http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2013/0
Thanks to the generosity of the folks at Penguin Books, I have a copy of Deborah Harkness' Shadow of Night for you to win! For more info about this title: Canada, USA, Europe.
Here's the blurb:
Deborah Harkness exploded onto the literary scene with her debut novel, A Discovery of Witches, Book One of the magical All Souls Trilogy and an international publishing phenomenon. The novel introduced Diana Bishop, Oxford scholar and reluctant witch, and the handsome geneticist and vampire Matthew Clairmont; together they found themselves at the center of a supernatural battle over an enchanted manuscript known as Ashmole 782.
Now, picking up from A Discovery of Witches’ cliffhanger ending, Shadow of Night plunges Diana and Matthew into Elizabethan London, a world of spies, subterfuge, and a coterie of Matthew’s old friends, the mysterious School of Night that includes Christopher Marlowe and Walter Raleigh. Here, Diana must locate a witch to tutor her in magic, Matthew is forced to confront a past he thought he had put to rest, and the mystery of Ashmole 782 deepens.
Deborah Harkness has crafted a gripping journey through a world of alchemy, time travel, and magical discoveries, delivering one of the most hotly anticipated novels of the season.
The rules are the same as usual. You need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "SHADOW." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy.
Second, your email must contain your full mailing address (that's snail mail!), otherwise your message will be deleted.
Lastly, multiple entries will disqualify whoever sends them. And please include your screen name and the message boards that you frequent using it, if you do hang out on a particular MB.
Good luck to all the participants!
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/arch
Some time ago, I showed how to get a window back on the screen when it moved far, far away. That technique still works in Windows 7 and 8, but there's an easier shortcut that takes advantage of window arrangement features added in Windows 7.
First, you switch to the application by whatever means. Then hit Win+UpArrow to maximize the window. That should put the window on-screen, albeit at the wrong size. Now you just grab the title bar of the window with the mouse and drag it off the top edge of the screen. Bingo, the window returns to its original position, and you can use the mouse to put it wherever you like.
This trick doesn't work for windows that cannot be resized (such as Calculator), but for those windows, you can use the old version of the trick.
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2013/0
It’s been a few months since I last wrote about Amazon Redshift and I thought I’d update you on some of the things we are hearing from customers. Since we launched, we’ve been adding over a hundred customers a week and are well over a thousand today. That’s pretty stunning. As far as I know, it’s unprecedented for this space. We’ve enabled our customers to save tens of millions of dollars in up front capital expenses by using Amazon Redshift.
It’s clear that Amazon Redshift’s message of price, performance and simplicity has resonated with our customers. That’s no surprise – these are core principles for every AWS service. But when we launched Amazon Redshift, a number of people asked me, “Aren’t data warehouses enterprise products? Do you really do enterprise? How do you handle availability, security, and integration?” My first reaction to that was, “Wait, doesn’t everybody care about these things? These aren’t enterprise-specific.” But, even if we accept that framing, we don’t have to limit ourselves to the enterprise. A lot of the power of AWS comes from the fact that we can invest in expertise in these sorts of areas and spread the benefits across all our customers. I’ve talked about performance and availability in Amazon Redshift before. This time, let’s take a look at how Amazon Redshift secures your data. I suspect it’s a lot more than what most people are doing on premise today. This is especially timely since Amazon Redshift has just been included in our SOC1 and SOC2 compliance reports.
Amazon Redshift starts with the security foundation underlying all AWS services. There are physical controls for datacenter access. Machines are wiped before they are provisioned. Physical media is destroyed before leaving our facilities. Drivers, BIOS, and NICs are protected. Access by our staff is monitored, logged and audited.
As a managed service, Amazon Redshift builds on this foundation by automatically configuring multiple firewalls, known as security groups, to control access to customer data warehouse clusters. Customers can explicitly set up ingress and egress rules or place their SQL endpoint inside their own VPC, isolating it from the rest of the AWS cloud. For multi-node clusters, the nodes storing customer data are isolated in their own security group, preventing direct access by the customer or the rest of the AWS network. Customers can require SSL for their own accesses to their cluster while the AWS operations to monitor and manage their cluster are always secured by SSL.
Amazon Redshift can also be set up to encrypt all data at rest using hardware-accelerated AES-256. All data includes all data blocks, system metadata, partial results from queries and backups stored in S3. Each data block gets its own unique randomly generated key. These keys are further encrypted with a randomly generated cluster-specific key that is encrypted and stored off-cluster, outside the AWS network, and only kept in-memory on the cluster itself. By using unique keys per-block and per-cluster, Amazon Redshift dramatically reduces the cost of key rotation and helps prevent unauthorized splicing of data from different blocks or clusters. We plan to support customer-managed hardware security modules (HSM) by further encrypting the cluster key, using Amazon CloudHSM or an on-premise HSM environment.
I always tell developers that they should obsess not only on the things that our customers ask for but also on the things they just expect. Chief amongst those is security. Every day, we need to come in and work hard to maintain the trust our customers have placed in us. I’m delighted to see how much work the Amazon Redshift team put into this area out of the gate.
http://allthingsd.com/20130522/phone-fir
http://allthingsd.com/?p=324323
Big phone companies have begun to sell the vast troves of data they gather about their subscribers’ locations, travels and Web-browsing habits.
The information provides a powerful tool for marketers but raises new privacy concerns. Even as Americans browsing the Internet grow more accustomed to having every move tracked, combining that information with a detailed accounting of their movements in the real world has long been considered particularly sensitive.
http://allthingsd.com/20130522/xbox-one-j
http://allthingsd.com/?p=324120
Games were given second billing at Microsoft’s Xbox One unveiling yesterday, but one of the coolest new features of the new console is only for games: Xbox One will be a social-media-ready DVR for gameplay video recaps.
Which means, in a nutshell, that developers will be able to tell their games to automatically record certain types of in-game events and achievements. For example, that amazing headshot you just made in Call of Duty: Ghosts? It will be auto-captured in all its gory detail, packaged and ready to send to your online friends.
Which friends, specifically? Marketing and strategy CVP Yusuf Mehdi declined to name names just yet, but said it will be possible to use a dedicated button on the Xbox One controller to upload videos to “popular sharing sites.”
This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Back in April, I wrote about how “gamecasting” is already poised to become a big deal for mainstream gamers. YouTube and game-video site Twitch are arming developers with tools that will let them put video recording and sharing functionality directly in their games.
And, of course, Sony announced way back in February that the PlayStation 4 would also let players snip and share their gameplay videos to live video site Ustream.
But Microsoft isn’t trying to reinvent the social gaming wheel; the company just wants to make it easier. With most games right now, you need additional hardware and software to broadcast a live multiplayer game or record yourself playing through a single-player campaign.
Lowering those mainstream-unfriendly hurdles means that a lot of players who just want to brag about their latest achievements will be inadvertently producing free commercials for games with their socially shared videos.
A Twitch spokesperson declined to comment when asked whether Xbox videos would be shareable to the gaming-oriented site. Ustream spokesperson Joellen Ferrer said, “We were not part of this latest announcement, [but] we aim to provide a ubiquitous experience across all platforms and will continue to push these conversations to provide the best experiences for users.”
http://allthingsd.com/?p=324298
After emerging from an ad-hoc group of technologists and bloggers around Kenya’s contentious and violent 2008 elections, the nonprofit organization Ushahidi now provides open-source tools for crowdsourced mapping that are used around the world. And that includes for Kenya’s largely peaceful 2013 election.
Ushahidi is a small organization that has had a global impact, with more than 44,000 public crowd maps created so far around environmental monitoring, corruption, election and crises. Contributors come from over 159 countries, and the platform is available in more than 33 languages.
Juliana Rotich is co-founder and executive director of Ushahidi, and she says that perhaps the most important lesson to learn from her experience at home in Nairobi and abroad is the notion of “context intelligence.”
We’re reposting the full video from Rotich’s D:Dive Into Mobile session today.
What does Rotich mean by “context intelligence”? Essentially, it is using a deeper understanding of and appreciation for different market needs and local culture to build relevant products.
For instance, the mobile advertising company InMobi pulled out of Kenya last year. Rotich said the problem was that smartphone penetration in Kenya wasn’t yet at the level to support a traditional mobile advertising business.
But a less traditional approach is actually working much better, Rotich said at Dive Into Mobile. She told the story of a company called FlashCast, which displays advertisements on local buses using a simple GPS chip that target particular locations. So what’s the mobile play? People riding the buses can earn FlashCast points by texting a number shown on the ad.
That’s not to say that global brands aren’t effective in Kenya, or in Africa more broadly; Rotich pointed to the strength of WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter at finding real markets and monetization in Africa.
She also said she sees lots of mobile technology opportunities ready for the taking, especially around payments and open APIs from mobile carriers. Watch the full interview for details on which local technology efforts she thinks are most promising.
Rotich also previewed the BRCK, “the backup generator for the Internet,” which is Ushahidi’s first hardware device. That project is now on Kickstarter, where it has raised $105,000 of its $125,000 goal.
http://allthingsd.com/20130522/amid-tech-s
http://allthingsd.com/?p=324339
Hewlett-Packard will report second-quarter results today after the markets close for trading in New York, and the pressure is on CEO Meg Whitman to show that she can keep the floundering tech giant on track toward a promised turnaround next year.
At the outset, it seems a tall order. Name a significant line of HP’s business and its probably in the middle of one sort of fundamental decline or another. Whether it’s the historical decline in PC sales, a weak environment for server sales, a lousy market for printers, or ongoing difficulties with its enterprise services business, HP has troubles in all four. Together, these troubled units accounted for about 92 percent of HP’s sales last quarter. Add to the mix a significant exposure to Europe, where the economy remains weak, and it becomes incredibly difficult to feel hopeful for a pleasant surprise in HP’s results today.
Whitman and CFO Cathie Lesjak have been clear in past public statements that there are no quick fixes for HP. And its rivals are taking advantage. Dell unleashed a bit of price war on the PC front, cutting prices aggressively in order to take some market share ahead of its anticipated $24.4 billion go-private transaction.
While Dell is willing to sacrifice profitability, HP doesn’t seem to have responded, and so may have missed some sales. As Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank Securities wrote in a note to clients yesterday, “It appears HP is sacrificing share to protect near-term margins.”
Dell has also been bragging about its ability to take market share away from HP on the server front.
What HP has got going for it: Aggressive cost management. Remember that HP surprised the Street with better-than-expected cash flow in the first quarter of the year, giving the appearance that the promised turnaround had begun in earnest. But much of that surprise came from a one-time tax benefit that added a half-billion dollars to operating cash flow. That is unlikely this quarter, so Whitmore is worried that cash flow may come up short: “The combination of cash restructuring payments, headwinds from revenue declines in PCs impacting working capital and cash cycle and the absence of favorable factors in Q1 (tax deferrals, bonus payments, etc) may result in worse than expected cash flow,” he wrote.
Analysts expect HP to report 81 cents per share on sales of $28.12 billion. A miss on either the top or bottom line will probably freak out shareholders impatient to see some tangible sign that, despite having survived the worst year in its history, HP can yet be salvaged, and that Whitman is the one to get the job done. HP shares opened up slightly this morning at $21.21 a share.
I talked about all this a little this morning on CNBC. The video is below:
http://allthingsd.com/20130522/apples-ma
http://allthingsd.com/?p=324223
Walt Mossberg: Will there be an Apple product ever made again in the United States?
Tim Cook: I want there to be.
Walt: You what?
Tim: I want there to be.
Walt: You want there to be.
When Apple announced its intention to manufacture one of its existing Mac lines exclusively in the U.S. last December, the company didn’t say which line, or where in the country it planned to build it. Now, some five months later, the answer to one of those questions has finally emerged.
During a Tuesday appearance before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed the state in which its Made-in-USA Mac will be manufactured: Texas.
“We’re investing $100 million to build a Mac product line here in the U.S.,” Cook said. “The product will be assembled in Texas, include components made in Illinois and Florida, and rely on equipment produced in Kentucky and Michigan.”
Apple’s pledge to build some Macs in the U.S. doesn’t mean that the company is setting up its own production facilities. Cook has said in the past that Apple will work with manufacturing partners on this particular effort. And now that he’s disclosed the state in which Mac production will be handled, the identity of Apple’s likely manufacturing partner is becoming clearer, as well.
Foxconn operates plants in Texas and has long handled a lot of Apple’s hardware production and assembly. Recently, the company said it was expanding its existing manufacturing operations in the U.S. to meet the needs of certain unnamed customers. Not definitive proof that Foxconn will manufacture Apple’s Made-in-USA Mac, but certainly a clear indication that it might.
Previously:
When Google Keep launched, it never got the fanfare it deserved. The people that did review it compared it to all the wrong apps, like Evernote or Microsoft OneNote. That's a shame, because a surprisingly good note taking app went under the radar, underrated for coming up short against contenders it wasn't designed to face. It's about time to give Google Keep a fair shake, see where it shines, and how it fits in with the competition.
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The corner cabinets are awkward, tricky places to store your kitchen stuff efficiently. It turns out, though, that this is a great spot for tucking away your pots and pans.
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A personal trainer is a great way to get a custom workout you'll enjoy, but you need to find someone you actually like working with. Health blog Greatist suggests that you ask yourself a few important questions to ensure you'll develop a healthy relationship with them.
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If your iPhone is feeling a bit sluggish after recent carrier updates from AT&T or T-Mobile, iTweakiOS has a guide for installing your own custom carrier bundle that should bring increased speeds.
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As the director of Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit that helps people avoid funeral fraud, I know all about mortuary mythology. (That’s what I call the collective "wisdom" about death, dying, funerals, and dead people.) Most Americans get their information about how to bury the dead from the people we pay to do it for us—not exactly the most disinterested source.
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When a debt collector comes calling, they may try to use intimidating tactics or pose as a government official to scare you into cooperating. If you do have an outstanding debt, you should work with them to get it paid off, but you can do it on your terms. Our friends at Marketplace have some tips for doing just that.
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http://www.languagehat.com/archives/0050
Via Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org, an interesting project, VerbCorner:
Dictionaries have existed for centuries, but scientists still haven't worked out the exact meanings for most words. At VerbCorner, we are trying to work out what verbs mean. Rather than try to work out the definition of a word all at once, we have broken the problem into a series of tasks. Each task has a fanciful backstory -- which we hope you enjoy! -- but at its heart, each task is asking about a specific component of meaning that scientists suspect makes up one of the building blocks of verb meaning.Give it a try!Ultimately, we hope to probe dozens of aspects of the meaning of thousands of verbs. This is a massive project, which is why we need your help! We will be sharing the results of this project freely with scientists and the public alike, and we expect it to make a valuable contribution to linguistics, psychology, and computer science.
But it had not yet become dark.
I went to hear some immortal words;
But everywhere I saw the birds.
In the trees of Shakespeare's Glen,
I saw a little Carolina Wren.
There was a pretty Northern Flicker,
Taking pity upon this clicker.
I looked up and saw two Mourning Doves
Sitting...and watching,...on a wire above.
A family of pretty Kildeer
Came quite near, without too much fear.
Robins and Starlings came to witness the sight
Of a rehearsal of Twelfth Night.
But the biggest fans of the famous Bard
Seemed to be the waddling Mallards!
Several of these ran up eagerly
And, along with the audience, settled to see
A famous play...I'm sure its creator
Never imagined birds watching his theatre!
I've put up some of the photos of the birds at the rehearsal of the play...
click here for my FB album
They are the commonest birds imaginable...but they utterly delighted me! Where else can I get Art and Nature together like this, except Forest Park?
Robin
Flicker
Mallards side
Mallards diagonal
Mallards near seats
Mallards near stage
Mallards near audience
( Here are some other images from the eveningCollapse )
Moon leaves
Sunset
Grass
Sunset Leaves
- Current Mood:
happy - Current Music:none
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/x
http://paidcontent.org/?p=229791
50 Shades of Grey, which started out as Twilight-inspired fan fiction, raised a few copyright questions that didn’t stop it from selling millions and millions of copies. But when a work is more directly based on another author’s creation — using the same characters and setting, for instance — the legal hurdles can be greater.
That doesn’t stop readers from writing their own spinoffs anyway: The largest fan fiction site, FanFiction.net, hosts millions of free stories. And in works like these — and the passionate readers who create them — Amazon sees the potential for profit.
On Tuesday, Amazon Publishing announced Kindle Worlds, “the first commercial publishing platform that will enable any writer to create fan fiction based on a range of original stories and characters and earn royalties for doing so.” The company is making this work by securing licenses from existing entertainment properties and by paying royalties to both the original author and the fan fiction author.
So far, Kindle Worlds has licenses for three Alloy Entertainment properties: Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars and Vampire Diaries. Writers can publish “authorized stories” inspired by these properties and sell them in the Kindle Store; Amazon says it will add more licenses soon.
The fan fiction authors get a royalty of 35 percent for works of at least 10,000 words, and a royalty of 20 percent on works between 5,000 and 10,000 words. Amazon is also paying royalties to the original authors of the properties, but would not disclose that royalty rate.
Kindle Worlds is not a self-publishing platform like KDP. First of all, any works published through Kindle Worlds are published by Amazon Publishing — they’re not self-published, so the author doesn’t retain print or digital rights and doesn’t set the work’s price. The website notes that “Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright.” Second, Kindle Worlds won’t publish all of the works submitted to it; it will only accept some. Finally, “Amazon Publishing will set the price for Kindle Worlds stories. Most will be priced from $0.99 through $3.99.”
Kindle Worlds will officially launch in June with “over 50 commissioned works” from authors like Barbara Freethy, John Everson and Colleen Thompson. At that time, readers can also start submitting works to Kindle Worlds.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/5-j
It’s easy to see how a motion-tracking, iPhone-compatible camera dock could appeal to any gadget hound or videography geek. But since the first Swivl launched in early 2012, its biggest fans haven’t been in the consumer or even corporate markets: they’ve been in education.
To build on that base, the company on Wednesday said it had raised $500,000 from Grishin Robotics, an investment company focused on supporting personal robotics. Previously, Swivl raised about $175,000 from Indiegogo and Kickstarter campaigns and less than $1 million in angel funding.
Since the device’s debut, Swivl co-founder and CEO Brian Lamb said the company has shipped about 10,000 units, with uses ranging from pet monitoring to corporate videoconferencing. But he added that 75 to 80 percent of its customers are coming from education.
“There’s a very powerful ongoing discussion about using video for [several] use cases [in education] that this plugged right into,” said Lamb. “It’s a tool to open the doors of the classroom and get people participating online.”
For teachers aiming to “flip” their classrooms with videos students can watch online or get feedback on their teaching styles from peers, the Swivl provides an easy way to self-record lectures and classes. The $199 device, which the company likens to a robotic “personal cameraman,” includes a sensor that tracks the subject’s movements, panning and turning the camera as necessary. (For more details on how it works, you can check out my colleague Kevin Tofel’s review of the first-generation Swivl.)
Already, it’s being used in 1,000 K-12 schools and 250 universities, Lamb said. With the new funding, the company plans to accelerate the production and distribution of the company’s second version of the Swivl, which includes more classroom-friendly features like iPad compatibility and a feature for attaching additional microphones to capture audio from students.
Even though it may have been unintended, Swivl’s rise in education makes sense given the surging interest in using technology to enhance and extend the classroom. In addition to the “flipped classroom” trend and growing calls for better teacher feedback systems, teachers are increasingly turning to video technology to support distance education programs and capture lectures for students to review or watch later on.
For example, companies like Torsh and Edthena provide tools for teacher observation and evaluation, while McGraw-Hill’s Tegrity and Echo360 are among those offering schools lecture-capture services. But given its focus on developing hardware and eventually offering connected cloud services (although Lamb wouldn’t elaborate too much on that), Swivl is more of a complementary rather than competitive startup.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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- Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
- GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
- Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/l
For HTC, when it rains, it pours. Over the last 18 months, the company has watched its smartphone sales slow and profits wither. Now there reports that key personnel have left the company, the most recent being Chief Product Officer Kouji Kodera, according to The Verge. At a time when the HTC One flagship is on the market and the company should be looking ahead to the next big product line, that doesn’t bode well for the company’s future.
Kodera isn’t the only recent departure, however, which makes the situation a little more bleak. Here are a few more joining the exodus, per The Verge:
“It’s not just Kodera. In the past three-odd months, HTC has lost a number of employees in rapid succession — most recently Jason Gordon, the company’s vice president of global communications. Other fresh departures include global retail marketing manager Rebecca Rowland, director of digital marketing John Starkweather, and product strategy manager Eric Lin.”
I knew that Lin had left: He moved recently to become a Product Marketing Manager for Skype after five years with HTC. The others are news to me, but in hindsight, perhaps not surprising given the company’s rough ride of late: delays for the HTC One flagship phone due to supply issues and the lack of buzz around the HTC First, a phone that highlights the Facebook experience.
With HTC’s fall from prominence in the U.S., it’s possible — likely even — that the Tawian-based company consolidates operations back to its home country. With Apple and Samsung dominating U.S. phone sales, it may make sense for HTC to concentrate more effort on the bigger opportunities in Asia. To do so really doesn’t require much of a U.S. presence, sadly.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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- What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
- Mobile 2012 and beyond
- Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/C
San Francisco-based PracticeFusion may bill itself as an electronic medical records company, but that’s definitely not all it is.
Since launching in 2005, the company has attracted 150,000 physicians with its free, cloud-based software for managing patient health information, scheduling, billing and other tasks. But last month, it rolled out its first consumer-facing service, a ZocDoc-like doctor appointment booking site that positions it to manage additional data about patient conditions, medications and treatment outcomes. And on Wednesday, it plans to expand its footprint even further with consumer-oriented tools that help patients track and manage their health expenses.
The electronic health record may have been its foot in the door — as founder and CEO Ryan Howard recently told VentureBeat, it’s “somewhat of a Trojan Horse.” But that’s enabling the company to build an enviable online community for physicians and patients, all with an eye on bringing some light and efficiency to the health system while amassing a valuable treasure trove of patient data. To date, the company says it manages health information for more than 62 million patients.
“Every part of health care is obfuscated,” Howard told me in a recent interview. “But we’ve just opened it up – from the administration to scheduling to the clinical data to now health spending.”
With its new health cost tracking tools, which are similar to products offered by startups like Simplee and CakeHealth, for example, PracticeFusion connects to patients’ healthcare accounts to help them better understand and manage their health finances. For example, it lets patients easily visualize their out-of-pocket expenses, costs covered by insurance and the remaining balance of their deductible.
For now, the health tracking tools can only be used by patients whose doctors use PracticeFusion, but Howard said the service will expand to other patients in the next quarter.
Considering that the average family spends more than $3,000 on out-of-pocket medical expenses and that medical debt has been cited as a leading cause of bankruptcy, it’s no wonder that PracticeFusion is zeroing in on health spending. For many patients, medical expenses are a big black hole and, as healthcare costs climb and employers continue to shift to high-deductible health plans, the need for more transparency and guidance around price is becoming even more needed.
Offering more tools to consumers gives PracticeFusion more opportunities to build its growing advertising business (the company, which advertises to doctors, doesn’t yet market to patients, but has indicated that it will). But, over time, the health-tracking tools could also give the company an interesting and comprehensive window on to the varying prices consumers pay for different providers and treatments.
Companies like Castlight Health and ClearCostHealth already work through employers to help patients get health care pricing information and encourage “healthcare consumerism.” But in the context of PracticeFusion’s community and appointment booking platform, pricing information could play an even bigger role in helping patients choose doctors.
Recognizing the potential sensitivity for physicians, the company doesn’t have immediate plans to display pricing information for patients. But given the need to bring more price transparency to patients, it seems to be something the company is carefully weighing.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/6
CloudCheckr, one of several vendors that monitor Amazon Web Services usage for customers, says it is the only one of those rivals that can do that job for Amazon’s restricted GovCloud. GovCloud is a separate U.S. region set up for state, local and federal agencies that must meet special requirements for cloud use.
Tools like CloudCheckr’s service can help in the government procurement process — a big deal given the U.S. government’s cloud-first mandate, which requires agencies not only to deploy a different sort of technology, but to readjust how they think about buying and paying for services.
“They have a hard time dealing with cloud costs because they’re so used to fixed-cost contracts,” said James Hirmas, COO of JHC Technology, an AWS consultancy specializing in government work and a prime contractor for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). JHC worked with CloudCheckr to integrate its service with GovCloud.
With that integration, a customer can see if it’s underutilizing compute instances for a certain task and, if so, advise that the work be moved to a smaller, cheaper instance, for example. CloudCheckr performs compliance checks and best practice analysis for GovCloud environments.
Aaron Klein, COO of Rochester, N.Y.-based CloudCheckr, said the GovCloud service does 90 percent of what it does on the commercial side. “GovCloud is architected differently from other AWS regions,” he said. “First you need access, then you need to delve in and adapt what you have to work best in that environment.” He also pointed out that not all of AWS’s own services are running on GovCloud so far.
Since GovCloud is compliant with the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) – only U.S.-born personnel can work there or access it. Its help desk is U.S.-only. Background checks are also required.
Amazon itself is clearly gearing up for more government work, having received its FedRAMP certification early this week. That accreditation should make it easier for more government entities to use GovCloud (or other U.S. regions depending on the workload) without having to go through a lot of redundant testing and paperwork.
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- The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/J
Google I/O has come and gone without any new Chrome OS hardware. Was it a bust for Chromies? Not at all, but most of the news were behind the scenes services and provided context for Chrome’s cross-platform future vision.
You can see some of that future in Chromium for the Mac, which is getting the Chrome App launcher. Our extension of the week dovetails with Google’s new Play Music All Access subscription service. And while Kevin still loves the Chromebook Pixel, he pleads with Google to add one important function to Chromebooks: Support for Google Play movie and TV downloads.
Show notes
Hosts: Chris Albrecht and Kevin C. Tofel
- So what was Google I/O like, what’s new for Chrome and what new services did Google add?
- More Intel-powered hardware builds are being tested
- Chromium for Mac getting the App launcher
- What’s Google’s vision for Chrome? To take over the world, of course!
- Extension of week: Better Music for Google Play Music
- When will Google add movie and TV downloads for Chromebooks?
Got questions, tips or tricks for an upcoming GigaOM Chrome Show? Find Kevin on Google+, Twitter (@kevinctofel) or via e-mail (kevin@gigaom.com)
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- Analyzing the wearable computing market
- Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust
- Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”
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Remember Truecaller, the Swedish phone directory service we reported on earlier this year? It’s a service for combatting phone scams – the user gets to see who’s calling them, with Truecaller identifying the caller by their phone number. It’s big in India, apparently.
Anyway, Truecaller now has 600 million partly crowdsourced names and phone numbers in its database, which is quite a lot, and it’s decided to open up this information to third parties that can make good use of it. “Great,” you might think, “what a boon to telemarketers.” But no, Truecaller is rather sensibly hand-picking those developers who get to tap into its newly-launched, 3scale-managed API, and telemarketers are not welcome at all.
As for potential uses for this reverse lookup service, that’s up to the developer’s imagination. Here’s what Truecaller CEO Alan Mamedi suggests:
“Among many other scenarios, the Truecaller API could be used to save time in call centres. Each call centre minute is connected to a cost. By using our API, both local and global, call centres can identify who is calling even before starting the call. Win-win.”
Truecaller’s database is populated by two main sources: traditional phone directory services and users who are willing to upload their address books. This latter source means it can contain numbers that are unlisted, including pay-as-you-go phone numbers. Numbers in the database come with two types of scores: a “spam score” to rate how likely it is that they are associated with telesales or robocalls, and a “true score” to denote importance.
Importantly, name search will not be a function associated with the API – it will only be available on the mobile app, meaning the API can only be used for reverse lookup purposes.
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Kids these days! There they are, creating all their little mobile apps, yet too many of them aren’t considering the possibilities provided by connections to other apps. That, at least, is the view of Cloudbase.io founder Stefano Buliani, whose London-based backend-as-a-service (BaaS) outfit wants to make it easier to both plug in and cash in.
As part of reaching that objective, Cloudbase.io has launched a shared API to encourage data-sharing between apps. By way of example, someone coming up with a Foursquare-like idea could decide to use Cloudbase.io to build their application. Cloudbase.io would handle the backend for that app, and the developer could tell the BaaS provider to let other apps access their shared API, allowing those apps to draw on the app’s check-in data and creating opportunities for business deals down the line.
As Buliani told me:
“What I found everywhere [as I was promoting] Cloudbase.io was that everybody with a background as a backend developer instantly got it. Mobile developers were questioning the need for their application to be connected to the internet. Most mobile developers are only mobile developers; they’ve never done anything else before – never worked on websites, for example. They had this mentality of building the small game for mobile.
“The premise for the idea is that we want mobile applications to become platforms. We want them to be able to publish their own layer of APIs, even though it’s hosted on Cloudbase.io. Cloudbase.io becomes invisible in the background. We want to encourage them to be as ambitious as possible and think of themselves as a platform. It’s a chicken-and-egg game of course – what came first, the business or the API? – but we want them to be prepared for it.”
This perspective is unsurprising coming from Buliani, a developer (he was part of the early Covestor team) who became a management consultant in London’s financial heart before returning to tech. But then again, Cloudbase.io is not the only company trying to help smalltime developers think bigger.
So what about rivals such as Parse? According to Buliani, there’s a “philosophical difference” between the two outfits.
“The easiest example is, if you want to build an application on top of Parse you have to register the users of your application within that framework, so your application will have to have authentication. With Cloudbase.io you can have no authentication — it’s entirely up to you,” he said, adding that he was proud of the fact that all of Cloudbase.io’s libraries are open source and available on Github.
Of course, Cloudbase.io’s new service also crosses over somewhat with the territory of API management specialists such as Apigee and 3scale.
As with Parse, it’s free to register with Cloudbase.io and get going. Once the app’s in an app store, users need to start paying – the most basic account costs $11.99 a month, which comes with a gigabyte of data exchange. Above that are professional ($47.99 for 8GB) and enterprise ($119.99 for 20GB) tiers, with the possibility of negotiated pricing for higher volumes.
Users should take note of how data exchange volume pricing works with the shared API. If the app accessing data from the original, Cloudbase.io-using app is also using the same BaaS platform, it’s that second app that gets charged. If the second app is off-platform, it will obviously be the original app’s developers who get charged (it might be smart to publish the shared API but keep it password protected).
Incidentally, for those developers who need as much help as possible, Cloudbase.io also partnered up last month with MoSync, a provider of open-source tools for building mobile applications. The idea there is for MoSync to allow the building and compiling of the apps, with Cloudbase.io adding in the connectivity, geo-location and social pieces.
(And on another note, cloud infrastructure and data-sharing will definitely be on the agenda for discussion at our Structure:Europe conference, which will run in London on September 18-19.)
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This week started off with a bang, as Yahoo announced its acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 billion on Monday. Follow our coverage of the story and analysis of what this means for Yahoo, Tumblr and their competitors in Silicon Valley and beyond. And while you’re at it, be sure to check our our latest batch of job listings from digital media companies across the country:
- Time, Inc.: Director of Digital Ad Product Experiences (New York)
- Gannett Co., Inc.: President and Publisher (Des Moines, Iowa)
- M80: Director, Paid Social (Los Angeles)
- Bloomberg: Media Licensing Manager – Latin America/Caribbean (New York)
- HitBliss: Digital Account Executive (Lexington, Mass.)
We also have listings from companies like Target, the Taunton Press, the Crackle Network at Sony Pictures and more. Click here to see what else is on our job board.
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There’s been lots of investor interest recently in backing startups focused on making IT more secure, at least in part because of the barrage of news of cyberattacks against government agencies and companies, including a defense contractor. Now comes more security investment activity. Blue Coat Systems, a vendor of network gear for security and WAN optimization, is bolstering its hardware and software strategies with the acquisition of Solera Networks.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Among Solera products is a BlackBox Recorder that, true to its name, records all network activity, which analysts can play back after attacks to see what happened. Solera Deepsee software conducts deep-packet inspection to reveal the nature of applications and associated files in play inside a network. It also brings up timelines of suspicious activity, runs analytics and enables integration with other network tools, such as Palo Alto Networks. Dashboards and other visual features are available. Solera also makes appliances that monitor traffic, storage boxes and a virtual appliance available as a VMware virtual machine.
The deal follows news earlier this month of Blue Coat’s acquisition of the SSL product line from Netronome. The thinking behind that deal was to offer enterprises more visibility into both inbound and outbound traffic and apply policy across all traffic, according to a Blue Coat statement.
Also this month, McAfee agreed to pay around $389 million for network-security provider Stonesoft.
In the midst of the attention on cybersecurity among other enterprise IT hot spots, it’s not surprising to see vendors rushing to bolt on products and services and then pinging potential customers to promise the solution to their problems (and then announcing sales gains). The real indicator people should be on the lookout for, though, is a drop in cyberattacks, and judging by some recent headlines, that might still be a ways off.
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Whether in gambling or relationships, many people have the feeling that they just need to stick with their chosen course of action if they’ve already invested blood, sweat, and dollars in it. Would-be entrepreneurs are also taught to be persistent, a quality that is often highly praised by both fellows entrepreneurs and the press. Therefore it’s not surprising that entrepreneurs are subject to many of the same biases that cause people to persist with their investments, and don’t necessarily behave to always maximize outcomes when presented with lucrative new opportunities, a new study says.
The sunk cost fallacy is the nearly automatic psychology that causes you to stick with losing bets rather than jump ship. A strategy to combat this fallacy — mentally focusing on the potential gains of cutting and running rather than the losses — was outlined last week in The Atlantic. Persistence, an important quality in entrepreneurs, can also be amplified by self-justification or normative pressures to stick with in-progress endeavors, according to researchers at Oregon State and Utah State universities. They surveyed 135 (mostly male, middle-aged) high-tech entrepreneurs in the U.S. and found that the entrepreneurs don’t always pursue decisions that would maximize utility if it requires giving up a current business venture.
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Like mere mortals, entrepreneurs are also motivated in their decision-making to maximize potential financial and non-financial benefits (value) given the likelihood of achieving those benefits (expectancy). Entrepreneurs also have a host of other factors to consider, like their past startup experience, the size of their current business, potential psychological, social, and financial switching costs, and whether starting a new business meshes with their personal principles of autonomy and risk-averseness, for example. When it comes to leaving their current business and starting a new one, however, it turns out that the way expectancy and value play into the decision isn’t straightforward.
Here’s how the survey worked, in the researchers’ own words:
“The participants were asked to rate the likelihood that they would pursue a series of hypothetical entrepreneurial opportunities. Each hypothetical opportunity was presented as a comparison with the participant’s current business across four criteria: value of financial returns, likelihood of financial returns, value of non-financial benefits, and the likelihood of non-financial benefits”
To test the effects of expectancy and value on entrepreneurs’ persistence with their existing business, the researchers set different prior conditions: in some cases the entrepreneurs would have the resources to continue with their current business as well as start a new one, while in others they had to choose between staying with the old business or launching a new one. These two conditions resulted in unexpected behaviors.
If the potential value of the current business was higher than that of the alternative, or if probability of success was higher for the current than the alternative, entrepreneurs tended to discount potential highly successful or financially rewarding outcomes associated with the hypothetical new business venture. That is, expectancy and value weren’t simply additive factors that predicted whether entrepreneurs would spring for a new business opportunity.
There are a number of factors that could be at play here beyond just money. The researchers also looked at the size of the company (entrepreneurs were more likely to leave bigger firms) and past startup experience, which could help entrepreneurs better evaluate the market (over 80 percent of those surveyed had previous startups under their belt). Uncertainty (as opposed to risk) may also play a role, with entrepreneurs opting to stick with their existing venture where some amount of uncertainty may already have been eliminated.
Of course, an online survey is no match for the real world, where entrepreneurs would have much more information and time to guide their business decisions. But if entrepreneurs can self-diagnose and recognize tendencies for overconfidence, counterfactual thinking, and a drive to avoid uncertainty, they can potentially maximize their returns and generate some kickass businesses in the process.
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Some publishers and content companies are betting their future on subscription revenue from readers and users, while others are keeping their content free and banking on advertising revenue to pay the way. What are the pros and cons of each model?
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Americans continue to spend big on their internet needs, and that is reflected in the robust demand for broadband during the first three months of 2013. Data collected by Leichtman Research Group, a Durham, NH-based market research company, shows that the top broadband providers in the U.S. added 1.1 million (net) new connections over that period, bringing the total number of broadband subscribers to about 82.4 million.
According to their research, cable companies have about 47.5 million broadband subscribers, while the remainder are with the phone companies. Cable companies added about 800,000 new subscribers, about 72 percent of the total for the month. The top two phone companies — AT&T and Verizon — saw a decline of 696,000 DSL accounts but added a total of 919,000 fiber subscribers. FIber-based broadband now accounts for about 40 percent of AT&T and Verizon’s total broadband customer base.
Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, pointed out that typically the first quarter is better than the second and third quarters of the year, and “2013 began with another strong first quarter.” Net broadband additions in Q1 2013 were about 500,000 more than in Q4 2012, and that bodes well for rest of the year.
A resurgent housing market and stronger economy along with our growing need for speed and connectivity are the reasons why demand for U.S. broadband is booming. Here are some numbers to give you an idea as to who is winning and who is losing.
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Microsoft’s new Xbox One has many new features, but one in particular raised some eyebrows Tuesday: The new game console will always be on, and users will be able to launch games, live TV or even a Skype call with simple voice commands, and without ever picking up a controller or remote control. Does that mean, as the Verge mused, that Microsoft will always be listening to each and every word spoken in your living room?
The answer is yes, no, and better get used to it. Microsoft hasn’t actually said how many aspects of the Xbox One are going to work, but the demo it gave at its campus in Redmond, Wash. Tuesday contained some solid hints on the particulars of its voice control. To wake up the device and launch live TV, play a game or do anything at all with it, users will first have to say “Xbox on.”
That’s what people who work on speech recognition call “hot words” – easily recognizable phrases that can be detected by a system without too much effort. Once a user says that magic word or phrase, the actual speech recognition kicks into high gear.
That means that the Xbox One continuously listens for someone to say “Xbox on,” and that everything else that’s spoken is automatically disregarded. Listening for these hot words is done locally and doesn’t require much in terms of system resources. For example, there’s no need to record anything, since all that matters are the hot words. But once those words are uttered, the Xbox One is going to use advanced speech recognition to figure out what users are actually talking about.
Again, Microsoft hasn’t said exactly how this is going to work, but a spokesperson told me that some of the personalization offered by the device is “one of the benefits of Xbox One being connected to and powered by the cloud.” I’d expect that the same is true for speech recognition, much in the same way that Google uploads everything you say to its servers when you use voice search on your Android phone.
The use of hot wording to wake up technology from a state of low-level listening to launch active speech recognition isn’t new. It’s also at work in Google Glass, where users get the device’s attention by saying “okay glass.” Google Now simply uses “Google” as a hot word to launch voice input. And the Xbox 360 starts to accept voice commands once users yell “Xbox” at the device’s Kinect sensor.
The difference between how the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One approach voice recognition isn’t so much about technology, even though Xbox users probably hope that the new iteration is going to work better. What makes people feel uncomfortable is that the Xbox One, and with it its microphone, are meant to be always on.
However, the always-on microphone of the Xbox One is just a sign of things to come. Voice input is going to become a key component of a growing number of internet-connected devices and appliances in your home, car and office, and many of them will use hot words to switch from low-level listening to active speech recognition.
In fact, you are likely looking at one of those devices right now: Laptops, tablets and mobile phones all contain microphones, and they’re all waiting to become hot words-aware any day now. Google just demonstrated how it is going to add hot wording to search on the desktop at last week’s Google I/O conference, allowing users to start a voice search query by simply saying “okay Google” without touching a single button.
Of course, all of this doesn’t mean that there are no privacy issues around hot wording and always-on microphones. Companies should make it clear how exactly they’re using the technology as it is becoming more widely distributed, and there should always be a way to opt out and rely on alternative input methods. It may also be a good idea to indicate to users when exactly a device is reverting back from active speech recognition to a state of passive listening. But I’d expect that most consumers quickly get used to the constantly running mic, always listening for those magic words.
Image courtesy of Flickr user visual.dichotomy.
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Sprint-owed prepaid operator Boost Mobile unveiled a mobile financial services app called Mobile Wallet at CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas on Tuesday. This isn’t your typical near field communications (NFC) or QR code contactless payment setup though. Instead, Boost is combining its prepaid mobile services model with a prepaid cash account, providing a physical prepaid card that customers can use at the register.
Mobile Wallet was developed by Wipit, a mobile payments provider for people without bank accounts and credit cards. Its platform therefore makes an ideal fit for many Boost customers who rely on cash to make pay for their wireless service. The approach seems to emulate the mobile payments revolution going on Africa and South Asia, where mobile operators are become bigger financial services providers than the traditional banks.
Mobile Wallet allows you to pay bills and send money to family or friends in 135 countries through Ria’s cash transfer network. Soon Boost will also offer a digital check cashing service, which lets you scan in a physical check and deposit the funds in your wallet account. You can also transfer money between different accounts, and top off your Boost Mobile plan within the app.
What you can’t do is use the Wallet App to make a payment at store. But Boost and WiPit have gotten around that problem by issuing a Visa prepaid card to any customer that signs up for a premium account. The card draws directly from the Wallet account and is accepted anywhere where Visa is. Google reportedly considered adopting the same approach for its digital wallet but dropped the idea.
Of course, all of these services come with fees, many of which are rather steep. Paying bills costs anywhere from $2 to $5 per transaction, while Ria money transfer fees vary depending on amount and destination. Even loading money into the account costs $3, though once the money is there, you can spend it freely using the Visa card. Until the check cashing service goes live, customers can only load money into the account at authorized Boost dealer locations.
The app is available to Boost’s Android customers and is downloadable in Google Play, but initially Boost is only enabling accounts for customers in Los Angles, San Diego and parts of New Jersey. The company is planning a nationwide rollout by the end of the year.
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It’s already a busy week in tech, as Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion on Monday. We have full coverage of the story and will be following the news throughout the week. In the meantime, be sure to check our our latest batch of job listings from tech companies across the country:
- Tango: Senior Software Engineer — Client (Palo Alto, Calif.)
- CrowdTwist: Data Scientist (New York)
- iSEC Partners: Experienced Security People (San Francisco)
- Publishers Clearing House: Front End/UI Developer (Port Washington, N.Y.)
- Akamai Technologies: Senior Product Architect — Media and CDN (San Mateo, Calif.)
We also have listings from companies like Manilla, Raytheon and more. Click here to see what else is on our job board.
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If you’re a popular social sharing service not named Google+, you might be integrated into iOS very soon. According to a report in 9to5Mac, Apple is working on integrating Yahoo’s revamped photo service Flickr and the social video network Vimeo into iOS 7. The two services would join the two big social networks, Twitter and Facebook, in enjoying operating system-level integration into the iPhone and iPad.
That would mean that users could sign in with their Flickr and Vimeo accounts within the Settings app on their iOS device, just as they can now with Twitter and Facebook. Then when the user hits the share button in an app, the menu will include the services that they’ve registered.
iOS is expected to be detailed by Apple at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June. 9to5Mac noted that the decision to include two additional social services could be reversed before any announcement is made. But the report does make a lot of sense.
Such a move could be read as a bit more anti-Google maneuvering from Apple. After all, the company last year shed all iOS-Google tie-ins in iOS 6 with the exception of keeping Google search as the default option in mobile Safari. YouTube is available as a third-party app from the App Store, but it’s no longer the default video service in iOS. Apple could also take up the move to support Vimeo in response to Google allowing iOS developers to enable a setting in their own apps that automatically opens YouTube videos in the YouTube app, instead of mobile Safari.
But it’s also just as likely that Apple is simply increasing feature parity between iOS and Mac OS X. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has built-in Flickr and Vimeo integration, as well as Twitter and Facebook. Facebook integration also began on OS X and moved to iOS, so Yahoo’s photo service and Vimeo’s social video service could be following that same path.
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As the dust begins to settle from one of the most significant acquisitions in web-land since the Facebook/Instagram deal, the warm glow of euphoria created by Yahoo’s $1.1-billion takeover of Tumblr has given way to the harsh reality of blending — or, more importantly, not blending — two vastly different companies and cultures. In a statement about the deal, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer promised not to “screw it up,” a comment undoubtedly aimed at the sensitive community of Tumblr fanatics. But is it even possible for Yahoo to keep this promise?
Even before the news was confirmed on Monday, critics with long memories were reminding anyone who would listen about Yahoo’s track record with acquisitions, which has some rather notorious bumps in it, including two major ones known as GeoCities and Flickr. Those two deals alone have made many question whether Yahoo will be able to do the right thing with Tumblr — and while it may be unfair to lay the blame for these at Marissa Mayer’s feet, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the future of this latest acquisition.
How long will it take yahoo to ruin tumblr?—
Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) May 19, 2013
GeoCities + Flickr: billions in missed opportunities
In 1999, Yahoo bought GeoCities for about $3.5 billion, which even at the time was an eye-popping amount. Although it was over a decade ago, which is eons in internet time, there are some broad similarities between what GeoCities was then and what Tumblr is now: both were distinctive and somewhat chaotic communities, focused on allowing individuals to create their own space. Yahoo did a number of things that arguably accelerated the demise of its high-priced acquisition, including trying to monetize it through hosting fees and cheesy banner ads.
The other stick that many anti-Yahoo types use when they want to beat the company up about its acquisition strategy is Flickr, the pioneering photo community that languished under Yahoo’s ownership until relatively recently. As many of its hard-core fans (including me) have argued in the past, Flickr was — or at least could have been — Instagram before Instagram.
There have been a number of post-mortems on what happened with Flickr, but in a nutshell Yahoo did almost everything wrong: the larger company took away or smothered much of the photo-sharing community’s most important features, prevented its employees from innovating or growing, and forced all kinds of integration between the two platforms that did nothing to benefit users — in fact, precisely the opposite. It was like the trifecta of failure, and a perfect example of why most large-scale acquisitions don’t work.
“All Yahoo cared about was the database its users had built and tagged. It didn’t care about the community that had created it or (more importantly) continuing to grow that community by introducing new features.”
Successful mergers are exceedingly rare
It’s certainly reasonable to argue — as many of her fans in Silicon Valley have since the Tumblr deal was announced — that Marissa Mayer shouldn’t be held to account for these lapses, since she had nothing to do with them and the internet has changed a lot since then. Yahoo is also substantially more desperate than it used to be (if that’s possible), and that has arguably made Mayer more cautious about potential screw-ups.
But the bottom line is that just because Mayer is a new CEO doesn’t mean she or the company won’t screw Tumblr up somehow anyway — either deliberately or by accident. That’s because large companies like Yahoo have a way of destroying the value of the things they acquire even if they don’t mean to do so, especially when the thing they have acquired is a somewhat unique community with special characteristics, which Tumblr arguably is.
This is why successful large acquisitions of web communities or services are so rare — rare enough that almost everyone can only point to a single example: namely, Google buying YouTube (although Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram is looking like it may be another one). The question for Yahoo and Mayer is whether Tumblr can be kept as a distinct entity and yet still monetized, as YouTube has been, or whether the process of monetization will inevitably turn Tumblr into the latest example of a MySpace-style failure.
Can Yahoo do what Google did with YouTube?
Former YouTube exec Hunter Walk took a look at what Google did right in the case of YouTube, and boiled it down to five factors, including keeping the product from getting too intertwined with the parent company and maintaining a separate physical identity. But to me the most important ones were:
Protect Tumblr from “helpful” Yahoos: This is where the accidental destruction of acquisitions often comes from — people who just want to help, but whose requests for features and other attempts at integration wound up almost “hugging us to death,” as Walk puts it. There is a powerful desire to get efficiencies out of acquisitions, but many of those attempts fail badly and ruin the thing they were trying to monetize or grow in the first place.
Stop short-term monetization that won’t scale: Walk talks about how YouTube managed to avoid the natural desire to build all sorts of easy-win monetization methods into the platform, and focused instead on longer-term approaches that were harder to sell in the early going but built more value. If Yahoo sees Tumblr as a way to bulk up its banner ad or other programs, it could wind up making the exact same mistake that YouTube was able to avoid.
In the end, much of the answer to the question about Yahoo screwing up Tumblr rests on Marissa Mayer, and her ability to stave off the desires of both the board of directors and the other senior managers who see Tumblr as either a distraction or a digital cow to be milked and then sent to the abbatoir.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Stephen Brace and Getty Images / Chris Jackson and Pamuk Sekerli Tardis
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The 20th century’s printed output is available in digital format, but that’s not the case for television — decades worth of TV broadcasts, which represent a rich news and cultural heritage, are instead locked up and unavailable. The Internet Archive has been trying to change that. Starting in September, the San Francisco non-profit embarked on an ambitious plan to collect all shows going back to the start of TV, and offer clips of them available online.
The outfit got a big boost this week thanks to a $1 million donation from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which will be used to expand its growing video library and to make it easier for video browsers to find everything from Jon Stewart to Walter Cronkite.
Right now, the Internet Archive has more than 400,000 news clips dating from 2009 that it offers as a research tool to scholars, journalists and the general public. Users can search them using closed captioning tags and other metadata the Archive has assembled.
“You can discover culture that’s languishing unseen and unheard,” Roger Macdonald, Internet Archive television news project director, told me by telephone.
He explained that the Internet Archive, which last year began using BitTorrent as a distribution system, had been recording the broadcasts for years — “we ingest, index and make available,” in Macdonald’s words.
The new money will help the nonprofit afford the petabyte’s worth of broadcast data it collects every year, and stores on servers located at its office, a converted Christian Science church in San Francisco’s Richmond district. Macdonald said the Internet Archive will also hire people to improve what is for now a fairly rudimentary user interface.
There is also the question of how the Internet Archive will be able to obtain older TV footage — think Dan Rather, Howard Cosell, I Love Lucy and so on. For now, the television networks jealously guard their copyright and make such content available in very limited ways; for instance, users can watch old shows from NBC, ABC and CBS at New York’s Paley Center for Media — but cannot do so online.
Macdonald said the Internet Archive, which lets users watch 30 second clips or rent DVDs, is in talks with the networks about gaining access to their content in the capacity of a digital librarian.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/U
A lithium ion battery that can power a smart phone or tablet for up to 25 percent longer between charges than current alternatives is now out in the marketplace, from a venture capital-backed battery startup that has been very quiet for several years. The company, Amprius, is backed by a group of investors including Google chairman Eric Schmidt, VantagePoint Venture Partners, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, among others.
We included Amprius, which was launched in 2008 as a spin out from Stanford University, on our list of 13 battery startups to watch in 2013. The startup has developed a battery based on research from Stanford’s Yi Cui, and its lithium ion batteries, announced Tuesday, use a nano-structured silicon material for the anode part of the battery.
A battery is made up of an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, with an electrolyte in between. Amprius’ nanostructured material allows the anode to be shrunk fourfold, delivering a fourfold increase in energy density.
Battery energy density is the amount of energy that can be stored in a battery per given volume. Amprius said its initial batteries can deliver 580 and 600 watt hours per liter, and its next-gen batteries can deliver 650 and 700 watt hours per liter. Traditional lithium ion batteries are operating at closer to 400 watt hours per liter.
Another one of the challenges that Amprius said it has overcome when building this battery is that it has had to engineer the silicon to make it stable enough to be charged and discharged repeatedly over time. The more stable the silicon, the longer the life time of the battery. Amprius said the anode can be charged and discharged more than 500 times while retaining 80 percent of the original capacity (a requirement for original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs).
Amprius is supplying its batteries to unnamed smartphone and tablet OEMs and is also working with OEMs to design its batteries in custom ways to fit into new consumer electronics, it said. The next-gen batteries are supposed to go into pilot production later this year.
Amprius has raised at least $25 million from investors including the ones listed above as well as IPV Capital, and Trident Capital. The company has an R&D lab in Sunnyvale, Calif., and an R&D lab and pilot production line in Nanjing, China.
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http://allthingsd.com/20130522/sony-boar
http://allthingsd.com/?p=324320
Under pressure from an activist investor to take part of its entertainment business public, Sony said it plans to discuss the proposal with its board.
“The proposal from Third Point, Dan Loeb is something that we should discuss thoroughly at a board meeting and then we’ll decide Sony’s stance,” Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai said in a briefing Wednesday to lay out his strategic vision for the company. “Therefore, we are now going to start the discussion and we are still at the starting stage.”
http://allthingsd.com/20130522/amazon-bo
http://allthingsd.com/?p=324172
Amazon planned to announce today that it is raising the maximum amount of tuition reimbursement it pre-pays to some of its employees from $2,000 to $3,000 a year for up to four years. The program, dubbed Amazon Career Choice, gives financial support toward tuition and related expenses to full-time hourly employees who pursue associate degrees or vocational certifications in fields that entities such as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics have deemed in demand and well-paying. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos first announced the Amazon Career Choice program in a big way last summer with a letter on Amazon’s homepage.
http://allthingsd.com/20130522/scanadu-h
http://allthingsd.com/?p=324160
As it worked to finalize its smartphone health-monitoring attachment, Scanadu decided that its planned $150 device wasn’t going to quite cut it.
The redesigned Scanadu Scout
People wanted more features and the ability to use the Scout on others, not just to measure their own vital statistics. So the company is adding a beefier processor as well as a new design that will allow people to measure their own vitals and those of others. The company is also using the new hardware to measure blood pressure without a cuff at 95 percent accuracy.
“The bad news is it is going to cost a bit more,” Scanadu’s Walter De Brouwer said in an interview. The Scout will now sell for $199 rather than the planned $149.
The company will still offer the first 1,000 devices for the original $149 price via an early testing program launching Wednesday on Indiegogo. The company says selling early products to testers this way will get the company the data it needs to get Food and Drug Administration approval — a necessary step before it can be sold commercially.
Depending on how long that approval takes, De Brouwer said that Scanadu hopes to make Scout commercially available in late 2014 or early 2015.
“Then we will be a real tricorder,” he said, arriving just in time for a Qualcomm-sponsored prize to build a commercial version of the “Star Trek” tricorder.
To tide it over, De Brouwer said the largely bootstrapped startup has raised a bit more money.
“Obviously, we are not a rich company, but we have enough to pull [it] off.”
http://allthingsd.com/20130522/social-st
http://allthingsd.com/?p=324302
Urturn, the London-based social startup focused heavily on the music and entertainment industry, announced Wednesday that it raised $13.4 million in venture capital. The round was led by Balderton Capital, which contributed more than $10 million, with participation from Debiopharm Group. The startup also launched an iOS mobile app, and is working to incorporate more personalized actions created by select developers through Urturn’s API, currently in private beta.
http://allthingsd.com/20130522/why-micro
http://allthingsd.com/?p=324234
Like everyone else, Microsoft wants to control your living room.
The problem with that plan: The cable guy already controls your living room. He’s not leaving anytime soon.
So, despite what you may have read yesterday, the new Xbox One isn’t TV’s future, today.
If you squint at it, you can imagine that Xbox One can help Microsoft dislodge the cable guy one day. But, for now, Microsoft is simply trying to take up a little more space. More precisely: Its box won’t let you watch live TV unless you have a pay TV subscription.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, as Microsoft has already signaled for some time that it wants to work with the pay TV guys, not boot them out.
Its previous forays into moving TV to the Xbox, via deals with programmers like ESPN and HBO, have only worked for customers who already had pay TV. And while Microsoft has previously mulled creating its own TV service, it has shelved the idea, and insists that it doesn’t want to build a pay TV competitor.
Related: With the exception of Intel, every big outsider that has approached the TV Industrial Complex has reached the same conclusion. Which is why Google Fiber TV looks just like regular cable TV, and why Apple TV has yet to do much more than play Netflix and iTunes.
And Microsoft will be literally tied to cable. In order to get the TV part of Xbox One to work, you’ll essentially end up plugging it into your existing cable box, via another box that lets you perform an “HDMI pass-through.”
In essence, Xbox One is acting as a sort of custom remote for your cable box, which will let you change the channel; it is also creating its own programming guide so you can see what’s on TV.
But note that Xbox One won’t give you full control of the set-top box — you won’t have access to the DVR your cable company provides, or any video-on-demand features they offer. If you want to do any of that, you’ll have to switch inputs, and go back to the cable guy’s system.
And beyond the technical arrangements, Microsoft is being as explicit as it can about the goodwill it has toward the cable guys. While the company’s marketing says its box can do everything, Microsoft’s official communications and fine print make it clear that it can’t do squat — TV-wise — without the TV Industrial Complex.
Here, for instance, is a response I got from a Microsoft PR rep when I asked about the Xbox One’s program guide, and whether they needed permission from the cable guys to build it:
“Information that appears in the OneGuide has been created and licensed by Xbox, and works in conjunction with video services that consumers subscribe to from cable and satellite companies. We value our partnerships with MVPDs [pay TV operators], and our vision is for Xbox One to work in tandem with MVPDs’ services and offer a unique and interactive experience on top of your favorite entertainment.”
Got that? “In conjunction” … “in tandem” … “on top of.” Pretty clear.
What is interesting is that, as far as I can tell, Microsoft hasn’t gotten the explicit blessing from all of the pay TV services to launch the Xbox One. It seems to have told some, but not all, of the TV guys about it in advance, but in any case doesn’t think it needs their permission.
In an interview with my colleague Eric Johnson on Tuesday, Microsoft entertainment boss Yusuf Mehdi said Microsoft would be reaching out to the TV guys to get additional features, like DVR recording and playback. And if Microsoft continues with that kind of tight partnership, then the cable guys won’t be leaving your house for a long time.
That said, if Xbox One really does become the primary way you watch video programming — not just live TV but video, period — then it’s possible to imagine a scenario where Microsoft, with an improved bargaining position, starts trying to push the cable guys closer to the door.
Don’t count on it happening any time soon, though. Those dudes are hard to move.
http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/fu
Most department stores and pharmacies still have photo labs and kiosks that let you print your photos. Just pop in an SD card or a USB drive, select the photos you want to print, and out they come, in whatever size you choose and on whatever paper you prefer. We have to wonder though: Who does that anymore?
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David Foster Wallace's commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon college has gone down as one of the better pieces of life advice out there. His suggestion is pretty simple: when you're annoyed with another person, think about why you would do what they're doing.
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http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/20
For a while now, I have been thinking about what civil disobedience looks like in the Internet Age. Certainly DDOS attacks, and politically motivated hacking in general, is a part of that. This is one of the reasons I found Molly Sauter's recent thesis, "Distributed Denial of Service Actions and the Challenge of Civil Disobedience on the Internet," so interesting:
Abstract: This thesis examines the history, development, theory, and practice of distributed denial of service actions as a tactic of political activism. DDOS actions have been used in online political activism since the early 1990s, though the tactic has recently attracted significant public attention with the actions of Anonymous and Operation Payback in December 2010. Guiding this work is the overarching question of how civil disobedience and disruptive activism can be practiced in the current online space. The internet acts as a vital arena of communication, self expression, and interpersonal organizing. When there is a message to convey, words to get out, people to organize, many will turn to the internet as the zone of that activity. Online, people sign petitions, investigate stories and rumors, amplify links and videos, donate money, and show their support for causes in a variety of ways. But as familiar and widely accepted activist tools -- petitions, fundraisers, mass letter-writing, call-in campaigns and others -- find equivalent practices in the online space, is there also room for the tactics of disruption and civil disobedience that are equally familiar from the realm of street marches, occupations, and sit-ins? This thesis grounds activist DDOS historically, focusing on early deployments of the tactic as well as modern instances to trace its development over time, both in theory and in practice. Through that examination, as well as tool design and development, participant identity, and state and corporate responses, this thesis presents an account of the development and current state of activist DDOS actions. It ends by presenting an analytical framework for the analysis of activist DDOS actions.
One of the problems with the legal system is that it doesn't make any differentiation between civil disobedience and "normal" criminal activity on the Internet, though it does in the real world.
http://allthingsd.com/20130521/choosy-de
http://allthingsd.com/?p=324229
The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.
– Steve Wilhite, the inventor of the GIF, on its pronunciation. Mr Wilhite was the recipient of a lifetime achievement award at the Webbys.
http://allthingsd.com/?p=324272
Already facing big challenges on the sales side, Taiwanese phone maker HTC has been hit with a wave of staff departures.
Chief among the exits is Chief Product Officer Kouji Kodera, with several others from the marketing and communications ranks also having recently left, including Eric Lin, who is now working for Microsoft’s Skype unit, and communications chief Jason Gordon, who left on Friday.
Kodera, a former head of products for Sony Ericsson, joined HTC in 2010.
“Kouji Kodera has left HTC to pursue other interests,” HTC said in a statement. “We appreciate his contributions and wish him all the best. Scott Croyle will take over his duties.”
Kodera declined to comment, as did Gordon.
Once a rapidly rising star in the phone world, HTC is struggling to reverse a steep sales slide. The company has pinned much of its hope on the HTC One. Though well-regarded, the device finds itself competing not only against products from Samsung and Apple — but also the giant marketing budgets that accompany those devices.
HTC had hoped to also get a boost by being first with a device supporting Facebook’s Home software, but the HTC First has not fared well at AT&T, and it’s unclear whether a price cut has helped move the needle. Both HTC and AT&T have declined to comment on sales.
The staff departures were first reported earlier Tuesday by The Verge.
Though hardly alone in scaling back its presence at CTIA, HTC was much less visible at the show than in past years. The company opted to skip the show floor entirely, and instead had a small booth at the MobileFocus press event on Tuesday night, where it showed the HTC One and the intricate manufacturing process that goes into its unibody aluminum casing.
The latest release of Chrome (27), now available for download, adds Google's conversational voice search for Star Trek-style voice searching.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/uclick/ca
http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2
