Travelers between the U.S. and Europe have one less barrier to deal with when it comes to wireless charging a mobile phone or tablet. Powermat, a joint venture with Duracell, and Helsinki-based PowerKiss reconciled their differences and became one on Tuesday. The two wireless charging companies previously used incompatible technologies, but are both committed to the PMA standard and will be combined under the Powermat Technologies name. Between the two, they have more than 2,500 wireless charging installations at public locations such as airports, coffee shops, malls and arenas. PowerKiss recently added some charging mats at select McDonalds Europe locations. The idea behind these installs is to allow customers to place their mobile device on a wireless charging pad and add juice to the battery. Of course, the device has to natively support wireless charging, such as Nokia’s Lumia 920, or be compatible with an add-on product such as a wireless charging cover. Overall, the ability to recharge a device by placing it on a special mat really hasn’t taken off with the mainstream public. Part of the reason is a battle over the technology standards: If you have a device that supports wireless charging but doesn’t work with a compatible charging mat, you’ll have to plug in your device, of course. Powermat Technologies is part of the PMA, or Power Matters Alliance, which boasts that 80 percent of its partner members represent the entire wireless install base. That sounds good, so what’s the issue? Well, there’s another body, the Wireless Power Consortium, that’s been at this longer than the PMA by about four years and uses the Qi-branded standard. Even worse: Some partners are members of both groups. So while the PMA gained a new member through marriage, there are still plenty of fish in the sea using a different wireless standard. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Podcast: Mobile winners and losers in 2012 and what to expect in 2013Analyzing the wearable computing marketLTE-Advanced: what it is and isn’t    
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In 2009, Sean Gourley, an Oxford-trained physicist, gave a TED talk called “The Mathematics of War.” Gourley had been working with the Pentagon, the United Nations and the Iraqi Government to help them better understand the nature of the insurgency in Iraq, and in his presentation he announced something fairly striking: After analyzing the location, timing, death toll and weapons used in thousands of deadly incidents around the country, he and his small team had discovered that the violence actually had a consistent footprint. In other words, you could develop an equation that would predict the likelihood of an attack of a certain size happening at a certain time. And this wasn’t just true in Iraq: Gourley’s team had also analyzed insurgent-led wars in other parts of the world — from Colombia to Senegal — and had discovered the very same pattern, even though the underlying issues in those conflicts were totally different. Sean Gourley, Co-Founder and CTO, Quid Structure Data 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com Gourley has since moved on from war zones. He helped found a company called Quid that does big data projects for companies like Intel, Visa and Samsung. In March, he spoke at our Structure:Data conference in New York, where he talked about the difference between “data science” (which is about finding correlations) and “data intelligence” (which is about solving problems). He said we need to shift our focus toward the latter if we want to tackle the biggest challenges our world is facing. I followed up with him after the conference to talk more about big data in wartime. In hindsight, we were fighting the data war in Baghdad with fairly primitive tools. It was before the explosion of social media and the flowering of open-source data. In future battles, he said, governments will be using data not just to predict violence but to fight “the war of ideas.” Just what does that mean? It means using big data to track the types of conversations that people are having about a war — and then injecting counter-stories back into the system to change those prevailing ways of thinking. A government like the U.S. could use this tactic in a war zone to, say, try to weaken a violent insurgent movement, but the government could also employ it at home to build domestic support for the war. We often talk about companies using data science to get people to buy more shoes or more airline tickets. But just as drones are helping to automate wars, we’re moving into an era where data can help automate propaganda — and that creates the potential for some pretty potent new experiments in brain washing. It makes dropping cookies on people’s browsers seem quaint. Below is an edited transcript of my Skype interview with Gourley. Q: How would you use data differently in Iraq if you were doing it all over again? A: It’s important to remind ourselves in 2013 where the information landscape was at the start of the Iraq war. In 2003, the world was very excited about something called blogging. We didn’t have Twitter. Cellphone coverage at the start of the war was exceedingly low. What we’ve seen over the past decade as the war unfolded was one of the biggest changes in the information landscape from a militaristic perspective in a long, long time. The reporters in the bureaus, from the New York Times, say, would be bunkered down in a fortified compound — they didn’t get out a lot. I mean, you wouldn’t if you were there, why would you? They would send stringers out on motorbikes with cellphones and they would text in if any attack happened. They would be paid based on their reporting of events. A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S— Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) May 01, 2011 Since taliban (probably) don't have helicpoters, and since they're saying it was not "ours", so must be a complicated situation #abbottabad— Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) May 01, 2011 You had a crowdsourced version of Twitter, but it wasn’t Twitter. As the conflict went on, in 2008-09, you saw the first adoption of Twitter coming in. Most of that conflict, it was text-based, written by bureaus, and reported on by collating paid people. And that, in and of itself, gave us a landscape that was more complete and in many ways more accurate than what the military was able to do with their eyes on the ground. Now, there is already more information being collected by the collective intelligence than by the military intelligence. One one hand, we’re moving into a world where you have drones recording continuous HD video. But we’re also seeing an upscaling in human reporting now with the likes of Instagram. You’re not just tweeting — you’re taking pictures that are triangulated. The crowdsourced info is still going to be more complete and at a higher resolution than even the stuff that is done with the advent of drones and sensors by the military. Q: You’ve said that what was missing in Iraq was “narrative structure” to the data. What do you mean by that?  A: The stories being told in Iraq and around the world about why we were going to war, how the war was going. Numbers are one thing, but stories and being able to analyze the stories is another. Now in 2013, we’re just now at that phase where we can start to process narratives, and that’s pretty exciting. Because as much as wars are fought with bullets, they’re also fought with stories. There is a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) contract out at the moment that is looking to South America particularly to track the formation of new ideas. Part of that is to inject new ideas back into the system. {You could say, for example} I don’t like the way people are talking about this, and then inject a new idea {into the conversation}. And not one based on my gut intuition or a random story, but one that recombines existing ideas and is positioned to nudge and manipulate a conversation in a particular direction. It means fine-tuned control of the stories people are telling each other about why the war is happening. We’re going to get a lot better at getting those stories and language adopted. From the standpoint of how you stop these wars and bring them to a resolution … One thing there is watching the language (in conversations) change from an “us” to an “us” and “them.” As soon as you have an us and them, you can have a war. You can’t really have a war without an us and them. The second piece of that is the stories that are being told by the different insurgent groups essentially as a recruiting tool. If you want to disrupt an insurgency, one key piece of that is a story that attracts them away from those groups and into jobs that are paying that don’t involve killing. So combating insurgent narratives in a way that allow people to gravitate toward a different kind of activity. There are patterns in the stories that are told. We can track them, and we can start to have narratives compete against each other. Exactly how that will be used and how it will unfold, we’re in the process of trying to figure that out. Q: Would the government use this tactic of story manipulation domestically as well as in the war zones themselves? A: You could have a much higher-resolution storytelling for convincing a nation to go to war. As the war progresses, you see words like “quagmire,” “civil war” and “intractable” — that language starts to pop up. Could you change the story of civil war and quagmire to something that was made it seem more positive— like the story of the underdogs fighting back? I don’t know how that would play out, but it was the Americans’ willingness to go to war that the insurgents were fighting against. So they’re killing people to change a narrative that America holds. The violence is targeted against that idea. This tool is more likely to be used by political parties inside the country going to war than inside the country at war. Q: It seems like the U.S. government had a pretty good handle on the marketing of the war. The problem wasn’t the lack of messaging — it was that over time, it simply became a harder sell. Do you think the government could have been more convincing if it had better data? A: (Laughs) I don’t think I would have gone and advised the government on how to sell their conflict. But a hypothetical person using mathematical tools, yes, absolutely. It becomes a more difficult sell as you go on, but there is basic stuff. Like once 10 people die in an attack, there is a big bump in news coverage. So if you stabilize below 10 in an attack, you can keep the news at a lower proportion. Just how the news of the attack resonates — you can start to see those patterns and then play around with them. That’s one piece of it. The other is we constructed stories at the start, and then the war got more difficult and the stories that we were telling didn’t evolve and adapt to keep resolution. Was there a story that the American people would have bought half way through the war? Yeah, quite possibility.  Would data have helped us get that story? It wouldn’t have come up with it for us, but I think it definitely would have helped us get to it. You would try 10 different stories, 50 different stories, and see which started to get resonance. You would monitor those that were already out there to see which were getting traction and start to collect those to get a broader narrative. The monitoring and tracking of that stuff would have helped massively. You could think of a war now using the simple tools of Facebook and Google and targeting ads, pictures and stories. How would you target those things using social networks? You could have hundreds of different stories. A war unfolding in a media landcape like we have today would have a very different set of tools available to manipulate public opinion. Getty Images Q: So it’s like the old-style propaganda campaigns, but supercharged by social networks and open-source. A: That’s right, but it’s also supercharged by an understanding of how people hold ideas in their heads. It’s not just, we can organize a protest via Twitter and we can have a lot of people show up in one place. It’s that we can actually change what they are thinking. That’t the algorithmic side. With all the sharing of information, we can process that algorithmically and determine the stories that people hold to justify different political beliefs, different idealogical beliefs and different reasons for why they would take certain actions. That’s the big difference. The real breakthrough here is the natural language processing that enables computers to understand stories. Q: Does the government acknowledge that the majority of useful data now comes from open sources? A: A former director of the defense intelligence agency said that 90 percent of our data comes from open sources. It’s the 10 percent that is the James Bond stuff. That’s the stuff that people get most excited by, but the reality is that most of the data is from open sources. They (the government) may be slow to the punch, but they’re not stupid. Q: This war of ideas — you can fight it from some desk in a some office building in some random city, right? Precisely. You can do a lot of this remotely. Yes, it’s very conceivable it would be done in Arlington, Va., it wouldn’t be done in Baghdad. The people making decisions off this stuff are still the higher ups. They are going to take these recommendations and combine with their gut instincts for what’s going on the ground, their feel for the political, and maybe a conversation they had with a young kid that morning. This is not a machine that is going to be making all your decisions. The human side of it is still going to combine with recommendations. I don’t think if you were designing this thing you’d just have a computer spit out a message and immediately accept that. Although it might spit out a message that says “experiment and see what resonates.” Getty Images Q: How much money would it take and how many people to create this kind of idea-shaping machine for wartime? A: At the moment, you’d have to do a lot of R&D to get this stuff up and running. There is as a lot of custom fitting that needs to happen. But I’d be surprised if in five years there isn’t something more off the shelf. At the moment, a team of a 100 could very feasibly do this. Maybe if it’s in government it’s going to be 200. But in Silicon Valley, a team of 100 could certainly do it. And that’s today. In five years, that could be cut in half. You’re probably going to invest $20 million or $30 million in a team that does this. Q: How close is all this to being a reality? A: I don’t think we’d be surprised if in 2016-17, this stuff was at the same place that the self driving was at 2008. As far as the militaries of the world are concerned, this is still near-term science fiction. It’s certainly not stuff they’re running here and now today. The state of integrating open source isn’t done in s particularly coherent fashion or a particularly smart fashion. The models they’re running underneath this have little or no impact on the data they’re collecting. Any kind of analysis they’re running on top of the narratives are cutting short at the length of sentiment The brightest minds in the world out there — they used to be at the NSA. They aren’t now. They used to go to finance. Now they don’t. They come out here to the Valley. The brightest minds doing these linguistic techniques are out in this part of the world — they’re not working for government. So we have a pretty good barometer in this Valley for what is possible. Q: Propaganda and spin, of course, are nothing new. But now governments have the power to take it to a new level. Should we applaud that or be scared by it? A: Technology is neither good nor bad — but then it is also never neutral. We as technologists have the responsibility that comes with creating this technology to ensure that it is used to make the world a better place. This, of course, is very difficult — you make bets to give the technology only to one government and not another, and you may end up on the wrong side of an unjust war. Don’t give it to anyone and you risk extending a conflict that could have been ended much sooner. My own take here is that you ultimately have to believe in the goodness of humanity — that on average, there are more good people in the world than there are people that want to harm it. Thus, the more accessible a technology becomes, the better people will use it, and more good people will do good things with it than bad people will do bad things. A simple equation — but perhaps the right one — and one that requires us to distribute the technology as widely as possible. As a final note, we already give corporations a huge amount of control over the information we share and in turn allow their algorithms to process and ultimately influence the information we receive. Should we be more or less wary of giving it to a government? Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013How HR can make the case for workforce analyticsThe 2013 task management tools market    
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The Publishing Hackathon, held this past weekend at coworking space The Alley in New York, gave 30 teams a little over a day to come up with an idea for a book discovery startup, build a demo and pitch it to a panel of judges. Six finalists were chosen Sunday by a panel of judges including Perseus CMO Rick Joyce and NYC Seed managing director Owen Thomas. The winning startup will be announced at Book Expo America on May 31 and will receive $10,000 and the chance to pitch its product to William Morris Endeavor co-CEO Ari Emanuel. Here are the finalists: BookCity: A way to find books set in your travel destination [photo illustrating this post] Captiv: Makes book recommendations based on your Twitter activity Coverlist: A solution that focuses on browsing book jackets Evoke:  A way to discover young adult literature through characters and browse books by emotion: “Readers may determine if they wish to be inspired, challenged, amused, or informed during their next read based on content generated by an audience-in-common” [photo on right] KooBrowser: Makes book recommendations based on your web browsing habits [photo on left] LibraryAtlas: A book discovery solution based on geolocation I attended the demos on Sunday. A few thoughts: It’s hard to come up with a book discovery idea that is not similar to Goodreads in some way, though the finalists above did a good job. Many of the teams built ideas on Goodreads data or pulled other information from it. Book-recommendation algorithms were big (and, you’ll notice, didn’t make the cut above). A lot of teams described their idea as “Pandora for books” or “Netflix for books,” but they just meant that the software serves content recommendations, not that it actually streams content. Of the above, I thought that KooBrowser seemed most useful and like something I’d actually use. The idea is that, if you’re reading an article online, you could pull up a list of book recommendations based on the content of that article. The success of KooBrowser depends on how good the recommendations are, of course. But this idea seems to fit well into users’ actual everyday activity without being annoying. (I’m still not sold on the idea of receiving book recommendations pushed to my phone when I’m out and about.) Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.    
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I like going to baseball games for the camaraderie, ice-cold beer and general excuse to sit out in the summertime sun.  But the only way I can actually pay attention to what’s happening on the field (unless maybe it’s the last inning of the last game of the World Series) is if I have some money on the line. It’s not that I’m a big gambler (whenever I’ve ever been to Vegas, I’ve wanted to spend more time poolside than tableside), it’s just that shelling out a few bucks into a hat with the prospect of winning a mini-windfall makes me see the game in a whole different way. Similarly, a new startup, called LifeVest, hopes that by tying employee health goals to the opportunity to win or lose cash — through what it calls a “stock market for health” — it can encourage people to see their health differently and take the necessary steps to make it better. It may not be the right solution for every company, but I think it underscores an important lesson for many employers trying to get their employees to improve their health: having skin in the game can be a powerful motivator. In theory, we all know that being healthy is a reward in itself — in matters of our health and wellness, we always, literally, have skin in the game. But when it comes to incentivizing people to lose weight, quit smoking and lower their blood pressure, a clean bill of health often isn’t a big enough carrot and the threat of chronic disease often isn’t a severe enough stick. Blending carrots and sticks Facing rising health care costs, more employers have started upping the ante for employees with wellness programs that either financially reward or penalize employees depending on how active they are in improving their health. CVS, for example, recently generated a ton of buzz for its decision to penalize employees who didn’t participate in its wellness program. And UnitedHealthCare is one of an increasing number of employers that offer employees financial rewards for getting their weight down and taking healthy steps. But LifeVest, which spun out of heathcare IT company Trizetto, offers employers a model that blends rewards and penalties. “We’ve got this notion of a stock tied to your health, which is powerful because it does a few things,” said CEO and co-founder Jon Cooper. “It changes the way people think about their health and [for a company] … markets are effective way to optimize an incentive budget.” To start, employers can choose to invest a minimum amount in each employee, which can depend on the demographics of their employee base and their goals. Then, each employee, as well as his family and friends, can add to the amount with their own investments. Employers can opt to match outside investments up to a certain amount. The more employees improve their weight, blood pressure and other health indicators, the greater their earnings and the less they improve, the less they stand to get paid (and the more they lose of their own investment). Getting an upfront commitment A Mayo Clinic study earlier this year supported the notion that financial incentives can lead to greater weight loss. But some argue that the fear of losing money can be a more powerful incentive for action than the prospect of gaining money and others say the effects may be short-lived. What I like about LifeVest is that it enables companies to carry a big stick while still giving employees some choice — in contrast to some penalty-based programs, like that promoted by CVS, employees that don’t want to participate aren’t forced to pay, while those that want to participate can still benefit from the “loss aversion” incentive. Sure, you might have some holdouts. But it lets the company focus on the people who are interested in making a change — and the promise of a financial prize could even be a way to get non-health-enthusiasts to the table. Also, similar to Stickk.com, a goal-setting site launched by Yale economists, it gets people to make the all-important upfront commitment. Just like paying for a membership to a gym or subscription to the philharmonic, it gets people invested in — and therefore more likely to follow through on — the activities we would like to have done but don’t always want to actually do. Amid the crowd of companies pitching employers with this or that approach to boosting employee health, LifeVest is a relatively small and new player — it just launched in October and recently graduated from the Tigerlabs health tech accelerator. And it doesn’t include all the health-tracking and engagement features of bigger companies like Keas or WellTok (although Cooper said it could be complementary to services like those). But I think its approach to incentivizing employees makes it an interesting company to watch — I don’t have any skin in this particular game, but you can be sure I’ll be paying attention. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013A near-term outlook for big dataHow HR can make the case for workforce analytics    
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Education technology startup Knewton just inked another deal with a major education publisher. But, for the first time, the initial audience for its partnership with Macmillan isn’t high school or college students — it’s for adults around the world learning English. Since launching in 2008, the adaptive learning company, which takes a data-driven approach to personalizing learning, has partnered with less than a handful of other publishers, including Pearson, Wiley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Its latest partnership shows that its not only making headway in the domestic K-12 and higher education markets, but that it’s extending its reach overseas and among markets that have been slower to go digital. “Today, ELT [English Language Teaching] is all offline,” said David Liu, Knewton’s COO. “[Macmillian is] creating content for the digital experience from scratch — not only the educational content, but the assessment content.” Over time, Liu said, the partnership will extend to other Macmillan content, not just that for ELT. But, to start, Macmillan will build on Knewton’s adaptive learning platform to provide personalized grammar and vocabulary lessons, exam reviews and other kinds of content to ELT classrooms, as well as individuals, across 120 countries. In the increasingly hot adaptive learning space, Knewton isn’t the only game in town. Dreambox Learning, McGraw-Hill and Cerego are a few other companies pitching various approaches to customized digital learning experiences for K-12 students, colleges and individual learners. While Knewton offers some evidence of its success – in a 2011 program of 2,000 remedial math students at Arizona State University, the company said, withdrawal rates dropped by 56 percent and pass rates climbed 11 percent – it’s still early days for adaptive learning and some learning experts say more proof is still needed.  Still, Knewton is growing steadily. By the end of last year, the company, which has raised $54 million, reached about 500,000 and it expects to reach 5 million students by the end of this year. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionHow consumer media will change in 2013Forecast: the evolution of the e-book market    
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Marco Arment — creator of Instapaper, co-founder of Tumblr and internet-famous software developer — has a knack for sharing unique and thoughtful insights on technology. Take, for example, public cloud–based storage services, such as Dropbox. Marco makes some salient points worth repeating here for users who may not be fully aware of the ramifications of storing sensitive data off-premise. Arment says: “Anything that is really sensitive or extremely valuable or needs to be kept very secret, I wouldn’t store on anybody else’s servers. That, to me, seems ridiculous unless I held the encryption keys like with the online backup service that I use.” Public cloud-based locker services hold the keys to encrypt and decrypt your data on their servers. Why? It’s important to remember they are used as a collaboration tool. To offer public file sharing features, they need to decrypt data stored on their servers. In addition, employee could view or steal your data. To make matters worse, public cloud services are more likely to be hit by hackers because they are high value targets. However, there is an alternative. Varonis DatAnywhere is a private cloud-based file sharing solution that is secure and easy to use. Create a secure private cloud experience using your existing file sharing infrastructure Keep your data on your file servers Keep your existing permissions (e.g., NTFS and Active Directory) Provide secure, enterprise-capable file synchronization and mobile access Collaborate with the same ease-of-use as public cloud solutions     
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Above the Law is a tabloid blog where the legal community comes to get news and gossip — and to say terrible things about one another. Many of the reader comments on the site are so mean or hurtful that they make notorious troll forums like Gawker feel like a petting zoo. And the Above the Law staff wouldn’t have it any other way. At a time when many publishers are trying to improve comments or else refuse to permit reader participation in the first place, Above the Law continues to let readers be as abrasive as they like. For example, here’s a screenshot of responses to a story by editor Elie Mystal about a scholarship for white people at Columbia: I spoke this month with Mystal and John Lerner, CEO of Breaking Media (the company that owns Above the Law), to learn more about the site’s comment philosophy and its effect on business strategy. “If you write on the internet, people will say horrible things about you. We allow them to say it to our faces — if we didn’t, they’d say it on Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr,” said Mystal. “Anyone who wants to write professionally better be prepared for ad hominem, unfair personal criticism. That’s not just part of media in 2013.” Above the Law’s writers, most of whom are Ivy League law school graduates, are frequent targets of personal vitriol by readers, but Mystal says he still appreciates them. “Commenters got me my job. Online people voted me in. I remember that when they’re screaming about how I look like a walrus.” The commenters also serve as a vital part of the site’s overall content and business strategy. Lerner explained that the story comments appear as separate web pages, which allows Above the Law to sell additional ads, and that the site also works with comment platform Disqus to sell sponsored comments on its app. And, contrary to popular wisdom, advertisers aren’t skittish about their brands appearing next to off-color stories (like this one about a lawyer who invoked the First Amendment to excuse “slut-shaming” someone who turned him down) – a quick look shows that most of ATL’s sponsors are big and boring professional firms. “It’s not like five years ago when a lot of advertisers didin’t know how the internet works,” said Mystal. “They realize there’s horrible comments on the Washington Post too.” Above the Law readers can flag comments as offensive but that doesn’t mean the editors will respond. The only thing likely to be pulled down is something that offends absolutely everybody — “no one one cares if you’re offended”, says Mystal, adding that moderating each comment would be a full time job. Ultimately, the no-holds-barred policy is not just simpler for the editors to oversee, but may also offer a more authentic view of humanity than the curated comments of other forums: “I used to work in a big firm in downtown Manhattan, and there were some racists there. We’re the legal community, and there’s people who hold racist, homophobic views — you’re going to meet people like that. Those people may be your boss.” (Image by ArTono via Shutterstock) Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.    
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As a co-founder of Basho Technologies, the company behind the Riak database, Antony Falco observed that companies already had lots of databases. It makes sense, given that not every database was created equal. But Falco noticed an inherent structural problems with using multiple databases. Keeping data isolated inside any one database prevents companies from making discoveries across multiple data sets. Plus, he said, at least one database tends to have trouble at any given time. Earlier this year, Falco started Orchestrate.io to respond to these issues. The company provides a single API through which customers can send data from multiple databases. This way, customers can join, say, geolocation data, time-series data and tweets, drawing graph relationships and doing full-text searches on top of it all. To build out the infrastructure to do this with multiple cloud providers and bring on customers, Portland, Ore.-based Orchestrate.io is taking on $3 million in seed funding. True Ventures is leading the round (see disclosure) alongside contributions from Frontline Ventures and Resonant Venture Partners. Some companies were already testing out the Orchestrate.io service, although Falco declined to identify them. He said the price of using the service is tied to the number of queries per second customer make. When it comes to competition, Falco said, “Certainly there’s Amazon.” On Amazon Web Services, customers can get a slew of tools, from RDS for relational databases to DynamoDB for nonrelational work to Elastic MapReduce for Hadoop. And, of course, if companies don’t buy into the Orchestrate.io logic, existing databases constitute challengers. But Falso has an answer for that. “Databases can do most of these queries,” he said. “The problem is, they can’t do them efficiently and at scale at the same time.” After the company comes out of private beta, Falco thinks Orchestrate.io has the potential to be a go-to provider for lots of different kinds of data-analysis services, Falco said, just as companies look to Twilio for voice services and SendGrid for email. “(There’s a) shift of operational burden from a corporation or the end user to a service provider,” he said. “I think we’re just part of the trend. You’re going to continue to see that over the next several years.” Disclosure: Orchestrate.io 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. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystemWhat’s driving the next phase of the e-commerce evolutionThe Red-Hot Data Warehouse Market: Who’s Buying Next?    
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ConsultingMD, a startup that connects patients with leading medical specialists, has raised a $10 million round of funding from Venrock Capital. The company, which launched earlier this year and previously raised $1 million from Harrison Metal, enables patients to seek second opinions from a network of top doctors, and to get referrals to  specialists in their own area. With the funding, the startup said it plans to further develop its technology and build out its network of elite doctors. In contrast to startups like ZocDoc or HealthTap, which help patients find any doctor available in their area or online, ConsultingMD bills itself as service that offers access to only the doctors in the top echelon of the medical world. These physicians – who encompass the one percent of their profession – tend to be the chiefs or chairmen of the department, with publications in the top medical journals, the company says. “The core problem is that in the highly elite world of academic specialists… access to these people is difficult [and] patients don’t know how to find them in the first place,” said CEO and co-founder Owen Tripp, who was previously COO and co-founder of Reputation.com. The company’s other co-founder is Dr. Lawrence Hofman, chief of interventional radiology at Stanford Hospital. Through the site, patients in need of second opinion spend a few minutes describing their case, disclosing where they’ve already received care and authorizing ConsultingMD to access their medical history. Then the startup digitizes and indexes the relevant medical records (an often frustrating and dragged-out process for patients) and delivers it to the appropriate specialist on ConsultingMD. While it can take the company an average of seven or eight days to aggregate all the records, once the doctor receives the information, Tripp said, they the doctor  can turn around a second opinion in an average of 48 hours. For individuals coming to the site, the pricing is steep, emphasizing ConsultingMD’s positioning as an elite service – the company’s website says a second opinion costs $3,750. But the company believes its bigger opportunity is by offering the service to employers looking for a way to help their employees get better outcomes (and therefore boost productivity and lower costs). For an additional $200, the company will also locate and schedule a priority appointment with a top specialist in a patient’s area, as well as deliver all of the necessary medical records. For doctors, the site offers a chance to interact with other top-tier medical professionals (doctors are only admitted to the site by peer recommendation), see more cases that match their research interests and, of course, earn a little more cash. For patients, the opportunity to reach the one or two leading experts in a given field may be attractive — especially in very specific or rare medical situations. But even though the company says that outcomes for elite doctors differ substantially from outcomes for less pedigreed professionals, it’s unclear that the research backs that up. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunityWeb startups: How to guard against security breaches    
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LogMeIn,  the company behind user-friendly web conferencing, screen sharing service and a Dropbox alternative, is about to add identity and application management capabilities to its menu. On Tuesday, the Boston-based company is launching a preview of AppGuru which aims to help IT  deal with the burgeoning bring-your-own-application (BYOA) craze which forces admins to deal with cloud-delivered personal applications that employees use at work but may not be officially sanctioned. AppGuru promises a central console for managing multiple apps; an easy way to create, import or move users which works with Active Directory if it’s installed; and tools for managing licenses. It also vows to provide an easy way to set policy management and granular controls as needed. That’s a mighty tall order. Michael Simon, CEO of LogMeI Michael Simon, CEO of the Boston-based company, said LogMeIn gets invaluable perspective from both the consumer and the IT side of the BYOA divide. “We don’t just have heavily used applications — with 55 million users — but we get visibility from consumer and IT perspectives,” Simon said. AppGuru will manage LogMeIn’s web conferencing and collaboration application; Joinme screen sharing and Cubby, a Dropbox alternative for businesses, as well as Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, he said. Simon said small and medium sized businesses are the company’s sweet spot but it has some very large enterprise accounts as well. Last quarter, for example, it announced a seven-figure deal with Hewlett-Packard, for LogMeIn Rescue, the company’s’ remote support offering. Simon did not disclose pricing but said AppGuru should be commercially available this fall. LogMeIn may have the chops to attack both the consumer and admin side of the equation, but it also faces formidable competition on the file-sync-and-share side of its business. Dropbox, the consumer champ, is gearing up Dropbox for Business while Google and Microsoft are pushing their respective application and storage tandems; and other competitors include Accellion, Egnyte and OwnCloud. They all claim to combine Dropbox-like simplicity with enterprise management perks. That’s probably why LogMeIn is adding enterprise perks that go beyond file storage and sync. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital futureWhat Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer SpaceThe 2013 task management tools market    
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Following successful pilots, SAP will step up its hiring of people on the autistic spectrum, the German business software firm has announced. Working with an outfit called Specialisterne, the company will bring in hundreds of autistic staff around the world to work in fields such as software testing, programming and data quality assurance. This is the latest move in what appears to be an interesting new trend. Texas-based CRM firm Alliance Data recently started seeking out workers on the autistic spectrum, as have other IT-related businesses such as the Berlin-based consultancy Auticon. SAP is the first major multinational to adopt similar hiring policies. Because autism tends to impair the sufferer’s social abilities, it can be problematic in a work environment. As a result, many sufferers find it difficult to gain and hold down a job. However, the autistic spectrum is wide and many of those with low-level autistic spectrum disorder – such as the recently reclassified Asperger Syndrome – can function in a work setting. People with autistic spectrum disorders often display highly focused and analytical behavior and, in the context of software testing and programming, it is these characteristics that companies such as SAP and Alliance Data are finding can work to their advantage. In its statement on Tuesday, SAP said it saw “a potential competitive advantage to leveraging the unique talents of people with autism.” According to SAP human resources chief Luisa Delgado: “By concentrating on the abilities that every talent brings to the table, we can redefine the way we manage diverse talents. With Specialisterne, we share a common belief that innovation comes from the ‘edges.’ Only by employing people who think differently and spark innovation will SAP be prepared to handle the challenges of the 21st century.” SAP has previously piloted its new hiring policies in India, where it worked with Specialisterne – a Denmark-based IT consultancy specializing in employing autistic workers – to hire 6 autistic software testers. It claims the result was a boost in productivity. SAP has also recently completed the screening process for hiring 5 autistic workers in Ireland, and is now preparing to take the program global. The company said the global expansion would begin in the U.S., Canada and Germany this year. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How HR can make the case for workforce analyticsSocial 2013: The enterprise strikes backSocial third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook    
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Orange Business Services has expanded its Flexible Computing infrastructure-as-a-service product to North America and Asia, targeting multinationals with a presence across those continents and Europe and South America, where the platform is already available. As can be expected with that sort of customer base, France Telecom’s business services arm is highlighting global business continuity support as the main reason for choosing its IaaS over the likes of Amazon or Rackspace. As the company’s international cloud chief, Chris McKay, told me, configurability is also a selling point. “There are no small, medium or large instances. You pay for what you use, but you don’t have to pay for steps in instances,” McKay said. Regarding competition from other telcos, particularly others from Europe such as BT and Deutsche Telekom, he stressed the “industrialized” nature of Orange’s offering – “we provide a catalog for the customer which has granularity of managed services which the customer can choose, from the OS to middleware to applications” – and the fact that Orange manages its own cloud data centers around the world rather than turning to outsourcing in certain locations. Orange already has around 500 customers for Flexible Computing, which allows both self-managed and fully managed usage. The platform is based on in-house technology, but McKay said Orange was also looking at “other avenues”. “Right now we’re carrying out studies,” he said. “[We will try] possibly OpenStack and a few others for an internal cloud solution at France Telecom in the next four months, where we’re going to evaluate what the right direction is for the future.” According to an Orange Business Services statement on the North American and Asian expansion, the company is on track to rake in €500 million ($644 million) in cloud revenues in 2015. It managed €113 million in 2012, which was a third up on the year before. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyondInfrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprisesForecasting the future cloud computing market    
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IBM’s Watson computer has taken on a new job — that of customer service agent — as Big Blue puts its Jeopardy-playing computer into a new role. This will also be the first time IBM delivers Watson completely as a service, instead of as a highly customized software product for select customers in the medical and financial services field. But as Watson expands its role it may invite more comparisons to Siri, Apple’s natural language processing assistant. Tuesday at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Nashville, Tenn., IBM plans to launch the Watson Engagement Advisor, aimed at helping consumer brands better recommend products to customers and provide better customer service at scale. Yes, that’s right. This is a technology that can diagnose cancer will be used to help sell people more products. Why we need Watson-level AI for customer service today. Still, customer service is a legitimate and complicated problem, especially in an era where social media meets our desire for a personalized and instant response to any inquiry or service issue. Firms have to engage with customers via phone calls, tweets, Yelp, Facebook posts and for all I know, angry letters. And many of those customers using new media don’t want to wait for a response. Companies that can offer good service quickly in a variety of mediums have an advantage. And Watson would allow them to do this at scale. Imagine offering Ritz Carlton service at Holiday Inn prices. Brands who buy the Engagement Advisor software will get access to a much smarter virtual agent that can sift through massive amounts of information to respond to users’ questions quickly. As someone who was totally schooled at Jeopardy by Watson, I cannot emphasize enough how fast it is. The IBM release notes that the Engagement Advisor software is designed to help existing customer service personnel answer questions quickly or it can be deployed via the brand’s mobile site where customers can interact with Watson directly. As IBM’s release says, “In one simple click, the solution’s “Ask Watson” feature will quickly address customers’ questions, offer advice to guide their purchase decisions, and troubleshoot their problems.” It’s possible this will remind users of Siri, Apple’s chatty personal assistant on the iPhone and iPad. However, instead of being deployed on a device, Watson is embedded on a brand web site. It can greet customers by name, however and offer to help them via a chat window on the company site or via a mobile push alert, that will appeal to people who want to tweet or text their customer care questions without having to stay focused on a single web page. In the ideal case Watson will have access to customer records plus the data stores it was trained on, and will be able to use both in giving a customer a recommendation or help. The business of Watson is a big one Instead of naming customers directly IBM writes that brands including ANZ, Celcom, IHS, Nielsen and Royal Bank of Canada are, “exploring how the Watson Engagement Advisor can help them engage with their customers.” This may be phrased this way because the initial pilot projects involving Watson require a lot of training of the computer before it becomes valuable. During Watson’s “apprenticeship period,” IBM in some cases hasn’t charged clients, or charges them lower rates. But it’s no secret that Watson is a big business bet for IBM. At last year’s Structure conference, Dan Cerutti, IBM’s VP of Watson Commercialization, explained IBM’s ambitions for Watson, including delivering the machine as a service over more and more devices. IBM sees Watson as a new type of computing and plans to build out new business models to support it, as Cerutti detailed in our chat almost a year ago. Along the way Watson not only impresses with its ability to filter through reams of data to correctly answer a natural language question, it also has been able to do this as it shrinks in size. Since its television debut, Watson has seen a 240 percent improvement in system performance, and a reduction in physical requirements by 75 percent. The whole system can now be run on a server that takes up the size of four pizza boxes from a giant machine that took up an entire bedroom. Smart, svelte and delivered as a service. Get ready to meet Watson in more roles and in some surprising places. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The state of cross-platform media measurementThe importance of putting the U and I in visualizationA near-term outlook for big data    
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Truphone has always had a soft spot for the international business traveler. When it became a virtual mobile carrier in 2010, its core service was a plan that charged you local rates for voice, SMS and data on either side of the Atlantic – a boon to any globetrotter accustomed to paying exorbitant roaming fees outside his home country. Now Truphone is extending more love to border-crossing businessmen and women – or at least to the companies that pay their phone bills. On Tuesday Truphone is unveiling its first shared plans for business. Companies can now buy big batches of minutes, texts and megabytes and pool them across not just multiple devices, but also multiple nations. For instance a $500 plan includes 5000 voice minutes, 5000 text messages and 1 GB of 3G data, all of which can be used anywhere in the U.S., U.K. Netherlands, Australia and Hong Kong. Germany, Poland and Spain will join that list later this year. Those prices will definitely seem high to most of us since we’re accustomed paying only for the for the domestic-only voice and data buckets offered by our local carriers. But if you’re splitting your time between countries in the Truphone “Zone” those rates look like a bargain. Anyone who has ever opened their mobile browser overseas can attest to international data roaming rates being practically criminal — $20 a megabyte isn’t uncommon. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How to manage the signaling storm in 2013New solutions for the evolving mobile networkU.S. Wireless Data Market, Q1 2009    
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Amazon Web Services can now claim a rare blessing among cloud providers: it has earned the FedRAMP accreditation that certifies that it has met a variety of security standards. That certification, which covers AWS GovCloud as well as Amazon’s other U.S. regions, should make it easier for state, local and government agencies to put workloads on Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure without having to jump through so many hoops. Amazon Web Services VP Adam Selipsky. FedRAMP, which stands for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, “is a U.S. government-wide standardized approach to security assessment, authorization and monitoring,” said Adam Selipsky, VP of AWS. If a service gets certified by FedRAMP for use by one agency, it will be easier for other government organizations to adopt it as well, he said. In government parlance, Amazon now has a three-year “Authority to Operate,” or ATO. That certifies that a range of government data can be stored or processed on Amazon infrastructure. Companies seeking FedRAMP certification typically work with a sponsor agency, which in Amazon’s case was the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS has used AWS to run for the Centers of Disease Control’s BioSense program for tracking health problems in the U.S. and for the National Database for Autism Research.  FedRAMP blessing greases the skids for more government use AWS now has both a FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) Moderate and a FedRAMP Moderate ranking.The latter designation means that ”sensitive data” can be stored and managed on AWS infrastructure. “This is a journey, a sliding scale. Sensitive data is a term of art used in government. Even more top secret categories of data require additional certifications,” Selipsky said. To date, exactly one cloud provider — Autonomic Resources, a small North Carolina company — had earned the FedRAMP seal of approval from the General Services Administration. Now AWS is in the mix, but the two companies won’t have the arena to themselves for very long. Up to 15 providers are expected to clear FedRAMP hurdles this year with double that number expected to do so in 2014 when FedRAMP certification becomes mandatory, according to Federal Computer Week, AWS is the kingpin in public cloud infrastructure where it’s had a 6 year head start. But now enterprise-focused rivals — VMware will announce its AWS response on Tuesday, HP and Rackspace have rolled out their own public clouds. An early FedRAMP certification which should make government IT types feel better about deploying work on AWS, may well be another early-mover advantage. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels may well talk about the importance of public sector workloads when he speaks at GigaOM Structure next month in San Francisco. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyondQuality of the cloud: best practices for ISVsThe fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud    
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PayPal may be taking on Square on its home mobile payments turf, but Square figures two can play that game. It has its own peer-to-peer payments in the works that will let users to transfer cash to each other by simply hitting the send button on an email. A splash page first spotted by TechCrunch on Square’s website shows a demo of the service, which for now is available only to invited users. The demo shows that a registered user only has to send an email to the payment recipient with the dollar amount of the transfer in the subject line and pay@square.com in the CC field to complete a transaction. According to the page, you can email money to any debit card. An accompanying FAQ reveals that all transactions will cost the sender 50 cents a pop, but the recipient pays nothing. We reached out to Square to get more details on the mysterious service, but the company isn’t revealing any more details for now. “We’re excited to share Square Cash with our friends,” a Square spokesperson said via email. “We’ll continue to invite others to try it out in the coming weeks.” Of course, Square is a bit late to the party given that PayPal has dominated this space for a decade, while other companies like Braintree’s Venmo have been filling whatever gaps PayPal left in mobile peer-to-peer payments. The major banks all have their own email transfer services, and just last week at I/O, Google announced its intention to dive head first into the same market by adding Google Wallet support to Gmail. Square might just be another peer-to-peer payments setup, but it’s building up a consumer following thanks to Square Wallet (and Starbucks, which will help it distinguish its cash service form others. Speaking of Google, the search giant revealed a sunset date of Nov. 20 for Google Checkout, a service it’s been promising to shut down for two years. Google has long intended to fold Checkout’s on-screen instant payment technology into Wallet. Google finally announced that transition at I/O last week. In a blog post, Google said it would continue to support U.S. merchants that have their own payment processing technology with its new Wallet Instant Buy system. For customers who don’t have their own payment processing, Google is working with Braintree, Shopify and Freshbooks to get them up and running on new a new commerce platform. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM ProMobile payments: forecasts, technologies and opportunitiesOpportunities and challenges for mobile deals    
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Startup Eos Energy Storgae announced on Monday that it has raised a $15 million series B round from a group of investors including power company NRG Energy. Eos Energy, based in New Jersey, has been building a low cost grid battery using air and zinc that it hopes utilities and power companies will buy to help manage their grids and combine with solar and wind projects. The company is looking to use the funding to help commercialize its batteries, which they’re calling Aurora, and Eos Energy hopes to deliver those to the market in 2014. According to a filing, this B round has been under development for over a year, and the company also says in its release that it is already in the process of raising a series C round, too. Eos Energy is testing out its first batteries with New York utility ConEdison, and the two are using a state grant to install batteries on the New York grid. The company says it also has other utility partners in the works. Scientists have been working on using air as the cathode for batteries for half a century. A battery is made up of an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, with an electrolyte in between. Air, of course, is abundant, light weight, and doesn’t require a heavy casing to contain it inside a battery cell. Also theoretically air can achieve a high energy density, or amount of energy that it can store. Eos Energy tech innovation comes from founder and inventor Steven Amendola who discovered a breakthrough with his original design of the bi-directional air cathode that could last for 10,000 cycles (or around three decades). The company has told me that its initial battery could cost $160 per kWh, lasts 30 years and be made up of everyday benign materials. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industryGreen IT Q4: solar, subsidies and the outlook for EVsGreen IT Q1: Cleantech Breaking Out — and Bracing for Hard Times    
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Microsoft is scheduled to take the wraps off its next Xbox at an event in Redmond, Wash. Tuesday, and the reveal of the new device is likely to not just get gaming fans excited: Game consoles have become the most popular devices to consume Netflix and other forms of online video in the living room, and Microsoft is expected to double down on TV viewing with the new device. Of course, Microsoft has kept mum on what it is going to announce, but there have been a few leaks and reports that give us a good idea on what the new Xbox is going to offer: A switch to PC hardware and Windows 8 The next Xbox is going to be based on an x86 processor likely made by AMD (for the specs lovers: there have been reports of an 8-core processor running at 1.6GHz CPU with 4MB of L2 cache), and a pretty powerful GPU to make those next-generation games look good. The device is also supposed to run a special version of Windows 8. Why that matters: Moving away from ARM and closer to the hardware and software of an ordinary desktop PC should make it easier to develop apps for the platform, which could bring even more entertainment services to the platform. There’s also talk that the next Xbox will allow multitasking, which means you might be able to run Skype while you watch a video on Netflix, or watch TV while you do some casual gaming. A Blu-ray drive There have been a number of reports claiming that the next Xbox will come with an integrated Blu-ray player. Microsoft didn’t add a Blu-ray drive to its Xbox 360 game console, and instead opted to offer users the option to buy a drive for the competing HD DVD standard – only to pull out of HD DVD when it became obvious that the format had no chance against Blu-ray. Why this matters: Blu-ray is a nice add-on for Xbox users who want HD movies without having to deal with yet another box in their living room. But it’s also an admission that physical media will still be around for some time, especially considering that high-quality movie downloads and bandwidth caps don’t mix all that well. Live TV, courtesy of your cable box Leaks of key documents about the next Xbox’s hardware have shown that the device will come with two HDMI ports: One to connect the Xbox to your TV, and one to connect your cable box to the Xbox. That’s the same setup used by Google TV and the latest Slingbox, and it allows Microsoft to access your live TV programming and overlay it with its own programming guide, widgets and apps. Why this matters: Microsoft wants users to always consume TV through the Xbox — even if the actual TV programming comes from traditional cable, and not an Xbox Live app. This shows how important TV has become for the Xbox, but the somewhat cumbersome setup also goes to show how complicated it is for even someone like Microsoft to get access to the content that matters most to consumers. No little sibling Last year, rumors surfaced that Microsoft was going to offer two separate Xboxes: A full-blown game console, and a lighter and cheaper device that would focus on video and TV viewing and only offer casual gaming. It now looks like we won’t see that Xbox mini any time soon. Why this matters: A cheap, and lightweight companion device like the Roku or the Apple TV could be a good way for Microsoft to address new audiences. But getting these devices right is challenging, which is one of the reasons why the existing Xbox 360 and PS3 have been so much more popular than any of the streaming boxes. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How consumer media will change in 2013OTT technologies and strategies for broadcastersWhat the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG    
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This article originally appeared on GigaOM Pro, our premium research subscription service. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has completed a study that comes up with two ways to use compressed air technology to store wind energy in underground chambers, the national lab said Monday. The two ways both use data and computer modelling to figure out the best sites that could successfully bank wind energy to be used at a later time. Compressed air, as its name suggests, makes use of an electrically powered air compressor that sends pressurized air into a storage facility, which can be man-made or an underground reservoir. The pressurized air is let out later to run a turbine and generator to produce electricity. As much as 80 percent of the electricity used to compress air can be recovered when the pressurized air is used to generate energy, the lab said. Power losses are common when converting one form of energy to another. Power in under ground caves Utilities in the Northwest have a good reason for taking a look at energy storage technology. Wind power makes up about 13 percent (8.6 GW) of the power supply for the Northwest, the national lab said. Wind power tends to be most plentiful at night, when demand is at the lowest. Storing wind power for use during the day would help utilities meet their customers’ demand and manage their grids, which run smoothly when there is a balance of supply and demand. That prompted the Bonneville Power Administration to work with the lab to look into whether compressed air would be a good fit. Many U.S. utilities or power producers have done preliminary studies or even pilot projects to check out different types of energy storage technologies, including various types of batteries. Often their regulators require them to gradually increase the amount of renewable energy they supply to their customers. Wind and solar have been popular choices, but they don’t generate a steady supply of electricity around the clock. Here is where energy storage comes in handy to help utilities manage their supply and demand. The researchers were looking for two suitable underground sites for storing compressed air. They used data from gas exploration in Washington state and a computer model that simulates the flow of fluids underground. The idea is to see how much air a site can hold and how easy it’d be for the air to be harvested for power generation. For the study, an ideal underground storage would be at least 1,500 feet deep and 30 feet thick, and it should be close to transmission lines, the lab said. Pacific Northwest They found two locations, a place by the Columbia River, just across from Boardman, Ore., and another one in the Yakima Canyon that is roughly 10 miles north of Selah, Wash. Sasquatch watches over the lobby of Facebook’s data center in Oregon The scientists then sketched out two different processes for storing and re-using energy. At the Columbia River location, which is close to a natural gas pipeline, a compressed air storage plant can use natural gas to heat the compressed air and in the process boost the amount of electricity that can be produced. At the Yakima location, the facility can use geothermal heat to run a chiller, which will in turn cool the air compressor to make it run more efficiently. Geothermal energy also can heat up the compressed air when it’s released from storage. Bonneville will now take the results of the $790,000 study and do a round of cost-and-benefit analysis to figure out if compressed air makes for a good business case. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The opportunities for the Internet and clean powerThe fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantechCleantech and investment in 2013    
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Yahoo’s already had a busy Monday, what with that little $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition, but the company had a few more announcements to make at a press conference Monday afternoon in New York. It’s revamping its photo-sharing service Flickr , which has largely been left to languish since Yahoo acquired it in 2005. “We want to make Flickr awesome again,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said. Flickr is getting three big updates. All users will get 1 terabyte of photo storage for free. The site’s s interface is also being redesigned to focus on full-resolution photos — both in photo browsing and in search — rather than words and links. Users will be able to share the full-resolution photos by email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr. And, in addition to the iOS app Flickr launched last December, Yahoo is launching an Android app. The location of the press conference — a hotel in Times Square — became clear as Mayer announced that Yahoo has taken out a lease for office space at 229 West 43rd Street — the old New York Times building — and will be moving all 500 of its New York-based employees there. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg took the stage to say the move reflects “what a big player New York has become in the tech industry,” with Yahoo becoming “one of the largest tech presences in the city.” He noted that Tumblr is a “New York-grown company” and that NYC was the first city government to have its own Tumblr. “Twenty years ago, if you looked out the window, there were plenty of yahoos in Times Square,” he said. “Now the Yahoos here will make an honest living … and help us grow and make our economy stronger.” Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implicationsReport: Mobile Augmented Reality Today and TomorrowThe future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro    
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Disney’s research arm has solved a problem that you probably didn’t even know robots have — their inability to accept objects from people in a natural way. The Disney Research team, working with funding from the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (interACT) at Carnegie Mellon and the University and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), believe that robots who can’t naturally accept “handoffs” of objects from people are creepy. In a paper presented this month, Disney and its partners detailed how they used several motion-sensitive cameras, a database of gestures and some fancy algorithms to solve this handoff problem. From the press release announcing the findings: “If a robot just sticks out its hand blindly, or uses motions that look more robotic than human, a person might feel uneasy working with that robot or might question whether it is up to the task,” Katsu Yamane, Disney Research, Pittsburgh senior research scientist explained. “We assume human-like motions are more user-friendly because they are familiar.” Despite the robot pictured on the Disney page touting this research looking like the mechanical, blue-haired skeleton that haunted my childhood nightmares, its attempts to grab the purse from the person do seem reactive to the human’s gestures, as opposed to the robot just sticking his arm out there and the person having to accommodate it. And that sort of naturalism will be important as we bring more robots into our homes and workplaces. For example, an MIT group used a dancer’s motions to build a robotic bartender in a quest for naturalism — even though that robot doesn’t interact with people. Today, designers try to endear robots to us with quirky noises (like R2D2) and maybe light displays or LED faces — anything to help anthropomorphize them. But as robots become more human-looking they can also become more sinister — achieving that same uncanny valley that Disney and other content companies have struggled with in animation. Remember the dead-eyed stars of the Polar Express that you probably couldn’t empathize with? The jerky movements of a home health robot might engender similar feelings — or worse — they may scare people. Building the natural gestures of the Disney robot took the creation of a hierarchical gesture database that the robot can access as it detects the person passing something to it. In the Disney paper research, the robot is not only able to reach for the handbag, but when the human attempts a fake pass to the robot, the blue-haired monstrosity robot is able to adapt. From the release: To enable a robot to access a library of human-to-human passing motions with the speed necessary for robot-human interaction, the researchers developed a hierarchical data structure. Using principal component analysis, the researchers first developed a rough estimate of the distribution of various motion samples. They then grouped samples of similar poses and organized them into a binary tree structure. With a series of “either/or” decisions, the robot can rapidly search this database, so it can recognize when the person initiates a handing motion and then refine its response as the person follows through. Even if you don’t have an opinion on how naturally robots should move, this research brings home the awesome amount of work it takes to build computers and robots that mimic the capabilities of a person. Much like computer visualization, the science of robotic interaction takes a problem the size of a mountain and has to chip it down into grains of sand using a toothpick to find solutions. It’s a testament to human curiosity that people are willing to try. Also, I expect Disney might be lured by the idea of natural-looking robots roaming its theme parks. My only question is would they be dressed up as characters or working the cash register at the gift stores. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The importance of putting the U and I in visualizationNewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeoutNewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout    
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AT&T on Monday said it plans to more broadly enable the use of Apple’s FaceTime for users over its cellular network in the next few weeks, and by year’s end plans to allow video chat apps use over its network by all customers. This latest position on FaceTime and similar apps represents total shift from its position almost a year ago. AT&T’s statement to the Verge on Monday notes that “by mid-June, we’ll have enabled those apps over cellular for our unlimited plan customers who have LTE devices from [Apple, Samsung and BlackBerry].” Besides FaceTime, Samsung and BlackBerry’s pre-installed video chat apps will also be included. And more will be coming for all of its customers before the end of the year: “Throughout the second half of this year, we plan to enable pre-loaded video chat apps over cellular for all our customers, regardless of data plan or device; that work is expected to be complete by year end.” When Apple updated its mobile video chat app to work over cellular last summer, AT&T came under fire when it announced subsequently that only customers who subscribed to one of its Mobile Share plans could use it. Several open internet groups threatened to file complaints with the FCC, calling the carrier’s policy a violation of net neutrality. Several months later, AT&T opened the service to anyone with an LTE device. Based on broadness of the statement, it sounds like video chat apps like Google’s new Hangouts app, available for both iOS and Android, will also be free to operate over AT&T’s network later on this year. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust2012: the year of confusion for NFC paymentsNFC will be driven by marketing and loyalty, not payments    
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Often times, the best way to to get a sense of your data is to look at it. A bunch of of numbers or words might not mean anything sitting within a table, but they start to make a lot more sense when they’re turned into a chart. In fields like mass cytometry, though, where doctors might want to analyze dozens of biological markers for each of tends of thousands of cells in a tissue sample, creating an easy-to-understand chart is easier said than done. That’s why a group of researchers from Columbia University and Stanford University developed an algorithm that can do just that, turning those cells into something that resembles your social graph. This lets researchers see how the various cells are related to each other so they know , for example, where to focus cancer treatment and what to track as that treatment progresses. The idea of representing large or complex data as a graph is nothing new, but it has taken on more prominence thanks to the rise of social media and those ubiquitous social graphs that map out who’s connected to whom. As we highlighted recently, however, graph analysis is becoming more popular outside the realm of social networks, and is being applied to problems that are more complex than just figuring out simple relationships within a network. In cases such as medical research, especially, graphs can provide a very effective way of seeing how potentially hundreds of thousands of data points spanning perhaps hundreds of variables are similar to each other. That’s exactly what the team at Columbia and Stanford has done with a new algorithm that they’ve demonstrated within the realm of mass cytometry. According to a press release announcing the research (which is available via paid download at Nature Biotechnology): “The method, called viSNE (visual interactive Stochastic Neighbor Embedding), is based on a sophisticated algorithm that translates high-dimensional data (e.g., a dataset that includes many different simultaneous measurements from single cells) into visual representations similar to two-dimensional ‘scatter plots’ …. “The viSNE software can analyze measurements of dozens of molecular markers. In the two-dimensional maps that result, the distance between points represents the degree of similarity between single cells. The maps can reveal clearly defined groups of cells with distinct behaviors (e.g., drug resistance) even if they are only a tiny fraction of the total population. This should enable the design of ways to physically isolate and study these cell subpopulations in the laboratory.” I assume they say similar to scatter plots because the algorithm is analyzing data across more than two dimensions, although the resulting chart is essentially the same (i.e., data points with similar characteristics will form clusters). The results of viSNE, showing cell densities in diagnosis and relapse samples. Whether or not they’re technically similar, this research seems similar to what Ayasdi is doing with its new data-analysis software based on a technique called topological data analysis. In both cases, though, the algorithms aren’t necessarily concerned with how data points interact with one another (like in network graphs), but rather what similar characteristics the points share. Ayasdi’s software has been used in cancer research, too, including on datasets spanning hundreds of patients and tens of thousands of variables. In theory — although not likely in practice considering the complexity of the datasets medical researchers are dealing with — these approaches are similar to clustering approaches that are also popular among data scientists working with web companies. In areas such as e-commerce or email management, for example, where there isn’t a strong social element, companies can broadly break customers into distinct groups based on their behavior or interests. A sample cluster of MailChimp subscribers. Of course, curing cancer is a slightly more compelling — and difficult — goal than targeted advertising. The algorithms have to be precise so as not to miss similarities hidden within the mass of data. In the case of viSNE, the researchers say they’ve been able to spot small groups of cells (like 20 out of tens of thousands) that might be able to survive chemotherapy and increase the likelihood of a recurring tumor. But we probably shouldn’t bee too quick to discount the work that web companies do as somehow less valuable than that of cancers researchers, for example. The big data era arguably started with the web, and web companies have generated some of the most important data-analysis techniques and technologies around today (see, for example, Google’s Jeff Dean, with whom I’ll be speaking at our Structure conference next month). As medical researchers start generating more and more data via cytometry, genome sequencing and even electronic medical records, it will be critical for individuals in all fields to keep track of what data scientists in other fields are doing and figure out how that might apply to their own work. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionA near-term outlook for big dataNewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout    
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Apple CEO Tim Cook is going before Congress on Tuesday to defend his company’s tax-paying practices. On Monday, the company published his planned testimony, including his recommendations for “a dramatic simplification of the corporate tax system.” Cook will argue that his general suggestions for an overhaul will benefit the economy by encouraging U.S.-based companies like his own to bring more of their foreign profits back to their accounts in the U.S. Cook will call for a revenue-neutral reform of the corporate tax code that does away with all tax expenditures, lowers tax rates and establishes a “reasonable” tax on companies’ earnings from overseas. It’s not in the planned testimony, but in an interview last week, Cook made it clear that he does not believe that a tax rate of zero is a reasonable number. In his testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Investigations, he will say that Apple supports this simplification of the tax code despite the likelihood that it will mean Apple’s overall corporate taxes will go up. The current corporate tax system “applies industrial era concepts to a digital economy” and “undermines U.S. competitiveness,” Apple believes. Before Cook gets into his specific suggestions for fixing how U.S. businesses are taxed on foreign earnings, he’s going to spend most of his time going over why he’s being called to testify in the first place: Apple’s accounting methods. Apple keeps at least $100 billion in foreign earnings outside of the IRS’s grasp because it doesn’t wish to pay the 35 percent tax it would incur by bringing that money home. Many other businesses follow similar practices. According to the published testimony, Cook will going into detail about how the company accounts for profits earned in the U.S., how investment in its foreign assets is taxed, how it shares R&D costs with an Irish subsidiary and more. (It’ll probably be a snoozefest for everyone except those who get a thrill out of spreadsheets.) Most of it is Cook on the defensive, explaining how what Apple does is within legal limits. Cook plans to assure the committee it’s not cheating on its taxes with any special tricks and “does not have a bank account in the Cayman Islands.” He will underscore his point about Apple being on the up and up by laying out how much the company pays in taxes. Last year it paid $6 billion in taxes to the U.S. and this year, Cook has said it will pay $7 billion. Tuesday’s testimony will be Cook’s first appearance before Congress. The company’s tax practices came to light a year ago when the New York Times highlighted some of the methods Apple has used to keep its overall taxes at a minimum. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Flash analysis: Steve JobsForecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015How consumer media will change in 2013    
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If Marissa Mayer is on a mission to teach kids about her company, which was founded before some of them were even born, buying Tumblr isn’t a bad way to do it. But in all the discussion of Yahoo’s new deal, too many people are writing about Yahoo buying a blogging site, comparing Tumblr to WordPress, when in fact Tumblr is more of a photo site for the youngs. While buying Tumblr isn’t necessarily a bad deal for the two companies, as my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote, there’s another photo site out there that might have been an even better deal: Pinterest. In many ways, Pinterest is also building a mobile-friendly photo site just like Tumblr, but Pinterest is also in the midst of constructing the underpinnings for a potentially much more lucrative native revenue experience. Pinterest is oriented around commerce and consumers craving particular items. That’s good for business. No, buying Pinterest wouldn’t help Yahoo discover its inner tween. It’s a well-known fact that Pinterest is populated mainly by adult women — not exactly the demographic Yahoo needs to attract. And no, considering Pinterest’s last funding round, such an acquisition probably wouldn’t have come cheap. Acquiring the company would require a much bigger departure from Yahoo’s current mass-market advertising into the world of e-commerce and affliate links. It could be a harder sell to the company’s investors, and a bigger transition for everyone. But if Yahoo is looking to shell out the big bucks for a site with viral growth, visuals to compete with Facebook, and a devoted community of users, Pinterest might have been the better choice. According to a Pew report in December, out of all online adults (which is basically anyone with an internet connection), just six percent of those people visited Tumblr on a regular basis, compared with 13 percent on Instagram (which isn’t exactly for sale), and 15 percent on Pinterest — only Twitter comes in at 16 percent ahead of the others and behind behemoth Facebook at 67 percent. Less than a year out of beta, Pinterest is a dominant force on the web; a place where women of all ages collect photos of things that inspire them or things that they want to remember or create. For many, it’s a digital wish-list. And because of that, Pinterest sends huge amounts of traffic to online retailers. To be the intermediary between the people and the stores is a good place to be — you’re a crucial link that drives the sales, without any of the hassle of shipping or orders or user acquisitions that come with e-commerce. Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann at the company’s new offices in San Francisco. Pinterest has no business model in place right now — the site is free to join and for brands to integrate with — but that’s just right now, and it likely won’t last. The company just announced yesterday that it is starting to connect photos of items back to the brands who sell them, and it’s not hard to image how this could play out. Tumblr does have a business model right now based on ads, and it just started rolling them out on mobile users in April. But the company has been reportedly burning through cash and not yet making a lot of revenue, hoping to bring in $100 million this year. But people are usually pretty unhappy about a free product suddenly peppering them with ads — especially if those ads are dropped into a feed that users have created (just ask anyone how they feel about Facebook ads.) CEO David Karp said at our paidContent event just last month that he wants advertising on the site to be native and unobstrusive. “We focused on higher up in the funnel, the type of advertising that creates intent,” Karp told us in April. “It gives room for the most creative advertisers to create their best work. I think we’ve started to prove it, and see really good examples of it.” But that’s a hard nut to crack. Suddenly, the possible Pinterest model of taking a cut on sales and traffic resulting from users creating digital shopping lists looks a lot less disruptive to the core experience, and potentially more lucrative, than trying to solve mobile display ads for the Tumblr feed. Making money off traffic and sales wouldn’t disrupt Pinterest’s core product, and would generally fit in with the company’s existing user experience, just as promoted tweets are fitting with Twitter’s on both desktop and mobile (a profitable venture so far estimated to bring Twitter $528 million in ad revenue this year.) So no, buying Pinterest wouldn’t make Yahoo all that hip. But buying the site that has potential to become a strong force in modern, social retail? Seems like a good bet — especially since teens might leave you once Mom joins and you become mainstream. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominatedStartup growth and the new recruiting ecosystemFlash analysis: future opportunities for Pinterest    
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