Management at Boloco posted the video on Facebook and YouTube in hopes that someone would recognize the thieves. The video has gotten national attention. According to their Facebook page:

“$1000 cash reward for information that leads to apprehension of these 3 individuals who broke in and robbed our Boloco Berklee location last night less than 30 minutes after our team locked the doors…

We debated about whether to share this or not – traditionally this isn’t something that is “shared”… but it’s 2012… and we think everyone needs to see what is happening out there, and work together to reduce and one day eliminate evil people like these three.”

So far, they have gotten lots of good tips and more neighborhood watch photos of the thieves. They feel close to an arrest.

The Boston Globe says that the fighting was among rival gang members and that many were drawn to the scene on Monday to watch the violence unfold. Apparently the first fight broke out around 5:30 and police responded to find the beach and parking lots overflowing with kids aged 14-19. State police had to call in tactical ops teams, SWAT teams, and emergency deployment teams to control the situation.

The kids reportedly dispersed, many boarding the train and headed both north and south to continue the fights. Although many peaceful Memorial Day outings were undoubtedly ruined by the fighting, there were no reports of serious injuries as of yesterday. The police are still investigating the actual gang ties behind the fights and there’s no official word on how many of the 1,000+ were actually fighting and how many were just watching.

It looks like social media sites like Facebook and Twitter played a part in the fights, which mirror incidents that had been happening over the course of the entire weekend.

Police said the gang members are part of a group of more than 1,000 youths who have used social media sites like Facebook to plan unruly gatherings on the beach on three of the past four nights. The beach falls under the jurisdiction of the State Police, who have been unable to prevent the violence.

The report doesn’t detail any specific Facebook pages that served as hubs for the planning, and a search of the social media site yields no centralized page or groups. It’s most likely that the teens used messaging and status updates to organize the gatherings at the beach.

Twitter has blown up about the violence, as Carson Beach was trending up until just recently. It’s hard to say that specific tweets involving Carson Beach were organizational tweets, directing people to the site of the brawls. But around 15 or so hours ago – around the time of the first fights being reported – there are a bunch of tweets that simply say things like “otw Carson Beach” and “Carson Beach, abt to roll up.”

People also noticed some disturbance in the area and reported on Twitter:

The reaction today is mixed between those simply shocked by the report that such a large number of youths were involved, and those that dispute those reports:

Whether or not a thousand kids were actually involved or that number is hyperbole, police say that was the largest gathering of teens at the beach in the last twenty years. If Facebook and Twitter played a significant role in the organization of these gatherings, it just shows the power the social networking sites have to get people moving behind a cause – whether that cause is for good or for violence.

That’s the stance of Boston Analytics, anyway, which analyzed the past, present, and future of mobile value added services in India.  And if anything, Boston Analytics may have taken a conservative approach – James Quintana Pearce believes it significantly underestimated the number of cell phone subscribers.

On to the data, then.  Boston Analytic’s graphs show India’s per capita GDP going up and mobile call tariffs going down.  Also, mobile revenues appear to be rising, even though the average revenue per user is dropping.  And these trends appear ready to continue for the foreseeable future.

So India’s shaping up to be an even more tempting spot for Google and Yahoo than it has been in the past.  Other American companies – including AOL? – could also try out their mobile products in this market.  (AOL has, by the way, given no indication that it would make such a move, but the company’s ongoing layoffs indicate that it needs to try something, and an expansion into the UK occurred just last month.)

We’ll see where this goes, but as with just about everything, don’t expect much to happen before the beginning of 2008.

“Google Inc. is considering two lab buildings as a site for a new 200,000-square-foot office in East Cambridge,” according to the Boston Business Journal’s Michelle Hillman.  “The Mountain View, Calif., search-engine company is reportedly looking at leasing space at 301 Binney St. or a site slated to be developed into a 313,000-square-foot lab building at 650 East Kendall St.  Both buildings are owned by Biomed Realty Trust Inc.”

That’s a lot of land (“plenty of space for engineers to spin their wheels sketching out never-to-be-released versions of the GooglePhone,” notes The Wag, who first came across Hillman’s subscription-only article), but we’ve repeatedly seen Google snatch up similar properties.

Who knows?  An expansion in Boston could even result in games and movie tie-ins, as occurred with “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “The Da Vinci Code.”  You see, along with “the Hub of the Universe,” Boston’s also called “Beantown,” and there’s a new Mr. Bean movie on its way . . .

In any case, all this comes just days after word of a possible land grab in New York; it looks like Google is intent on solidifying its East Coast presence.

The money comes from General Catalyst Partners and Highland Capital Partners, according to Om Malik.  General Catalyst gave money to Tudou, a Chinese video-sharing site, just last week – these guys know how to branch out.  And fittingly enough, Malik says that the Going.com money is earmarked “for expansion into new cities.”

There’s no word yet as to where the expansion will take place.  The Boston Business Journal notes that both General Catalyst and Highland Partners are based in Massachusetts, though, so, given Going.com’s presence in Boston, it’s not likely that the site will worry about moving closer to them.

Going.com won’t head to one of Florida’s retirement communities, either.  “We think providing a hyper local community connecting 20-somethings with similar passionate interests in their urban city is just the beginning of a local media revolution,” said Evan Schumacher, Going.com’s CEO, in a statement recorded by the Journal.

$5 million will rent a lot of U-Hauls, or, well, whatever Going.com will use to redistribute its social site (and its “revolution”).  I’m sure Schumacher can figure something out.

Google Lawyer Settles With SEC

We used to call this “no blood, no foul” when we played basketball on the playground. Drummond will pay the SEC and admit no wrongdoing with regards to claims he failed to maintain proper accounting controls at a previous job.

The Boston Globe said Drummond, several co-defendants, and an Irish unit of accounting firm Ernst & Young all settled under similar terms where no one admitted to doing anything wrong. The firm in question, SkillSoft, known as SmartForce when Drummond was there, overstated revenue and profit from 1999 through 2002.

Drummond’s settlement won’t earn him any repercussions from his current employer, either. The Globe noted Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s support of Drummond and the settlement, and another Google spokesperson said there would be no discipline of their top attorney.

As for the six-figure settlement, Drummond shouldn’t have any problem with that. On March 1st, he exercised an option to pick up 15,000 shares of Google at zero cost. When the market opens today with Google shares priced at $512, those shares will be worth $7.68 million.

The Boston location is, to be more accurate, in the Greater Boston area.  To be perfectly accurate, it’s in Cambridge.  The Boston Globe’s Robert Weisman gives an brief history of the setup:

“The company, which had just two engineers and a handful of advertising sales people in Boston at the end of 2005, dramatically expanded its operations here in February . . . .  For its new staff of 50, Google leased the seventh floor of the One Broadway office building.”

Then comes the big news: “the Googlers on the Charles, like their colleagues at the Googleplex campus in Mountain View, Calif., are in growth mode, planning to double again by year’s end.”  From a geographic standpoint, that would kind of make sense – balancing out the heavy concentration of Googlers on the West Coast.

(Granted, an Internet company doesn’t need to worry much about geography, but it never hurts to take these things into consideration.)

The Chicago office could further even things out.  And in this case, Google spoke for itself about the need for expansion.  “Well, now we’re decking out the office with binary clocks and caffeinated soap because Google is hiring engineers here,” writes Brian Fitzpatrick on the Official Google Blog.

Free food, dogs at work . . . we all know the perks.  If you live near Boston or Chicago, you might consider dusting off that resume.

The drive to create or acquire Web content is nothing new. Google has been on a mission to add to its content portfolio by acquisition (e.g., YouTube), contract (e.g., MySpace), and internal development (any number of beta and Google Labs sites). Newspapers are pushing their content onto the web, with good results – online newspaper advertising was up 22% in the first quarter alone. And, of course, independent publishers have been busy, too. Everything from vibrant web communities to cheesy made-for-Adsense (MFA) sites are causing an exponential growth in web content.

And there’s the rub – content on the Web is growing faster than the number of eyeballs viewing it and faster than the infusion of advertising dollars. As everyone rushes to cash in on the Internet advertising boom, there are few brick walls ahead – over the horizon, perhaps, but still in the roadway. First, to some degree advertising is a zero-sum game. Web advertising can make rapid gains while it is poaching dollars from traditional media, but may not expand the total of advertising dollars very much. Sure, new media opportunities may cause some increases in ad budgets, but ultimately there is a ceiling determined by the amount of money firms can devote to advertising and marketing. The second wall is the amount of time consumers spend on the Web. Here, too, new media has been poaching time both from traditional media and from other leisure and work activities. Eventually, though, time spent on the Web will have to level out.

What does this mean for Web publishers? I don’t think they have to worry in the short run. Successful content will continue to be successful, and ad revenues have plenty of room to grow. In the long run, though, compelling content will be increasingly important – throwing a hundred thousand pages on the web won’t guarantee strong revenues. Sites that rely on search traffic for most pageviews will increasingly struggle to be found as they find themselves competing with major authority sites for the same visitors. Old media will push into new media publishing more aggressively, using their far from insignificant marketing muscle to drive traffic to their efforts. (In today’s news: CBS paid $280 million for Last.FM, while News Corp – already a new media powerhouse – snapped up Photobucket and Flektor.) With heavyweights like this competing for Web eyeballs, both big and small publishers are going to have to ensure that their Web properties are engaging and involving. Content will have to be better than the competition; Web 2.0 and community features that involve visitors and drive repeat traffic will be increasingly important.

Currently, there’s a dichotomy in advertising rates between major Web properties that command premium ad rates and everyone else, who rely on some mix of Google Adsense or other ad networks for monetization. If anything, this dichotomy will grow – both in revenue per pageview and total ad revenues. Smaller publishers won’t be totally at a loss, though. The contextual advertising push started by Google’s Adsense will continue to allow successful long tail monetization. And, as part of the drive to gain more content, big publishers will look for opportunities to snap up smaller publishers to capture the differential in advertising dollars. Content will continue to be king, but this will be a meritocracy rather than an aristocracy.

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The Encyclopedia of Life won’t exactly be peer-edited, but neither will users be solely responsible for its content; instead, “the Encyclopedia will be developed by bringing together (‘mashing up’) content from a wide variety of sources,” reports the site’s FAQ section.  “This material will then be authenticated by scientists, so that users will have authoritative information.”

But there will also be “anecdotes from amateur naturalists (clearly separated from expert opinion),” reports the Boston Globe’s Colin Nickerson.  Then – again, this is pretty amazing stuff – “[e]ventually, the work will hold the equivalent of about 300 million pages of information.”

The Encyclopedia of Life is currently a long way off from this goal, however; the FAQ reveals that it may take ten years before a “full” version is available.  It may also take in excess of $12.5 million – that’s the amount that has already been donated by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

It’s conceivable that the Encyclopedia could eventually rely on advertisers’ dollars.  Even the private foundations mentioned above “want the Encyclopedia to develop longer-term plans for both revenues and expenses and models to stay in business.  Like biodiversity, the Encyclopedia needs to be sustainable.”

Still, in terms of content, the Encyclopedia of Life appears to have found an excellent balance between using a single group of editors, a larger organization of peers, and random people who follow Stephen Colbert’s advice about elephants.  But, given the energy, time, and money that the Encyclopedia will require, it’ll be interesting to see if that approach is widely adopted.

Still, there was serious cause for concern when the story first broke.  “Mayor of Boston bans Boing Boing,” reported Boing Boing’s own Cory Doctorow.  His post is complete with a picture bearing the words “Access To This Webpage Is Restricted” and the seal of the Mayor of Boston – not good, not good at all.

Seth Finkelstein offered a (relatively) comforting explanation, however: the ban was created by a piece of automatic censorware, which apparently objected to a link from Boing Boing to a version of Google with the SafeSearch turned “off.”  Furthermore, the ban was only temporary.

“BoingBoing should be viewable again on that network when the offending post scrolls off the main page, which should happen in a day or so,” according to Finkelstein.  “But that post itself will remain censorware’d until someone changes the phrase blacklist entries.”

So . . . who (or what) is responsible for the censorware?  Not Boston’s mayor, as it turns out, and not the city, either.  Blame for the Boing Boing ban falls upon openairboston.net, “a private, non-profit corporation created to develop, implement and operate a network to provide affordable wireless internet access throughout the City of Boston.”

Censorship did, then, take place, and as Doctorow wrote, the ban may have been enacted upon an “incredible [sic] stupid basis.”  But, as a Boston native, I’m happy to report that the city (which is just a partner of openairboston.net) was not at fault.