The universe of apps for Google Glass, initially limited to the New York Times and the social network Path, is expanding rapidly. Google on Thursday announcedseveral more entries to its Glassware stable: Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Tumblr, CNN news updates, Elle fashion features and a Glass-only game called Ice Breaker.

Look for more Glass apps to surface as the augmented reality goggles move closer to a public rollout later this year.

In all of the razzle-dazzle coming out of Google I/OWednesday morning, it’s easy to forget about the company’s core product: Search. But Google didn’t forget about Search, showing off a number of interesting improvements, including a new hands-free feature that will bring voice-activated searches to desktop computers.

(See also Google Is Turning Search Into The Planet’s Biggest Anticipatory System.)

Google Loves Star Trek

The new voice commands for Google Search are the culmination of Google’s fixation on the Star Trek computer interface of the future. It’s something that Senior VP Amit Singhal very much wants to see – and Google Chrome browser users on desktops and laptops will get to share in the experience, simply by saying the phrase “OK Google” and then speaking the desired search term. No need to even press a button.

Voice search is already familiar to iOS users, in the form ofSiri, and Google Search for Android users. The roll out on Android no doubt served as a great testbed to get Google’s voice-recognition algorithms better adapted to human speech patterns.

According to a blog post by by Google senior VP Amit Singhal, the idea is to turn search into a natural language conversation:

Soon, you’ll be able to just say, hands-free, “OK Google, will it be sunny in Santa Cruz this weekend?” and get a spoken answer. Then, you’ll be able to continue the conversation and just follow up with “how far is it from here?” if you care about the drive or “how about Monterey?” if you want to check weather somewhere else, and get Google to tell you the answer.

Reminder Cards & Knowledge Graphs

Voice was not the only addition to Google Search’s feature set: the company also announced new reminder cards in itsGoogle Now tool. Currently, Now’s cards are based on a set type of search, such as sports team cards based on your frequent searches. Now users will be able to add reminders set to pop up as cards in Google Now whenever your location in time and space (your context) is close to the reminder. Like a note to buy milk when you go by the grocery store.

Google’s search will also start to deliver information in a far more anticipatory way, using Google’s Knowledge Graph to build and manage connections between searches and deliver information based not only on the user’s immediate search, but potential searches that many people ask as a follow-up.

(See also Forget Searching For Content – Content Is About To Start Searching For You.)

All of these features move Google towards a more friction-free form of contextual search – and that promises to bring knowledge to users faster and more seamlessly.

The best way to start the conversation about “Big Data” is to define it. Its name is perhaps confusing and not quite apt, since it implies that existing data is “small,” or that we simply have a lot more data. The reality is, the term Big Data is applied to information that cannot be analyzed with traditional tools or processes.

Big Data has three fundamental characteristics: it involves managing a large volume of information, processing the data quickly or in real time, and integrating a large variety of information sources that may be able to draw conclusions from data connections that are not apparent from the start.

The large quantity of information being uploaded to the Internet represents a wonderful opportunity to segment according to people’s behavior and not just by socio-demographic factors. Companies acquire transactional information from their customers by making them fill out forms, but the challenge for brands is to enrich their databases with information on the customers’ daily habits and behavior, which can be obtained from online chats and then processed, crossed and enriched with many other types of information thanks to Big Data-based initiatives.

Big Data has recently gained relevance because companies are realizing what it can do for them and that it is a gold mine for finding competitive advantages. Proximity’s Juan Manuel Ramírez, Director of Strategy and Development, and Daniel Camprubí, Planner, delve into detail on how you can apply Big Data to the realm of business or marketing, where the conversation revolves around consumer trends, developing new products, and other insights into the market.

Big Data by Digital Lab

BlackBerry has announced today that its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) messenger service will be launching on iOS and Android this summer. The new cross-platform app will support all Apple hardware running iOS 6 and higher, as well as Android version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and above.

It means that for the first time, BlackBerry owners will be able to communicate with users on other mobile platforms, for free, using the BBM service. The new apps will support multi-person conversations, voice note sharing and BlackBerry Groups; the latter of which lets users set up group for up to 30 people in order to share calendar information, photos and other files.

“For BlackBerry, messaging and collaboration are inseparable from the mobile experience, and the time is definitely right for BBM to become a multi-platform mobile service,” Andrew Bocking, Executive Vice President of Software Product Management and Ecosystem at BlackBerry said.

“BBM has always been one of the most engaging services for BlackBerry customers, enabling them to easily connect while maintaining a valued level of personal privacy. We’re excited to offer iOS and Android users the possibility to join the BBM community.”

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins made the announcement at BlackBerry Live shortly after unveiling BBM Channels, a new social feature which will allow any company, celebrity or lifestyle brand to create a public page for BBM users to follow. Channel owners can send out news or status updates at anytime, which users can interact with by leaving a comment or ‘like’.

The concept feels very similar to Plus Friend Home, a combination of both instant messaging and passive social network accounts which was recently unveiled by Korean-startup Kakao for its cross-platform messaging app Kakao Talk.

It’s only a beta program for now, but BlackBerry plans to update the feature every two to four weeks ahead of a full launch later this summer. BBM Channels can post news and status updates at anytime, and users who follow these accounts will be able to comment and like on them too.

BlackBerry says BBM Channels will be added to its upcoming Android and iOS apps later this year, alongside voice and video calling, subject to approval by the App Store and Play Store.

Heins also announced today that BBM now has over 60 million monthly active users, which send and receive over 10 billion messages every day – twice as many as any other mobile messaging app. The number of daily active users that connect with other BBM enthusiasts for at least an hour and a half every day has also risen to 51 million.

It should come as no surprise that BlackBerry wants to expand the BBM service to new users. The rise of cross-platform mobile messaging apps such as Viber and WhatsApp has slowed the growth in BBM users, and perhaps even put off new consumers from switching to the BlackBerry 10 platform. The addition of BBM Channels is an interesting move, but one that will likely struggle to gain the same critical mass of users enjoyed by Twitter or Facebook.

A bold move, or just a case of too little, too late?

Last week, Steve Marriott, Director of Business Development at Mass Relevance, joined us in the Digital Lab to discuss the unique products that can help brands increase social engagement.

Mass Relevance is a social curation company that has come a long way since its start two years ago. They are the first certified Twitter partner licensed to re-syndicate Twitter content for display, and they also pull in social content from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google+. In just two years they’ve collaborated with over 200 major brands, sports teams, publishers and broadcasters—including Nike, Patagonia, GE, Pepsi, MTV, CBS, Fox and NBC—and have produced successful projects with each. Their secret sauce? A simple but effective workflow model, in which Mass Relevance takes content streams from social platforms, puts the streams through their moderation system, which filters out the noise. There are two ways this can happen—through a standardized list where companies check off the things they want filtered out, or through a customized list where companies can specify specific phrases to be included or not included within the social content stream. Finally, the content that remains is redisplayed on a digital end point. And all this happens in less than 3 seconds. Impressive.

In addition to all this, Mass Relevance has a plethora of products for marketers to choose from to engage their audiences.

Tweets on TV/in the Stadium, Mass Polls

One of these products is Tweets on TV. If you’ve ever seen The Voice or American Idol, you’ve seen Tweets on TV. Because they’re one of Twitter’s certified partners, Mass Relevance can access all tweets to a brand’s hashtag—if they weren’t they would be cut off after accessing a random selection of 20-30 tweets. These can be filtered and flowed onto the screen without human moderation, but if the brand prefers, they can hand moderate everything that flows through the fire hose. For live sporting events, Mass Relevance has crafted a product called Tweets in the Stadium, which allows tweets to flow directly to Jumbotrons in stadiums or on fields for spectators to see. Tweets on TV and Tweets in the Stadium both work with Mass Polls, a Twitter voting product created by Mass Relevance as well.

Mass Answers, Mass Maps

Mass Answers is Mass Relevance’s take on Reddit’s IAmA—where interesting people invite others to ask them questions about their lives—for brands. To promote the release of Madonna’s latest album, MDNA, Mass Relevance crafted a Mass Answers campaign called #askmadonna, a call to action to ask Madonna anything. The Mass Relevance team received 110,000 tweets in an hour, removed terms like “Guy Richie”, “Lourdes”, and other things that Madonna’s reps requested, and narrowed down appropriate questions to a couple hundred. Of these, Madonna answered 40. The unique features of this product include coupling up questions and answers so that readers didn’t have to scroll up and down to find the corresponding questions to her answers. Mass Relevance also flags verified account tweets, and brings them to the forefront so that Madonna can reply to, say, Justin Bieber, instead of Mary Sue from Ohio. Furthermore, with Mass Maps, brands (in this case, Madonna) can see where people are talking about them (her). These maps are interactive and update in real time, and tweets plotted on the map can be access through the map itself.

Mass Expression

Mass Relevance social experiences can live anywhere—on Facebook tabs, brand websites, you name it. To simplify the call to action, which gets consumers to interact with the brand, Mass Relevance has come up with a “mad lib product” of sorts called Mass Expression. For example, in a cause-related marketing campaign for Patagonia, visitors could fill in the blanks to tweet out this statement: “I vote the environment #becauseilove [blank]”. Although Patagonia is a clothing brand and not an activist- or non-profit group, their eco-friendly products are a part of what their brand is about. The Mass Expression product, in steering consumers to participate around a particular subject, can allow brands to own social content that might highlight a different aspect of their identity.

Tweet to Unleash

The (arguably) most exciting Twitter product that Mass Relevance has is the Tweet to Unleash tool. Essentially how it works is that a brand has content that they know fans would want to see, but keeps it hidden until a certain level of social participation is reached. For the release of Tom Cruise’s fourth Mission: Impossible film, Ghost Protocol, the trailer remained hidden until 50,000 tweets to #mission was reached, upon which Tweeters could watch it.

So given all these products (and more), how can a brand use Mass Relevance and its services to its greatest benefit? The image below says it all.

Take a moment to think about it. The mobile market – hardware, software, apps, services, infrastructure – is expanding to just about every corner of the wold. And as mobile connects the entire planet – linking billions of people in real-time from almost any place you can imagine – it is re-constructing how people everywhere engage in shopping, banking, entertainment, work, healthcare and learning.

Mobile Is Everywhere

This isn’t news, of course, mobile’s momentum has been building for years. But when you consider some of the data released this year – and give it time to really sink in – the implications are staggering.

Figures published earlier this year from the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU), for example, reveal the amazing spread of mobile connectivity. According to the ITU’s “facts and figures” publication, mobile penetration rates (pdf) are now about equal to the global population – including an 89% penetration rate in “developing countries,” which currently have the highest mobile growth rates.

In other words, nearly everyone on the planet has a mobile phone – or will have one soon enough.

The ITU report also notes that “mobile broadband” subscriptions have grown from 278 million in 2007 – when the iPhone was first introduced – to 2.1 billion in 2013 – an annual growth rate of 40%.

While larger still in the developed world, since 2010, mobile broadband adoption has grown fastest in developing countries – with rates hitting 82% in Africa and 55% in the Arab states.

Cost Still Matters

One stumbling block to universal mobile penetration, of course, remains cost – at least with respect to data connectivity. The price of the phones and smartphones have dropped in price significantly. Consider that Nokia releases its Asha 501 next month – for $99 or less (without being subsidized by a contract). The Asha 501′s specs are surprisingly robust, although the device is initially designed only for 2G networks.

Android smartphone prices could go even lower. There are already numerous Android phones available in the developing world for less than $100 (off-contract). And venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently told Bloomberg, expect $50 Android smartphones to be available this year.

Mobile broadband, though, is still relatively expensive in the developing world. As the ITU notes, whereas an “entry level mobile broadband plan” represents approximately 1-2% of per capita income in developed nations, in developing nations  the cost ranges from 11-25% of per capita income.” That said, mobile broadband is oftencheaper than wired-broadband in developing countries.

Mary Meeker’s Metrics

If the ITU’s numbers aren’t enough to convince you that mobile is eating the world, look back just a bit farther.

At the end of 2012, Mary Meeker, an analyst with Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, offered data on global Internet trends and the stunning rise of mobile was plain. There are already, she noted, more than 1 billion smartphone subscribers worldwide. In addition, since the fourth quarter of 2010, smartphone and tablet sales have exceeded PC sales – and the growth trends continue to favor these newer devices. Mobile devices now account for 13% of global Internet traffic – and rising.

If this keeps up, and all indications are that it’s not going to stop any time soon, the global trend toward mobile will reach every corner of the globe and affect just about every aspect of our lives.

Storage, databases, query processing and algorithms are all extremely important — heck, visualization is next to nothing without them — but in a data-driven world where is obsessed with insights, they’re just the foundational layers. They are to big data what server and network configurations are to mobile-app development on platforms like Parse. If you’re going to find out new things from massive and highly complex data sets, or going to give new types of people the ability to analyze even simple data, the presentation of that data and the ability to create consumable presentations are critical.

With that in mind, here are six startups I’ve seen trying to fundamentally change the way that data is visualized. Some are highly complex under the covers, some are not and none are perfect, but they’re all doing their part to make us rethink what it means to look at data and make spreadsheets and static charts look like relics. (And this list is by no means exhaustive, so feel free to add your favorite visualization tools in the comments.) We’ll be highlighting data visualization at our design-focused RoadMap conference in San Francisco in November (sign up hereto get first access to tickets this Summer).

Ayasdi

The idea of network graphs isn’t new, but Ayasdi’s approach to it is. Under the covers, there’s an HBase data store, a technique called topographical topological data analysis and hundreds of machine learning algorithms to churn through complex data sets and determine the similarity among the data points. To the end user, though, there’s a map of the data set that looks a lot like a network graph(only it’s probably not network data) highlighting clusters of related data points that analysts might want to investigate further.

BeyondCORE

BeyondCore actually operates under the same basic premise as Ayasdi — show users the significant correlations so they don’t have to think of the queries that will uncover them — but it uses some different techniques to get there. It uses a different visualization method, too: BeyondCore sticks to standard charts, but actually offers the option of having an avatar talk users through the correlationsthe software has discovered.

ClearStory

ClearStory has a pretty unique product in the works — even if it’s keeping many details and all of its screenshots under lock and key until its formally launches. Essentially, though, it’s trying to tell stories via visualizations that display mashups of numerous data sources, update automatically when the source data changes, and invoke collaboration and social concepts. Here’s Co-founder and CEO Sharmila Mulligan explaining the idea behind ClearStory at Structure: Data in March.

Datahero

Unlike so many data startups, Datahero isn’t trying to woo people fed up with business-intelligence software or the difficulties of getting insights from Hadoop data. Rather, it’s trying to let people with simple business or personal data make simple charts without ever having to enter an Excel function or worry too much about how their spreadsheets are formatted. Early on, Datahero’s visualizations are still pretty commonplace (bars, pies, plots, etc.), but it’s the ease of creating them that’s so unique.

Platfora

Platfora has undertaken the ambitious task of trying to make analyzing mountains of data stored in Hadoop clusters as easy as analyzing their own Stripe data might be for developers using Datahero. It’s based on a foundation of Hadoop and massively parallel query processing, but is presented like an HTML5 version ofcurrent visualization golden boy Tableau that’s all about dragging, dropping, and visually slicing and dicing through data. The latter capability is actually critical in a big data world where there are likely more data points than you can ever digest at once.

Zoomdata

Zoomdata is far from the only analytics company to support mobile devices, but it’s one of the few I know of (Roambi also comes to mind) designed primarily for them. Zoomdata connects to standard business data sources, but takes advantage of touch screens and the D3.js visualization project to offer up some visually interesting charts that are designed to be manipulated like an artist’s palette.

Through our discussions, we came up with a list of testing strategies. Obviously, there are numerous things we came up to test, but I will only highlight five in this post. By looking into these strategies, we will better understand what our pinners are interested in and how best to engage them.

1) Descriptions Length | Short vs. Long:

Does the description of a pin determine whether you “repin” or click through to the source or not? Testing this strategy might be worth your time being that it could increase the life of that pin, not to mention increase traffic to your page.

Short vs Long:

2) Board Titles | To The Point or Fun?

When you search on Pinterest, what is it that you are searching for? “Breakfast” or “Rise and Shine?” How do the titles of your boards affect your search results?  If the two boards were both on your page, which would get higher click through rates?

Found at the top of search results

VS

Found at the bottom of search results

3) Pricing | In The Image or In The Description:

Selling on Pinterest? Perhaps adding a price tag to your image will help you sell it.  I haven’t seen too many big brands do this, but it’s worth exploring.Will there be a difference between a product with a price tag vs. one without?

4) Image Size | Is Bigger Better or Is Content King?

Does image size have an impact on the virality of your pins? My personal opinion is that yes, it does.  If I click into an image and it isn’t as big as I thought it was going to be, then I am less likely to share it, but perhaps the content behind the image is worth re-pinning despite image size…we will see.

5) Image Copy:

What are your personal thoughts on copy within an image? Pinerly (now Reachli) put out the below infographic last year showing what their test results found, but I hardly ever see brands writing out the recipe title in their images. Does it make that big of a difference on the virality of the pin?

Obviously, I encourage you to explore more than just these five tests. The more efficient and engaging you can make your pins, the more brand awareness you will build, the more traffic you might drive to your website, the more sales you might have and the better your organic search results will be.

What are other testing strategies you’ve done? What are testing strategies you’d like to hear the results for? Let us know in the comments below!

—

“There are three sides to every story: Your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying.” – Robert Evans (“The Kid Stays in the Picture”)

I recently met up with my friend and one-time business partner, Steve Lee, who is product director on the Google Glass project, and before that, ran product management on Google Maps for Mobile. Other than a quick tour of the device, Steve basically let me dive in, so as to experience Glass with a beginner’s mind. I won’t bother reviewing the basic capabilities and specs, which have been covered exhaustively already. Instead I want to focus on some of the points that are in debate, and whether I believe that Glass is destined to succeed.

Glass is translucent; designed to be invisible

In “Waves of Power,” David Moschella shows how new disruptive industries begin as verticals, since the complete product solution requires one provider to deliver the whole enchilada. The new industry continues on this path until the solutions finally reach the “good enough” stage, when the larger trend becomes horizontal orientation, so as to achieve ubiquity, commoditization and the broadest possible ecosystem. (In passing, one can see the battle between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android in this light.) The endgame, so to speak, is that the technology becomes persistent, embedded and ever-present to the point of being “invisible.”

It’s a paradoxical concept to be sure. On the one hand, the technology is everywhere; how can it be invisible? On the other, it’s because it’s everywhere that we no longer think about it as exceptional – and, equally, grand solutions can anticipate and incorporate its ever-presence.

Take for instance the evolution of social mores around cellphones. Every day on my morning bus ride to work, virtually everyone is peering into some device, immersed in another world – a concept that once would have been considered rude and shocking. Similarly, I recently endured a ride near a phone-yapping lawyer who was advising a prospective client on their legal rights – casually and unconcerned, within full earshot of others. This is the new normal.

I think that in the not very distant future, the new forms of interactions that come from using Google Glass – or a very close version of them – will not only be accepted, but commonplace. Google Glass is going to be the NEW, new normal.

Designing a new kind of native experience

To further the point, many have suggested that wearing Google Glass out in public will carry a negative stigma, implying rudeness at a minimum, and privacy invasion at worst. My gut tells me that those people are flat out wrong for two reasons. One, that particular cow has already left the barn (my morning bus ride is emblematic of this truth.)

Two, Google got the design ethos exactly right. It’s a device that is designed for everyday use, but also an adornment that is designed to look good when worn as an accessory. For instance, I never post pictures of myself in my articles, yet I specifically wanted to post a picture of myself wearing Glass:

Why? I think it looks good in the same way a merino wool Zegna sweater looks good.

That in itself is a key narrative: Google has taken the ultimate in geekery and made it feel cool.

The hard technical problems solved

In the age of mobility, connectivity and apps, native experiences will flower and bloom prodigiously. Seen in this light, Google Glass is a credible new flower, growing a little bit every day. So is it ready for prime time? In the continuum from alpha to beta to mass-consumer ready, I’d call it a pretty advanced beta.

The bottom line is that it’s clear Google has solved the hard technical problems, the way they think about the complete solution is well thought out, and I can see a clear segmentation path for how they will take this to market.

As such, if you believe that using your voice, simplified touch actions and augmented visuals is a logical native modality for being social, creative, curious or communicative, then Glass is worth a look.

That brings me to the screen, which is neither obtrusive nor ineffective. It’s there when you need it, and it works. That’s analogous to being embedded to the point of invisibility – until, you have a native moment, and then Glass is at the ready. That in itself is a triumph.  Moreover, its voice-directed interface, interaction with smartphones (for 3G service) and touch controls are mightily impressive.

What is a bit pedestrian, though, is the experiential richness of the actual services that you can access through the system’s card like screens – both Google’s and third party ones. For the device to evolve from missionary to mission-critical, this is the area needing the greatest improvement (although, to be fair, we are at the earliest of days of Glass as a developer platform).

The road to mainstream

For me, the key variables start with pricing. The Explorer release is $1500, which obviously targets a very select niche. I can easily see such a device going for $600-800, since there is no carrier subsidy to lean on. Positioned as a fashion accessory at that price point, Glass should grab a Louis Vuitton-esque slice of the market. That’s single-digit millions of units annually. It’s not until such a device gets to $300 or less when one can expect tens of millions of devices selling annually. But in a five-year horizon, that scenario is not hard to see playing out.

I haven’t yet decided if Glass is a device that I would use everyday all the time, or on spot occasions. Then again, who says I need to? This is more about viability and heartbeat, and the fact that there are lots of jobs for such a device in personal, interpersonal, and industry vertical job categories.

On this front, my eyes don’t lie.

Google Glass is now “unofficially officially” out in the wild, early reviews are in, and they’re not spectacular. I’ve been a Glass skeptic from the start, but now I’m just going to come right out and say it: If the developer version is at all an accurate representation of what Glass will look like as a finished product, it’s going to fail.

Here’s why.

No One Likes To Wear Glasses

If people liked wearing glasses, we wouldn’t live in a world where many people opt to wear contacts. I actually don’t like wearing contacts (my eyes are sensitive) and because my insurance covers the cost of buying glasses I dutifully trot in, excited by the prospect that this time, I’m going to find the perfect pair.

(See also: Google Glass Unboxing Photo Gallery: Meet The Future Of Mobile)

An unboxing and overview of what’s in the box with Google Glass, a moonshot project that might just be crazy enough to catch on. I speak from experience: No matter how well they’re fitted, glasses slip. They pinch. They’re easy to forget. They cause headaches. They’re inconvenient when they’re on and even more so when we need to take them off. Put simply, glasses are a hassle and despite my best intentions I give up on wearing them after only a couple months.

No matter your level of respect for Google, it won’t have solved these problems. If anything, they’re only going to be exacerbated by the fact that Glass will need to fit perfectly in order to work perfectly. Also by the fact that people who like to wear glasses can’t currently wear Glass, because it doesn’t work with… glasses!

(See also: Google Glass: What Do You Want To Know About Google’s Internet Eyewear?)

Whether we like wearing glasses or not, we definitely don’t like wearing ugly glasses and Google Glass is nothing if not ugly. (Take a look at any picture that doesn’t feature a professional model at a professional photo shoot and tell me I’m wrong.)

Those of us who are forced to wear corrective glasses are pretty particular about what we’ll wear, and Google says we can have any design we like as long as it’s ugly.

Google Glass Is Already A Parody Of Itself

The iPad elicited pre-release chuckles because we’re all children and we think feminine hygiene products are hilarious. Apple put an end to our juvenile japes by releasing a product that worked well. More important, perhaps, the iPad was announced and then it was released and reviewed as a finished product.

As a result, we were able to walk into a store, buy one and draw our own conclusions. And we did. Millions of times, collectively.

Not so with Google Glass. The devices are out there, yes, but most of us will never know someone who owns a pre-release pair. Many of us already understand that wearing prescription glasses kind of sucks, and even if we have no real idea what it’s like to meld a tiny screen to that experience, adding to bad doesn’t often make good.

This means we’ll spend the next several months forming our opinions based on preconceived notions, reviews, word-of-mouth and, yes, Saturday Night Live skits.

The Reviews Have Been Terrible

Whether it’s battery life, how well they function, the price to value ratio, or build quality, no one seems to have much nice to say about Google Glass in its current form. (ReadWrite’s Taylor Hatmaker is one exception.) You might retort that it’s unfair to review a beta product, but Google could have released Glass alongside an NDA or an embargo, and it didn’t do that. It unconditionally put the “future of tech” in the hands of any journalist who was willing to shell out $1500 and hoped for the best.

Is it possible that Google will completely overhaul their flagship next-generation mobile computer in an effort to address these issues? Sure it is. I think it’s unlikely, but it’s possible. Does it matter? Is “Joe Average” going to spend his money on a first-of-its-kind product that was savaged in early reviews? Not likely.

Word-Of-Mouth Has Been Terrible

Glasshole. It’s not terribly clever — okay, it’s actually sort of clever — but it caught on. And it makes a strong and succinct point that if you wear these, you’re kind of a dick. This isn’t a jab at the product, it’s a commentary about the person wearing the product. If you’re wearing them, that person is you.

That’s the kiss of death for any device, let alone an expensive product that also happens to be getting so-so reviews at best. (Maybe Glass won’t be expensive once it’s actually released. But Google is cultivating the idea that the device will be expensive by keeping silent about the eventual price.)

Live from New York: Google Glass Is Terrible!

If Glass were well-reviewed, I’d leave this alone. The problem isn’t that Saturday Night Live is making fun of a new tech product; they do that all the time. The problem is that Saturday Night live is parodying a product and it’s hard to tell that it’s a parody. I’ve seen videos of people wearing Glass and they’re experiencing all the issues that Fred Armisen sends up in his sketch.

The joke is that his character is going out of the way to seem enthusiastic about Glass despite all the glitches, and therein lies the difference between parody and reality: Most of the “real” reviewers seem to be just as confounded by things like poor speech recognition, but far from being enthusiastic, they seem mostly disappointed that “the future” is so wonky.

Google needs an army of disciples who will evangelizedespite flaws, and thus far, it seems like they’ve just gotRobert Scoble. (This is a good time, I think, to bring up my point about professional models again.)

Google needs to get out in front of the impression that Glass doesn’t work well, and it has yet to do so.

Wear No Evil

Add to all that my ongoing concerns about wearer discomfort, the potential for long-term negative impacts on our vision, inevitable privacy issues, and the likelihood that businesses will ban the use of Google Glass outright.

Maybe Google is giving us a preview of the future. Maybe we should all be excited that Google is willing push the envelope by trying something new.

For now, though, maybe we should all come to terms with the idea that Google is facing a failure of epic proportions.

The same week that brought us a video of someone firing a gun built using parts manufactured on a 3D printer, on Wednesday offered us an inspiring story about using the same type of printer to manufacture a prosthetic hand for more than hundred times less than the cost of a traditional prosthetic set of fingers.

The story of the Robohand is as inspiring as an Oprah interview. One of the participants, however, noted that he didn’t intend to help those missing a limb. Instead, he sought out a 3D printed hand to save himself after a wood working accident shaved off four of his fingers. And yet, thanks to a collaboration between carpenter Richard Van As in Johannesburg, and a Seattle prop designer a five-year old born without fingers now has a more functional hand.

There’s also an Indigogo campaign to raise money to make more of these and help more children and adults born without fingers get their own Robohands. It’s heartwarming.

The collaboration between the two also emphasizes the best of what the internet and connectivity has to offer. This story wouldn’t have happened without a 3D printer, but it also wouldn’t have happened without the rapid dissemination of information enabled by the internet. For example, the South African woodworker first learned about Ivan Owen in Seattle because a video Owen had done showing a robot hand he had made went viral.

Then, there’s the building of the hand, which costs about $150. After Owen and Van As developed the plans for a hand, they made the plans open source andfreely available on the internet. At a point where plenty of people are worrying about the IP infringement implications of 3D printing, such as printing out a proprietary design such as LEGOs or the dangers of evading regulations by printing harmful devices such as guns, this story is a reminder that people will use 3D printing for good as well.

Yes, this story is being pushed hard by MakerBot, the company that makes 3D printers (there are more than 15,000 of them in use today), but it’s also a reminder that as any new technology is introduced it will be used for both good and bad. And with regulators having met last month in Washington DC a conference to discuss some of the implications of 3D printing technology, it’s good to remember that 3D printers are a tool capable of good or bad when pondering upcoming laws and regulations.

We are lucky to live in a time when technological advances are making new things possible at pace that is possibly more rapid than any other time in human history. We have the rapid dissemination of knowledge and ability to share across continents thanks to broadband. Crowd funding tools now allow a wider spectrum of people to raise money for their ideas and we also have tools like 3D printing to turn digital designs into physical products.

And perhaps most of all, we have an engaged community of people who have the technical know-how reaching out to those around the world who have the curiosity and intelligence to make a difference. Now those billions can have the tools as well.

Ever wonder why it has taken so long for your robot butler to arrive? It’s 2013, so why aren’t those long-promised robotic domestic servants helping out around the house yet?

One reason for the delay: Robot engineers lacked a common platform on which to communicate and collaborate with one another. Robotic hardware and software systems had to be built from the ground up every time.

Open Source Robotics

But just as open-source operating systems for computers have amped up digital innovation, the robotics industry has undergone a similar transformation over the last five years. Ever since the advent of ROS (Robot Operating System), an open-source platform on which engineers could build robotic programs and apps, robotic innovation has picked up speed.

On Friday, robot engineers from around the world gather for the second annual ROScon in Stuttgart, Germany. Meanwhile, ROS has become a requirement for several high-profile DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) robotics projects - in this year’s DARPA Robotics Challenge, every contestant will use ROS.

“ROS has also started to appear in job listings and on resumes,” said Tully Foote, ROS Platform Manager at the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). ”At robotics conferences and presentations, most people are using ROS on their robots,” Foote said, “and those who are not often justify why the are not using ROS if they are not.”

“ROS is distinguished by its focus on building a community of collaborators,” Foote added. “From its inception, ROS has been designed to facilitate sharing of the software between members of the worldwide robotics community.”

Leveling The Robotics Playing Field

Steve Rainwater, a robotics expert and blogger at Robots.net, agrees that ROS is today’s “leading software framework for robotics,” because it integrates exceptionally well with prior robotics research frameworks.

“There have been other projects that tried to write complete robot operating systems from the ground up, but where [ROS creators] Willow Garage got it right is they understand how open source works,” Rainwater said. “They invent the parts they need and integrate them with the parts that already exist.”

ROS “keeps the playing field level to an extent between students and hobbyists at one end of the spectrum and governments and universities at the other,” Rainwater added. “Improvements to robot software can come from either end of that spectrum and because of the way free software licenses work, everyone’s contributions are accessible to benefit the entire community.”

How ROS Works

Robotics research center Willow Garage invented ROS to solve the common platform problem. Today, the platform is overseen by the nonprofit OSRF to ensure that is remains easy to share and distribute.

As an example of how ROS works, imagine you’re building an app. That app is useless without hardware and software – that is, your computer and operating system. Before ROS, engineers in different labs had to build that hardware and software specifically for every robotic project. As a result, the robotic app-making process was incredibly slow – and done in a vacuum.

Now ROS, along with complementary robot prototypes, provide that supporting hardware and software. Robot researchers can shortcut straight to the app building. And since other researchers around the world are using the same tools, they can easily share their developments from one project to another.

What Hath ROS Wrought?

The PR2, Willow Garage’s most sophisticated robot (built on ROS), has been prototyped to a variety of apps already. It can walk the dog, fold the laundry, bring you a beer and even plug itself in when it senses its battery is running low. At $400,000, it’s designed for researchers, not customers, and only 60 exist so far.

“One of the ones I consider most impressive is the PR2 and Rosie making pancakes in Munich,” said Foote. “This is a demonstration of situational awareness, multiple robots coordinating, perception of deformable objects and they are doing it repeatedly with many visitors watching.”

We’re still a long way from affordable, personal robot assistants doing real work in homes and institutions. But the common ROS platform is helping roboticists create workable robot butlers – and many other useful robotics applications – far sooner than would have otherwise been possible.

Images courtesy of Willow Garage.

The result was Lowe’s ingenious Vine campaign “Fix in Six.” Using an iPhone and stop-motion photography, we created a dozen six-second Vine films based on useful how-to tips. The campaign was hailed a whirlwind success—the first campaign of its kind—that brought meaningful, compelling content to a platform often associated with trivial curiosities.

Check out the case video below:

Guest author Darrell Benatar is CEO of UserTesting.com.

It seems so obvious: you have a successful desktop app or website and users are asking for mobile access to it. So you rewrite your current product for mobile. You take out the Flash graphics, rearrange the interface elements, change the font sizes and you’re done.

This sort of “porting” approach rarely succeeds. Most desktop apps and websites are carefully balanced products that have been optimized for years to fit the conditions found on a computer: high-speed continuous network connections, large screen, powerful local processing, keyboard, and mouse.

Mobile has none of those features. What it does have are many features not found in most computers including location awareness and a touchscreen interface. Porting an existing product or site to mobile almost always produces an awkward hybrid that doesn’t work as well as the desktop version.

Two Traps When Porting To Mobile

1. Nothing Changes

Have you ever used a mobile-optimized website only to be dumped back onto a desktop-optimized website? That happens a lot. These old-style Web pages force the users to pinch and zoom constantly and require a lot of horizontal scrolling. Users are often intolerant of these half-mobile sites.

2.  Trying To Recreate Your Desktop User Experience

Failure to create a real mobile experience is the kiss of death, so by now, even the most stalwart desktop software companies have done at least some mobile development. Yet that exposes them to the next big temptation: trying to faithfully recreate your software for mobile. It’s almost always a mistake.

Your users, of course, will tell you they want the full functionality of your website or app transferred to their mobile devices. In reality, though, mobile device can rarely handle the same features and controls without making things way too complicated. The absence of things like Flash and a pointing device like a mouse make it virtually impossible to replicate a traditional desktop experience in mobile.

Rethink For Mobile, Don’t Port

We’ve learned a lot from previous software evolutions. From DOS to Windows, and from Windows to the Web, our digital history is filled with companies that couldn’t rethink their strategies for the new paradigm.

The lesson from these industry transitions is clear: Don’t just reformat your app or website, rethink it. Mobile isn’t just a different set of technologies; it’s a different set of user behaviors and expectations. Desktop computers are generally used in long immersive sessions focused on productivity or entertainment. The user expects to dedicate some time to the session and is relatively tolerant of complexity and involved processes.

In mobile, users expect immediate gratification. The user may have only a minute available so they need to get in, accomplish something and get out. That means the basic workflow of an app or website — its purpose and structure — needs to be redesigned with that foremost in mind.

In some cases, it’s best to break your product or site into several distinct apps or mobile sites. (Facebook has been done some of this with Messages and Camera.) In other cases, the right approach may be to focus on only one area of functionality and completely ignore other features of the computer version. Or you can choose a mixed approach, with one app or website that’s feature-rich and another app that’s rifle-shot focused on a single important mobile feature.

5 Tips to Avoid The Mobile Trap

1. Understand what problems users have: Users often can’t do this sort of thinking for themselves. Skilled product managers need to focus on understanding the users so thoroughly that they can think on their behalf.
2. Design for the mainstream 80% of mobile users: Don’t design for the technophile. You’ll add too many features and make your app and site too complex for anyone else.
3. Decide which user problems to tackle first — and dump the rest: In mobile, it’s better to start with an app or that does a few things well, then gradually add more functionality. Evernote does this particularly well.
4. Functionality is key: Make sure the app or site works properly and is easy to navigate. Then make that design as beautiful as possible.
5. Test for engagement, not just usability: Use all the testing tools available to you to make sure that your users will actually engage with the product you release.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. Ideally, a company should set up a separate team to focus full-time on mobile issues. That is not always affordable. At minimum, you should have a mobile-focused product manager who spends full time rethinking what you need to do to succeed in mobile.

The transition to mobile is dangerous. By relying on traditional assumptions about what makes an app or website effective, companies leave themselves vulnerable to new competitors who design for mobile first. However, by rethinking — instead of merely porting — their mobile apps and sites, companies can avoid falling into mobile traps and gain a competitive advantage for years to come.

When bombs in Boston went off last month, Jill Abramson went in minutes from being a “joyous executive editor” at a ceremony celebrating the New York Times‘ recent Pulitzer Prize wins to overseeing a major story.

Abramson is familiar with working on major news events, including 9/11, but said her primary concerns were different this time.

“In Boston, what was first and foremost was making sure our standards were understood,” Abramson said at the Wired Business conference in New York City on Tuesday.

Abramson said that, for major stories in the past, the only focus was the next day’s paper. This time around, she was preoccupied with ensuring that no one at the paper seized on one of the many thinly sourced rumors flying around on social media.

Abramson, speaking with Wired editor-in-chief Scott Dedich, also addressed other recent trends in media, including a popular marketing trend.

“Native advertising seems to be for the conference set. It’s the buzz word of 2013,” she said, pouring cold water on a term popularized by BuzzFeed and others.

Abramson spoke of the “months and months and months” of effort that went into producing the NYT’s Pulitzer Prize-winning multimedia story “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” but didn’t address how the paper will fund such projects in the future. She did note, though, that technical virtuosity isn’t enough for great journalism.

“I think that what a new editor needs first and foremost, and this sounds old-fashioned, is that gut sense of what’s a great NYT story.”

The discussion didn’t touch on a widely panned Politico report that Abramson was losing the newsroom, but did address her role as first female executive editor of the Times. She said that there was no point being the first woman in anything if there wasn’t going to be a second, but said she was pleased with overall gender roles at the Times.

After a nearly year-long wait, Google Glass #961 made it into my early-adopter open arms on Friday morning. I live in Portland, and while I could have flown down to the Bay Area for the full Glass indoctrination, I instead opted to go it alone and see what strange and serendipitous experiences might result for a lone technophile-turned-cyborg in the Pacific Northwest.

Here, that story begins — with an unboxing of course.

I ordered the “Cotton” color of Glass. At the time of ordering the bright blue and tangerine colors were sold out, but white was my first choice anyway.

When it arrived, the black outer packaging was about to fall off… a bit disconcerting considering Glass is a $1500 device.

“XE” Explorer Edition logo, for pre-orders from last year’s Google I/O

Glass came with sparse instructions, but at least there were a few arrows.

The front of the device, and what you’ll be looking through.

The 5-megapixel, 720p camera sits on an adjustable arm.

Google Glass is surprisingly lightweight, even more so than I’d expected.

The device charges via a micro-USB, included in the box.

Google Glass uses bone conduction technology so that what the wearer hears is amplified considerably.

The black and white micro-USB and microfiber pouch (with a hard case bottom) were nice luxury touches.

Glass packs 12 gigabytes of memory for all the photos and videos you’ll be taking.

Looking through Glass really does feel like glancing up at a tiny TV screen. The image is reflected from the outside.

Much more is on the way for our Google Glass coverage. After I finally got the thing on my face, I wore Glass for 48 hours straight (excepting a few moments and sleep of course — no Scoble-style showering here).

Let’s just say that it’s been a really interesting weekend. Google’s evolution of the smartphone has surprised me more times than I can count, so stay tuned.

When I started wearing Fitbit’s clip-on fitness tracker a few months ago, I loved how easy it was to hide. You can clip it to a pants pocket (or ladies can clip it to an undergarment) and no one has to know that it’s there.

But I, like a few of my colleagues and other users, soon discovered a downside to Fitbit’s (see disclosure) discreet design — it’s so inconspicuous that you can forget about it entirely. On several occasions, it ended up in my laundry hamper, on the verge of taking a dunk in the washing machine. And many days, I’d simply forget to re-attach it to an article of clothing.

So I was curious to check out Fitbit’s newest device, the Flex wristband, which the company debuted earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show and is available starting today.

Like the Nike Fuelband and Jawbone’s UP, the Flex is a sporty band worn around the wrist. It logs steps taken, distance traveled, hours slept and active minutes – a new stat measuring the number of moderate-intensity cardio minutes experienced a day. It syncs wirelessly via Bluetooth with Fibit iOS and Android apps and also displays data through an online dashboard.

I chose Fitbit’s One tracker over the Fuelband and UP precisely because I didn’t want an extra accessory on my wrist. But after wearing the Flex for a couple of days, I can see the benefits of the new design. It’s nice not rummaging through your laundry hamper to find the tracker or trying to find a suitable pocket each day on which to clip it. And while I loved the One’s sleep-tracking and alarm capabilities in theory, I rarely actually put it in the device’s nighttime wrist band so that it could do actually do its job. With the Flex, it’s easier to monitor sleep and use its wake-up feature because the tracker is already attached to your wrist (although you do need to remember to tap it into sleep mode).

I also liked the simplicity of the Flex’s display. With the One, I was constantly fumbling under layers to check my steps or loading the app and waiting for the Bluetooth connection to show my progress. But the Flex includes LED lights that indicate how close you are to achieving your daily goal instead of an actual screen that shares stats. With a couple of taps, it shows one to four lights, with each light representing 20 percent of your daily steps. When you reach your goal, the device buzzes in acknowledgement.

Still, despite the extra convenience I experienced with the new Flex design, I’m still not in love with its aesthetic. The band was more comfortable and unobtrusive than I expected it to be, but (like the Fuelband and UP) it’s still more of an accessory than I’d like it to be. It also took me a while to get the band to snap into place on my wrist (the company acknowledges that the clasp can be tricky but wanted to err on the side of making it more secure).

Those who already have a Fitbit or other activity tracking device might not be in a rush to buy another. But it’s an attractive, full-featured option for those in the market for an activity tracker — and its $99.95 price tag might be more appealing than the slightly more expensive Fuelbands and UPs.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

The controversy over Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban telecommuting at Yahoo just won’t go away. Mayer said the move was necessary to foster collaboration at the struggling new media giant, but what about startups? Is remote working right for very young companies? Are there particular issues to watchout for?

To learn more, we asked eight founders from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) to share their company policies with respect to work outside the office – and why it works for their teams.

It turns out that while many young startups do have entirely or partly remote remote workforces, they still feel it’s important to have some sort of physical space for meetings and “collaborative” work. Many have offices they use some or all of the time, and others promote remote work as a privilege or perk.

1. Boost Productivity With Fridays At Home

At Scripted, we always work from home on Fridays and have a flexible vacation and sick day policy. Our office is simply a physical resource we use to collaborate and socialize. If on any particular day this resource isn’t required or is detrimental to your productivity, then you don’t need to use it. Plus, our Fridays from home boost productivity the rest of the week. We all love it. - Ryan Buckley, Scripted

2. Establish Asynchronous Collaboration

We’ve gotten the best results from a team that has the flexibility to work when and where they believe makes the most sense, coupled with a strong anchor in our office as the primary locale for everyone. I’d say more than 75% of the team’s time is spent in or near the office, but most of our collaboration is done asynchronously using tools like Yammer, Trello, Salesforce and others. - Derek Shanahan, Playerize

3. Create A Culture Of Communication

Our team is based in San Francisco, Atlanta and Los Angeles. We are rarely in a room together. Agenda-driven team calls limit the ability to collaborate. We found considerable success in transitioning from an “emailing” company to a “calling” one. When you call a teammate with a question, you work together to create a solution. Impromptu conference calls with multiple offices are truly effective. - Aaron Schwartz, Modify Watches

4. Make Remote Work A Privilege

Our people work remotely only after they’ve been in the office for a while. I need to get to know their personalities first to make sure they understand our culture and interests. Then, they can work from wherever they want. Real-time collaboration tools like Skype, HipChat and Google Drive make it easy to stay in the loop, no matter where you are. - Jim Belosic, ShortStack/Pancake Labs

5. Set Up A Daily Huddle Call

We’ve implemented a daily huddle call at 1:11 p.m. This keeps everyone on the same page. Tracking our most important daily metrics together, going over 24-hour agendas and discussing bottlenecks are regular activities. We do not have an office, but we have four people who live locally and get together once or twice a month for lunch or coffee. Hiring locally and doing daily huddles helps greatly. - Joe Barton, Barton Publishing

6. Trust Your Employees

As a company whose entire company culture is established on the foundation of remote working, we really believe in flexible work. It starts at the beginning: you must hire with the knowledge that your employees will be independent and responsible and have the capacity to work from home. When you hire right and place your trust in these employees, collaboration happens and people are productive. - David Ehrenberg, Early Growth Financial Services

7. Encourage Balance And Flexibility

Our team of five works on a remote basis, even though we’re mostly located in New York. I just spent seven months overseas; it was difficult scheduling agendas and regular calls. Technologies like Skype, Ghat and iMessage made it work. We try to have balance and flexibility, and that’s what we pride ourselves on. Yvon Chouinard’s book, Let My People Go Surfing, gives insight into our philosophy. -Matt Wilson, Under30Media

8. Implement Productivity-Based Measures

Our entire company is remote and has great workflow tools in place. I agree with Mayer’s decision since people blatantly took advantage of the policy. The incentives to be productive were not effectively structured. Your team needs compensation for productivity-based measures and salary. We developed workflows to require collaboration and transparency. Everyone can see what everyone else is doing. - Chuck Cohn, Varsity Tutors

Any attendee at this year’s CES couldn’t help but notice the sheer number of wearable health vendors in the health and fitness section of the convention floor. What was once a small corner at last year’s show has blossomed into a couple hundred exhibitors. Confirming the trend is real, ABI Research claims that nearly 30 million wireless wearable health devices were shipped in 2012 and that figure is projected to grow to 48 million in 2013. But with so many new companies producing their activity monitors, fitness trackers and calorie counters, what is the tangible future for this segment of emerging tech?

Well, we may have gotten a preview of that recently with Jawbone’s acquisition of BodyMedia (Disclosure: the author’s company, Comcast Ventures, is an investor in BodyMedia). Coming on the heels of Zeo closing the doors on its innovative sleep tracking device, is it possible the pendulum is already swinging from proliferation and expansion to consolidation in just four short months since CES?

I think it’s still too soon to make that call, but clearly market leaders like Jawbone are looking forward, identifying what still needs to be solved in this category, and acting strategically. It’s going to be a land grab for the right talent, intellectual property and data that can help.

Below are three key components that companies in the wearable technology segment still need to address in order to produce positive results for today’s consumers and stay relevant:

1. Accuracy and efficacy: The core sensing technology for many of these products is a three-axis accelerometer of the same sort found in our smartphones. A lot can be inferred from one sensor, but having a multitude of sensors sharpens the accuracy of what we think the body is doing. That’s why we are seeing additional sensors such as heart rate, skin temperature, galvanic skin response and heat flux becoming more prevalent in these devices. It’s also critical to appreciate the increased order of magnitude in difficulty when going from one sensor to multiple sensors.  Sensor fusion is the future, but sensor fusion is hard.  Only true data scientists need apply.When dealing with personal health, “close enough” is not good enough, and this class of product could be leading its consumers astray. The healthcare industry is accustomed to conducting clinical studies and publishing research findings. While that model is perhaps a little heavyweight for fitness trackers, there is still room for greater transparency on the accuracy and efficacy of these devices. Simply put, accuracy shouldn’t be in the eye of the beholder, and can only be achieved by benchmarking against voluminous amounts of data over a sustained period of time. In order to establish and justify widespread consumer trust, there needs to be independent analysis against gold standards, shared in a public setting.
2. The right form factor for the occasion: At CES 2013, we witnessed new wristbands from Fitbit and Fitbug (Disclosure: see below), new forearm bands from Scosche and Wahoo, new clip-on units from Withings and GeoPalz, and new watches from Basis and Mio. The technology has also moved to T-shirts, headbands, hats and shoes and BodyMedia showed off a more jewelry-like form factor. Clearly there’s a lot of experimentation with form factor going on, and the question remains whether one dominant type will emerge that rules them all, or if instead manufacturers evolve to a product line strategy with a SKU that accompanies each corresponding daily activity.We’re accustomed to changing our clothes during the course of the day, so some would argue it’s not unreasonable to think we may some day adopt the habit of change our assemblage of devices, too. But a strong case can be made too that passive tracking may be the preferred long-term model over premeditated, active tracking – we’ve all witnessed too many New Year’s resolutions fall by the wayside to assume otherwise.
3. Coaching and counseling: At its core, all these devices encourage behavioral change in an individual to lead a more active, healthy lifestyle. Any weight loss or fitness professional will tell you that maintaining a behavioral change is extremely difficult and so when left as a solo endeavor, the chances of long-term success are less than promising.Thus several companies have wisely paired their products with fitness services to increase consumers’ chances for success: Philips Active Link is available to Weight Watchers members, BodyMedia is a long-standing partner with 24 Hour Fitness, and Fitbit collaborates with Retrofit. Incorporating the use of these devices in a larger, more holistic program makes a lot of sense and may become the predominant model of engagement in the future. For sure, the data scientists can make the data dashboards coming off of these apps more intuitive, more actionable, more DIY, but the successful system of tomorrow may just need to expand its scope into “services” such as coaching and counseling.

We are experiencing more consumerization of healthcare and this class of technologies engenders more knowledge and more transparency. For this category to have the long lasting affect we all hope for, however, the technology needs to evolve beyond simply measuring calories burned or steps walked. The market winners and losers are starting to take shape.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Michael Yang is Managing Director of Comcast Ventures. 

Growing up in India, Tara Chklovski said she felt that young girls and boys were equally encouraged to study engineering and the sciences. So when she came to the U.S. in her early twenties, she was surprised to see women leaning away from careers in technology.

“I was struck by how, in a first-world country, you have women who don’t see themselves as inventors and problem-solvers,” she said. “Women don’t see science and engineering as fields that are accessible to them.”

Chklovski had planned to pursue a PhD in aerospace engineering and then work for an aviation company. But, along the way, she decided to switch gears and launch the non-profit Iridescent Learning, with a mission of bringing a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) curriculum to high school girls and encouraging women engineers, scientists and other high-tech professionals to be mentors.

And now that the program is gaining traction in the U.S., she’s expanding its scope to countries around the world.

Meetups meet massive open online classes

Through its annual Technovation Challenge, girls across the country take part in a 12-week mobile app development program that includes involvement from female tech leaders like Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Edmodo CEO Crystal Hutter. Participants meet with their team and a teacher or local mentor each week in person, as well as follow online instructions through P2PU, an online open education project.

“[The program is] like a hybrid between meetups and Coursera,” said Chklovski.

This year, for example, the program challenged more than 100 teams of girls to create a mobile app that solves an issue in their community. Some of the finalists, who will pitch their ideas to judges from Google, Dropbox, the Office of Naval Research and other STEM organizations this week, include an app that pairs nonprofits and volunteers and a mobile service for school attendance taking. The top team will win $10,000 and support to bring their app to market.

Given the dearth of programming instruction in the U.S. schools — it’s not offered at 90 percent of U.S. schools, despite the fact that programming jobs are growing at double the pace of other jobs, according to Code.org — more startups and nonprofits are stepping up to fill the instructional void.

But, as Silicon Valley knows so well, the need for technical training is even more pronounced among women and girls. While about 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees go to women, the percentage of computer science degrees earned by women is in the low double-digits. In addition to Iridescent, organizations like Girls Who Code, Girl Develop It and Black Girls Code are zeroing on the gender gap in technology with programs that give women and girls technical training and support networks.

Inspiring women inventors in the developing world

In the seven years since its launch, Iridescent has raised millions of dollars from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research and it’s partnered with top tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Twitter and LinkedIn to mentor and educate more than 17,000 girls in NY, LA, Chicago, Boston and the Bay Area through its several programs.

For the first time this year, international teams competed in the Technovation Challenge. But Chklovksi said she wants to reach beyond more affluent teams overseas to girls in the developing world.

While Iridescent can shoulder the cost of providing teams with mobile phones and corporate partners with international networks can help provide access to other technology, Chklovski said that as they expand, a bigger challenge may be infrastructure issues — for example, reaching areas that don’t have widespread Internet access. For teams in those regions, she said, they’re moving content to USB drives so students aren’t dependent on the Internet.

Other teams may face cultural barriers. This year, a team from Ghana that wanted to participate in the challenge ran into difficulties because it was only culturally-appropriate for middle-aged men to have mobile phones, not young girls. Translating the program’s content from English into different languages will likely be another issue as Iridescent boosts its presence in the developing world.

But Chklovski said they’re learning from their efforts and are working with their partners’ local networks around the world to troubleshoot problems that pop up. And to be extra sure teams in more remote areas can still complete the program, she said that for next year they’re removing the 12-week schedule so that teams have ample time to complete the curriculum.

“[The idea] is girls in third world countries looking at a phone and saying, ‘I can fix this’,” she said. “It’s having the confidence to think of themselves as inventors. We’re changing the way the public sees girls and the way that girls see themselves.”

People want their television to work like a TV. Sending tweets on Twitter, posting photos on Facebook and browsing the Web are best left to smartphones and tablets. Indeed, more than 40% of U.S. households with Internet-enabled TVs haven’t even bothered to hook them up to the Web, according to market researcher NPD Group.

This is not the future TV manufacturers expected.

RIP, Smart TV

In 2010, reimagining TVs as computer hybrids with big screens for the living room seemed to make lots of sense. Why not play games, run applications and surf the Web from the same box that shows movies and programming from a cable or satellite provider? Proponents quickly dubbed the new device the “smart TV.”

Intel, sensing a new market for its microprocessors, was a huge supporter, saying the smart TV ”could be the most significant change in television history.” Yet by end of 2011, Intel had abandoned the smart TV business to focus on smartphones and tablets.

The main problem was that what Samsung, LG big TV makers delivered was a mishmash of applications that had nothing to do with watching TV — the main reason people gather around the big box in the first place. Unsurprisingly, very few consumers wanted to spend more for supposed next-generation television sets that included a bunch of features they didn’t want in the first place.

Today, the TV is evolving much differently. Internet video now comes to the set via other devices such as the Apple TV, Roku and Boxee Box. Nearly six in 10 consumers who own an Internet-connected high-definition TV use such services to supplement pay TV subscriptions, NPD says.

As for other once-vaunted “smart TV” activities — reading or posting on Twitter or Facebook, reading digital books or magazines, video calling, shopping or gaming — well, they attract well below 10% of such people.

Second-Screen TV

Video is clearly what people want on their TVs, so pay TV providers have turned theirattention to tablet apps. Instead of shipping expensive set-top boxes, service providers want people to use tablets to find movies, see what friends are watching and browse their favorite programming.

The apps will add to the enjoyment of watching TV by providing player stats in a baseball game or actor bios and behind-the-scene clips from the users’ favorite shows. These apps could yield be a goldmine of subscriber data that can be fed to advertisers who could then turn around and use the information to target advertising.

Having an app that knows your viewing habits could be useful when you’re traveling. Imagine connecting your tablet to the TV in a hotel room and immediately having the same viewing experience you have at home.

“The TV needs to be more like a docking station,” Paul Gray, analyst for DisplaySearch, an NPD company, told me. “It needs to play nice with these mobile devices.”

Panasonic is one of the first manufacturers to ship televisions capable of communicating wirelessly with a tablet. Rivals will surely follow suit, as manufacturers emphasize seamless integration with mobile devices.

Dumb Monitors Need Not Apply

To call these sets “dumb monitors” would oversimplify things. A lot of good engineering is needed to provide reliable interoperability with any tablet or smartphone, irrespective of whether it runs Android or Apple’s iOS.

“I do contest people who say that TV ends up as sort of a big dumb monitor,” Gray says. “You actually probably need quite a lot of intelligence, but it’s kind of under the hood.”

TV manufacturers, however, are still stuck in the same box they’ve long tried to escape: Their products are mostly all alike and thus hard to differentiate. Shifts in broadcast technology — such as NTSC to HD, and before long, HD to 4K — or screen technology (LCD vs. LED, for instance) enable some innovation, but once things shake out and picture quality is comparable across models, TV sets once again become commodites. That leaves Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and the rest with price cuts and not much more to lure buyers.

Commoditization is the curse of the consumer electronics industry. TV makers will look for ways to add value after the use of second-screen apps become mainstream. The trick will be to avoid another failure like the smart TV.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Maker Studios started as a physical studio. It was a business about content creators made by YouTubers working collaboratively. In their first two years, its founders built out a production studio in a building so that YouTube stars could have their own, small-scale version of a professional studio to produce their content. Since then, they’ve created over 15,000 YouTube channels featuring these stars and accumulated over 165 million subscribers. They have partnered with studios and celebrities such as Snoop Lion, Robert De Niro and Kevin Smith, and presently garner approximately 3 billion video views a month across 210 million unique viewers. 80% of these viewers are in the 13-34 age range, which is the core millennial demographic that many brands are desperate to reach.

Needless to say, these are startling stats for a company that has only been around for 4 years.

Their network of talent is extensive. From Snoop Lion to Nice Peter of Epic Rap Battles fame, and the Gregory Brothers from Songify aka Auto-Tune the News of “hide your kids, hide your wife” fame, every creator they work with has a massive audience that brands are welcome to tap into. Here’s a case study of when a company successfully did that with Maker’s help.

For any of you YouTube enthusiasts who [secretly] love a cappella, you probably know who Mike Tompkins is. If you don’t, all you need to know is that he is a one man a cappella choir—a good one at that—commonly referred to as the number-one a cappella sensation on YouTube. Universal Pictures had a film coming out called Pitch Perfect about collegiate a cappella, which was a perfect opportunity for them to collaborate with Mike on a promotional piece. The project’s goal was to get Mike Tompkins’ fans to submit videos of themselves singing parts of an arrangement that Mike put together, and create something that was based around the Pitch Perfect brand. After putting out a call to action on Mike’s channel and building a microsite that allowed people to submit entries, Universal received over 1000 submissions domestically. They invited the cast of the show to record their part, while Mike put the pieces together. This is what came of that effort:

This video got over 82,000 likes, over 14,000 comments, over 13,000 shares, and got favorited almost 23,000 times. It was viewed 2.6 million times prior to the film’s release, and 2 million times since then. Maker was told that they had a huge hand in opening the film, hitting the bull’s eye to engage the target market and get conversations started about the movie. The clip is currently on the DVD as a bonus feature.

This Pitch Perfect case study clearly shows how brands can interact with and leverage the talent that Maker Studios has in their network, and the scale and reach that these collaborations result in.

Maker Studios has created a class of creators who are wholeheartedly devoted to putting great content on YouTube, who, more times than not, are more in touch with their audience than perhaps even the brand itself. Brands looking to develop a collaborative relationship with Maker can either come in with existing ideas that Maker can help them hash out in more detail, or Maker’s development teams can help them come up with ideas. The focus, when creating content with brands and YouTube stars, is on authenticity, staying true to the star’s voice while helping brands build to build their own, which can be very difficult for a brand as an entity. Maker Studios is without a doubt one of the best resources for boosting your brand’s YouTube presence.

Check out the Maker Studios website and some articles about them:
http://www.tubefilter.com/2013/04/06/maker-studios-tribeca-enterprises-the-picture-show/
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sxsw-maker-studios-execs-turning-427405
http://www.tubefilter.com/2012/06/30/maker-studios-billion-views/
http://socialnewsdaily.com/6772/maker-studios-teams-with-kevin-smith/

Ah, public Wi-Fi. That magical tool that lets you surf the Internet at your favorite coffee house, bookstore or the mall. (Because nothing says cool like surfing at the food court.)

As much of a boon as using the Internet in public places can be, there are always risks involved whenever you are connected to a public network. Here are five steps you can take to help keep your public Web activities secure.

Beware Fake Wi-Fi

You sit down at the bookstore, fire up the laptop and lo and behold, you see the store’s network name (SSID). But wait, what’s this? An even stronger signal from an SSID that’s wide open. Strong signal equals better connection, so that’s the one you want, right?

Think again.

Known as a man-in-the-middle attack, that shiny new (and possibly free-of-charge) Wi-Fi signal may not belong to the store at all, but rather someone else in the store who has set up their own Wi-Fi router to attract people just like you. Once you’re using their signal versus the store’s, they can monitor all of your Internet traffic using special software that can easily discern things like login and password information.

I actually discovered someone doing this at the local Borders a few years back when there was a local Borders. The kid had even mimicked the store name with the SSID “Borders_1″. But I knew the real SSID and started looking around the stacks until I found him right in the middle of the store just sitting with his laptop.

Cities are particularly bad about this kind of thing because everywhere you go, there’s a Wi-Fi signal. My favorite: the “FREE-WIFI_Here” SSID my computer saw when staying at a Midtown hotel in Manhattan.

If you are not sure about what the store’s Wi-Fi SSID is, just ask, or look for a sign. Better to be sure than surf on someone else’s network.

You Don’t Know Where That’s Been

You grab a seat at the table, stealing coffee and a scone in hand. And on the floor under the table, you see a thumb drive. Ever the helpful citizen, you pick it up and boot your laptop with the intent to insert the drive and see if you can figure out who it belongs to.

Stop, helpful citizen.

That USB drive may in fact have been planted there, waiting for a Good Samaritan like you to pick it up and do exactly that. And instead of finding a file that says “This drive belongs to…” you will probably find trojan malware that will infect your machine so a hacker can get into it then, or later.

This is a method of breaking into your system that goes beyond public Wi-Fi, too. In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security conducted a study where they left USB drives and discs in the parking lots of government buildings. When found, 60% of the government workers – who really should have known better – plugged the drives into their office computer. If the thumb drive or CD case had an official logo, 90% of the workers would plug them in.

If you find a drive or CD somewhere public, and want to be helpful, turn it in to the nearest lost and found and let that be your good deed for the day.

Cowboy Up

In Westerns, the gunslinger always sits with his back to the wall – so as to avoid getting shot from behind when someone walked in the door spoiling for a fight.

That’s not a bad plan, when it comes to public Wi-Fi. If at all possible, find a seat where there’s no way someone can be behind you. You don’t want anyone looking over your shoulder or worse, recording you when you are typing in critical information.

Don’t Share Your Internet

Very occasionally, you may get someone who is desperate to use your computer or smartphone to check something on the Internet. Put your foot down and say no, even if they say it’s an emergency.

First, if its really an emergency, they should be calling someone, not communicating with Facebook or email. Second, even if you watch them to make sure they insert nothing into your computer, all it takes is a quick visit to a known malicious site on another browser tab to get your machine infected.

Don’t Login

I have a pretty standard rule of thumb about surfing in public: never conduct banking transactions or visit a credit card website account. If I absolutely have to, I will use my phone’s cellular connection to get to the bank Web site, but never with Wi-Fi I am just visiting.

But beyond that, I don’t sign into Facebook or Twitter in a public place, either. If I want to use those networks, or anything similar, I use an app on the phone that’s already signed in. That way, there’s nothing to spy on and see.

Surfing in public doesn’t have to be dangerous to your online identity, but you should always take care about your personal safety in a public place, and that includes your online activities.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

BBDO Argentina was recently behind one such innovative campaign for client 7up.

The holiday season is typically one that most of us see as cold and frosty, leaving us craving a cup of cocoa or warm cider instead of a soda. For those in Buenos Aires, however, the holiday season is smack in the middle of summer.

To quench passersby’s thirst, BBDO Argentina placed their “The Melting Machine”—a “vending machine” made out of ice that “dispenses” ice-cold 7ups to the public once the ice melts—in the middle of town, and invited people to guess and tweet what time the last can would be released. The winners received a refreshing 6-pack of 7up as a reward. Take a look at how The Melting Machine brought joy to Buenos Aires, and disappeared as fast as Frosty the Snowman, in the video below.

In regards to social media marketing—and, in fact, having a social media presence in general—influencers are incredibly important. Every brand needs them. But the road to getting an influencer to recognize and advocate for a particular brand is certainly difficult. Enter Adly.

Who/what is Adly?

Adly is a Beverly Hills-based social advertising startup that helps brands connect with well-known celebrities to drive consumer engagement, by sparking conversations with their fans. Adly is certainly a leader in the social media marketing space, working with a network of over 2000 top celebrities and influencers who reach millions of people through their social following. In addition to front end activation, Adly also provides also data and analytics (for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram) to justify ad spend—always a good thing for any brand. Walter Delph, Adly’s CEO, holds that “with Adly, you have the benefits of the reach of television with the analytics that you find in technology.”

Why should brands work with celebrity influencers?

On social media platforms, what you share is what you’ve heard from the folks that you follow, whether it is a brand, a publication, a friend, or a celebrity. This is where Adly fits into the mix. Adly matches brands with celebrities and followers to create authentic conversations that drive results.

Here are a few interesting stats:

A person who follows a celebrity is 4x more likely to follow a brand. For brands that struggle getting followers, a celebrity influencer can really turn things around.

Celebrity fans are 86% more likely to interact and share content on social networking sites. In addition to liking and engaging with your brand’s content, they’re more likely to share it as well.

How does Adly match celebrities with brands? How does it know who is a good fit for a particular brand?

Adly’s match system is based off of audience segmenting. Their internal platform figures out the groups that particular celebrities reach (e.g.: age group; demographics; psychographics, etc.) using analytical tools, and match them with the groups brands want to reach. They call this process “intelligent targeting.”

Intelligent Targeting in 5 Steps:

1. Figure out who the brand’s target audience is.
2. Look into which of those celebrities best overlap with the brand’s targeting goals, based on what the celebrity is doing in the world and how well that meshes with the brand.
3. Work with agencies to figure out what kind of publisher to use with what type of content, so that paid media looks and feels organic.
4. Execute campaign.
5. Measure what happened with that campaign, e.g.: which publishers received the most shares, which celebrities got the most retweets, how much paid media translated into earned media etc.

Case Study: Second Screen Activation

For the NBA Playoffs, State Farm created a TV campaign that featured two professional assisters: Clippers starter Chris Paul, and his twin brother, Cliff, who is a State Farm insurance agent. Adly took charge of the campaign’s second screen activations and got celebrity siblings Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian to tweet about whether they assist like Chris (Khloe) or assist like Cliff (Kourtney), as well as celebrity siblings-in-law Lamar Odom (assists like Chris—obviously) and Scott Disick (assists like Cliff). The celebrities’ social media accounts are piped into the Adly platform, and tweets were scheduled to go out concurrently with the playoffs with special focus on Clippers home games, when there would be the largest amount of airtime for the ad. The tweet maximized efficiency of the ad unit, reaching over 50 million people over the course of the campaign’s first week.

Every brand needs influencers, and Adly can help your brand find one, connecting your brand with relevant and compatible celebrity influencers who can engage their fans in an organic way. See the video below for more details.

–

Walter Delph is the CEO of Adly and can be reached at walter@adly.com

Johnny Shin is the VP of Business Development and can be reached at johnny@adly.com

The Big Data boom has largely been fueled by a simple calculation: Data + Technology = Actionable Insights, Magic Ponies, and Superpowers. The reality, of course, is far more pedestrian, because while Big Data technology has indeed increased our ability to store and process lots of disparate data in real-time, the technology is only as useful the people managing it. As Bill Wise, CEO of Mediaocean, highlights, the costs of getting it wrong increase as our reliance on data grows.

To be clear, we’ve long been able to query so-called “Big Data.” We’ve had expensive data warehousing and Business Intelligence tools for many years. The great innovation of tools like Hadoop is that they’ve made such capabilities available as free, open-source tools that run on commodity hardware, essentially paving the way for anyone and everyone to become a data scientist.

Therein lies the problem.

Taking an influential paper on economics and intelligence efforts around the Boston bombing suspects as background, wherein a few missing rows in Excel and a misspelling of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s name, Wise points out that “data management tools (i.e., the FBI’s systems and Excel) were undone by fairly simple errors,” with terrible results. In other words, as much as we may believe Big Data is as simple as “Input data into Hadoop, out come insights!”, the reality depends heavily on the people querying that data.

And the bigger the data, the bigger the likelihood we’ll read it wrong, as Wise posits:

[M]ore human/data interaction means a lot more room for error (and inefficiency) around increasingly critical data sets – which… can have very serious results… If Big Data can’t fit hand-in-glove with usability and workflow, a lot of the promise of big data will be empty data crunching. That’s not just a problem for getting where we want to be in the evolution of computing. It’s a situation that can lead to bad data management – which translates into bad economics and, sometimes, far worse.

This confirms renowned statistician Nate Silver’s arguments that data doesn’t speak for itself, but is instead corrupted by our biases. Worse, the bigger the data set, the more noise to sift through: “the noise is increasing faster than the signal. There are so many hypotheses to test, so many data sets to mine – but a relatively constant amount of objective truth.”

Often, misunderstanding our data simply means our businesses will run more inefficiently or, at least, no more efficiently than before. But if Wise is correct, getting our data wrong can have disastrous consequences.

Which means, as I’ve argued before, that we really need to look inside our organizations for “data scientists,” because context is critical to effectively querying our data, as well as knowing which data to collect in the first place. It also means, as Kate Crawford argues in Harvard Business Review, ”data scientists should take a page from social scientists, who have a long history of asking where the data they’re working with comes from, what methods were used to gather and analyze it, and what cognitive biases they might bring to its interpretation.”

In other words, the more data has the potential to impact our organizations, the more humble and circumspect we should become in using it. The consequences of reading our data wrong scale with the volume and velocity of that data.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

It’s also AT&T’s first foray into an over the top service. The company will offer the service in all areas where it provides wireless service, which may not seem like a big deal, except that the system will connect to both the AT&T wireless network as well as the wireline broadband inside a home. Looks like Ma Bell is ready to make some money on other people’s pipes.

What’s inside Digital Life

As for the service, it’s pretty compelling for the average person who’s evaluating a home automation or security system, especially if AT&t does open up the platformlater as it promises it will. There are two basic packages. The cheaper entry-level package costs $29.99 a month plus $149.99 for equipment and installation. It includes 24/7 home monitoring, a wireless keypad, a remote, some sensors and an indoor siren. The more expensive package includes all of that plus three more sensors of the owner’s choice for $39.99 a month and $249.99 for the gear and installation.

AT&T also has a slew of add-on devices including water leakage sensors, wireless cameras and thermostats that a consumer can buy and add to the plan for a monthly fee. AT&T has staffed two call centers around the clock in the U.S. and has provided a battery with the system to ensure that the product is reliable and online all the time. The wireline broadband and AT&T wireless provide redundancy for the connectivity.

Glen Lurie, the president of emerging enterprises and partnerships at AT&T, explained that the whole plan behind the system is for it to be secure and easy for customers to use. That’s why for example, you can’t just bring any old connected device onto the Digital Life network. Much like AT&T’s wireless network, the AT&T wants to test the devices before it will allow them on your home network. Lurie declined to tell me when AT&T would bring on additional partners. He also declined to tell me what companies AT&T is partnering with at launch.

And yet …

However, AT&T’s plan is pretty darn basic at the entry-level and adding standard components for really useful automation and security can bring the total installation and gear cost to about $600 and the monthly service fees to about $55 a month if you add the security camera ($200 installed) and energy management ($150 installed) packages. Remote door locks, water shut-off valves and other tweaks are extra.

That’s not crazy considering you get an integrated app that’s actually quite nice to use for controlling everything, but it’s still a significant investment: especially given the closed nature of the ecosystem.

I’m currently contemplating a $210 set of connected door locks (the non-connected locks are about $85) and so I know that adding connected gadgets to your home isn’t cheap. Because for some of these devices, like thermostats or door locks are also installed into the home, you had better hope you like the overall service. Of course, that’s great for AT&T, because it presumably reduces churn. My colleague Kevin Tofel and I had a good discussion of how to choose a home automation system this week on the internet of things podcast.

And once I have those locks I’ll have to wait for a system such as MobiPlug or SmartThings to support those locks if I want to integrate them into my existing home network. Or maybe I’d have to hope my locks are supported by a software vendor such as Zosoff. Plus, I’d have to do the equivalent of programming scenes that AT&T already has its app. The Leave Home scene will turn down your air, turn off the lights and lock your doors, for example.

Lurie claimed that AT&T is ahead of its competitors by about two to three years, noting that many of the home security products from companies such as Comcast or Time Warner Cable are provided by outside vendors and don’t have an integrated ecosystem like what AT&T is offering.

I think the integration is wonderful, but I do think it will be more powerful when I can bring in some of my existing connected devices onto the AT&T Digital Life network. While the hub that comes with the service supports Wi-Fi, 915 Mhz and other radios, the devices connect in a proprietary mesh that AT&T uses because it ensures security. It also ensures I can’t bring my own devices into the Digital Life family just yet.

But for those without my own particular hangups, the product is certainly worth a look. It launches in 15 markets on Friday including Atlanta, Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colo.; Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, Riverside, Calif.; San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis and select areas of the New York and New Jersey areas.It will be in 50 markets by the end of 2013, available for purchase online and for testing at AT&T wireless stores.

Instead of being tethered to your hardware, WorldKit is designed to make access to computing instant and mobile by making the world your touchscreen. Right now, the system involves a ceiling-mounted camera and projector that record hand movements and then project onto the surface of your choice. Some potential uses include TV remote controls, which can be accessed by rubbing the arm of a sofa, or calendars that can be swiped onto doors.

With projectors and depth-sensing cameras (the current system uses a Kinect) getting smaller, the researchers envision a system like WorldKit could eventually fit into a light bulb. Any room thus equipped could become a smart environment, where objects and walls become display surfaces. One member of the research team, Chris Harrison, previously worked on the Skinput device that allows users to turn their own arms into touch interfaces.

In the future, users should be able to design their own interfaces with WorldKit. The system currently allows for things like buttons, multitouch drawing (akin to a whiteboard), and counting the number of object within an interaction “bubble.” The existing prototype still has limited resolution and input dimensions, but hardware advances and future research could allow voice commands or even interaction in free space rather than on surfaces. The CMU team will be presenting their work at CHI2013 on April 30.

Image via Chris Harrison/Carnegie Mellon University

BBDO Proximity Düsseldorf built a digital transformation tool that can help you find out.  And since hunger can elicit different emotions in different people, you can see what you look like when you’re angry-hungry, irritated-hungry, weak-hungry, vacant-hungry, stupid-hungry, or any combination of those emotions, at different levels of intensity.

This is how it works: first you are asked to enter your date of birth, then, you are asked to take off your glasses, push your hair out of your face, and look into the webcam without smiling. The app allows you to identify the position and size of your eyes, nose and mouth, so that the tool can better transform your face depending on your level of hunger. There are five different levers, one for each emotion associated with hunger: angry, irritated, weak, vacant and stupid. Position the levers for the intensity of each emotion (you can mix emotions here too), and see your face transform before your very eyes.

Here’s a little sample of what I look like when I’m hungry:

 This is me as an irritated, ravenous diva.

This is me as a stupidly starving, rather pimply adolescent.

This is me as my dangerously angry, famished self. Frighteningly enough, this is the image that most closely resembles my actual face.

And finally, this is me looking vacantly weak and hungry.

These images can also be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and the Snickers scrapbook of hungry faces, which features Snickers employees and other users in various states of hunger. If you link the app to your Facebook account, you can see what your friends look like when they are hungry as well.

The Hungry-Me Generator is a part of a larger international, fully integrated activation campaign for Snickers to not only discover celebrities’ hungry selves, but your own hungry selves. It’s available as a smartphone and a tablet app, and also has its own interactive microsite. After its initial launch in Germany, the digital campaign will be launched in ten other European countries as well as New Zealand.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has some ambitious plans for search at Google.

Kurzweil, who joined Google at the end of last year as director of engineering, became famous for creating the first text-to-speech software. He’s also been called “the ultimate thinking machine.”

Now, he’s bringing his ultimate thinking machine to Google, where he’s working on a system that can truly understand natural language.

“Search has moved beyond just finding keywords, but it still doesn’t read all these billions of web pages and book pages for semantic content,” Kurzweil said in an interview with Wired’s Steven Levy. “If you write a blog post, you’ve got something to say, you’re not just creating words and synonyms. We’d like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning. If that happens, and I believe that it’s feasible, people could ask more complex questions.”

So if Kurzweil succeeds in building such a system, Google search may one day be conscious and actually know who you are.

“And that doesn’t just mean logical intelligence,” Kurzweil says. “It means emotional intelligence, being funny, getting the joke, being sexy, being loving, understanding human emotion. That’s actually the most complex thing we do. That is what separates computers and humans today. I believe that gap will close by 2029.”

Check out the full interview with Kurzweil on Wired > interview. It’s definitely worth reading.

Read more at Business Insider.

A technology born of the Web and accelerated by mobile is now blossoming inside businesses. Ignored for years, application programming interfaces—a key layer of connectivity between disparate software—are undergoing a renaissance.

The trickiness of managing these connections, and their importance to the way businesses run their operations today, explains why we see vendors like Intel buying Mashery. Or CA Technologies snapping up Layer 7 Technologies. Or MuleSoft picking up ProgrammableWeb. Or, this morning, a startup contender, 3scale, raising $4 million from investors.

And that’s just in the last seven days.

Of course, this raises the question: what the heck is an application programming interface?

First, The APIs

In the simplest terms, an application programming interface, or API, is a set of requirements that enables one application to talk to another application.

On your desktop, an API is what lets some applications talk to others (like Word to Excel and vice versa), or access features of the operating system. Such APIs are familiar ground to any programmer who has built an application that needs to share features or data directly.

This is the API with which I am familiar: steady sets of code and requirements that lived on the operating system. But there’s a whole other class of APIs, built for Web services, that has kicked open the field of API management.

Web APIs are analogous to their older counterparts, but they serve as gateways to Web-based services, like Twitter or Facebook or Foursquare or Amazon. They are what enables developers to build applications to communicate directly with those services.

If you have a third-party app that connects to, say, Twitter, that app communicates with Twitter’s API to handle the actual connection. You, as the user, never see this API. As far as you are concerned, the whole thing is seamless. You post a tweet in the app and it shows up in the Twitter feed. But it’s the API that handles the job.

It is easy to think of APIs in this context as doors; they let data in and out of a Web service. But they are rarely indiscriminate doors. Like any door, they only swing in a certain way. And they are typically open for only the people who have keys to the lock. They have rules.

And rules have to managed.

Here Come The Managers

It turns out, explained Ed Anuff, a vice president at API management vendor Apigee, there are actually a lot of things that need to be managed about Web service APIs.

There’s the sign-up process for developers who express interest in using an API. There’s the documentation for the API, so they can write code that accesses it. There are credentials to be issued to both developers and users—these are all just part of the scope of information that has to be managed when a service releases an API for developers.

“All of that stuff is part of what an API management tool does,” Anuff said.

A critical function of API management tools is handing out the keys that let authorized developers unlock the door to a Web service’s data and functionality. Some APIs charge for access; API management tools handle billing. Sometimes there are limitations on access; those must be enforced.

API management began as a way for popular consumer Web services to open up to the creativity of independent developers. But what fueled the rise of API management as a cottage industry was enterprise IT managers who saw the success these household Web names were having with their APIs and who wanted to adapt the same model for their internal infrastructure.

“Lots more companies looked at these Web services and saw things they needed,” Anuff said. “Internal APIs didn’t have this self-service stuff.”

What really kicked the industry in the pants, however, was the tidal wave of mobile computing. Rather than building two separate versions of software for a desktop website and a mobile app, it’s far more efficient to build an API for the underlying service that holds user data and business logic, and then build desktop and Web versions of software that talk to that same API.

Add up all the different mobile platforms out there—iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and so on—and an API rapidly becomes the only sensible architectural approach. Suddenly enterprise developers needed much better API management to handle all of the apps they wanted to build for their own employees on a variety of platforms.

It’s All About The Data

Anuff gave two big reasons why enterprises are seeking API management tools.

The first was operational. If a developer produced a poorly written app that made a burst of requests to an API, one right after the other, for instance, an API management tool would enable the IT staff to throttle the requests hitting the company’s Web service to something approaching a sane level until the app could be fixed.

The second example is very likely the reason why there’s been so much interest in this sector of late.

Recall that when an API is in use to connect to a service, then all of the data shared by the third-party app and the service passes through the API and, therefore, through the API management tool. This means that API management tools can be one-stop shops for rich and valuable data.

Larger vendors who want to keep their skin in the big-data game are going to be very interested in startups in the API management space. The analytics API management tools can provide for the requests they handle are a rich gold mine of information, and a new source of data is bound to attract attention.

Which explains a lot of the hubbub.

The Machine-to-Machine Future

Today, the APIs we think about most often – like Twitter’s and Facebook’s – typically handle requests generated by people clicking on a website or swiping and tapping on an app. But another, far more interesting potential for APIs lies in processing requests generated by machines – a market that could hit $18 billion in spending by 2014.

Think of the smart, Internet-connected energy meters being adding to homes. Or diagnostic sensors in your carthat report back to the manufacturer when there are signs of an incipient engine failure. Or systems that detect atypical network traffic and reroute it on the fly to avoid slowdowns or outages. These all need defined rules for how one machine talks to another. And those rules are found in – you guessed it – APIs. APIs that need to be managed.

That’s the real growth market for APIs. And it suggests that what we’ve seen in the past week is only the first glimmer of a vein of gold that smart people will mine for decades to come.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

When hackers compromised the Associated Press’s Twitter account yesterday, they showed just how much damage one can do with a few scary tweets.

Now, Twitter is finally making it harder for that to happen again. The company is working on a two-factor authentication system for Twitter accounts, which should, in theory, make it harder for hackers to break into them, as Wired reports.

Twitter’s reply? “We have nothing to announce at this time,” the company tells VentureBeat.

Here’s how it the system would work: Right now when you log into your Twitter account from a new computer or device, Twitter treats that device like any other you’ve used — you just log in and start using the service. With two-factor authentication, that process gets a bit more complicated: Soon, when you try to log in on a new device, Twitter will also send to your phone a random code, which must be entered on you new device before you’re able to use Twitter.

Basically, what two-factor authentication does is add a second layer of security: Hackers may get a hold of your password, but it won’t do them much good if they don’t also have your phone.

While two-factor authentication is new to Twitter, Facebook, Google, and, most recently, Microsoft all already offer it. It’s not perfect, but then again, no security measure really is.
Read more at Venturebeat.

Flipboard joined the Digital Lab to give us a look at their take on beautiful, native advertising on their platform as well as give us a tour of the functionalities of Flipboard 2.0.

For those of you who aren’t so familiar with the app, here are a few quick facts:

• Flipboard launched in December 2010 and has over $60 million in funding.
• Its user base is 53 million.
• Over 500,000 magazines have been created by users since Flipboard released version 2.0 of its app. (http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/flipboard-adds-3-million-users-since-launch-of-personalized-magazines-over-500000-magazines-created-to-date/)
• 50% of Flipboard 2.0 users use the app daily.
• Flipboard 2.0 new features focus on personalization, such as allowing others to subscribe to fellow users’ magazines.

So where exactly does Flipboard sit in the mobile media ecosystem? On the one hand, it is a content publishing app, which stands to reason given its 100+ magazine partners whose users can access digital subscriptions through Flipboard. It is a social app, where users can read articles posted on their social network walls on the Flipboard platform, and share magazines they create with friends. It’s an app that combines scale, content, and social, which gives marketers and publishers alike access to a completely new audience.

Flipboard creates custom templates for each publication they partner with, so that the reader feels immersed in the branded experience of the publication. Flipboard works similarly with brands as they do with their publisher partners. Instead of a rich media experience, they offer interactive advertising experiences that fit within publications housed within the app. These are similar to native ads, but take it a step further, allowing the user to step into a brand experience within the app itself—or flip past it, if they so desire. Take Levi’s, for example. Levi’s has essentially built a branded magazine that features articles, photos and products. Tapping on the product brings the user into a template-based product page with a buy now button, which directs them to the Levi’s e-commerce site in a window within the app itself.

Brands also can create their own feeds and magazines with Flipboard, which usually consist of a mix of original content from the brand and content from third-party publishers. These brand magazines can work with Flipboard to create a template so that it has the same look and feel as the brand itself.

Check out the latest articles on Flipboard below:

http://allthingsd.com/20130326/new-flipboard-news-and-posts-handpicked-and-shared/

http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/26/4151110/flipboard-2-0-refreshes-apps-look-now-lets-everyone-run-their-own

And this great infographic they just released.

Earth Day, which has been held annually in the U.S. on April 22 for the last 43 years, is a moment for education about and support for environmental protection. Founded in 1970 as a teach-in day by Senator Gaylord Nelson, Earth Day marks a time to work together on renewable energy, recycling and preservation, as well as to celebrate the life that exists outside our phone and laptop screens.

There is no better time to than Earth Day to reflect on how best to use and recycle technology while staying conscious of power use. These 5 tips won’t save the planet, but they will make your own tech use a little greener:

1.  Monitor Your Sleep Mode Preferences

IT solutions provider En Pointe Technologies points out that computer use during off hours is a huge energy waster that driving up facilities costs for businesses. One way to curb this problem is to stay on top of your power management and energy-saver preferences, ensuring that your devices go to sleep in a timely manner when not in use.

2. Unplug To Avoid “Vampire Power”

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), devices that are in standby mode but still plugged in add up to an extra $10 billion in energy costs per year. The solution to the effects of vampire power is to always switch off power strips, or unplug at the end of the day or before the start of a long trip. This goes for not only PCs and laptops, but for smartphones and tablets as well.

3. Recycle Your Old Tech

Numerous retailers, from Apple Best Buy to Staples and Office Max, have technology-recycling programs that allow you to either drop off or send in your unused devices for environmentally safe recycling. Apple’s Recycling Programis a great start for any and all iDevices, and theEnvironmental Protection Agency has a great searchable database for donation and recycling by device and company. And even enterprises can contribute by relying on recycled technology when appropriate.

(See also Refurbished IT: A Cost-Efficient, Green Approach To Big Data.)

Why is this so important? “Recycling one million laptops saves the energy equivalent to the electricity used by more than 3,500 U.S. homes in a year,” says the EPA, and for every million cell phones recycled, 35 thousand pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, 75 pounds of gold, and 33 pounds of palladium can be recovered.

4. Put Up Barriers To Office Printing

It might seem hard to believe what with all our electronic gadgets, but the average office worker still uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year. Mixed in with that huge stack of paper is a considerable chunk of un-retrieved print jobs, where someone prints something off and ends up never picking it up. By adding authentication, like the scanning of employee ID, to initiate printing, businesss can cut down on the amount of paper wasted in the office.

5. Go Fluorescent

Fluorescent light bulbs may not be as sexy as power-saving algorithms on your smartphone, but they arguably make a much bigger difference to the planet. Fluorescent bulbs enable a number energy-saving factors that reduce power consumption. Compared with incandescent bulbs, a standard fluorescent bulbs lasts 10 to 20 times longer (35,000 hours vs. 2,000 hours) and use 75% less energy. They also produce 75% less heat, which helps cut airconditioning costs.

Replacing your home or business’ incandescent light bulbs with eco-friendly fluorescent ones is a huge step towards an overall greener tech footprint – without even touching your computers and mobile devices.

The world of online services may be convenient, but there is always a risk of such services doing something your locally installed software won’t: drop off the face of the Earth at a moment’s notice.

That is the scenario OfficeDrop users are now facing, after receiving word last Friday that the five-year-old online collaboration and storage service would no longer be around after May 5.

“We know that many of you have come to depend on OfficeDrop to store and share your files in the cloud,” a notice to users from OfficeDrop CEO Prasad Thammineni read, “Regrettably, we will not be able to offer OfficeDrop as a standalone service anymore and will be discontinuing it permanently as of May 5th, 2013.”

The wording of the notice was specific: OfficeDrop as a company is not going away, just the service to its users. After reaching out to Thammineni over the weekend, he explained the situation.

“Recently we signed an agreement to sell OfficeDrop to another Cloud Storage player. We will be closing soon and will announce more details as to who the acquirer is and other related information,” Thammineni responded to inquiries about the nature of the service’s ending.

“Unfortunately, [the] acquirer has decided to not continue offering the OfficeDrop service and instead will integrate the product, technology and team with theirs and market it through their channels,” he added.

According to the notice sent to OfficeDrop users, billing for OfficeDrop has stopped, and refunds are being issues when applicable. The notice urges all files be downloaded as soon as possible, because “they will be securely and permanently deleted as of May 6th, 2013.”

What OfficeDrop Users Will Be Missing

OfficeDrop has seen some critical success over the years, with many reviewers appreciating the capability of iOS and Android apps that could take a picture of a document and then save a file in the cloud as a searchable PDF using optical character recognition. Think Evernote, with big side of Dropbox, and you get the idea.

The service has been aimed at small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), but this experience may leave a poor taste in OfficeDrop users’ mouths. Given the just 16-day notice they received and the hard stop for their files’ existence on the cloud-based service, (a hard stop that falls on a Sunday, which will probably make for a blown weekend for quite a few people), this could put SMBs with potentially limited IT resources in a bind.

After all, downloading the documents will be relatively simple, but finding a place to store them and enable users the same kind of access could be tricky for a local platform. After all, it’s the very availability of files that makes the cloud so attractive to customers in the first place. Storage is easy – access is hard.

Vanishing Like A Cloud

In the days before cloud, acquisitions and consolidations happened between software companies all the time. But even when Company A swallowed Company B and discontinued B’s software product line, devout users of B’s software could still keep using that software – albeit unsupported – until they could figure out what move to make next.

For cloud services, the timing of service shutdowns is no longer decided by the users… it’s the service provider who calls the shots.

As online services continue to pop up with some new feature or convenience, it is not unexpected that we will see more of these kinds of consolidations happen over the coming months. And end users will have to bear the brunt of the inevitable service shutdowns that will follow.

Last week I visited London and brought a Lytro camera to document the experience.

Lytro is a “light field” camera that promises to let users shoot now and focus later. The technology is so innovative, Steve Jobs met with Lytro’s founder before he died. He wanted to use it in iPhone cameras. Investors have given the two-year-old startup $50 million.

For a photography novice like me, Lytro sounds great. You can have next-to-no skill and still manage to take good photos, because you can change the perspective afterward. When you take a good Lytro photo, the pictures seem to come alive. They shift focus from one object to another, pulling them forward or blurring them into the background. It can completely change the story a photo is telling.

Skip To: Check out what Lytro’s living photos really look like >

The device is sleek and narrow. It looks like a kaleidoscope. The most expensive version is red, holds 16 GB of images, and retails for $499. It allows you to store 750 photos at once. The other models retail for $399 and let you store 350 photos. They come in electric blue, graphite, moxie pink and sea glass.

Carrying a Lytro is like wearing Google Glass – you’re instantly the center of attention. I was lent the red 16 GB camera and got looks whenever I pulled it out of my pocket. While going through security in Heathrow Airport, the man behind me asked, “How long have you had your Lytro?” He was a United employee from Houston who had read about it on a tech blog.

Others actually pointed and stared. Some asked to try the camera themselves. The cameras are sold on Lytro’s website, Amazon, Best Buy and Target, but it isn’t currently available in London.

I trekked all over East London with the Lytro, then over to some major attractions: Buckingham Palace, The London Eye, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, The Shard and London Bridge. The Lytro was more convenient than my company’s DSLR, which is bulky, heavy, and retails for a similar price.

It’s easier to take photos with, too. There are only two buttons: an on/off switch on the bottom near a hidden USB port, and a shutter button on top. The top also has a thin ridged surface. Stroking left to right will let you zoom in, right to left lets you zoom out.

Lytro’s head of photography, who lent us the camera, admits the screen on the camera could be better. It’s hard to see a clear image of what you’ve just taken because the screen is small and pixelated. And it’s difficult to view in the sun. But it’s a touch screen, so you can tap to zoom or trash an image, swipe to review old photos, and star your favorites. You can also switch camera modes from the default setting, which is better for distance shots, to “creative”, which is better for close-ups.

Alyson Shontell/Business Insider

Once you upload all of the photos, you can add special effects like filters, then process them. Processing photos takes a very long time. The Lytro desktop application crashed multiple times before all 150+ photos could be uploaded to my online gallery.

Once the photos are in your online gallery, you can share them to social media sites, some of which keep Lytro’s instant perspective shift and refocusing features. Facebook, for example, does this. You can also embed Lytro photos in web pages because they’re iframes, so others can play with the photos too.

Most of my Lytro photos ended up being a disappointment. I was warned to practice taking photos before I took London, so the blame could be mine for not learning all of Lytro’s tricks. But out of the 150+ photos I took, less than five display Lytro’s technology well. I’m much happier with the DSLR photos. They’re at least clear, while Lytro’s are blurry and don’t show much depth.

Lytro would be a better if you could apply filters to photos once they’re uploaded online, so you don’t have to take time editing on your desktop, then re-processing the image. It also would work best as a mobile app, like Instagram.

So while I like what Steve Jobs had in mind with Lytro and the technology has a lot of promise, the current camera isn’t worth the steep price tag until a few more of the kinks are worked out.

At least not for photography novices, like me.
Read more at Business Insider.

Specifically, Google discussed the mCommerce trends for 2013.  According to Google, 1 in 10 eCommerce dollars are now spent on mobile, which shows the beginning of this shift.

mCommerce is beyond “purchase on a mobile device.”  Today, mCommerce demonstrates the  convergence of on- and offline experiences. <obile consumers no longer take a linear path-to-purchase; with mCommerce, users are moving through a newly formed purchase funnel where the sale doesn’t begin and end on the same device.

According to Prakash Hariramani of Google, there are four mCommerce trends:

1. Curation over Selection:
   • Users want a personalized and socialized purchase experience, not a catalog experience selected by the brand

• EG:  Fancy, Gilt Group and Pinterest and now, eBay

1. 2.     Showrooming:

• Consumers are more likely to go in store to explore products through live-research on mobile devices (thank you, Amazon Price Check)

1. 3.     Tablet Proliferation:

• Used at the expense of the desktop, and take digital sales away from desktops as users choose tablet-commerce

1. 4.     Mobile Payments:

• Mobile purchasing is still painful w/20+ steps*, but technologies like Google Wallet decrease the steps through single-identity sign-on and trusted privacy settings

For us:

In order to truly take these trends and create actionable next steps, we must work with our brand partners to think “Mobile-First.” Our customers use mobile devices to aid their purchase journey.  If our partners’ content is not available for mobile we too are providing our customers with a disservice.

Also, try to get to a Google breakfast.  Informative and delicious.

The images in the photo album show messages such as “you need to practice more,” and “still not perfect,” when the images are blurry, but eventually reveals the car in its totality in the third shot.

This campaign effectively calls users to engage with the ad through the game-like screenshot feature. Furthermore, the ad is saved directly into the user’s personal photo album, which adds to its viral quality, as users would be more inclined to share the ad or the R8 images with their friends if they found the ad amusing.

Take a look for yourself in the video below.

Needless to say, Foursquare has come a long way in the past few years. Since its launch at 2009’s SXSW Interactive Festival, Foursquare has become the number-three mobile app behind Facebook and Twitter (in terms of unique users) according to Nielsen, and has over 30 million users globally.

Dana O’Malley, Account Executive at Foursquare, visited us in the Digital lab to give us a tour of their ad product offerings and give us an exclusive look at new products scheduled to launch later this year.

In recent months, Foursquare has shifted their consumer focus towards exploration and discovery; towards becoming that app that people use when they are looking for something to do, as opposed to the app they use once they get there. Now that they have a mass of involved users, and lots of data on said users, Foursquare has built a personalized recommendation feature, which is tailored specifically for every user based on past behavior and that of his/her friends. The more you use the app, the smarter it gets about who you are.

Brands as well as consumers can benefit from Foursquare’s new focus. By encouraging and rewarding people for exploration—checking in to new places and leaving tips in more locations—businesses can drive new customers to their stores through promoted updates. Promoted updates, described by Ms. O’Malley as “similar to a search ad, but with pictures”, consist of image and text. Sometimes brands will even attach an offer, which can be a general promotional offer or a Foursquare exclusive offer, to entice people to visit them in person.

One of the newer features of the offers is that merchants can add unique codes to them make things easier on the staff (for example, a bar code that can be scanned at POS instead of a code to type in), and/or to easily ensure a deal is only redeemed once per device. With their beta partner, Walgreens, Foursquare saw a 31% redemption rate on a promoted product using these unique codes. The redemption experience is seamless for brands as well as users.

The overall check-in rate for promoted updates is 2% on average while their best campaign had a 10% check-in rate. 65% people were first time check-ins or lapse customers, and 52% checked-in within 24 hours of engaging with the ads they saw on Foursquare. For mobile advertising, these are pretty great returns.

In the coming months, Foursquare will be debuting a couple new ad products that take advantage of the data that Foursquare has collected on its users so far.

–

Dana O’Malley is an Account Executive at Foursquare and is reachable at dana@foursquare.com

Cheaper mobile phones with access to the web are certainly a part of that demand growth in developing nations, while in more traditional technology markets, hotspots, larger applications and cloud computing are to blame. Whatever the reason for demand, carriers are responding accordingly, with new submarine cables connecting more countries than ever before.

Telegeography tracks bandwidth supply, pricing and data on submarine cables, and the latest data shows how carriers that range from traditional players like Level 3 and Tata to newer investors such as Google are connecting all areas of the world. The firm estimates all regions are getting about 10 to 12 new terabits per second of capacity each year. All in all in the last five years the world has gained 54 Tbps of new capacity.

This is great, because additional cables means more redundancy, so when accidents happen or cables get cut — as happened late last month off the coast of Egypt – traffic can route around the nicks in the system. That redundancy also allows new players into the market and can result in lower bandwidth costs, which is good for businesses buying bandwidth and indirectly for consumers.

Not long after the Boston Marathon bombings occurred on Monday afternoon, several Twitter users noted that these kinds of real-time news events illustrate how incredible the service is as a source of breaking news, but at the same timehow terrible it is.

Sure enough, there were plenty of fake news reports to go around on Monday, from reports of suspicious vehicles to the arrest of alleged perpetrators — just as there were during superstorm Sandy and the school shootings in Connecticut. But does that invalidate Twitter as a news source? And should the service try harder to filter out bad information and highlight verified news reports? I think the answer to both of these questions is the same: No.

Erik Wemple of the Washington Post noted that in some cases Twitter can act as a “news ombudsman,” pointing out that there were a number of people advising caution in the tweeting and re-tweeting of details about the blasts, although Wemple may also have been following more members of the media than the average person (ironically, some criticized Wemple himself for being too quick to post his thoughts about Twitter use during the aftermath of the bombings).

This in itself illustrates one of the problems with Twitter as a news-delivery vehicle, which is that no one can agree on the proper behavior during such events — or at least not enough people to make it worthwhile. When (if ever) is it too soon to speculate about the source of the attack or details like the number of wounded? Which sources are reliable and which aren’t when it comes to retweeting? Does everything have to be verified? Is it okay to retweet graphic videos and photos?

Journalism in real time, with all its flaws

These are all the same challenges that breaking-news outlets like CNN face, but they have teams of seasoned editors to make those decisions (and still often get them wrong — perhaps even as wrong as Twitter does). Twitter has nothing but a short attention span, a hair trigger and a couple of buttons that say “tweet” and “retweet,” and they are all too easy to push. Should more people think twice before they click them? Undoubtedly. Will they? Probably not.

That said, however, there’s no question that Twitter is one of the best tools for breaking-news delivery since the telegraph. Unfortunately, it is also a great tool for distributing lies, speculation, innuendo, hoaxes and every other form of inaccurate information. I’ve argued before that this is just the way the news works now — the news wire and police scanner are no longer available only to journalists, but to anyone who cares to listen. And so is the ability to republish.

Should Twitter do more to verify sources, or highlight accurate information, as some have suggested? It’s an appealing idea. The service could try to usegeotagging to identify those who are close to the scene, or some other method to determine credibility — something third-party services like Sulia and Storyful also try to do through a variety of methods. But is that really Twitter’s place?

Leave verification to the journalists

Why don’t we get YouTube to verify the source of videos as well, like the ones that are posted from Syria or Egypt? Or get Google to sort the news it pulls in based on the likelihood of it being credible? The simplest answer is that this isn’t what those services are for — they are distribution engines, or pipes (a series of tubes, if you will). Asking them to become news entities is a little like asking AT&T to eavesdrop on phone calls in order to figure out who is a terrorist.

Rather than relying on Twitter to do this, I think it’s far better to accept the somewhat chaotic nature of the medium, and rely on journalists — and not just the professional kind, but the amateur kind as well — to filter that information in real time, the way Andy Carvin did during the Arab Spring (by using Twitter as a crowdsourced newsroom) and others did during Sandy and the Colorado shootings. Over time, I believe, Twitter becomes a kind of self-cleaning oven, as writer Sasha Frere-Jones put it.

Sure, it’s messy and erratic, but that’s because it is made of human beings. Traditional media is like that too, we just rarely see it happening out in the open. But I believe that having it happen out in the open is ultimately better than keeping it behind closed doors.

Leap Motion, creators of a motion-control device that allows interaction with a computer interface through hand movements, has announced a partnership with Hewlett Packard that will embed gesture control directly within HP hardware and get this technology out to more mainstream consumers.

The Leap Motion device was already scheduled for a standalone launch on May 13, and the announcement calls for it to be bundled with HP products beginning this summer.

The deal will have Leap Motion’s AirSpace app store pre-loaded on HP laptops and PCs and have Leap Motion technology embedded in future HP devices. Although the companies declined to share a time frame for when HP’s Leap Motion-embedded devices will hit the market, the combination could help HP become an early leader in the motion-control movement.

How HP Helps Leap Motion

“They were a logical choice for us with their sheer distribution and their worldwide footprint,” said Leap Motion’s president and COO Andy Miller, of getting involved with HP.

That seems to encapsulate this symbiotic partnership: HP may be a struggling hardware titan, but it has the global reach and R&D muscle that Leap Motion needs to push its device from nifty niche product into mainstream hardware companion. On the flip side, Leap Motion infuses some cutting edge functionality into generic HP devices.

It’s a win-win if Leap Motion takes off like many predict it will. Miller claimed the device has received “hundreds of thousands” of pre-orders from nearly every country in the world.

Leap Motion Looking For More Licensing Deals

Beyond HP, Leap Motion is remaining tight-lipped about additional deals. “We are anxious and encouraging of folks to license our technology, non-consumer as well,” Miller said. “We’ve had conversations about robotic surgery, automotive, fighter jets, data visualization… and any place where there is a cleanliness aspect where you can’t use touch – like in an operating room or clean room or even fast-food kitchen.”

The device is currently available for pre-order for $79.99 from LeapMotion.com, BestBuy.com (for U.S. only), and Amazon.uk for United Kingdom customers.

Image courtesy of Leap Motion.

Earlier this month, controversy arose at Microsoft’s gaming division when Adam Orth, a lead game designer, dismissed the concerns of gamers about a rumored requirement that an internet connection would be required to play future Xbox titles. On his Twitter account, Orth wrote, “Sorry, I don’t get the drama around having an ‘always on’ console. Every device now is ‘always on.’ That’s the world we live in. #dealwithit.” Over Twitter, Orth’s friend and fellow game designer Manveer Heir reminded him of the problems that Diablo III and Sim City encountered with a similar policy, and furthermore pointed out that many users—especially outside major urban areas—experience inconsistent internet connections, but Orth also dismissed these concerns.

After the exchange sparked discussion on the gaming forum NeoGAF, Microsoft responded with an apology and explanation: “We apologize for the inappropriate comments made by an employee on Twitter yesterday. This person is not a spokesperson for Microsoft, and his personal views do not reflect the customer centric approach we take to our products or how we would communicate directly with our loyal consumers.”

Orth’s critics may point to a 2011 New York Times article that reported a lack of high speed internet access in rural parts of the country. But tone aside, was Orth partially right? For example, in a February blog post, Hal Singer, a blogger for Forbes, dissected similar reports, and found internet access to be less divided. For example, he pointed out that the FCC’s annual report on broadband deployment—a key measure of internet accessibility—overstates the number of users without access to high speed internet because its definition of high speed access may be too rigid.

According to Orth, the FCC doesn’t consider internet connections that are below its thresholds—for example, DSL at 3Mbps and wireless connections such as 10Mbps 4G LTE—as, for its purposes, broadband access. The FCC has the high speed coverage gap at 7 million people, but Singer puts it closer to 2 to 5 million. Singer continues, “It is hyperbole to suggest that broadband operators have ignored large swaths of the country.”

What does this mean for brands, who are increasing their digital ad spend in hopes of reaching a wider audience? What does this mean for consumers, who are assumed to be constantly connected and “always on?” While it is true that coverage gaps still do exist, many cable and telecommunication providers are working hard to expand Internet access to wider audiences. This, and the fact that the FCC is being urged to offer smaller nationwide carriers a fair share of the increased low-frequency spectrum is good news for businesses. Though not every brand currently has a digital strategy, this offers more of these companies who may not be located in major metropolitan area to develop one and reach their newly connected customers more easily.

For most of us, social networks are something of a personal affair, something we use at work but not necessarily for work, or at least not in an official manner. We flick between our inboxes and our social networks. We interrupt sometimes more menial tasks with something lighter, like scrolling through Facebook.

Many businesses find this interruption a threat to productivity and take the seemingly extreme measure of blocking social networks in the work environment. They assume employees will be more efficient if they are restricted to a more formal set of work tools, such as emails, meetings and PowerPoint presentations.

An enlightened minority of businesses, however, believe the opposite. They have augmented their traditional tool chest with social networking tools and practices. Rather than seeing social networking as something to be controlled, they embrace the participatory nature of social networks, the collective action it spurs and the transparency that it demands.

Social businesses are arguably the next generation of business; a new model of operating, and interacting. They are businesses where success is based on the participation of all, rather than the outputs of a few. Strategists Maggie Christie and Michegro Chisolm from Proximity Auckland decided to dig deeper to understand just what the social business model is about, and what its benefits are for brands and consumers alike.

Please read, share, and enjoy.

Social–Good for Business?

Last year, Almap BBDO decided to reignite the idea of HP in people’s minds by creating an interactive experience at Sao Paolo’s biggest music festival, Planeta Terra. To do this, HP built a huge inflatable “photo ball,” which was fitted with an HD camera and a Wi-Fi receiver. As the ball bounced among the crowd, it took snapshots, which were transmitted live (as video) to the stage, broadcast online, and uploaded immediately to HP’s Facebook fan page as still images.  In addition, HP had a booth where concert attendees could print out pictures of themselves taken by the photo ball.

Through the photo ball, HP and Almap BBDO were able to introduce the new brand positioning: “Making Memories Last.”

Lately, though, there’s one big concept that seems really exciting, and that’s anticipatory systems.

We’re starting to see glimmerings of these new, smarter systems in everything from check-in services like Foursquare to calendar apps, advertising and even online-personals services. Increasingly, rather than waiting for us to tell them what we want, in the form of a search query or command, they’ll prompt us with suggestions.

What Is An Anticipatory System?

Here’s a simple definition of anticipatory systems. Think of them as artificially intelligent services that are aware of external context — including ambient inputs like time of day, social connections, upcoming meetings, local weather, traffic and more. Taking all of that into account comes naturally to humans. But for computers, it’s hard.

The big challenge in artificial intelligence isn’t that computers are stupid. It’s that they’re ignorant. We haven’t given them enough data, nor the tools and rules to process it all. But that’s rapidly changing.

The notion of anticipatory systems in computing dates back at least to the late 1990s. Daniel Dubois, a professor at the University of Liège in Belgium, defined an anticipatory system as one ”that computes its current states [by] taking into account its past and present states but also its potential future states.”

That’s a bit vague, and the practical application of anticipatory systems has proven accordingly tricky. But all of the trends we’re kind of bored with now — social, local, mobile, big data — have laid the groundwork for the realization of anticipatory systems’ promise.

Foursquare, for example, has been collecting years of data about where people are and what places they’re interested in — not just their explicit check-ins, but their local searches, tips and likes. So far, that’s allowed Foursquare to offer personalized recommendations. But now the company is taking the next step into anticipating users’ needs, Foursquare’s head of search, Andrew Hogue, told Fast Company. Hogue gave the example of giving users recommendations for lunch spots at 11 a.m., rather than requiring users to type “lunch” into a search.

That kind of ambient awareness is at the center of the latest version of a mobile dining guide made by Ness Computing. Older versions of Ness sucked in data from Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and other sources to offer personalized dining recommendations based on friends’ tastes. The next step Ness is taking is to tailor those recommendations based on context — time of day and location. Currently in beta, the new version should come out later this month.

Merely analyzing social data isn’t enough, says Ness CEO Corey Reese: ”Just because a computer is aware of what you’re doing doesn’t mean it will add value to your life.”

Anticipating Your Schedule

Schedule-management apps are another field getting reinvented by anticipatory computing, as startup consultant Semil Shah recently noted in TechCrunch. Apps like Twist and Leave Now alert people we’re meeting with to our real arrival times. That’s a welcome, computer-assisted acknowledgement of the reality that calendars are a perpetual act of optimism, subject to real-time revision by factors we can manage — like self-discipline — and factors we can’t, like traffic and transit delays.

Even our social lives are getting transformed. Consider Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature, which draws on both its own social graph of our connections and external cues like our email inboxes to recommend friends. That’s perhaps the most widely distributed and used anticipatory system in the world. Dating sites are getting smarter, too, relying on the implicit cues of self-presentation as well as explicit data in user’s searches to match up people. That’s what online daters are already doing, more or less manually as they sort through profiles — the trick is for personals sites to start doing the work for them.

The biggest bet on anticipatory computing at present is Google Now, Google’s intelligent mobile assistant that’s built into Android. Drawing on all the data Google has, from flight confirmations in your Gmail to upcoming events in Google Calendar to your history of Web searches, Google Now attempts to give you what you might search for without making you search.

Apple’s Siri, though more of a voice-command system, also has anticipatory elements. But it is hobbled by the thinness of the data Apple has on tap. If it wants Siri to anticipate our needs, Apple will have to partner more deeply with Facebook, Yelp and a host of other services so it knows more about us.

The true challenge for Apple, Google and Facebook is how to design a great anticipatory service around a specific need — without feeling creepy or, worse, clumsy. So much of what makes an anticipatory system great lies in the nuances of the service. Written prompts and design cues will play a huge role in getting people comfortable with computers that know a lot about us and make eerily accurate guesses.

But if people can get it right and design anticipatory systems that feel human and respond to our needs — well, I can only shiver with anticipation.

Search Spammers are a blight on Google’s reputation.

When Google introduced its Panda algorithm update in 2011, the company’s goal was to weed out and punish low-quality sites that had manipulated their way to the top of search results. 2012′s Penguin update tackled the same issue but from a different angle. This time Google was targeting bad guys guilty of over-optimizing their sites with tactics like keyword stuffing and intentionally created duplicate content.

Google’s desires here should be pretty clear: It’s an advertising company, so the better its search results are, the more ad revenue it can pull in.

But while improving results is obviously helpful for web search, it’s far more important for the mobile world, where all of the problems with search spam are amplified.

“With mobile devices, search quality is a far bigger issue than it is on the web,” Ian Lurie, the CEO of Internet marketing company Portent, said.

Basically, when you’re dealing with smaller screens, every little bit of screen real estate is hugely important. This means that companies have less margin for error — especially with search.

Mobile also affects searchers’ patience for crappy results:  You may be able to tolerate a few unhelpful spam links while at home, but that restraint goes out the window while you’re flicking through search results on your smartphone. On mobile, accuracy matters.

“With mobile, I want the number one, two, or three result to be what I want,” Lurie said.

This reality obviously puts a lot of pressure on Google, which makes its money by giving searchers fast, useful results and selling advertisements against them. Every false, gamed search result is a tiny failure for Google’s search algorithm. It’s death by a thousand spammers.

These pressures are even worse for products like Google Glass and Google Now, which are part of “ubiquitous and embedded” future of search, as Lurie puts it.

Both of these products take Google’s search finesse to a new level: Glass is literally about seeing the world through Google, and Google Now is about giving you relevant, accurate information before you even realize you need it.

Neither one of these products will have a particularly high tolerance for crappy spam links or inaccurate search results of any kind. Just imagine making a search on Glass and getting a result that a spammer had manipulated to the top of Google’s results (or, heck, even a search that returned an unhelpful result). These kinds of situations would completely destroy the experience of using Glass, which is supposed to be simple, seamless, and largely invisible.

If the tolerance for bad search results is tiny on mobile phones, it’s nonexistent on Google Glass: As the interface options disappear, the acceptance for bad search results also vanishes. (Let’s call it the Law of Search Frustration Tolerance.)

All of which should make it very clear that Google is sure to get increasingly tough on search spam as the mobile web, Google Now, and Google Glass become more important. Google has to kill search spam before search spam kills it.

Read more at Venturebeat.

Just looking at ads is bad enough, so who would want totalk to them? While many people would likely answer “no one,” voice-recognition software maker Nuance says the opposite is true.

What Is A Voice Ad?

Wanting in on the booming mobile ad market, Nuance developed a way for people to chat with ads much as they do with Siri on the iPhone. Called Voice Ads, the technology works off the Internet connection of any iOS or Android mobile device.

Voice-recognition software has been around for years, but remains relatively immature as a form of communication between humans and computers. Founded in 1994, Nuance has been developing the technology longer than most other companies. Nuance’s technology reportedly powers Apple’s Siri, although neither company will confirm it.

Nuance’s voice-ad technology is available today through the mobile ad frameworks of Jumptap,  Millennial Media and Opera Mediaworks. An ad framework is what developers embed into their mobile apps, so they can display advertising distributed by an ad network.

Advertisers using Nuance’s software development kit could build two-way communications requiring only “Yes” and “No” answers – or ones with more complicated responses. An example of Voice Ads can be seen onYouTube.

The development process is not self-service, though. Ad developers have to work directly with Nuance to connect the advertising to the company’s voice-recognition servers over the Internet. And because the technology is so new, it isn’t supported in third-party rich-media ad creation tools, except Celtra.

Talking To Ads Could Make Sense

In many ways, Voice Ads make sense on a smartphone. Why fiddle with clicking on tiny links and trying to type on a 4-inch screen, when you can click once and start talking with a brand?

As people get comfortable talking to their smartphones through personal assistants like Siri, it’s possible they could be enticed into starting a conversation through a product discount or promotional pricing. According to Nuance, advertisers see lots of potential.

“When you actually have a live conversation with an ad, it’s sort of like you’re creating more of a tight relationship with the brand itself, because you’re having a discussion with it,” said Peter Mahoney, chief marketing officer for Nuance. “The brand feels more responsive. It feels like something you can actually have a real live relationship with.”

While the thought of having a “tight relationship” with an ad may sound absurd, there is big money at stake. Worldwide mobile advertising revenue is expected to hit $11.4 billion this year, reaching $24.5 billion by 2016,according to Gartner.

The key is the quality of the experience. Nuance’s technology will have to convince people they are actually having a meaningful, two-way conversation. Advertisers will have to give potential customers something in return for having that conversation with a brand.

Speech is continuing to evolve as a means of communication with computers. As people get used to talking to the machines they use in their everyday lives, the jump to talking to an ad may not seem so extreme.

Image courtesy of ShutterStock.

U.S. teens’ passionate embrace of smartphones and a “mobile first” mentality to the Internet shows no signs of slowing down. According to the latest Pew Research on teens and technology:

• 37% of teens in the U.S. have a smartphone.
• 25% of those aged 12-17 access the Internet “primarily” via a cell phone or smartphone.
• Among teens with a smartphone, however, 50%access the Internet primarily via the mobile device.
• Girls are more likely than boys to rely on their smartphone as their primary Internet access device.

The rapid adoption of smartphones and the parallel demands for a real-time, location-based and personalized Internet will clearly have a significant and potentially lasting impact on work, shopping, entertainment, the PC industry – and even the structural underpinnings of the Internet. According to Pew:

In many ways, teens represent the leading edge of mobile connectivity, and the patterns of their technology use often signal future changes in the adult population. Teens are just as likely to have a cell phone as they are to have a desktop or laptop computer. And increasingly these phones are affording teens always-on, mobile access to the internet — in some cases, serving as their primary point of access.

(See also “Good Luck Building A Business In Today’s Youth Market.”)

Adoption of the mobile Web by teens appears to be accelerating.

• 37% of American youth ages 12-17 now have a smartphone, up from 23% in 2011.
• Already, 23% of teens own a tablet.
• No group is more connected to the Internet overall than teens.

Household income and urbanity are strongly correlated with teen smartphone use. Black and Hispanic teens are more likely to own a smartphone than their White counterparts. The smartphone could be the tool that eradicates the digital divide.

What Parents Don’t Know

A 2012 University of Washington study noted that teens in general considered their rather high level of connectivity as necessary for effective cultural development and to prevent social isolation.

This does not mean, however, that teens are eagerly sharing these many online engagements with their parents. Smartphones, which by their very nature are designed for use by a single person – unlike a family computer in the living room, say – may make it even harder for parents to know what their children are doing online. A McAfee study last year, for example, noted that 70% of teens actively seek to hide their online behaviorfrom their parents. (The McAfee study examined digital activity across multiple computing devices, not just smartphones.)

The shift to mobile internet use changes the ways teens access information and creates new challenges for parents who wish to monitor their children’s Internet use. Given bandwidth constraints and the fact that many websites are not yet optimized for mobile devices, teens who access content primarily on their cell phone may have to work harder to get important information.  On the other hand, for parents who may wish to restrict access to their children’s exposure to certain kinds of content online, mobile devices can make it more difficult for parents to use the passive monitoring strategies they tell us they prefer, instead requiring more technical solutions.

It is not yet fully understood how the always-connected teen might alter the economy, work, even culture – though it will no doubt touch nearly every aspect of society. For example, there has already been a “drastic drop” in the number of teens getting  driver’s licenses, likely due to their adoption of mobile technology and social media. Expect many more changes to come. Today’s teens have grown up online – and online increasingly means via a smartphone.

Image of happy teens courtesy of Shutterstock.

Editor’s note: Gary Shapiro is president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the U.S. trade association representing more than 2,000 consumer electronics companies, and author of the New York Times best-selling books Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World’s Most Successful Businesses and The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream. 

Gary will be speaking at The Next Web Conference Europe 2013, which takes place in Amsterdam on 25-26 April. His views expressed here are his own. Connect with him on Twitter: @GaryShapiro.

Looking around the world today, things appear grim. The bank crisis in Cyprus threatened property rights of depositors; the EU economy is challenged and the US is slipping in global competitiveness rankings. Many look to the government for answers to economic problems, but we should be looking to the private sector for leadership and examples. By taking a look at the world’s most successful businesses and asking how they’ve achieved their greatness, countries, businesses, and individuals alike can learn to adapt winning strategies to help achieve their own goals as well.

In the 30 years I’ve spent in the consumer electronics industry, I’ve seen my fair share of companies that have tried and failed, and other savvy ones that have succeeded. During that time, I took mental notes on what characteristics, strategies, and personality traits the most successful entrepreneurs shared, eventually coining the term “ninja innovation” to describe the strength, cunning, intensity and adaptability they have in common.

The foundational trait of a ninja innovator is his or her commitment to victory. This means that his goal must be to outwit the enemy, or the competition, with a strategy in place to win. To do this, a ninja innovator must assemble a ‘strike force’ – a team of professionals that will help him achieve his goal. Many think of entrepreneurs as starting alone in a garage or basement and building an empire through individual toil. In reality, most successful entrepreneurs benefited from the insight and contributions of many people along the way to achieve those goals.

Next, the ninja innovator and his team must be prepared to take risks. The most successful business leaders treat their assignments as a way of life, not just a day job. It’s easy to want consistency and to avoid risk, but by being savvy and assessing the outcomes of different options, one can get a jump on competitors and position a company as the industry leader. Taking risks includes the possibility of failure, but a ninja innovator is prepared to learn from his mistakes and press on toward the goal in spite of setbacks.

The best way to prepare for these mishaps is to develop a living strategy that can change depending on the environment. By putting a blueprint in place, the ninja innovator knows the direction she’s willing to go and can quickly adapt and adjust to whichever situation comes her way. Ninja innovators also take advantage of their surroundings, always evaluating the opportunities and threats that are around them.

Finally, ninja innovators never settle and are never satisfied. The most successful business leaders are the ones that are always improving, always trying to find ways to achieve the next rung of success. Similarly, they have energy and passion to keep their businesses fresh and exciting. Ninja innovators think about what can be, rather than what is. They challenge themselves to make things happen, they make goals and they achieve.

Later this month, thousands of entrepreneurs in the technology space will gather in Amsterdam for The Next Web Conference Europe 2013, where we’ll explore these ideas in greater detail. I’m honored to be delivering a keynote address, but I’m most looking forward to meeting more ninja innovators and sharing ideas for success. The philosophy of ninja innovation is one that troubled companies – and governments – should turn to for guidance on navigating the course out of crisis and back to profitability and financial security.

Image credit: Thinkstock

Starbucks is set to expand its Pick of the Week program, which offers customers a free app or piece of digital content when they visit one of its stores, to include in-store downloads through its own iOS app.

The update, reported by CNET, will give users the chance to download a free app or book through the Starbucks iOS app and in-store Wi-Fi network, without the use of physical printed cards.

It’s a small, but significant step forward for the coffee retailer, as it removes the need for redemption codes and encourages further engagement with its official app, which already offers Passbook payments, Starbucks Rewards and a map for finding nearby stores.

“This expansion, of adding apps and books, is the reflection of Starbucks and Apple working together to strengthen the relationship for customers,” Starbucks Chief Digital Officer Adam Brotman reportedly said. “This is another step in the direction that we’re going to integrate more things into our mobile application.”

Angry Birds Star Wars, the latest mobile video game from hit developer Rovio, will be the first title to take advantage of the in-app functionality.

There’s no word yet on whether the service will ever be expanded to Starbuck’s Android app, however. Ever since Pick of the Week launched back in 2008, the printed cards have been exclusively for content available in iTunes or the App Store. Creating a similar partnership with Google and the Google Play store would be an obvious step forward, it seems.

It’s unclear whether the printed cards will be discontinued, or if they will be offered simultaneously with the in-app downloads. Either way, it’s nice to know that you’ll never have to worry about reaching the counter only to find that the last card has been taken, or forgetting it completely when leaving the store.

Starbucks has been proactive in embracing technology at every turn. Earlier this year it began selling Square Mobile Card Readers in its 7,000 stores across the United States, and has also partnered with The New York Times to offer its customers up to 15 free articles each day onNYTimes.com.

➤ Starbucks | iOS

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Image Credit: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

SXSW By the Numbers

This year’s SXSW saw over 30,000 attendees and 1833 interactive sessions. 60% of attendees were male, and 48% were repeat attendees. 21% were international registrants from 72 different countries, and the biggest celebrity there was none other than the precious Tardar Sauce, the meme more commonly known as Grumpy Cat.

Despite not having a breakout app like last year, many hardware and design technologies were still buzzed about, such as 3D printing company Makerbot, which launched the Digitizer; gesturing technology like Leap Motion; and Google Glass competitors like Telepathy.

Before leaving for the conference, our team of strategists helped to launch Digital Lab Live, BBDO/Proximity’s Tumblr platform, as a way to cover live events and post a ton of original and curated content from around the Web.  We focused on five streams of content:  Design & Development, Art & Inspiration, Culture & Entertainment, Content & Distribution, and The Future.  We interviewed thought leaders, startups and attendees on our YouTube channel and blog.

Here’s what we took away from it all:

I.              Design & Development (by Rohit Thawani)

NASA—The User Experience of a Space Station

Design is at the forefront of everything that we do. Apple’s success as a technology company is not about its hardware or its software—it’s about its simplicity and its intuitive user interface that keeps consumers coming back. As creators of content, we need to consider UX from the beginning, and design it from the end user’s point of view. What’s intuitive to a UX designer may not be intuitive to an astronaut—we need a bottom up feed, not a top down one.

Designing for User Generated Chaos

This is especially pertinent when it comes to the Internet age and its many calls for user generated content. For example, Lego’s initiative Cuusoo (Japanese for “wish”) sources ideas from fans to create new sets. Once an idea reaches 10,000 supporters, it will be reviewed by the Cuusoo team who will then decide on whether to produce it. This is a prime example of a bottom up feed, getting users to tell you what they want, before you go about making it.

Merging Physical and Digital:  The Future of Toys

Countries like China are pushing children to play and invent in their schools, while the U.S. continues to fall below standards of other powerful nations.  Kids learn through play, and this panel discussed how future toys can unlock the potential of our future generations.  By merging the physical toy with interactive digital experiences, learning and playing become indistinguishable.

The biggest takeaway from my Design & Development track is that we can’t continue to develop work for our screens without recognizing that they’re being used in wholly different ways.  Small children expect to be able to touch and swipe a screen for something to happen, and that’s just the beginning.  We’re not just entering the post-PC and post-dumb-TV age, but also the post-keyboard, post-mouse and post-remote age.  As we adopt new methods and design and develop more intuitive interfaces, we will grow quicker than we ever have before.

Leap Motion and the Disappearing Interface

Sensors will be the most important mode of data input in the future. According to Leap Motion, a gesture control company, the thing that’s holding computers back in this day and age is the number of ways in which we can use them.

Leap Motion is a $79 motion controller for your PC (similar to Microsoft’s Kinect) that recognizes your body and lets you control your Xbox with motions.  At first I thought it was a bit of a gimmick, but when inventors David Holz and Michael Buckwald demonstrated Leap Motion’s applications, I was blown away:

• Education – kids can play with subatomic particles to see how they move and react without dense formulas and diagrams
• Design – artists can quickly and intuitively create a 3-D object with their hands
• Health – surgeons can operate from thousands of miles away

Going Beyond Mobile

Increasingly we are seeing that there are dumb devices and smart devices. We want to see a lot of dumb devices (passive, data-collecting sensors) and just a few smart devices (that connect to dumb devices and pick up and interpret data it collects). This will allow us to learn more about ourselves through our screens while moving our interactions into the real world. The fear of being overly connected online and less so in the real world is proving to be unfounded.

II.            Art & Inspiration (by Rebecca Nadilo)

How Agencies are Adapting to the New Landscape

The rise of technology has changed the way people behave. Artists, brands, agencies and people everywhere are changing to reflect this. Agencies, in particular, have been a bit slow to adapt to these changes on the whole, but the feeling of experimentation that pervaded SXSW gave the agencies that were doing it right a chance to explain their methodologies, techniques, and processes.

There are four ways that agencies and brands are redefining ideas.

• Technology is being treated as the idea, not something that the idea can be built on.
• Ideas can come from anywhere.
• Digital Labs (like ours) can help agencies make strides in digital.
• Quick, agile collaboration is key.

R/GA is one of the agencies that has been able to embrace these four rules to change their workflow instead of using the traditional idea model in which an idea jumps from one party to another in a fixed manner until it gets to the execution stage. R/GA’s model, on the other hand, starts with the technology they want to leverage. They then embrace the constraints that the technology puts on them (what’s the point in thinking so far out of the box when no body can make it happen?) and brainstorm different ideas within their limits. This, of course, is an entirely collaborative process that draws from people from every different nook and cranny of the agency, and is a great model to emulate upon because it eliminates the waterfall model that segregates the workflow and brainstorming process.

BBDO 747Labs, built out of Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, helps digital fit into a bigger, existing model. A group of digitally minded people from all over the agency makes up a team of consultants who serve the broader agency by solving problems with technology.

Fabrique, in the Netherlands, has small teams that have short, intense and agile work sessions known as “scrums.” They take the “agile approach” to solving problems by creating little increments of the end product and make improvements as they go along.

Agencies, thus, have many models to learn from in regards to formulating innovative ways of working. It is important that agencies trial new ways of working until they come up with something that works for them. Ideas that incorporate the audience and include end users are particularly important, and can be uncovered during regular idea and design sprints, that train employees’ brains to work quickly and malleably.

III.           Culture & Entertainment (by Christine Ngo)

The Convergence of Entertainment and Technology

Not so long ago, the technology, marketing and entertainment industries operated in silos, only tapping into one another when needed.  The big shot jocks didn’t hang out with the computer geeks, ever. Now, the three sectors are working together, leveraging each other’s strengths in a more integrated way than ever before.  Many of the entertainment panels at SXSW focused on ways the three sectors can continue to work together to better reach consumers.

Technology is now a companion, another experience that enhances traditional entertainment, which is often a mere passive experience. These connected second screens are creating new channels for discovery, and offers an opportunity to draw the consumer deeper into the narrative. Brands can leverage this by looking outside traditional channels for ways to complement existing content and connect with their audiences.

Raising A New Generation of Digital Natives

We’ve always thought that we were “digital natives,” but we’re not. The true digital natives are the babies who learn how to read using tablets, the kids who have had digital footprints since they were infants. That said, there is a genuine anxiety and many unanswered questions as to how best to raise this generation of true digital natives who are exposed to technology even before they can recite the alphabet.  How do we strike a balance from raising a digitally savvy child while ensuring that technology is not distracting them and hampering their development? From debating how much toddlers should be exposed to devices, to sharing how to address issues of cyber-bullying, parents are facing new challenges in setting examples and finding solutions for young people everyday. The solution is to be less tone deaf, and to use our power as storytellers to tell intelligent, inspirational stories to teens, so they can reach out to one another for help as they need it.

IV.           Content & Distribution (by Jonathan Vu)

Shifts in Hollywood Attitude Towards Digital

As you can see above, there has been a disruption of traditional media, which has drastically changed how they’re moving towards the future. There has been a shift in Hollywood—in both how they are producing content and how we are consuming it. It’s becoming increasingly important for brands to have integrated channels, since users will go to where the content lives.

Key Articles:

Mobile is powerful because it intersects intent and context.

http://www.digitallablive.com/post/44873642295/social-local-mobile-consumers-dont-see-these-buckets

Good content programming is built on assets and content, not channels. For example, House of Cards is a Netflix original series that is taking the US by storm. And it is being distributed across the Internet through none other than Netflix. Netflix might not be an HBO, but they are certainly getting there with their original series. Consumers are going to them to get the content that they want, and they’re making a real impression.

http://www.digitallablive.com/post/44982220813/tmzs-pov-on-the-internets-impact-on-tv

The Big Power Shift In Media

Content that generates consistent sharing and exposure doesn’t require high production quality.  But it has to be relevant to the consumer. Social sharing can’t be an afterthought. Content must be specifically designed to be socially shared. There are 6 rules to follow when creating social content:

• Have a heart, be emotional.
• Connect with the consumer’s identity. Don’t try to talk to everyone at the same time, talk to the smaller group and try to inspire them so that they can advocate for you.
• Be nimble and responsive.
• Humor is always worth sharing!
• Nostalgia, as well.
• Don’t post things that people are embarrassed to share.

Demystifying “Viral” Videos

We’ve all heard it before—“create a viral video.” But that’s hard! How do we make sure that a video will be viral, save for personally asking Justin Bieber to tweet about it? To truly increase chances of generating consistent earned views, try to clone the type of content that your consumers organically watch.

V.            The Future (by Zach Pentel)

Key Articles:

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX/Solar City/Tesla, is going to Mars. Today’s best innovators, like Elon Musk, only have interest in building things that are “substantially better than what came before.” They don’t see long-term value in incremental innovation, because the pace of change is so rapid.

http://www.digitallablive.com/post/45033709156/elon-musk-is-going-to-mars

The Future is About Information

Futurists don’t like smartphones. They have the power to collect data but all the data they collect has to be inputted manually. For example, we are the ones who scan QR codes into programs to redirect to sites. We are the ones who check ourselves in on Foursquare. The system requires too much of us. Our smartphones should understand us better. A solution to that is passive technology (the aforementioned dumb device to our smartphones’ smart device).

Some passive technology is already among us in the forms of data-tracking devices like the Jawbone Up and the Nike Fuelband, which collect data about our behavior as we go about our day-to-day lives. This data helps us better understand our patterns and ourselves. These devices, however, are child’s play compared to what’s to come. The release of Google Glass is just a few months away, and the augmented reality glasses will tell us exactly whawt we need to know when we need to know it. This will fundamentally shift the way we act, communicate, and remember things. Google Glass acknowledges what our brains are already good at and helps us out with the rest.

“Learning to invade someone’s space with more marketing does not make you a better company” (Olivier Blanchard on the false notion that online marketing is still a game of interrupting our audiences in as many places as possible).

Forget marketing efficiently:  the most progressive brands are focusing on developing branded experiences that are central to their campaigns, not an afterthought.  As our audiences become harder to reach, and their options for ignoring us become more sophisticated, we have to create experiences they actually want to have.  This has never been more apparent.

But the story of the year and half-old venture capital-backed Misfit isn’t just a tale about a startup building a coveted Apple-inspired gadget. Though it certainly is that — the company was founded on the day that Steve Jobs died, “Misfit” is a tribute to Jobs and Apple’s ads to think differently, and one of the company’s co-founders is Apple’s former CEO John Sculley (who was instrumental in pushing out Jobs in the 80′s).

Misfit has emerged at the intersection of a few key trends in 2013 that are shaping wearable computing, data, and design. These trends include the emergence of next-generation wearables that have more mainstream appeal, the development of the lean hardware movement that is using crowd funding to experiment, the collection of data that uses narrative and emotion to create an impact, and, most importantly, the introduction of a new type of user interface, which Misfit CEO Sonny Vu has coined as “the glanceable UI.”

Next-gen wearables

Accelerometers and sensors have been around for years. One of the pioneers of the space, Fitbit (see disclosure), is already a five-year-old company. Back in 2008, it was novel to just have a device that could track your movements, count your steps and calories, and sync with your laptop or smart phone.

But in 2013 the hardware for wearable devices has become a commodity, and the success of companies creating wearable computing will depend on the design of the device, the functionality of the software, and how the software and the gadget work together to provide value to the user’s life.

Misfit is part of this second wave of design-centric wearable computing. “We’re very focused on the packaging,” Vu told me with a smile during an interview last week at Misfit’s modest office in Daly City, California. Misfit was founded by Vu, Sculley, and Sridhar Iyengar, who was a co-founder with Vu at his former company AgaMatrix. AgaMatrix created the first FDA-approved glucose meter to work with the iPhone, giving Vu and Iyengar years of rare experience building wearable devices.

While crowd-funding helped fund Misfit’s first run of the Shine, Misfit is actually backed by some of the most well-known investors in the Valley, including Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. Along with its team in Daly City, it has a group of software developers in Vietnam, and makes its gadget in Japan and South Korea.

Think differently

For Misfit, design innovation has been fundamental to creating its hardware. The company doesn’t use words like sensors, or accelerometers on its website, and is trying to look far beyond the niche, early-adopter “quantified self” community.

The first aspect of its design innovation is in the materials. While most wearables on the market are made of rubber or plastic, Misfit’s Shine is almost completely made out of metal — a first in the industry. The metal is part of what makes the device so beautiful and also gives the feeling of value to the user. The metal also makes it very durable; the Shine is fully water proof.

There are reasons why competitors haven’t used metal for pint-sized wearables. The Shine might look awesome, but it takes four different factories just to make the various pieces of the shell and the metal also has created some usability restrictions. The Shine has to be placed directly onto (actually touching) the face of the mobile phone to sync it; the wireless signals wouldn’t escape the metal casing without that.

“The next time I think of doing an entirely metal product, someone shoot me,” laughed Vu.

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Steve Jobs also famously went to great lengths for hardware design, like the iPhone’s unscratchable glass screen, and the handle on top of the original iMac.

Another unusual design element that Misfit deemed necessary is that the Shine isn’t chargeable. It’s got a coin battery, which lasts 4 to 6 months before it needs to be replaced. Pretty much every other wearable on the market is chargeable and requires weekly, or even daily, charging. “We had an almost religious belief that wearables should not be charged. You don’t charge the buttons on your jacket, or the backpack on your back,” Vu said.

The decision to forgo charging also created usability restrictions, namely power management. The Shine needed bright LED lights on its display, the LEDs needed to shine through the metal casing, and the battery had to run the processor and keep time for up to 6 months. Pairing it with a wireless charging dock would have been far easier and would have enabled far more functionality.

A third counterintuitive design choice is that the Shine is a circle, but uses an inverted edge to connect with various accessories — there’s a sports and leather wristband accessory, a magnet clip for clothing, and a necklace that hangs it from your neck. Vu said that quintessential form choice will make the Shine more accessible for people’s various needs.

For example, many women won’t put anything on their wrist, which means wrist-only devices like the FuelBand or Jawbone’s UP are neglecting a good portion of potential users. From a business perspective, accessories can also add substantially to margins, which, for Misfit, could be tight given the Shine is a higher-end device made completely of metal that is trying to hit the price point of the Fitbit.

These types of design decisions have created a device that is substantially different from Misfit’s larger and older competitors. Vu said before founding the company and designing the Shine, the team read every single negative review of the Fitbit, the Nike Fuelband, and the Jawbone products.

Glanceable UI

Beyond the hardware, Misfit is also innovating around the UI and how the user experiences feedback from the Shine. The design team made the decision to remove a digital screen interface entirely and replace it with a halo of tiny LED lights. They also removed an on/off button. Part of the reason they made these changes was because of the power management issue — there’s no way the device could power a brightly-lit screen and not be a chargeable device.

But the move was also a decision to head in the direction of what Vu called a “glanceable UI.” Designers have for years been focused on UIs for the laptop and cell phone screens, but are more recently just beginning to create interfaces for the very quick glance that is needed for a wearable device.

The Shine takes what the Nike Fuelband started with its colored-LED display and basically pares it down. Shine users can check to see how complete the circle of lights is around the gizmo to determine if they’re meeting their daily fitness goal. By briefly touching the center of the Shine, the lights can quickly configure into a clock to tell the time, meaning the Shine is also a smart watch, too.

If you hear wearable designers and developers talk about user experience, they’ll commonly talk about truncating content. Google’s Glass advocate Timothy Jordanexplained recently at SXSW that an app built for Glass, like the New York Times app, has to show enough of a snippet of information to be conveyed in just a look. The New York Times Glass app shows headlines and images, but not full articles.

Likewise, health and body information on a wearable device like the Shine should be able to be conveyed in a second or two. The cell phone app that syncs with the Shine houses the rest of the functionality.

A glanceable UI is about creating a second’s worth of meaning out of important and impactful data. Whether that’s a moment to convey how well you’re doing toward your daily fitness goal or a single blinking light to encourage more movement. As Om wrote recently, as data becomes the world’s currency, data without emotion, empathy or narrative is meaningless. Wearable gadgets can track as much data as they want, but if the user isn’t exposed to the data in a way that impacts their lives, and in a time frame that they can work with, then the device has failed.

Getting to market

Some of Misfit’s design decisions were controversial even within the company, which is why Misfit decided to test out to see if customers would be interested in a metal, non-rechargeable, no-screen, wearable gadget. Turns out, at least on Indiegogo, they are. The company raised over $800,000 from almost 8,000 funders who wanted to buy the Shine early.

Crowd-funding was a way for Misfit to experiment. It’s actually gotten millions from traditional Valley investors to launch its products more commercially. But crowd-funding is becoming a common way for the so-called lean hardware movement to operate. Hardware innovation was front and center at SXSW this year.

Misfit is shipping its first 5,000 Shines to customers in early June and another 7,000 or 8,000 in the second half of June. Shortly after that the Shine will go on sale at retail outlets for around the same price point as the Fitbit, which is around $99.

The Shine is only Misfit’s first product, which Vu calls Product Zero. They’re also working on a device called Mars, or Project One, which will be launched early next year. On the topic of Mars, Vu would only say that it would be a wearable but one that has a longer battery, makes more use of data, and has a different material and different shape.

While Misfit is just a young company, and has yet to deliver its gadgets to its first customers, it’s operating at that the intersection of some of the Valley’s most interesting trends, including the power of design, the next-generation of more mainstream wearables, the importance of impactful data, and a coming era that will feature the glanceable UI.

I look forward to hearing about the first Shine users’ experiences this Summer. In November we’ll be talking more about these issues of design, connectedness and experience at our third annual RoadMap event in San Francisco. Tickets will go on sale this summer, but you can sign up to be one of the first to access tickets.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.

The big question following this week’s Facebook Home announcement is whether it is going to move the needle. And when one looks at the numbers, it’s a question of reach. At least in the near term, Facebook Home will not achieve the reach needed to move the needle.

Facebook avoided several traps

Facebook clearly did many things right. First, it elected not to get into the hardware business by developing its own handset, and thus competing directly with Apple, Samsung, HTC, Motorola, LG and others. Second, it didn’t try to build a new operating system, and compete with Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone (which is battling BlackBerry for third spot). And if it had to pick one OS, Android was definitely the right option, both because of the design choices that open source provides and the sheer number of Android devices being activated.

More importantly, as anyone watching the Facebook Home event yesterday saw, Facebook went big. Facebook Home is ambitious, well designed, stunning and immersive in the experience; Mark Zuckerberg is justifiably proud of what his company has created. But the question remains, will it move the needle?

The numbers tell the story

There are 130 million smartphone users in the U.S., as of the end of January (all figures are according to ComScore’s most recent report). Currently 76 percent of U.S. smartphone users, or 98 million people, have the Facebook app installed on their phones. Android currently has 52 percent of the smartphone market, which, barring switching from iPhones or other smartphones, leaves the total available market of U.S. Android users with Facebook installed to 51 million.

But, crucially, Facebook Home will only work on newer (less than a year old) Android handsets, for now the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III, Note II, HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4, and HTC First. (Hey, where’s my Samsung Galaxy Nexus and any number of other, newer Android handsets?) So once we take Android users currently with the Facebook app installed (about 50 million users) and subtract from that those with older and/or lower-end Android handsets, we’re left with some 25 million possible Home users in the U.S.

But there’s more. Facebook Home is not for everyone. We can assume that casual users who check Facebook infrequently – those who have it installed on their Android handset but aren’t frequent users – aren’t likely to convert to Facebook Home. According to Facebook’s year-end presentation, when comparing the number of Monthly Active Users to Daily Active Users, 59 percent of Facebook’s MAUs are DAUs, which makes sense and provides some insight into casual users who don’t check in daily. Nor can we ignore non-contract (prepaid) mobile users – who account for about 25 percent of the mobile user base, and often pay for data by the KB – who will find Facebook Home “immersion” to be very costly.

So using the best data available, we see that Facebook’s maximum potential reach is seriously impaired by the realities that three-quarters of Facebook smartphone users have iPhones, Blackberries, Windows Phone, Symbian devices or older or low-end Android handsets. Are Facebook users with iPhones or any competing devices going to switch en masse? Certainly not enough to move the needle.

Consumer concerns will factor

For casual users, and those concerned about data consumption, the Facebook mobile app will suffice. Likewise for  those who are justifiably concerned about Facebook Home’s ability to monitor every minute detail of their whereabouts, activities, habits, and so on – even when they’re using other apps.

And then, there’s battery life, already a big issue for smartphone users, as an endless stream of pictures pops up on their handsets.

At least for the U.S. market, where revenue per user is highest, Facebook Home will simply not move the needle, and shouldn’t add up to more than 10 million  to 20 million of Facebook’s current 100 million U.S. mobile users.

Exclusive hardware limits reach

And what about the HTC First, the Facebook handset to be offered exclusively by AT&T on April 12, the same day Facebook Home is scheduled to become available on Google Play? The HTC First is a mid-range and very well-designed handset with a good price point, four pleasing colors, and a great screen. HTC is clearly a contender, and builds gorgeous handsets. But why is this deal, where reach is critical, an exclusive? It simply further limits reach for Facebook.

Two years ago, AT&T and HTC offered the first Facebook Phone, the HTC Status with QWERTY keyboard and a dedicated Facebook button that took you right into FB. The phone sold in AT&T stores for half the price of the HTC First, and was pulled within a few months for lack of interest. Again, the HTC First (ironically, HTC’s second Facebook handset) should sell okay, but don’t expect lines around the block, or even out the door. Most AT&T smartphone customers use iPhones, which accounted for 85 percent of smartphone sales last quarter.

The bigger play, and where this can move the needle for Facebook, in time, is to produce a lower-cost handset with Facebook Home for India and other international markets where revenue per user is very low and upside is considerable.

Whitey Bluestein is an international strategic advisor and corporate development specialist focused on mobile applications, prepaid, MVNOs, payments and roaming services. He is a GigaOM Pro Analyst and Mobile Industry expert, and frequent commentator on CNBC Fast Money. Visit whiteybluestein.com.

Facebook Home is something we’ve never seen before. It’s far more than just an app and beyond just a skin, but something less than an operating system. It doesn’t replace Android or skins like TouchWiz, but installing it will radically transform your Android phone — and not necessarily for the better.

What Home boils down to is this: if you’re obsessed with Facebook, Home is for you. But if you’d like to use your Android phone for something else — like checking email, for example — you’ll probably find Home more trouble than it’s worth.

Facebook launched Home at a press event on Thursday. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, described it as a way to redesign the phone for “people first,” rather than the apps that dominate the rest of the smartphone universe.

If you’d like to try out Home, you have two options: wait until April 12 and download it from Google Play, or buy the HTC First for $99, the first phone with Home embedded within it. If you choose to download, be aware that Home will only run on the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung’s Galaxy S3 and Note 2, and the forthcoming HTC One and Galaxy S4, Facebook said.

Facebook allowed the press to look at both the HTC First as well as phones running the Home software following the press event. While many weren’t allowed to touch the phone, product managers encouraged me to play around with the downloadable Home app running on a Galaxy S3. I also tested the First, albeit briefly.

Home Feels Like Home

Home interjects itself from the first moment you pick up your phone. On the unlock screen, Home displays the first entry in what Facebook calls its Cover Feed: full-screen, vertically-oriented photos with text from a status message overlaid. Swiping left and right brings up new entries.

You can think of Cover Feed as an Instapaper-like view of your News Feed, emphasizing photos and status messages. You won’t see video, group posts, or even ads — yet. But Facebook promises almost monthly updates, so plan on additional features to be added in the future. Who wants to bet that ads will one day be one of those additions?

Clearly, this “home” slice of “Home” is the easiest to use, and the most enjoyable. Even if you have a just a few seconds, you can quickly swipe left and right to bring up new updates, double-tap an image to Like it, and add a comment by clicking the icon at the bottom of the screen. Sliding from image to image was effortless, at least on both the First and the Note II.

Note that this is Facebook’s domain: there are no widgets, no app shortcuts, and no Google search bar at the top of the screen. If you want those, you’ll have to work for it.

Home also displays a small, circular icon at the bottom of the screen with an image of your face inside it, as a starting point for further navigation. If you want to launch a Web browser, swipe right; swipe left to launch Facebook Messenger, and swipe up to access your “apps”.

Swiping right brings up the stock Web browser — no problems there. Swiping left brings up Messenger, where you can text and message your friends. If you’re on a cellular connection, those Messages will be sent via SMS, which highlights them in blue. (Or so the product-demo person at the event told me. No, I don’t see why it couldn’t send Facebook messages via cellular data, either.)

But Facebook Home also includes both notifications and something called “Chat Heads,” which can follow you from app to app. If you happen to be listening to Spotify, for example, and your friend pings you, their “head” — a circular icon with their picture — shows up and you can begin chatting. You can engage in multiple conversations with different friends via different “tabs,” each keyed to a chat head.

Home also sends you notifications for friends who Like your posts, which will pop up on your screen. Home has a nifty trick for dismissing them all at once: just hold down your finger on the screen, and they’ll converge like hungry fish. They then can be “thrown” off of the screen.

I suppose some may be nonplussed by chat and notification icons popping up randomly, but most Facebook addicts will probably love these features. It’s when you bring apps into the equation that things get a little awkward.

You Can Log Off, But You Can (Almost) Never Leave

Why? Because accessing other apps implies that you want to look away from Facebook. Facebook doesn’t want you to leave; part of the value Facebook ascribes to itself is its engagement with the user. When you swipe up to access apps, you don’t really access “apps” — a small window of “shortcuts” to the apps themselves appear. And at the top of the window is the familiar “status” and “photo” shortcuts.

In other words, you haven’t actually left Home; you’re just in its antechamber.

Home does allow you to access your full list of apps, arranged alphabetically. At the very bottom is a “More” icon. Clicking that takes you back to your home screen — except this time, you’re within the Android/TouchWiz/HTC Sense environment. Congratulations — you’ve escaped.

As you might have figured out, Home wants to monopolize your attention, so that any other function your phone wishes to perform — such as notifying you of an email, for example — gets treated as an intrusion.

No E-Mail For You!

This is where experience on phones like the HTC First diverge from phones built around the Home app. The First notifies users of incoming emails (or Google Talk requests, as I saw) via notifications. On a phone which uses a Home app, the Android status bar at the top of the screen does the same thing, before being banished by Home. Functionally, it’s almost the same thing. But inside Home, you tend to forget about the “outside world” of Android.

This, to me, feels like the “catch” of Facebook Home. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was asked whether he felt that Google would tolerate Home, since it essentially domnates the screen real estate that Google has traditionally regarded as its own.

It’s “theoretically possible,” Zuckerberg said, that Google would go back on its “promise of openness”. Zuckerberg also described Apple as a partner, but iOS as a “very controlled environment” — the implication being that Home on top of iOS is a pipe dream.

Google representatives said that they consider Home to be a “launcher,” a way of recasting Google’s Android. Does it bury Google content to the point that it’s hidden? I think so. So far, it doesn’t matter: “The Android platform has spurred the development of hundreds of different types of devices,” Google said in a statement. “This latest device demonstrates the openness and flexibility that has made Android so popular.”

But it’s significant, I think, that Facebook has already shown that its mobile apps can be downloaded outside the Google Play store. If in fact Google tries to ban Facebook, Facebook may be able to pursue alternative means of distribution.

Should you download Home? Absolutely. You’ll need to most recent updates to Facebook and Messenger to do so. But make sure that when you launch Home, you choose the option to run Home once, to try it out. Home will blow you away the first time you use it, but I think its appeal will wane for all but the most social users.

Read more at Venturebeat.

When Twitter started, it was just a service where you could post status messages on the Web via text message. It would soon take on a life of its own. Developers saw the value that Twitter could bring and started developing apps, clients and revenue models. Twitter, without really meaning to, had become a platform.

That platform, as Twitter generally saw it, was a threat to Twitter itself. In the past several years, Twitter hasrestricted access to its APIs, cut off some developer shops entirely and consolidated control of the platform to its own headquarters. The developer community was outraged.

Twitter may have had a method to its madness. Yesterday, Twitter gave birth to “Cards” – a way for developers and media to connect their apps, media, products, photos, videos and galleries to Tweets. Cards is kind of a reverse method for Twitter to re-open its platform to developers and media. Consider it Twitter’s way of giving back to the developers it once spurned.

What Are Twitter Cards?

Twitter is getting meta. Metadata, that is.

Essentially, Cards is all about metadata. If you are unfamiliar with the term, metadata is data that describes other kinds of data. For instance, where did a Tweet come from (an app, publication, button)? What location did it come from and what time of day? What kind of media is attached to it? Twitter has long kept track of this data and allowed developers to use some of it. Most users on Twitter have little idea that one Tweet can generate more than a dozen different data points.

Twitter is now taking some of that data and making it forward facing to the public. Developers can access this data by choosing the type of Card they want (there are six kinds), inserting the proper meta tags and validating the content through Twitter. By doing that, Cards will be able to connect straight from Twitter to a variety of media, including apps. Or products. Twitter calls this process of “deep linking.”

What does that mean though? “Twitter now directly links to my app?” Really, it means exactly what it says.

Twitter card as seen on Twitter.com

Let’s take the example of mobile social network Path. I, the user, post a picture to Path and tweet it from the Path app for Android or iOS. You, my follower, see that photo and open the tweet from on the Web, mobile Web, iOS or Android.

Since Path has set up Cards, on the bottom of you the tweet you will see “Get the Path app.” Click on that and Twitter will send you straight to Path on your device. If you don’t have Path installed, you will be directed to sign up for the service.

Click the link, you are sent to Path on the Web. Same would work for Path mobile app.

For web sites, it is similar. Say I post one of my articles to Twitter (which I do, often). The Card will give a preview of my article and on the bottom it will say “View on ReadWrite.” That button will take you to the ReadWrite web site on whatever device you are using. We do not have a dedicated app for Android or iOS anymore, but if we did we could direct you there, too.

There are six kinds of Cards that you can now create. Per Twitter’s own description:

• Summary Card: Default card, including a title, description, thumbnail and Twitter account attribution
• Photo Card: A Tweet sized photo card
• Gallery Card: A Tweet card geared toward highlighting a collection of photos
• App Card: A Tweet card for providing a profile of an application
• Player Card: A Tweet sized video/audio/media player card
• Product Card: A Tweet card to better represent product content

What Is New?

The concept of Cards is not actually new at Twitter. Showing the preview of photos, articles and web sites from a link has been available since the middle of 2012. What is new are the expansion of the types of cards as well as the update to the Android, iOS and mobile web apps.

This is where it gets interesting.

Twitter has created the capability to send users all over the Internet. We are not just talking about links anymore. We are talking native apps, mobile web sites, or various types of media that can either stand alone or live within those apps. Twitter has basically just created a platform that can act as a directional compass for the Internet. One word for that is “platform.”

Platform is a very developer-centric term. When it comes to the Web and mobile apps, it more or less means “something that can be built on top of.” For Twitter, Cards has another type of connotation for its users:

Portal.

Portal 2.0

Portal has become something of a nasty word on the Web over the past several years. When we think portal, we think of the old AOL homepage or Yahoo or even iGoogle (which Google will kill on Nov. 1, 2013). Twitter Cards are like Portal 2.0, in a similar manner that Facebook has become. Portal 2.0 is inherently social and does not just send you to other Web content the way the original portals did. Portal 2.0 can send you a variety of types of media, like the app or the product page.

For instance, an enterprising company could use Cards to link to a product, like a pair of sunglasses. You could then purchase those new sunglasses from the site. Twitter could even be the arbiter of the transaction by using your account as authentication, tied to a credit card or other payment service.

So, Cards as an example of Portal 2.0 are social, mobile, directional, built as a platform and, perhaps, transactional.

California has proposed a potentially groundbreaking consumer privacy law. The Right To Know Act, if approved, would require companies to divulge what kind of data they have on individual consumers, as well as with whom they’re sharing that information.

We need this. Not only should California pass this law, but it should be emulated far and wide. And while it’s a good start, The Right To Know Act is really just the beginning of what’s needed.

The vast quantity of personal data that companies collect, store and sell is mind-boggling. We caught a glimpse of some of this massive and now-routine data mining during the presidential campaign. Outside of the election cycle, it continues full force as marketers and financial institutions amass private information about consumers, sell it to one another and use it in ways that aren’t entirely clear. Much of it is totally obvious and innocent. Some of it probably isn’t. We don’t know. That’s the problem.

The Ongoing Personal Data Explosion

Of course, this data is just going to keep exploding. The proliferation of smartphones has generated enough privacy questions to keep lawyers and legislators busy for a generation. We’re just beginning to grapple with those issues and now Google wants us to wear computers on our faces. As we move toward wearable computers, connected cars and smart homes, the sheer volume of data about our personal lives is going to grow exponentially.

There’s a lot we stand to gain from these advances in personal technology, just as we have with smartphones and tablets. But before we plough forward into this otherwise awesome future, we should probably take a minute and think about some of the less exciting implications. Privacy is at the top of the list.

The Right To Know Act sounds like a sensible attempt to set up the kind of consumer privacy framework we’ll need to have in place if we don’t want things to get too weird in the future.

Whether or not we actually regulate the ways companies use this data is another question, which we’ll also need to deal with. In the meantime, what the Right To Know Act will do is simply allow consumers to know exactly what data exists and and to learn a little bit about how it’s being used.

“This Law Is About Transparency”

“This law is about transparency and access, not new restrictions on data sharing,” writes the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the supporters of the bill. ”It helps consumers, regulators, policymakers, and the world at large shine a light onto the largely hidden, highly lucrative world of the personal data economy.”

To Europeans, this concept isn’t anything radical. As Ars Technica points out, the European Union has laws like this on the books already, as it should. The principle of habeas data, as it’s known, is just a part of digital life there.

How likely is passage of the bill? Plenty of firms will loathe it, but it will be interesting to see how tolerant the more privacy-friendly tech companies are of the idea. It’s hard to predict the bill’s fate, but when it comes to implementing forward-thinking privacy laws, California has a pretty decent track record.

The premise is that simple: Companies know a lot about us, and we, as consumers, have a right to know what they know. Whether or not we can do anything about it, we at least deserve to know. They are, after all, our lives.

A couple of weeks ago Nicholas Felton released his latest annual report. Most famous for his work on the Facebook timeline redesign, Felton has been putting together a compendium of his life since 2005. What makes his report so unique is that he details every mundane aspect of his life and transforms these graphs into works of art, literally (he sells limited edition prints).

While a full report about one’s own life may seem a little self-absorbed, self-tracking is becoming more of a reality for many people. The primary reason for the increasing ubiquity of this phenomenon is simply that it’s becoming much easier, thanks to apps and wearable technology.

Apps

Felton began his project 8 years ago when he realized he had recorded all the meals he ate with friends. As he began to collect more and more data on his activities, he recognized he needed an easy way to keep track of them, trying out iCal notes to internet surveys. This past year, he finally developed an iPhone app called Reporter that would simplify the life recording process. Every 90 minutes the app buzzed Felton to ask him: Where are you? Who are you with? What are you wearing? How productive were you today? This tool will soon be released in the App store. And while there are already many self-tracking apps available (the Quantified Self website lists more than 500 mobile and web tools to help users track all aspects of their life from their travel to health to web history), this one would provide more of a holistic view.

Wearable Technology

The main issue with these apps is that you have to make a conscious effort to track your behavior, which is where wearable tools could come into play. The first iteration of these devices started with the Fitbit, Jawbone Up and Nike+ Fuelband, which record personal data such as physical activity and sleep patterns. Apple is getting in on the wristband-tracking market with its iWatch, which is expected to be released at the end of this year. For more intense health tracking purposes, Garmin and Polar offer heart rate monitoring devices, Zeo is a head piece that monitors sleep in-depth and there are variety of services that track DNA, amino acids etc. More excitingly, Google recently announced Project Glass, which could track activity way beyond healthcare. And while it may sound like these tools won’t go mainstream until the distant future, the market is poised to grow fast soon with Juniper research estimating wearable technology becoming a $1.5B business by 2014.

Innate Behavior

Further solidifying this prediction, a 2012 Pew study found that 70% of Americans perform some kind of self-tracking, with about 14% using technology (sites/apps) to monitor their health and wellness, which is more than the percentage of Twitter users. This number will continue to rise as apps and wearable technology become more mainstream. Additionally, many smartphone users already share aspects of their lives via Foursquare and Instagram.

On the flip side, the existing user behavior of highly curating what is shared to social networks that could be the main hindrance to the growth of the Quantified Self movement. Mark Wilson, a Fast Company writer who did a piece on Felton, accurately coins it, saying “the latest Feltron Report, along with Reporter, make for a particularly fascinating counterpoint to the self-reported social media experience. Rather than an Instagram feed full of selfies, it’s more like a Nike+ Fuelband for your greater existence.”

In a Reddit AMA today, Bob Baldwin, a product engineer at Facebook answered questions readers had about the social network company’s products. Questions ranged from his thoughts on the direction the company is taking, its future, and other interesting things Facebook is doing. The remarks that Baldwin makes weren’t scripted and appears to be candid.

According to the his Facebook profile, Baldwin has helped to build various products within the social network, including Groups, Messages, Calendar, Lists, Events, Photos, Pokes, Places, and perhaps one of every single major feature it has. He has helped to organize hackathons.

It’s quite fascinating to see someone from Facebook host a Reddit AMA, especially an employee so deeply ingrained in much of the inner workings of the social network. Since the launch of threaded comments on Facebook, it’s also a noteworthy that this AMA was held on Reddit, as some believe that the implementation of this feature was an attempt to compete against Reddit. After all, Diane Sawyer held a brief AMA-like service last week and it will most likely continue to increase in frequency.

although you could always chalk it up to the bigger audience than what Baldwin could probably have on his Facebook Page.

On Facebook’s direction

One Redditor asked Baldwin about his thoughts about where Facebook is heading. The Facebook engineer replied by indicating that he was very supportive in the direction in which founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was leading the company. He says that it’s undeniable that the trends are moving away from Web towards primarily mobile usage — because of this, he has started to build for iOS and Web. Oddly he failed to mention Android — perhaps a sign of the Android phone that’s is believed to be announced this week?

So where does Baldwin see Facebook going in the next 20 years? He’s not really sure because he says he has a hard time predicting how the company will perform in six months, let alone years. He even disclosed that he wasn’t a wizard or a fortune teller so it’s probably safe to believe him about his lack of clairvoyance.

The best and most difficult products on Facebook

As he has been involved at Facebook since joining in 2009 working on a plethora of products, Baldwin admits that one of the hardest products he’s ever built was the ill-famed Questions feature. Building a community around the feature proved harder than expected, dooming it to lackluster performance. Additionally, he said that it was difficult to find ways to compare usage of “specialized content type” like questions to that which can be posted everyday (e.g. status updates, photos, and others).

On the flip side, Baldwin says that Groups was the product he was the most proud of because at launch, it became one of the fastest growing feature Facebook had ever launched. He believes that the communication with small groups of people that know each other in real life is really personal and directed in a way that public sharing could never match. Over time, the thought is that more sharing will move away from being public and into private networks — perhaps a plug of Path and other similar services?

Some Facebook users may have realized that the Events tab on the new profile pages has disappeared. Through this feature, users could see what their friends are doing. Baldwin states in the AMA that that feature was built by Ed Maia at a hackathon (coincidentally the same one where Baldwin built the Events Calendar) and it was removed due to a programming bug. The thought is that it will be fixed and reenabled, although Baldwin was not able to give a specific timeframe.

What was Facebook’s biggest mistake?

When asked what Facebook’s biggest mistake was in its history, Baldwin believes that it was when the company emulated incumbent apps. He think that it’s better when the team built tools using their own intuitions: “what works for a competing product might not be the best approach for Facebook.”

How can I dislike this?

One Redditor chose to ask a question that many Facebook users have probably been dying to know the answer to: will Facebook ever have a dislike button? At this time, Facebook will most likely not have this feature. As Baldwin explained:

Actions on Facebook tend to focus on positive social interactions. Like is the lightest-weight way to express positive sentiment. I don’t think adding a light-weight way to express negative sentiment would be that valuable. I know there are times when it’d make sense, like when a friend is having a rough day, or got into a car accident like my sister yesterday (she’s okay!). For these times, a nice comment from a friend goes a long way.

Space travel is apparently too slow

Prior to working at Facebook, a Redditor discovered that Baldwin hadpreviously worked for NASA. When asked about whether he would go back to that life, Baldwin said that he has found himself “craving a faster industry”.

No marketing conspiracy here

Baldwin’s appearance on Reddit is only the first this month. Next week, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg will be hosting her own AMA, most likely to speak about her experience at the company, her new book Lean In and any other topic people ask her about. Baldwin disputes his appearance as some Facebook marketing push to get more people out to meet the people — he was recently featured in a Fast Company article about hackathons and just launched the Weather on Events feature so it was just good timing, he says.

The one thing you didn’t know about Facebook

In a light-hearted moment on Reddit, someone tried to get Baldwin todivulge some secrets about Facebook. Turns out that the company is a “poster making company led by Ben Barry.” Who would have thought that the thing that gets the most attention in the media is its social networking app.

Photo credit: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Read more at Venturebeat.

Read more at Venturebeat. This story is part of a series exploring the themes of our upcoming, invitation-only Mobile Summit, April 1-2 in Sausalito, Calif. Explore more stories in the Mobile Summit Debate series.

In less than 20 years, experts predict, we will reach the physical limit of how much processing capability can be squeezed out of silicon-based processors in the heart of our computing devices. But a recent scientific finding that could completely change the way we build computing devices may simply allow engineers to sidestep any obstacles.

The breakthrough from materials scientists at IBM Research doesn’t sound like a big deal. In a nutshell, they claim to have figured out how to convert metal oxide materials, which act as natural insulators, to a conductive metallic state. Even better, the process is reversible.

Shifting materials from insulator to conductor and back is not exactly new, according to Stuart Parkin, IBM Fellow at IBM Research. What is new is that these changes in state are stable even after you shut off the power flowing through the materials.

And that’s huge.

Power On… And On And On And On…

When it comes to computing — mobile, desktop or server — all devices have one key problem: they’re inefficient as hell with power.

As users, we experience this every day with phone batteries dipping into the red, hot notebook computers burning our laps or noisily whirring PC fans grating our ears. System administrators and hardware architects in data centers are even more acutely aware of power inefficiency, since they run huge collections of machines that mainline electricity while generating tremendous amounts of heat (which in turn eats more power for the requisite cooling systems).

Here’s one basic reason for all the inefficiency: Silicon-based transistors must be powered all the time, and as current runs through these very tiny transistors inside a computer processor, some of it leaks. Both the active transistors and the leaking current generate heat — so much that without heat sinks, water lines or fans to cool them, processors would probably just melt.

Enter the IBM researchers. Computers process information by switching transistors on or off, generating binary 1s and 0s.  processing depends on manipulating two states of a transistor: off or on, 1s or 0s — all while the power is flowing. But suppose you could switch a transistor with just a microburst of electricity instead of supplying it constantly with current. The power savings would be enormous, and the heat generated, far, far lower.

That’s exactly what the IBM team says it can now accomplish with its state-changing metal oxides. This kind of ultra-low power use is similar to the way neurons in our own brains fire to make connections across synapses, Parkin explained. The human brain is more powerful than the processors we use today, he added, but “it uses a millionth of the power.”

The implications are clear. Assuming this technology can be refined and actually manufactured for use in processors and memory, it could form the basis of an entirely whole new class of electronic devices that would barely sip at power. Imagine a smartphone with that kind of technology. The screen, speakers and radios would still need power, but the processor and memory hardware would barely touch the battery.

Moore’s Law? What Moore’s Law?

There’s a lot more research ahead before this technology sees practical applications. Parkin explained that the fluid used to help achieve the steady state changes in these materials needs to be more efficiently delivered using nano-channels, which is what he and his fellow researchers will be focusing on next.

Ultimately, this breakthrough is one among many that we have seen and will see in computing technology. Put in that perspective, it’s hard to get that impressed. But stepping back a bit, it’s clear that the so-called end of the road for processors due to physical limits is probably not as big a deal as one would think. True, silicon-based processing may see its time pass, but there are other technologies on the horizon that should take its place.

Now all we have to do is think of a new name for Silicon Valley.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Charles Huang is the chief executive of Green Throttle Games. He also co-founded Red Octane, creator of Guitar Hero.

Smart phones, tablets, and smart TVs will soon be powered by the same technology stack — ARM processors running iOS or Android along with their respective app stores. That means the key differentiating feature between these devices will be staring you right in the face — screen size.

Screen size matters more than content creators think. For starters, look at this research from Google that shows engagement increases with screen size.

This makes sense, as people consume content differently on different screen sizes. 4-5” phones are great for checking emails, tweets, social networks (especially uploading photos you took on your phone), listening to music, and playing casual games like Angry Birds. Consumers surveys show that email is the #1 activity on smart phones.

7-10” tablets are great for reading books and magazines, surfing the web, watching videos, and playing casual to mid-core game, like Plants vs Zombies or Infinity Blade. Consumer surveys show that gaming is the #1 activity on tablets.

30-50” TVs are great for long session movies, TV shows, and video games. Big screen TVs are usually hooked up to the best speakers in the house, so it’s great for rich audio and video experiences. Perhaps most important, the 30-50” screen is for content you want to share with family and friends. Increasingly, the user experience in front of the TV now includes a 2nd screen in the form of a tablet/phone. This dual screen experience is common enough that the Wii U built an entire controller to facilitate this.

App Annie recently started to track Kindle app performance and their data backs up my thesis on screen size. According to App Annie’s data, all of the current top 10 paid apps on the Kindle store are games.

Meanwhile, on Google Play, seven out of the top 10 paid apps are utility apps. This makes sense as Play enabled devices are predominantly phones, while Kindle is a tablet. This juxtaposition shows that screen size matters for apps when it comes to phones vs tablets.

So what does this mean for developers? Sophisticated iOS and Android game devs need to build games with target screen sizes in mind to deliver an optimal user experience. Better UX is needed to improve monetization. In my field of video games, I’ve always believed that World of Warcraft doesn’t work on mobile and Angry Birds doesn’t work on TVs. It’s also worth pointing out that Guitar Hero (my game) never sold well on PC.

So why did we at Green Throttle Games target Android-based TV games? Because data shows that bigger screen sizes lead to longer engagement sessions. Our thesis is that longer engagement sessions will lead to higher monetization. This is true for video (think YouTube snippets vs. TV shows vs. movies). And of course, this is true for games (think phone vs. tablet vs. PC vs. console).
Read more at Venturebeat.

I was interested in learning more about digital badges in this context, so I asked Emily Goligoski, Design + Community Lead for Mozilla Open Badges, a few questions on the origins of the program, where it’s headed and how digital badges can benefit us folks in the adtech and creative community.

What inspired Mozilla to enter the digital badge space? Why gamify learning and education?

About two years ago at Mozilla Festival, a global gathering of people passionate about making and hacking the web, a group started talking about badges as a growing form of social currency across gaming and coding communities. Yet many badges that people earned weren’t able to be shared beyond the silo of the particular badge issuing organization. Under a grant from MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla started developing a technical standard to make badges from different communities interoperable and stackable. The standard features metadata information that is baked into each badge, allowing someone who encounters it through an earner’s blog or social channels to learn about the criteria, evidence, and standards behind the badge. Along with our broad contributor community, we talk less about gamification and more about ways that badges can serve as verifiable signals of reward and recognition that learning has taken place (be it in the forms of professional achievements, academic accomplishments, personal interests, and much more).

It’s worth noting that digital badges are image-based files. They are different from open badges, which have metadata information baked in that makes them information-rich (one neat visualization of the distinction is by Kyle Bowen)

What kind of people are using digital badges for learning right now?

Since we launched last year, more than 600 organizations–ranging from formal and informal educational institutions; multinational corporations; industry associations; non-profits; and groups interested in professional development–have issued more than 60,000 open badges. These badges are being used to realize increased learning and professional opportunities, and it’s been wonderful to see the diversity of lifelong learners who are earning and displaying their open badges. You can join the mix by earning your first badges and creating a “backpack,” a digital repository for managing your badges.

How do you feel that digital badges can encourage learning within the adtech and creative community?

Open badges can recognize professional growth, skills, literacies, proficiencies, and more. They can work especially well for creative professionals who have grown their work across a variety of learning environments and want to show their credentials in highly visible ways. These earners can curate personally meaningful collections of their badges and share as it benefits them. We’re looking forward to seeing badges increasingly be used among these communities for the purposes of hiring and finding collaborators.

In what ways can brands get involved with Mozilla Open Badges? 

The curriculum, content, and visual design of open badges is completely determined by organizations and individuals who issue badges. They decide both how their badge systems are structured as well as the look of their badges, which creates a great opportunity for visibility as earners share their badges with friends, family, and potential future colleagues. Open badges also feature links to explore the issuer’s site, which has great word of mouth potential.

What’s on the horizon for Mozilla Open Badges? 

We’re working with the City of Chicago on summer learning initiatives that include badges as part of exciting city-wide educational programs. Throughout the year we’ll also be working to build out the discovery side of the ecosystem so that badge earners and their pathways might become more actionable for people exploring badges. Definitely stay tuned to @OpenBadges for more!

For more information, visit the following:

Open Badges Information & Community Involvement

• Open badges website: http://openbadges.org/
• Open badges wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges
• All things badges blog: http://openbadges.tumblr.com/
• Weekly Wednesday community calls: http://bit.ly/OpenBadgesCommunityCalls
• Google group for dialogue: http://bit.ly/OpenBadgesGroup

Technical Resources

• Open badges github repository: https://github.com/mozilla/openbadges
• Dev group: http://bit.ly/OpenBadgesDevGroup
• README: https://github.com/mozilla/openbadges#mozilla-open-badges
• Badge assertion / metadata specification: http://bit.ly/NewOpenBadgesAssertion
• Issuer API: https://github.com/mozilla/openbadges/wiki/Issuer-API
• Displayer API: https://github.com/mozilla/openbadges/wiki/Displayer-API

Thorsten Heins was supposed to be the steward that oversaw the final collapse of one of the great technology companies of the last 30 years. When Heins took over Research In Motion in early 2012, not many people gave him a lot of hope. “Thorsten Heins Is A Patsy Set Up To Fail” was my take here on ReadWrite.

At the time, Research In Motion (now BlackBerry) was grasping for straws. It had just reported half a billion dollars in quarterly, losses and co-founders and co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis were getting ousted by the RIM board — a panel they ostensibly controlled for more than a decade. At the time, Heins was seen as a front guy while Balsillie and Lazaridis pulled his strings from behind the curtain. Heins was supposed to be Norville Barnes. Heins Comes Into His Own

Fast forward to today. BlackBerry has a new name, a new series of good smartphones in its BlackBerry Z10 and coming Q10 devices and a streamlined and more efficient business that has renewed focus on services and applications. In its latest quarterly earnings report, BlackBerry announced $94 million in profit and said it sold a million BlackBerry Z10 devices in a little over a month, with strong channel sales likely to come.

“Our financial transformation over the past 12 months has been outstanding,” Heins said on the company’s earnings call. “To say that it was a very challenging environment to deliver improved financial results could well be the understatement of the year. In the face of numerous challenges this past year, BlackBerry has gone from a significant operating loss in the first quarter of the year to an operating profit in the fourth quarter.”

Heins, who is prone to over enthusiasm and exaggeration, wasn’t lying. The company swung to profit from a GAAP loss of $518 million and an operating loss of $118 million. In that time, BlackBerry’s liquid cash hoard rose from $2.1 billion to $2.9 billion despite losing market share to the like of Android and Apple.

Balsillie is gone. Lazaridis is retiring at the beginning of May. It appears that Heins has taken hold of BlackBerry and made it his without the puppeteers manipulating from the background.

Remaking BlackBerry In His Own Image

“Thorsten has been doing a good job at the helm, in my opinion. He got the devices to market (although a bit later than expected),” mobile analyst Jack Gold, principal at J. Gold Associates, wrote me in an email. “He’s effectively managing the bottom line (still not done but he’s on his way), and he’s made a number of management changes. The restructuring isn’t totally done yet, but he does seem to be remaking BB in his image of what it needs to be.”

BlackBerry and Heins had a baptism by fire in 2012. The new BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system was delayed. Then it was delayed again.BlackBerry completely missed the holiday shopping season, eventually launching its new devices on Jan. 30. at an event in New York City. Between the time that Heins took over and the launch of BlackBerry 10, the company was forced to lay off thousands of workers. It got so bad that BlackBerry hired powerful Wall Street groups J.P Morgan and RBC Capital to perform a strategic review, something that pointed to a potential sale of the company.

Instead of a sale, it seems that the strategic review has led to a leaner, meaner BlackBerry. The company saw a billion dollars in savings from operating income a year before it expected to. That has led to profitability, even though BlackBerry technically lost 3 million subscribers (from 79 million to 76 million) in the most recent quarter.

Just The Beginning

BlackBerry is not done though. Heins called the profitable quarter and launch of BlackBerry 10 just the beginning. It has yet to launch the BlackBerry Q10, which like BlackBerrys of old features a physical keyboard, though it has been testing the device on 40 carriers in 20 countries. In 2013, more BlackBerry 10 devices will be released at lower price points to take advantage of emerging markets where BlackBerry plays particularly well, like the Middle East and Africa.

“Everyone at BlackBerry understands that there is more work to do. Delivering BlackBerry 10 and a profitable quarter is just the starting line, not the finish line,” Heins said.

Through it all, Heins comes out looking like a hero. Instead of a patsy, he has superseded both Balsillie and Lazaridis and given the BlackBerry tangible hope for a profitable future. It may only be the beginning, but Heins’s first year of hardship is over.

“Of course, the next two-to-four quarters will give us a better understanding of how successful he’s been, but so far I give him a pretty good grade,” Gold said.

Lazaridis photo courtesy of Wikipedia 

Google is testing a slick new feature for its Google Play Movies & TV appon Android tablets that automaticallys pull up info cards about on-screen actors and in-movie music.

The feature is currently US-only and limited to tablets running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but Google says it hopes to expand info cards to “more countries and devices soon”.

The info cards pop up when eligible viewers press the pause button. Users can tap on individual actors’ faces to get more information, such as age and which other movies the performer has starred in. It’s a minor feature, but it’ll save me the trouble of having to hit up IMDB when an actor looks familiar and I can’t quite place him or her. Support for songs is also a nice touch, since it’s not always easy to find that information.

Other changes to the app include improvements to the search function, notifications for new TV shows and a “refresh” option for checking for updates to the library. Google on Wednesday also added India and Mexicoto its list of countries that support Google Play Movies.

Google’s implementation will draw some comparisons to Amazon’s own X-Ray service, which recently came to TV shows on Instant Video. Currently, info cards are only supported for “hundreds of movies”, but Google should have no trouble building out the data base since itsKnowledge Graph, which launched last year, has hundreds of millions of connections.

As I wrote last week, I’m not fully comfortable with how Google’s core search engine is evolving, but these new info cards are an excellent example of how Google is putting its graph to use to make life a little easier for us.

Millions of people may have been affected by an attack that caused disruption and a slowdown of the Internet, according to a not-for-profit anti-spam organization that blacklisted a Dutch Web-hosting company.

The interruptions came after Spamhaus, a spam-fighting group based in Geneva, temporarily added CyberBunker to a blacklist that is used by e-mail providers to weed out spam. The attacks work by trying to make a network unavailable to its intended users by overloading a server with coordinated requests to access it, according to security firm Kaspersky Lab.

Calling the disruptions “one of the largest computer attacks on the Internet,” the New York Times reported today that millions of Web users have experienced delays in services such as Netflix video-streaming service or couldn’t reach a certain website for a short time.

“The size of the attack hurt some very large networks and Internet exchange points such as the London Internet Exchange,” John Reid, a spokesman for Spamhaus, said in an e-mailed response to questions by Bloomberg News. “It could be thousands, it could be millions. Due to our global infrastructure, the attackers target places all over the world.”

Spamhaus was targeted with a so-called distributed denial of service attack on the evening of March 15, Reid said.

Dutch Bunker

The attackers pretended to be Spamhaus and bombarded the Internet’s Domain Name System with simultaneous requests for information, according to Michael Sutton, vice president of security research for Zscaler. The System thinks the requests are from Spamhaus and sends them back to its website, creating a wall of data so large that the site crashes, he said.

“This attack isn’t new but I’ve never seen it abused to this scale,” he said in an interview. A traditional denial-of- service attack floods a website with tens of thousands of requests a second, causing it to temporarily shut down.

CyberBunker, which was founded 1998 and is based in a military bunker near a Dutch town called Goes, offers Web- hosting services for all sites except child pornography and anything related to terrorism, according to its portal.

“The only thing we would like to say is that we do not, and never have, sent any spam,” Cyberbunker spokesman Jordan Robson said in an e-mail.

Such attacks are growing in quantity as well as scale, according to Vitaly Kamluk, chief malware expert of Kaspersky Lab’s global research and analysis team. The two main motives for the disruptions are money through cybercrime and political and social activism, he said.

“This is indeed the largest known DDoS operation,” Kamluk said by e-mail. “Such DDoS attack may affect regular users as well, with network slowdown or total unavailability of certain web resources as typical symptoms.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Spillane in London at cspillane3@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Kenneth Wong at kwong11@bloomberg.net.

Behind every billion dollar product is a billion dollar patent, and we could see lots of those in 2013 from mobile companies.

Roughly a quarter of patents filed in the U.S. this year will be mobile-related, according to a report from analyst Chetan Sharma (PDF). In 2001, that number was just five percent.

While that increase is interesting, it’s not particularly surprising: Mobile patents are, after all, big money. A big part of the reason Google spent $12.5 billion on Motorola last year was because of Motorola’s patents, for example. Elsewhere, companies are going to court left and right over patents.

It might be easier if we just patented money.

As any patent troll can tell you, a good patent can net a company millions of dollars in licensing fees from third parties if it’s positioned right. This is more than just protecting your intellectual property — this is about making gobs of money from it.

But while the increase in mobile patents is a good sign that the mobile industry won’t stop growing anytime soon, the news here isn’t all good. A big question on many minds is how many of the patents filed this year will be poorly conceived, overly broad, or plain dumb. Many lawyers, activists, and even game execs, have argued that the current patent system is broken, which means that it might be bad news if the numbers continue to increase at this rate.

But this isn’t just about mobile. The increase in mobile patents comes as the overall number of patent applications has increased by 61 percent over the past decade, according to the US Patent Office. Clearly our patent system is still alive and well, and for a lot of people, that’s exactly the problem.

To get an idea of which companies are leading the pack in getting mobile patents, check the chart below.

Read more at VentureBeat.

When lawmakers consider banning something before it’s even hit the market, it’s clear that it has the potential to be truly disruptive. However, a politician in West Virginia looking to ban the use of devices like Google Glass while driving is just the tip of an iceberg. Devices like Glass could well change society immensely over the next next few years.

What devices are we talking about? Glass is the obvious flagship here, with its ability to snap and upload pictures and video live from a scene, not to mention its contextual alerts and the apps it can run but there’s theMemoto, too.

This wearable camera is due to launch in the next few weeks, it will snap a photograph every thirty seconds throughout the day, candidly capturingwhatever the wearer is doing. While it’s nowhere near as advanced as Glass, it has a similar effect of introducing wearable, Internet-focused cameras into our daily lives, taking photos without the traditional cue of someone holding up and aiming a camera or smartphone to alert others nearby to the fact that an image was being captured.

Memoto

You may or may not object to government and police-controlled CCTV cameras tracking what we do, but we’re about to enter a world where anyone could be tracking everything you do with cameras you may not be aware of. While it’s pretty obvious if someone is wearing Google Glass, the Memoto is far more subtle. Meanwhile other manufacturers likeSamsung are said to be working on their own products along the same lines. If these products enter the mass market, it’s important we’re prepared for some of the issues they raise.

Fighting crime… and the perfect alibi?

I recently witnessed a crime near where I live. I reported it to the police and they made an arrest. However, I couldn’t give any solid details of what the people I saw looked like – I was a really bad eyewitness. If I’d have had something like the Memoto or Glass, I could have been able to record the event easily and subtly. When the police asked “How many people did you see? What were they wearing?”, I’d have had my own CCTV record to refer back to.

Going a step further, these devices could be the perfect alibi. I’ve often wondered if the police would accept my Google Latitude location record as legitimate proof of my location if I was accused of a crime I didn’t commit. Geotagged, timestamped point-of-view photos and video may be even better. Write a lifelogging app for Google Glass or use a Memoto and you suddenly have multimedia proof of where you’ve been.

Subpoenaed for the record of your life

Of course, it could go the other way. If you’re accused of being somewhere you weren’t, or if someone’s accusing you in court of being in a certain location at a certain time, maybe you have a record of it on your Google account or your Memoto account – maybe your fitness bracelet that you wore all day recorded your location without you even thinking about it? It’s easy to imagine this kind of data being subpoenaed in the search for evidence of where you were and what you were doing at a certain time.

Who controls the record of your life?

If we do want to use devices like Glass and Memoto to log our whole lives, the question about who owns and controls all that data becomes important. Using cloud-based technologies, your life history could be stored forever on some big technology company’s server. What happens if someone else buys that company – and all its data – later down the line? This isn’t just like your Facebook account with its record of your friends, chats, photos and the like – this is far more personal. Will you ever know who’s really looking at your life history – where you’ve been, what you’ve seen and what you’ve done?

There’s definite value in lifelogging via wearable technology, so we’re unlikely to reject it completely as a society. More likely is that we’ll see the same split between people who are happy to give their data over to third parties in exchange for an easy life (think users of Twitter, Google or Facebook for the social Web equivalent), and people who are committed to owning their own data and so adopt more open source technologies that they can tailor to their own needs – and, crucially, control their own data.

The evolution of lying

The first series of the excellent UK future-gazing drama series Black Mirror included an episode called ‘The Entire History of You’ (if you’re in the UK you can watch it legally on YouTube). It imagined a future in which everything everyone sees and hears is recorded via a body implant. Individuals can watch replays of any point in their lives, and even share those videos with others. It causes problems for the couple followed in the episode when evidence of infidelity, and even video of a full-on, marriage-ruining sexual encounter, is revealed.

This mashup of Google’s Glass promo with clips from the Black Mirror episode (by YouTube user Oriel2000) gives a flavor of the similarities between the real and fictional technologies.

While the technology emerging this year is obviously a long way from what Black Mirror imagined, we’re starting off on that road. Lying in the very near future is going to be a very different proposition. What may have previously been a simple lie about your whereabouts may involve careful preparation by deleting evidence or altering geotags, just in case someone decides to look into your claim.

Where will these cameras be banned?

It’s one thing you or your friends uploading pictures of you and sharing them with the world, but what about strangers? Would you act differently knowing that everything you do, every conversation you have, could be recorded by a camera you’re not aware of? We all talk differently when we’re off guard. Talk to me over a drink in a relaxed setting and I’ll probably be far more loose with what I say than in a formal meeting or in an email. Will I change that if I think that what I say could be being recorded. “Don’t tweet that” could well become “don’t Glass this.”

It’ll only take a few high-profile cases of photos or videos uploaded and presented out of context to make us all rethink how we approach our everyday lives. Beyond obvious places that ban all cameras (art galleries for example), it’s easy to imagine bars, and other places where people just want to relax, banning wearable cameras and smart glasses.

What else?

The impact on technology like Glass on society could be huge, and this is only a hint at the changes it could usher in. What other impact could we see? I’d love to read your ideas, so please leave a comment.

Now read: Google Glass and wearable tech: This is a game-changer, not a fad and From fare-dodgers to racial abuse, smartphones mean you must behave yourself in public.

Header image credit: Getty Images

So how can we be sure we are reaching our audience with the right screen at the right time?

This is the question we set out to answer when BBDO and Proximity partnered with Collective:  to look into how viewing patterns may differ across screens and across dayparts.  Because advertisers who truly understand this dynamic can gain a competitive edge in engaging their consumer.

As a follow-up to “Meet the Screens,” take a look at this joint research study by BBDO/Proximity Worldwide and Collective as a guide to advertisers in managing this new multiscreen paradigm.

The Multiscreen Dayparting Playbook

We spoke on the occasion of the release of Bushnell’s new book: Finding the Next Steve Jobs,written with Gene Stone (more on the book’s unusual publishing model later).

As many people know, Jobs worked for Bushell at Atari in the mid 1970s before moving on to Apple. Bushnell uses Jobs as a symbol of creativity at tech companies: “Steve Jobs showed that an innovative company can create the highest market cap company in the world.” Despite Jobs’ passing in 2011, Bushnell says today’s best companies are far ahead of where we used to be.

“In the early days of Atari,” Bushnell recalls, “engineers came to work in a coat and tie and were working 9-5.” Venture capitalists willing to give cash to help innovative startups were just a tiny niche, he says, “All the real financial clout was controlled by big banks in New York, but now we have vibrant angel investors, Kickstarter and crowdfunding.”

And that’s only part of the change. Even as we eliminate the gatekeepers, Bushnell contends, the costs of creativity itself are coming down as technological tools get cheaper and more powerful. Individuals and small groups can now shoot a movie or create a software company on their own. “In many cases, that’s the most important thing,” Bushnell says.

Unleashing Creativity

But there’s still a lot more to be done. “The problem isn’t creativity,” Bushnell explains, “but creating the environment for creatives to work in… too much [good stuff] ends up on the cutting room floor.”

“I believe we have literally thousands of Steve Jobses,” but we don’t empower them to create. “Look at the way we treat creative people! We just have to detoxify our companies and we’ll have innovation flowing out of the ground like oil.”

Hire Obnoxious People

One key considieration is to value true creative talent over mere niceness. This flies in the face of the “no assholes” rules now gaining popularity The problem, Bushnell says, is that “a lot of really brilliant people are obnoxious. They’re used to always being the smartest person in the room and they may treat other people with disdain.”

And Bushnell says that separating brilliant andobnoxious from just plain obnoxious is actually easier than you think.

The Importance Of Hobbies

Their contribution is one clue, of course, but Bushnell also suggests looking at what creative types do on their own time. “Enthusiasm is kind of the mitigator” for the obnoxious people, he says.

What you want is someone who truly has the companies interest at heart and just happens to be dismissive of people less capable of achieving those goals.

Bushnell points out that many people used to complain withering criticism from Steve Jobs. But Bushnell adds that it turns out that most of the time, Jobs was right. His victims just didn’t like the way he critiziced them.

Today’s Most Creative Company?

So who’s getting it right today? When asked to name today’s most creative company, Bushnell doesn’t hesitate:”Google. There are so many things going on at the Google campus right now that exemplify the right track. A lot of true craziness coming out of that company, but it’s crazy like a fox. Autodrive cars? That’s going to happen in a short amount of time… and think about what it took! That represents a large corporate commitment.”

Book Publishing As Startup

Clearly, Bushnell tried to be creative with his book, as well. Rather than signing with a big publisher or going the self-publishing route espoused by folks like Guy Kawasaki, Bushnell chose to be the first example of a new startup publishing model that distributes the risk and the rewards.

Instead of doing all the work yourself, or having a traditional publisher pull together all the skills needed to put together a book, Net Minds works by trading equity in the project for the required work. Editors, designers, etc. get points, not just cash, and participate in any upside. According to co-founder Tim Sanders, Net Minds has 17 more books in the pipeline – not all of them attached to well-known names like Bushnell. According to Sanders, the team-publishing model lets freelance publishing professionals optimize their available time to earn passive income from successful projects.

Sanders claims to have 400 freelancers signed up, both new players and established veterans like Bushnell’s co-author Gene Stone. While Sanders says the company is working on software to appraise a book’s commercial potential, it’s hard to see how it could pull in top-notch talent for anything but the sexiest, easiest-to-sell projects.

Disclosure: Many years ago, Nolan Bushnell wrote a column for me atElectronic Entertainment magazine.

Guest author Lucas Carlson is the founder and CEO of AppFog.

2012 was a huge year for the cloud, providing developers with a bounty of both public and private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options.

Enterprise developers quickly understood the benefits of the cloud, and sunk their teeth into porting projects onto public infrastructure, experimenting with PaaS, developing cloud-based dev/test solutions and incorporating all kinds of SaaS offerings into their daily workflow.

While this is all very exciting for developers, rampant cloud adoption can be a headache for enterprise IT departments. They need to manage, govern and control cloud adoption or deal with chaos.

Uncontrolled Cloud Growth Creates Cloud Sprawl

Cloud sprawl is what happens when enterprise IT and the lines of business it supports all simultaneously but independently employ a variety of cloud services in an uncoordinated fashion.

The business groups could be running apps across a half-dozen different runtimes and using an equal number of different database technologies – some on-premise on a VMware vSphere cloud, others experimenting withOpenStack and some on Rackspace OpenCloud across various regions and zones. The rest could be using Amazon’s public cloud – in Virginia or perhaps Singapore.

In some cases, the enterprise pays for the cloud services. But in many cases, individuals are simply using their personal credit cards and expensing the costs. It’s the Wild Wild West!

Not surprisingly, IT leaders are conflicted. On one hand, they’re inspired by the drive and creativity of their development teams. And they love the velocity of development and releases, and the innovation that results. But they are positively horrified by the thought of making it all work together: “If my department has an app in development on Amazon Web Services (AWS), we need it on our private cloud. Who’s going to make that happen? How much time are we talking here?”

From Cloud Sprawl To Cloud Sanity?

Cloud sanity means having one deployment and management solution responsible for the wide range of app lifecycle processes, including app deployment, deletion, starting/stopping, database service provisioning and tunneling, cloning and re-deploying apps across infrastructures, memory management and more.

It also means having one solution for deploying to AWS, and for migrating from Azure to OpenStack, and for creating new PostgresQL databases, and for syncing up distributed systems through RabbitMQ… well, you get the idea. Right now, sadly, most companies have a single tool (or more commonly each employee has their own version of a script) for each individual task.

The old way of taming cloud sprawl was through vendor lock-in. If your company’s data and apps ended up scattered across a variety of clouds, then you were compelled to pull them all under a single umbrella, be it a private cloud or a single public cloud provider. IT gained predictability from doing this, but lost the ability to experiment outside of the chosen vendor’s bubble. Lock-in means degraded velocity and an elimination of flexibility. Lock-in means an end to innovation.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Horizontal Hybrid PaaS = Cloud Sanity

A horizontal hybrid PaaS provides a single solution to handle app deployment and management without having to give up on an agile, experimental way of doing things. With a horizontal hybrid PaaS, the enterprise gains freedom from both vendor lock-in and cloud sprawl.

CTOs, CIOs, IT directors and other technology decision makers regain governance of cloud services across the enterprise, as well as single-point-of-truth insight into where apps and services are housed. If they don’t like what they see in terms of performance or agility or any other metric, the workload portability gained from using a horizontal hybrid PaaS makes it easy to switch between clouds, turn services on and off, and switch apps from development to production and back.

Meanwhile, developers gain agility and speed above and beyond anything they’ve experienced in the enterprise. They gain the ability to use and experiment with a variety of cloud services – public, private, Rackspace, AWS, OpenStack, Azure and any language they want – in a way that doesn’t give their bosses headaches about cloud sprawl.

Business leaders are happy because IT is humming along, quickly implementing new ideas and doing more with less. All with reduced cost complexity.

Heterogeneous Clouds In The Enterprise

In 2013, heterogeneity is the name of the game in the cloud. But cloud heterogeneity is still scarier than it needs to be. But heterogeneity can be freeing and enabling, if it’s properly managed.

IT should want to have it all: flexibility and control, experimentation and insight, the cost and efficiency advantages of the cloud and a no-surprises approach to cost apportionment.

Yahoo announced today that it has acquired Summly, a mobile news aggregation app from British entrepenuer Nick D’Aloisio.

D’Aloisio is only 17-years-old. When he started Summly, he was only 15.

Summly scans the Web for news and uses an algorithm to find the type of content you want to read. Then it summarizes it for you.

Yahoo is going to shut down Summly as a stand alone app, but it says it’s going to incorporate Summly technology into its own mobile apps and sites.

Clearly, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wanted to hire D’Aloisio. She has been making a lot of small acquisitions like Summly. She wants to bring young, fresh, mobile-focused talent to Yahoo.

There was no price announced with the deal. However, All Things D reporter Kara Swisher says Yahoo paid just under $30 million. The app generated no revenue.

According to Crunchbase, Summly has raised $1.53 million in venture funding from an impressive list of investors.

Hong Kong billionaire businessman Li Ka-shing put $300,000 in the company in September of 2011. A year later, the rest of the money came from people like Brian Chesky, the CEO and founder of AirBnb, Mark Pincus, the founder and CEO of Zynga, Ashton Kutcher, Yoko Ono, Wendy Murdoch, and a few other big names in tech.

When Steve Jobs opened the iPhone‘s App Store, Nick D’Aloisio was only 12-years-old.

D’Aloisio taught himself how to make an app. Three years later he launched his own startup, Trimit, which truncated a news story into 140 characters for people that wanted to tweet out stories.

He realized people didn’t want to truncate the news. They wanted the news truncated for them. So, he flipped the app and made Summly.

Previously it was reported Summly only had 500,000 downloads, which is not much for an app. D’Aloisio says Summly has had “90 million summaries read,” whatever that metric means.

Here’s the release from Yahoo announcing the deal:

Today, we’re excited to share that we’re acquiring Summly, a mobile product company founded with a vision to simplify the way we get information, making it faster, easier and more concise.

At the age of 15, Nick D’Aloisio created the Summly app at his home in London. It started with an insight — that we live in a world of constant information and need new ways to simplify how we find the stories that are important to us, at a glance. Mobile devices are shifting our daily routines, and users have changed not only what, but how much information they consume. Yet most articles and web pages were formatted for browsing with mouse clicks. The ability to skim them on a phone or a tablet can be a real challenge — we want easier ways to identify what’s important to us.

Summly solves this by delivering snapshots of stories, giving you a simple and elegant way to find the news you want, faster than ever before. For publishers, the Summly technology provides a new approach to drive interest in stories and reach a generation of mobile users that want information on the go.

Nick and the Summly team are joining Yahoo! in the coming weeks. While the Summly app will close, you will see the technology come to life throughout Yahoo!’s mobile experiences soon. So stay tuned!

Mobile devices are at the center of how we engage with the people, experiences and interests we love. Across Yahoo!, we’re focused on creating beautiful experiences that people are excited to use every day — products that inspire and delight. We can’t wait to work with Nick and the Summly team to do just that.

And here’s Summly’s announcement:

In true Summly fashion, I will keep this short and sweet.

Read more at Business Insider.

San Francisco-based startup ThisMoment has an answer and a solution: You need the brand to give the people more than content—you need to give them an experience. ThisMoment is a platform that helps agencies develop innovative technology solutions for the evolving web. These Dynamic Brand Experiences allow the audience to get a hands-on feel of the brand’s personality, and distribute it across multiple channels.

Since its start, ThisMoment has launched over 400 channels with over 350 million video views across YouTube, Facebook, and brand.com. Their uncanny ability to strike up social conversation with brand audiences around the world has resulted in an average brand engagement of 6 minutes across campaigns.

The Digital Lab was fortunate to have ThisMoment’s Andrew Bolton and Jen Starr present and demo their newest iteration of DEC (Distributed Engagement Channel) and show us how to make brands stand out as experiences using ThisMoment’s unique tools.

Lets start at the beginning. ThisMoment was started in 2008 and launched their premier product, DEC version 1, in 2010. DEC1’s purpose was to centralize and organize all the different experiences that a single brand had on the web, and distribute them across multiple channels. DEC2 focused on globalization—giving the digital brand experiences themselves the ability to sense and detect where in the world and in which language content was being consumed. This information helped the brand ensure that content on the site being consumed in Russia, for example, was relevant and sensitive to its readers. DEC3 focused on overlaying social, mobile, and community management tools in their CMS so that the brand experiences could be easily managed on the backend. DEC4, the current version, is what ThisMoment calls the Dynamic Brand Experience.

The Dynamic Brand Experience allows scalability across different platforms and different devices. Its mantra is: “Maximum relevance translates into maximum engagement.” Here are its four main functions:

1)    Content: Brands have lots of content on different social platforms that can easily get lost online. DEC4 allows marketers to store and categorize that content, collect user-generated content, moderate it, and push it out as creative executions that resonate with the consumer.

2)    Creative: DEC offers multiple approaches to pushing out creative content, including providing quick-to-market layouts, an open developer toolkit and a developer network to each client so that their brands can focus more on the front end creative.

3)    Conversation: Community management tools are integrated directly into the dashboard.

4)    Analytics: ThisMoment offers apples-to-apples reporting, to see how specific campaigns are performing across different channels in different regions, and identify which pieces of content are most relevant, engaging and effective.

For platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, ThisMoment has templates that promote both design flexibility and ease of use. On YouTube, brands can create channels that function as brand hubs, which can be useful for brands with different product lines, as each line would get its own sub-channel, if you will.

The brand hub can then deep link to the sub-channel’s different videos without taking the viewer out of the overall brand experience. Furthermore, a social conversation module that integrates all conversations taking place on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, can be added to every ThisMoment social experience. Even better, displayed conversations can be moderated on the backend so that unrelated or inappropriate comments won’t show. These social elements can also be integrated into the brand site itself.

All in all, ThisMoment helps brands and agencies develop cohesive, social brand experiences with their software and services that revolve around giving clients more time to concentrate on making the front-end experience as relevant to the consumer as possible. In an industry, nay, a world, where time is money and thus incredibly precious, companies like ThisMoment are godsends.

–

Andrew Bolton is an Account Executive at ThisMoment East and can be reached at andrewbolton@thismoment.com.

Jennifer Starr is also an Account Executive at ThisMoment East and can be reached at Jennifer@thismoment.com.

HBO’s executive leadership seems locked on keeping access to the premium cable network exclusive to cable and satellite TV subscribers, the same isn’t necessarily true for its HBO Go streaming service.

At the Game of Thrones season three premiere event earlier this week, the channel’s chief exec Richard Plepler opened up about the possibility of selling standalone access to HBO Go as part of a bundled broadband Internet subscription plan. Plepler suggested that bundling Internet service with premium streaming video services could be part of a new evolution for how content is packaged, but didn’t offer any kind of hard time frame of when it could happen, reports Reuters.

“We would have to make the math work,” Plepler told Reuters.

And I think I speak for a whole slew of people when I say, HBO needs to get cracking on that math ASAP.

HBO Go’s streaming app provides on-demand access to hundreds of notable movies as well as a complete library of all HBO original programming, including The Sopranos, True Blood, Newsroom, and Game of Thrones. And since HBO Go is currently a complimentary service to the cable channel, you’ll need to spend about $25 to $40 on top of a regular monthly cable or satellite TV subscription bill.

Yet, if HBO Go did become something that customers could add on to their Internet bundle, Plepler indicated that it could drop the price of the streaming service to an estimated $10 to $15 per month. That means people who only wanted Internet and HBO shows would spend around $65 per month instead of the over $150 in monthly subscriptions as a result of having a full cable TV service within a bundle of services.

Depending on who you talk to and which reports you read, cable TV subscriptions are being seen as unnecessary expenses that can’t compete with low-cost streaming services like Netflix and Hulu Plus, each of which cost $8 per month for a large library of video content. Over the next few years, this could translate into drastically lower cable TV customer — and in turn cut into the lucrative revenue stream that HBO currently gets by keeping the channel paired with cable subscriptions. And when you look at it that way, pairing HBO Go with broadband Internet actually makes a lot of sense for everyone except the cable companies.

Read more at Venturebeat.

This post is brought to you by Comcast Business Class .

There’s a lot of big talk about “Big Data,” but it’s difficult to understand exactly what it all means. When you begin tossing around high-level explanations of data frameworks such as NoSQL, Hadoop, and Cassandra, it’s easy to get lost in the details and not understand what implementing Big Data IT measures can do for an enterprise business.

Big Data is an aggregate collection of large-scale and granular analytics that can be related to just about anything. In the easiest example of practical application, Amazon relies on Big Data to keep track of everything from ecommerce transactions to recommendations. Because so much effort is involved in curating, managing and storing Big Data, it relies on special frameworks that are meant to handle data efficiently.

“Enterprises have been using customer data to drive more value out of their organization for years,” says David Steinberg, CEO of New York-based digital marketing agency XL Marketing. “It used to be that a when a company would try to run a report, it could take two days — that same report can now be run in moments.”

Big Data has plenty of applications for an enterprise, but it’s also not for everyone. Keep in mind these handy tips to establishing your own Big Data framework, and you’ll be able to take advantage of more metrics — and make smarter decisions — to drive more value than you could with a standard database system alone.

1. Assess Your Needs

The first thing to recognize in pursuing a comprehensive system to take advantage of Big Data is that it’s not the end-all be-all for the company of the future. Make an honest assessment of your company’s data needs, and plan accordingly.

The main reason to not rush into implementing a Big Data framework is because it is, well, work — implementing a distributed file system that can easily handle granular (read : a ton of) information requires answering a ton of questions: Where will all this data live? How will it run? Who will manage it? Ensure that those questions are answered correctly by hiring a consultant or training someone who knows the business on Big Data.

“When I look at the organizations, there’s often a disconnect between the technology group, which is collecting the data, and the other groups in the organization and the goals they’re trying to achieve,” Steinberg explains. “You’ll have a Chief Marketing Officer who wants to achieve one goal, the EVP of Sales wants to achieve another, the CFO who wants to achieve another, the CEO who is trying to put it all together, and then a CTO and CIO who are battling it out for who owns the data.”

Despite all the posturing, the good news is that Big Data is becoming much cheaper to gather, much easier to scale, and much faster to report. If your company is looking to gather more information about users, clients and behaviors, or to internally monitor the actions of the company, then Big Data could be a cheap and sophisticated way to manage all that information.

“The technology around the space — server capacity, storage capacity, reporting capacity — has gotten so inexpensive that it’s been able to gather more data and use that data,” Steinberg adds.

2. Make Data Goals

Once the decision to embrace Big Data is made, the next step is to turn all of that previously unused information into reportable, actionable facts that make a big impact on your business. Whether you’re working with an in-house IT team or a proprietary service (like Cloudera), the number one way to manage your data is to identify what’s important and how it can be used to its fullest extent.

Omer Trajman, former VP of Technology for Cloudera and current VP of Field Operations at Big Data application firm WibiData, says that a great feature of employing Big Data is the ability to refocus onto different data types and filter systems to get the right information at the right time. Trajman adds that Cloudera CTO Amr Awadallah had first-hand experience with the limitations of traditional data — which led to the development of the company and a more vested interest in Big Data management.

“He was trying to do analytics on browser usage platforms, and they had Windows, Mac, Linux, and an ‘Other’ bucket,” Trajman explains. “And then, within two months, the ‘Other’ bucket shot through the roof and they had no idea why. They couldn’t see it in the data because in their data warehouse, they set all other platforms to ‘Other.’ If they had Hadoop at the time, they could have just gone back to the raw data and changed what they were looking at to see that they needed an ‘iPhone’ option.”

3. Monitoring is Key

Implementing a file-system and work flow is only half of the issue: companies must be prepared to monitor the health and security of their system in order to ensure it is used to its maximum efficiency. Because many of these file systems are relatively new (Hadoop is ten years old), plenty of security and monitoring systems are still nascent.

“Relatively speaking, these systems have had less exposure in the enterprise, and there’s been less time for enterprises to develop security protocol,” Trajman adds. “Adoption is going a lot faster, but there’s a bit of a chase in the near-term to lock down solid security protocols.”

Investing in a Big Data system means that you must invest in a caretaking mechanism to ensure everything works correctly. It’s not enough to assume that what works in a traditional database system will work with a file framework — especially considering many of the data frameworks that can shuttle Big Data are able to do so because everything is as raw as possible. This means that it’s imperative to stringently monitor pieces of data to ensure the system is working at maximum efficiency and nothing is out of place.

As with any IT system, the more a company knows about the shortcomings of a Big Data network, the more efficient everything will run and the more knowledge will be given to the company.

4. Pursue the Future

While Big Data is great for monitoring events that have already happened, it’s no surprise that IT companies are using it to employ the next generation of predictive modeling. In order to take advantage of Big Data in the long term, it’s time to consider what data sets are key to predicting your customers’ needs. Embracing the future now means that you can get a jump on your competition and begin to use Big Data for real change.

“Once again, the more you can make your data actionable, the more valuable it’s going to be,” Steinberg explains. “You’re seeing a lot of numbers crunching and a lot of smart people trying to figure out what it all means. It’s really the evolution of Big Data.”

Trajman’s company, WibiData, recently released an open-source, real-time predictive modeling software for the Kiji Project. He stresses that predictive modeling is the next logical step in Big Data, as more departments use the accumulation of data to forecast user behavior. For example, an Ad Ops team can see that a certain ad is getting a massive clickthrough rate on a particular page, and determine which sites with similar demographics would be just as receptive.

“We’re really just scratching the surface of the potential of all of this,” Trajman adds. “It’s really exciting.”

Like predicting weather patterns or the ends of words in Google Instant, predictive modeling is the cutting edge of Big Data. Strategize now, and you’ll ensure that your company not only moves with the curve, but gets ahead of it.

Big Data? Big Potential.

Like any IT solution, the foundational blocks of implementing a Big Data system are clear, concise, and practical. If you’re interested in putting in the work and maintaining the system correctly, you’ll find that a mysterious world of data — useful data — can be made available to you with surprising speed.

But it’s important to remember: Data is only as good as how you use it. 

“Data should be transformational,” Trajman explains. “You need to create better experiences using your data, and that’s a pretty novel idea.”