Anne Mulcahy is a former chairperson and chief executive officer of Xerox corp. and a director at Johnson & Johnson, Target, and Washington Post Co. According to one source, she had this to say about the situation:

“We’re long past having to defend or explain why women should be on boards, given all the data that shows how companies with female as well as male directors perform better. It’s unfortunate when companies with a large percentage of women constituents don’t reflect that in their boardrooms.”

She also said:

“As Facebook and other young companies mature, they need to break out of this pattern and have more diverse representation. Women also need to be better represented in the private equity industry.”

A Fortune 500 survey discovered that those companies with 3 or more female members on their board outperformed those with fewer from 2005 to 2009, scraping in a 43 percent better ROE. Since Facebook’s 5 billion dollar IPO, the contents of its board strategy is faulted. Susan Stautberg, who is the the co-founder of NYBWCD or New York-Based Women Corporate Directors said this about female board members:

“It doesn’t make sense for a company that claims to be so forward looking to not have any women directors. If they just have an old boy’s network in the boardroom, they won’t have access to diverse ideas and strategies.”

Facebook’s board consisting of all men is rather odd considering the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, is a woman who, in fact, is a supporter of gender equality; Sandberg is Facebook’s public face, she’s also the best paid senior exec. raking in 30.9 million dollars last year.

In light of this news, how do you feel about Facebook’s lack of female presence on their board? Does it anger you? Are you indifferent? Let us know exactly how you feel in the comments section.

Hammer’s other roles has also appeared in “J. Edgar”, TV’s “Gossip Girl, and is slated to play The Lone Ranger in an upcoming film. In “The Social Network” he played a dual role as the Winklevoss twins, whose business relationship(s) with Mark Zuckerberg led to lawsuits and fights in the Facebook camp.

Hammer told TMZ, “Texas is one of those places where you don’t want to mess around, period.”

In almost every country surveyed the majority of the population owned a mobile phone – the lone exception was Pakistan, where ownership is at 48%, though the percentage in several countries was less than 60%. The country with the highest percentage of mobile phone ownership was Spain, at 96%, while in the US 85% of the population owns a mobile phone. In most of these countries, ownership was highest among younger age groups, or those with higher levels of education. College graduates and people under the age of 30 were most likely to have a phone.

In addition to mobile phone ownership, the survey also examined the most common uses of mobile phones in each country: voice, text, picture/video, and internet usage. As should probably be expected, the vast majority of mobile phone users in every country use their phones for voice calls. Several countries clocked in at 100% voice usage. Nearly every other country was in the 90s, with the exception of Germany and Britain, where just 82% and 87% of phone owners use their devices for voice calling, respectively.

As might be expected, texting is the second most common activity among mobile phone users. Though the numbers for text usage are not as high as voice usage, still in most countries the majority of mobile phone owners text. Only in India (49%) and Pakistan (44%) do fewer than half use their phones for text. In the US 67% of phone owners text, while the highest percentage is in Indonesia, where a whopping 96% of people who have mobile phones use the for texting.

Results for picture and video usage were consistently lower than voice and text usage, though they showed a wide disparity in results from country to country. While most results were in the 40s or 50s, some were in the 20s and 30s. Pakistan scored lowest: only 9% of Pakistanis use their phones to send pictures or texts. Meanwhile, in Japan fully 72% of mobile phone owners use them for taking pictures or video. Mexico is in seocnd place with 61%, while the US is tied with Israel for third place at 57%.

Mobile internet usage figures were consistently lower than picture and video usage, and were similarly varied. The authors of the study speculate that the difference stems from the widely varied availability of internet access in the surveyed countries. Unlike other usage categories, in no surveyed country do a majority of mobile phone owners use their phones In the US 43% of mobile phone owners use their phones to access the internet, while 47% each of Israeli and Japanese phone owners do the same. Pakistan again had the lowest score, at 6%. The survey does not appear to have differentiated between those who own smartphones and those who do not.

The study also examined (separately) social networking usage among adults. In this section the results are broken down according to those who have internet access and those who do not. The highest percentage of social network use is in the US and Israel, where 50% and 53%, respectively, of all adults are members of social media networks. While usage tends to drop considerably in some countries, the primary reason is a lack of internet access. In almost every country surveyed a considerable majority of internet users were also social network users. For example, while 19% of the population of Kenya use social networking, only 26% of the population even has internet access. That means that 73% of Kenyan internet users are members of social networks.

As mentioned above, the study found significant differences in mobile phone and social network use between age groups and education levels. The young and the more educated are far more likely in every country to own mobile phones and to participate in social networking. The study found almost no difference in usage between genders, however. The notable exceptions being Spain, Germany, and Turkey.

What could be the most loathed mascot on the Internet, Twitter’s Fail Whale has been popping up and ruining the start of the morning for many across the Internet. It’s unclear at this time what the issue with Twitter is as they’ve yet to update their Status blog.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Fail Whale, here is a little background on the big lug: The Fail Whale is employed by Twitter during periods of excessive downtime and is accompanied by the message “Twitter is over capacity. Please wait a moment and try again.”

Below are some tweets (when I could get them to load) of people venting their frustrations after seeing the Fail Whale.

Have you seen the Fail Whale this morning? Let us know in the comment area

The President joined Google+ on Wednesday, and quickly gained a “verified account” notifier. As you might suspect the account isn’t being ran by the President himself, but by his reelection effort.

The President’s first post states:

“Welcome to the Obama 2012 Google+ page. We’re still kicking the tires and figuring this out, so let us know what you’d like to see here and your ideas for how we can use this space to help you stay connected to the campaign.”

President Obama’s arrival on Google+ should be seen as a stamp of approval for the service, as his reelection campaigns sees it as vaiable platform to spread campaign information.

Do you think Google+ will ever catch up to the likes of Facebook and Twitter? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

The advertisement plays up that it’s different from Facebook, allowing you to organize your family, friends, and random people you know into various Circles. You can check it out below.

What did you think of the commercial? Tell us what you thought below.

Personally, I thought it was a little dry compared to some of their other commercials, like the ones they did for Google Chrome.

If you’re unfamiliar with Zhitomirskiy, he was one of the four co-founders of Diaspora, a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service. It’s been rumored that Diaspora could eventually become a direct competitor to Facebook.

The death of Zhitomirskiy is pretty hard to grasp, he was only 22. The exact cause of his death is unknown at this time. If you’d like to read more about Zhitomirskiy, you can visit FamousDead.com.

Our thoughts go out to his friends and family.

Below is a video of the Diaspora team discussing their project.

Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network from daniel grippi on Vimeo.

View more infographic round-ups here.

The Importance of Social Networks in Retail:

++ Click Image to Enlarge ++

Will Apple Release a NFC-Enabled iPhone 5 or iPad 3?

via

“If you have a private profile, you will see the following message at the top of your profile with options to make it public or delete it:

Display my full name publicly | Delete my profile”

Do you think this will have a negative effect on Google+ when it launches to the public? Tell us your thoughts.

Essentially Google is giving privacy conscientiousness users an ultimatum, and we’re not sure how well this will sit with Google+ users.

One interesting fact worth pointing out is that the initial help section post stated, “keep in mind that your full name and gender are the only required information that will be displayed on your profile”. With the new updated information, there is no mention of gender at all. This coincides with a video update that Google+ Profiles Product Manager Frances Haugen shared.

It’ll be interesting to see how many people delete their profiles, or have them deleted, simply to avoid displaying their full name.

“The purpose of Google Profiles is to enable you to manage your online identity. Today, nearly all Google Profiles are public. We believe that using Google Profiles to help people find and connect with you online is how the product is best used. Private profiles don’t allow this, so we have decided to require all profiles to be public.”

Do you think this will have a negative effect on Google+ when it launches to the public? Tell us your thoughts.

Keep in mind that your full name and gender are the only required information that will be displayed on your profile; you’ll be able to edit or remove any other information that you don’t want to share.

Essentially, if you leave your Google+ profile private, Google will simply delete it after July 31, 2011.

Before you get in a tizzy over your name and gender being made public, keep in mind that, with Facebook, even with the most private settings users can still see your name, gender and profile picture… and it’s been that way since 2010. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, was asked why Facebook didn’t just give users full control of what information is shared, his response was:

“The site has actually never worked in a way that you sign up and the only people who can see you or your information were your friends. The reason for that is … if only the people who were already your friends on the site could see your information then it would be really difficult to connect with your actual friends and actually be able to have meaningful interactions with them.”

Some Twitter users aren’t happy with this news, as I’m sure you’d imagine:

You shouldn’t worry about all your information though, as you can still keep most of it safely tucked away, limiting access to certain elements within Google+ (circles, extended circles, etc.)

Do you think Google should delete profiles, or let people keep them private if they want? Tell us what you think.