitement for an Internet IPO not seen in nearly a decade.

The stock continued to hold its own Friday, trading as high as $107 a share.

We spoke with Lise Buyer, founding principal of IPO consulting company Class V Group and the former investment banker who helped guide Google through its IPO in 2004.

Q: Did you expect the LinkedIn IPO to pop the way it did on Thursday?

A: There is no way ever to know what's going to happen on day one and particularly yesterday, when there had been so much activity in the private markets. Clearly when they raised the estimated range and then when they priced LinkedIn at the top of the range, that was a pretty good signal that they thought there would be significant after-market demand. But it's impossible to predict what the retail investor will do. People who are chastising the banks for having dramatically underpriced it aren't really being fair. You can't predict what will happen.

 Q: What does it mean for future Internet IPOs?

A: LinkedIn wanted to get out before Facebook. But I don’t think Facebook is going to change its behavior because of LinkedIn. It will go when it's good and ready to go. I think that in some boardrooms today  people are looking at what happened to LinkedIn and they are saying, "Maybe we can be next." But that's a little short-sighted unless you are a high-profile brand consumer Internet company with a couple hundred million dollars in revenue.

Q: Do you think it was smart of LinkedIn to take so long to launch an IPO?

A: Ten years ago companies went to the public markets before they were ready. Taking 10 years to build a business is the right thing to do if that's what it takes. Hats off to them. That's where the secondary markets come in. Private exchanges like Sharespost and SecondMarket have eased some of the pressure on companies to go public too soon.

Q: What do you think of all the talk of another Internet bubble?

A: There is no question that the reaction to the LinkedIn IPO demonstrates a frenzy for that one stock. But one company or group of companies do not a bubble make.

Q: What does the performance of LinkedIn's IPO tell us about investor interest in social networking?

A: I think on the institutions side, the enthusiasm tells us that professional investors are looking for high-growth profitable companies with compelling stories to tell. On the individual investor side, it tells us we haven’t learned anything. Everybody wants to own a piece of something they know about. Consumer brands almost always have an advantage when they go public. It also tells us that individuals are feeling favorable about the stock market again.

Q: What does the warm reception of the LinkedIn IPO tell us about what kind of reaction Facebook will get?

A: One would probably not be wrong to extrapolate wild expectations.

Q: What other impact will we see from Thursday’s IPO?

A: On the secondary markets, what happens to stocks like Zynga and Facebook. Let’s hope this wild enthusiasm is well founded.

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Photo: LinkedIn offices in Mountain View, Calif. Credit: Adam Barker/LinkedIn

A Sony server has been hacked to host a website for an alleged phishing scam targeting an Italian credit card company and its users, according to the web security firm F-Secure.

"We know you're not supposed to kick somebody when they're already down ... but we just found a live phishing site running on one of Sony's servers," F-Secure wrote in a blog post on the hack.

The security breach appears to be unrelated to the attacks that took down Sony's PlayStation Network and Qriocity music service, the San Jose-based security company said.

However, it is yet another example of how the Japanese tech giant is struggling with security.

The attacks on Sony's online services that affected PlayStation and Qriocity users resulted in exposure and possible theft of personal data for more than 90 million customers.

Sony Chief Executive Howard Stringer apologized for the attacks, which resulted in the PlayStation Network and Qriocity being shut down on April 20, with a partial return on May 14 -- though many parts of the PlayStation Network, such as the PlayStation Store, still aren't fully up and running as they were before.

The Web server used to host the phishing site is normally used to host Sony's Thai site, F-Secure said, adding that it believes that the hack only affected a server that has no access to Sony customer's personal information.

F-Secure said it has notified Sony of the attack, later blocking the URL for the phishing site. Sony officials were unavailable for comment on the matter on Friday morning.

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Image: A screenshot of an alleged phishing site placed on a Sony server by hackers. Credit: F-Secure

Consumers Union called on Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to do more to keep underage users off the site after a recent survey showed that as many as 7.5 million children under the age of  13 had accounts on the social network.

The nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, which conducted the survey, also said that company needed to be "more diligent and effective" in protecting the privacy of the estimated 20 million people less than 18 years old who actively used Facebook over the past year.

"We urge Facebook to strengthen its efforts to identify and terminate the accounts of users under 13 years of age, and also to implement more effective age verification methods for users signing up for new accounts," Ioana Rusu, the regulatory counsel for Consumers Union, wrote in a letter Friday to Zuckerberg.

"Facebook should also be more transparent about its current strategies to prevent preteens from accessing the site, as well as its efforts to seek out and terminate underage user accounts," she said.

The letter follows tough questioning of a Facebook executive Thursday at a congressional hearing over the issue of underage users.  Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said it was "indefensible" that Facebook had only 100 employees monitoring the activities of its 600 million users.

Lawmakers and regulators are considering new online privacy regulations, particularly for children.

Facebook's policy is not to allow anyone under 13 to open an account, which allows the company to avoid federal regulations covering children online. At the hearing, Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor said Facebook shuts down the accounts of people found to be lying about their age to avoid the company's restriction.

But Taylor admitted that Facebook depended on other users to report underage users. Facebook did not have immediate comment on the letter.

[Updated, 11:27 a.m., May 20: Facebook on Friday reiterated earlier comments that age restrictions are difficult to implement and that "there is no single solution to ensuring younger children don’t circumvent a system or lie about their age."

But Fortune magazine posted an interview with Zuckerberg on Friday in which he said that children under 13 years old should be allowed to use Facebook because of the educational opportunities the site could offer. He said he wants to change the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act to allow it.

"That will be a fight we take on at some point," Zuckerberg said. "My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age."

He said that because of federal restrictions Facebook hasn't looked at how younger children would use the site. "If they're lifted, then we'd start to learn what works. We'd take a lot of precautions to make sure that they [younger kids] are safe."]

Consumers Union said the privacy problems go beyond preteens. A phone survey it conducted in May found that 73% of respondents supported tougher protections for teens' online data.

The group said that it believes many minors don't understand the implications of all the information they are sharing on Facebook. A recent example took place in New Hampshire, where a 13-year-old middle school student was suspended for a Facebook post in which she wished Osama bin Laden had killed her math teacher.

Consumers Union said Facebook's default privacy setting for minors should be to share information with "friends only" instead of "friends of friends" -- a category that publicizes the average users information to 16,900 people.

The group also called for Facebook to create an "eraser button" that would allow users to delete all potentially embarrassing information posted about them on the site when they were minors.

"This would help ensure that adult Facebook users will not be perpetually haunted by pictures and posts on the site added while they were still minors," Rusu wrote. "In law enforcement, juvenile records are expunged at the age of 18. Facebook should have a similar policy, allowing users to completely erase all personally identifying information posted to the site while the individual is a minor."

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Photo: Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook, at a town hall event at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto on April 20, 2011, which featured President Barack Obama.Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

The twists and turns performed by the Air Force Thunderbirds this week may pale in comparison with what’s going on inside the planes.

A fuel blend that includes a biofuel made from the camelina flower will power two of the six jets as they perform their aerial stunts Friday and Saturday at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

The aerial demonstration team will fly for about 45 minutes on the fuel, which is domestically made.

The Air Force has been testing and evaluating biofuels made from the blooms, as well as mixtures involving beef tallow and waste oils and greases. Its goal is to derive half of its domestic aviation fuel from alternative sources by 2016 and to have all its aircraft certified to use biofuels by 2013.

The Air Force uses billions of gallons of jet fuel each year.

The camelina blend has also made an appearance in the A-10 Thunderbolt II, known as the Warthog. Last month, three of four F-15 fighter jets that flew over a Philadelphia baseball game used a similar biofuel mix.

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Photo: The U.S. Air Force precision flying team, the Thunderbirds, execute a crossover at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia on May 13 2011. Credit: U.S. Air Force /Airman 1st Class Kayla Newman

Verizon is joining AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile in offering a smartphone running Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating system with the announcement of the HTC Trophy.

The new phone will go on sale at verizon.com May 26, and in Verizon stores June 2, selling for $149.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement.

Those who pick up the Trophy will receive their rebates on the phone in the form of a debit card, which customers can use "as cash anywhere debit cards are accepted," Verizon said.

The Trophy, which will run on Verizon's 3G wireless network, features a 3.8-inch touch screen and a 1gigahertz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. A 5-megapixel camera is on the back of the device with an LED flash. It's also capable of shooting high-definition 720p video. Memory comes in at 16 gigabytes.

As with all Windows Phone handsets, the Trophy will feature Microsoft Office apps and an Xbox Live app for mobile gaming.

Microsoft and Verizon are also offering a free Xbox 360 console game -- Halo: Reach, Kinect Sports or Lode Runner -- for those who buy a Trophy before July 15.

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Image: The HTC Trophy smartphone. Credit: Verizon

Old-school sports trading cards have gotten a high-tech makeover.

Limited-edition video trading cards -- packed with 20 minutes of career highlight footage -- will begin hitting store shelves in June. The first ones will feature four basketball players: Lakers star Kobe Bryant, Blake Griffin of the Los Angeles Clippers, John Wall of the Washington Wizards and Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder.

The cards were created by San Dimas display company Recom Group Inc. for Panini America Inc., maker of trading cards for the National Basketball Assn., the National Hockey League and the National Football League.

Recom owner Rob Norden said the concept behind the video trading card was an upgrade on the traditional card while "staying true to the form" of a beloved sports memorabilia.

For example, he said, the video cards "are actually still on cardboard."

But the cards will be slightly bigger than normal and the electronics inside make them several times thicker. A screen will fill two-thirds of one side and will play clips of on-court action, to be accompanied by music and possibly voice-over commentary, Norden said. The screen can be turned off when you've had your fill of slam dunks and chest thumping.

With 2 gigabytes of storage space, the cards -- which also come with chargers -- can also be used to store music or documents, Norden said.

They will be limited inserts in Panini's Totally Certified Basketball card line, which will include hundreds of traditional cards of active and former NBA players. A pack of five retails for $20 and will be available in sports memorabilia shops around the country.

For collectors that covet exclusivity, Panini will also put out a small quantity of autographed video cards -- to be accompanied with a video of the player signing the card for the ultimate proof of authenticity.

"In the collection business it's always the question of 'Is this really the real thing?' " Norden said. "With this, card owners will actually be able to watch players sign the very card they are holding."

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Photo: Sample video trading card from Panini America and Recom Group. Credit: Recom Group

LinkedIn shares closed at $94.25 on Thursday, up 109% from their IPO's opening price of $45 a share.

The debut of the social network for professionals on the New York Stock Exchange was "spectacular," said Los Angeles Times financial columnist Tom Petruno.

"But in terms of the frothiness quotient, the social networking site's initial public offering is a piker compared with what we saw during the late-1990s dot-com madness," Petruno wrote on our sister blog Money & Company.

LinkedIn shares soared as high as $122.69 during its first full day of trading before closing at $94.25.

"That's going to make plenty of the IPO buyers rich (or just richer)," Petruno wrote. "But it ranks far down the list of the all-time biggest first-day IPO gains."

As he noted, the record is held by VA Linux, which made servers and personal computers running on the "once-vaunted" Linux operating system, he noted. VA Linux held its IPO on Dec. 8, 1999, at $30 a share before closing at $239.25, for a Day-One jump of 698%.

Other dot-com era companies also posted huge IPO jumps, which Petruno compiled in a list of "the 10 biggest first-day IPO pops of all time" in his Money & Company report LinkedIn's first-day stock pop: Not even close to 1990s dot-com madness.

From Petruno:

Firm......................Date..............First-day gain

VA Linux................12/08/99........698%
Exodus Commun....03/18/98........637%
Theglobe.com........11/12/98........606%
Foundry Networks....09/27/99....525%
webMethods...........02/10/00......508%
MarketWatch.com...01/14/99.....505%
FreeMarkets...........12/09/99......483%
Cobalt Networks.....11/04/99......482%
Akamai Tech...........10/28/99......458%
CacheFlow..............11/18/99........427%

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Photo: A LinkedIn banner hangs on the front of the New York Stock Exchange in New York on May 19, 2011. Credit: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

Google is in the process of updating its Android operating system to fix an issue that is believed to have left millions of smartphones and tablets vulnerable to personal data leaks.

"We recently started rolling out a fix which addresses a potential security flaw that could, under certain circumstances, allow a third party access to data available in calendar and contacts," a Google spokesman said in a statement. "This fix requires no action from users and will roll out globally over the next few days."

The fix is being issued for every version of Android released and began updating devices Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the software update who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of their relationship with Google.

The Mountain View tech giant hasn't found any instances of hackers taking advantage of the flaw to steal a user's personal data, the person said, adding that Google hadn't known of the potential for such an exploitation until Germany's University of Ulm issued a report on the security hole.

"The implications of this vulnerability reach from disclosure to loss of personal information for the Calendar data," Ulm researchers Bastian Könings, Jens Nickels and Florian Schaub wrote in their report.

"For Contact information, private information of others is also affected, potentially including phone numbers, home addresses and email addresses."

The vulnerability in Android was first pointed out by Rice University professor Dan Wallach in February, and the University of Ulm probed it further.

"Beyond the mere stealing of such information, an adversary could perform subtle changes without the user noticing," the Ulm researchers said. "For example, an adversary could change the stored email address of the victim's boss or business partners hoping to receive sensitive or confidential material pertaining to their business."

The flaw affected 99.7% of all Android smartphones and was not limited to Google Calendar and contacts, "but is theoretically feasible with all Google services," the University of Ulm said.

Among the weaknesses mentioned in the report was ClientLogin, which is Android's system to authenticate apps.

"Basically, to use ClientLogin, an application needs to request an authentication token (authToken) from the Google service by passing an account name and password via a https connection," the report said. "The returned authToken can be used for any subsequent request to the service API and is valid for a maximum duration of two weeks."

However, if the authToken is not encrypted and sent over an unsecured wireless network, "an adversary can easily sniff the authToken" and then use it to access any personal data which is made available to installed apps.

"For instance, the adversary can gain full access to the calendar, contacts information or private Web albums of the respective Google user," the Ulm researchers said. "This means that the adversary can view, modify or delete any contacts, calendar events, or private pictures. This is not limited to items currently being synced but affects all items of that user."

The tactic "is very similar to stealing session cookies of websites" or sidejacking, which is a popular attack among hackers breaking in to Facebook or Twitter accounts over unsecured wireless networks.

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Photo: Google Nexus S and HTC Incredible S, two phones that run on Google's Android operating system. Credit: Carnero.cc via Flickr