Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer thinks that what Blogger did for Google, Tumblr could do for her aging Internet company — make it relevant and a major player on the modern web. And for that she is willing to spend a billion dollars (or perhaps higher) in order to buy New York-based social publishing and sharing platform. The news of the pending deal was first reported by AllThingsD and later Adweek reported rumors of their deal as well. At least a couple of our own sources say that the talks are serious. We have also learnt that the deal is being championed by CEO Mayer who according to Kara Swisher, has met with the team from Tumblr. We have learned that Yahoo’s New York-based corporate development team is leading the process, though like all deals, talks could fall apart. David Karp, Founder and CEO, Tumblr (c) 2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com Tumblr says it has nearly 108 million blogs, over 50 billion posts and it is said to have 117 million visitors a month according to comScore. Forbes.com reports that Tumblr made $13 million in 2012 and is looking to bring in about $100 million, thanks to its new advertising initiatives. The company also recently introduced mobile advertising. For Yahoo this could be a much needed foray into mobile advertising and also into pushing new native ad-formats that help diversify its ad business away from the usual web advertising. Valley calls Karp David Karp, one of the co-founders and chief executive of Tumblr has been seen around in Silicon Valley. Tumblr has been trying to raise a new round of funding but its slower than expected revenue ramp has acted as a dampener for the fundraising efforts. Tumblr has raised a total of $125 million and is rumored to be valued at $800 million. Tumblr investors include Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Ventures. But Yahoo may not be alone in courting Tumblr. In November 2012, my colleague Mathew Ingram argued that Facebook and Tumblr should poke each other. Surprise surprise, it is something that is nagging Yahoo bigwigs. Facebook in the mix? We have heard that Yahoo is worried that Facebook could sweep in at the last minute and beat it to the buzzer. If Instagram acquisition was any indication, then we shouldn’t doubt Zuckerberg’s salesmanship. Karp is said to have close relationship with Facebook and was recently spotted at the Facebook Home launch. Facebook could use the much needed younger 18-to-24 year old demographic, something it (successfully) tried to acquire with Instagram. (Read this a teenager’s response to a question on Quora, “How do teenagers waste hours upon hours consuming Tumblr?” ) The question is why wouldn’t Google want Tumblr. After all, it would mean young people on a social network that could feed into Google+ — sort of like how Blogger fed pages into Google. I am guessing given its ownership of Google+ and Blogger, Google might meet some resistance from the Department of Justice. Still, as our sources pointed, Yahoo knows the challenges in the competitive landscape and is trying to move very fast. The speed, would perhaps mean that the company could short circuit the due diligence process and overlook Tumblr’s challenges with content of questionable provenance. Money Talks The good news for Tumblr and its backers: Mayer will soon be super flush with cash. According to a recent Yahoo 10-Q filing, the value of Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba has gone up substantially as Alibaba’s continues to grow its revenues at a healthy clip. Yahoo owns about 23 percent of Alibaba and the Chinese eCommerce company is likely to go public and could worth as much as $100 billion in its post-IPO avatar. Yahoo is expected to sell about half its stake in the Chinese company in the likely 2014 IPO. Wall Street currently values Alibaba at around $70 billion. In the end the question that remains: is Tumblr the fountain of youth that Yahoo badly needs or will this be case of a pathetic old-middle aged guy hanging with youngsters trying to be hip. Either way, Tumblr founders and backers could laugh all the way to the bank. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implicationsThe state of cross-platform media measurementFlash analysis: future opportunities for Pinterest    
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For years, the internet provided users with static clumps of information stored and refreshed in databases on the back end. But as interactive games, animations and fancy scrolling have become popular, graphics have become fancier and screens richer. Throughout this evolution, hardware components on users’ devices have gotten more capable, but now Google seems to think the GPU is the best tool for the internet of tomorrow. At a talk at the Google I/O conference on Thursday, Googlers Colt McAnlis (pictured), a developer advocate working on Chrome games and performance, and Grace Kloba, the technical lead on Chrome for Android, gave developers some tips for making better use of the GPU. Doing some of these things can help websites display their graphics as soon as possible and become optimized for “touch events” such as scrolling without sacrificing performance. Chrome developers can split up many website components into GPU layers, each of which can be subdivided into a bunch of tiles for an entire page — think of a grid overlaid on top of the page. Instead of asking the CPU to upload the pixels to the whole screen area, the GPU caches those tiles inside its memory when a page is accessed and then serves up select tiles in response to user behavior, such as scrolling. This approach “allows the CPU to drink margaritas and essentially chill out while the GPU does all the heavy lifting,” McAnlis said. But there’s a tradeoff to this layering approach. Making many layers can result in entirely too many tiles, and the GPU “has a static, non-growable memory resource in its texture cache,” McAnlis said. “If the cache is full, you have to push old tiles out of the cache before you put new tiles in.” And that can result in a decrease in performance. In short, developers have to figure out the right number of layers for each page. For example, if a user ends up not using a tile that is loaded and cached on the GPU, it’s a waste of a GPU compute cycle. Developers can learn more about the use of GPU inside Chrome in the Chromium Project’s design documents and get insight into GPU use with the Trace Event Profiling Tool. Developers can also run experiments through Chrome, McAnlis said. To demonstrate good use of layers, McAnlis pointed, perhaps unsurprisingly, to a Google site, the mobile version of the Google I/O conference site. “Look at the source code,” he said. “It’s a great example.” The header is its own layer, he said, and it expands and contracts and adjusts the times of conference sessions as the user scrolls up and down the page. The winners on the web over the next few years will be the sites that can serve rich, compelling content as fast as possible. It looks like Google believes taking full advantage of the GPU might be the best way to accomplish that goal. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.A near-term outlook for big dataDissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital futureNewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang    
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Last night at Google I/O, Bluetooth scored a major victory for connected consumers when Google said it would support the Bluetooth Smart Ready platform natively in Android. This was functionality that iOS devices already have, and it should mean that Android users will get more functional apps to go with their Bluetooth-enabled devices. As someone who spends a lot of time playing with connected home and personal devices this is fabulous news. I had started gathering research for a post about how as an Android user I feel like many of the popular connected devices are leaving me out in the cold with lame apps, while iOS users get sparkly interfaces and more functionality. The Hue app, the WeMo app, the BlueBulb app and the FitBit are all examples of this iOS first and foremost (and sometimes only) mindset. Or when it comes to specific devices such as the Wahoo Blue heart rate monitor my colleague Kevin Tofel wrote about last year, the Android support only extends to a few devices. But one reason for the focus on iOS for many devices, especially those containing Bluetooth, is that native support and easy integration between the radio and the app wasn’t there. But with this announcement, which means developers will find it easier to build Android-based apps for connecting to Bluetooth devices, all that changes. Then app developers building software for Bluetooth enabled gadgets no longer have an excuse. Although, as seems to be the case with Hue and WeMo which both work with Wi-Fi, perhaps they just think iOS users are more likely to buy their gear, so they’ve skimped on Android resources for the time being. Hue lightbulbs are also exclusively sold in Apple stores, which may also contribute to the meh nature of its Android app. Bluetooth is serious about the internet of things. While the Android news is great for the growing number of people toting those devices, it’s just one element in The Bluetooth Special Interest Group’s plans to make the radio technology ubiquitous for the internet of things. Bluetooth is already making huge strides in personal area networking compared with other standards I covered as far back as Jan. 2011. Bluetooth radios are set to be in 2.5 billion new devices this year, according to Mark Powell, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG, who I met with on Wednesday. That’s one fourth of the 10 billion Bluetooth radios that have shipped in the lifetime of the technology, according to ABI Research provided by the Bluetooth SIG. Clearly Bluetooth is popular, and the acceptance by Google of the overarching Smart Ready application development framework will enhance the experience for more consumers, but Powell also detailed plans to create a secure end-to-end network layer for Bluetooth. That technology could ensure that communications between certain devices stay private, an important consideration for medical or personal data. He also said that in addition to the profiles for data that the SIG had developed for formatting data (for example, it has a running profile that tracks the data associated with steps so an app developer doesn’t have to figure that out), it’s developing a service discovery layer. This will become more important as we get more connected devices and want them to talk to each other without human intervention. For example, if you have four connected Bluetooth lightbulbs in a room, you might want to turn them on all at once instead of individually programming them. This is a concept I explored with Mike Kuniavsky, a principal in the Innovation Services Group at PARC, in a podcast in March. Foley also noted that in addition to the low energy specification the SIG released it’s working on extending the range of Bluetooth in some flavors to 100 meters. That means it can be used in the home, and not just as a personal area network, but for devices communicating between rooms. Combine that with the end-to-end security and suddenly my Z-wave door locks look like the wrong choice. However, I won’t sweat that just yet. Even as Bluetooth beefs up for the internet of things, it won’t become the sole radio technology connecting my gizmos and gadgets to the web any more than Wi-Fi is my sole means of accessing the internet. However, Bluetooth has really grown up and moved well beyond its early days as a connection technology for wireless headsets and computer peripherals. Even if I’m not bullish on the future of the Bluetooth mouse, I’m bullish on Bluetooth. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”The connected planet: Smartphones aren’t the only playerBluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom    
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Tableau Software has priced shares for its initial public offering on Friday at $31. The company is offering up 5 million shares, while stockholders are offering 3.2 million shares. Tableau Co-founder and CEO Christian Chabot will ring the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange, where the company will list under the symbol “DATA.” That’s an apt ticker symbol for a company that is in some ways a bellwether for the current fascination with all things data. Tableau isn’t a big data company, per se, but its visualization software breathes life into many big data calculations. Its focus on making software that’s easy to use and that creates visually captivating charts has turned people from numerous professions into amateur data analysts. (I’ve even used it in the past, including for the first time in 2011.) Christian Chabot As Chabot told me during a conversation in 2011, “In any field of human endeavor . . . there are a hundred to a thousand more people who understand the data of that field more than they understand reporting and analytics.” Anytime you read about a hot new visualization or analytics startup promising the moon, you’re also seeing the results of what Tableau has sown in terms of the user experience. Many of those same companies will be quick to tell you how limited Tableau’s capabilities are. It’s memory-bound, it doesn’t have a database, it’s not available in the cloud (or on the Mac operating system), it can’t do predictive analytics. All true. Of course, if it raises the kind of capital it expects to by going public, it can build and buy a lot of those capabilities. If pricing stays flat all day Friday, Tableau stands to make $155 million from its 5 million shares. If investors have really bought into the company and the concept of a data-driven world, then who knows. Machine-data expert Splunk wnet public in 2012, flying the big data banner, and saw shares peak at 91 percent above its original asking price of $17. I’m not suggesting Tableau is the biggest name in data, or even that it will some day become it. This next-generation analytics field is very young, with startups and larger vendors alike sometimes competing against themselves to win wholly new accounts than trying to displace legacy vendors within large enterprises. And every month, it seems, I come across some new startup that was built with the same principles in mind as Tableau, but with the advantage of having today’s best practices baked into its software. But Tableau definitely commands a lot of the mindshare. How it fares as a public company could be a strong indicator of just how powerful the data movement is, and how well it capitalizes on a new influx of cash will determine how long it stays on the top of customers’ minds. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The importance of putting the U and I in visualization4 iPad apps to help wrangle dataHealth care and big data in 2012    
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Famed Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator announced Thursday that it’s added a new full-time partner and five part-time partners, and among those five are former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason and App.net’s Dalton Caldwell. The incubator, which was extensively profiled by the New York Times Magazine recently, has emerged over the past few years as a powerful force in the early-stage startup scene in Silicon Valley. The group has both full-time and part-time partners who advise startups in the program, and Caldwell and Mason are both young, notable faces in the technology world. Caldwell was the founder of the music-sharing service Imeem and now runs App.net, an open developer network for apps. I profiled Caldwell back in December, when he talked with me about his evolving attitudes toward the Valley ecosystem and the benefit of paid services. Mason departed from Groupon about three months ago in a fairly memorable firing announcement that included jokes about Battletoads and fat camp. Mason wrote in a blog post that he would be launching a new company when he moves to San Francisco. “I’ve accumulated a backlog of ideas over the last several years, my favorite of which I’ll be turning into a new company this fall,” he wrote. And in more entertaining news, Mason wrote that he will also be recording motivational business music in L.A. Hopefully he got a coupon for the recording studio fees. From Mason’s blog post:  I came to realize that there was a real need to present business wisdom in a format that is more accessible to the younger generation. It was with this in mind that I spent a week in LA earlier this month recording Hardly Workin’, a seven song album of motivational business music targeted at people newly entering the workforce.  These songs will help young people understand some of the ideas that I’ve found to be a key part of becoming a productive and effective employee.  I’m really happy with the results and look forward to sharing them as soon as I figure out how to load music onto iTunes, hopefully in the next few weeks. 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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Satellite broadband provider ViaSat has selected Boeing to develop and build its new geostationary orbiter, a satellite that will put even the impressive might of its recently launched ViaSat-1 to shame. The two companies said they will jointly design and build the new satellite and are planning to launch it into high-Earth orbit in mid-2016. ViaSat-1 has already won numerous praise as satellite marvel, boasting a total capacity of 140 Gbps, which it uses to provide its Exede broadband service in remote and rural areas in the U.S. as well as supply internet connectivity to JetBlue airplanes. The new satellite, aptly named ViaSat-2, is expected to double ViaSat-1’s capacity and fill greatly expand the providers coverage in the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean and Central America (ViaSat-1’s beams today skip over large parts of the Rocky Mountains and Western Great Plains). The satellite hasn’t been without controversy, though, as ViaSat is switching out suppliers. Space Systems/Loral built ViaSat-1, but the two became embroiled in litigation after ViaSat accused the aerospace company of absconding with its intellectual property when it built a competing satellite for Hughes Network Systems. That satellite became EchoStar 17, doesn’t have quite the capacity of ViaSat-1, but Hughes is using it to go head to head with ViaSat in the rural broadband market. Its Gen4 service offers speeds of 10-15 Mbps to customers, while ViaSat’s Exede service clocks in at about 12 Mbps. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Confused about the wireless markets? Here’s a breakdownGigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013How HR can make the case for workforce analytics    
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Turtles have homes too, and Google wants to show us how they live: Google Ocean Program manager Jenifer Austin Foulkes and Unterwater Earth founder Richard Vevers gave a fascinating talk Thursday about the company’s Underwater Streetview project, showing how divers use special cameras and explaining why the project is so important. One of the underwater Streetview cameras, on display at Google I/O. Google launched Streetview for the world’s oceans in cooperation with Underwater Earth the at the end of last year, and has mapped a total of six sites so far, including the Great Barrier Reef in Australia as well as reefs in Hawaii and the Philippines. Vevers explained that his organization’s Catlin Seaview Survey has been using divers carrying custom-made cameras that shoot photos every three seconds, with divers being able to cover about two kilometers during every expedition. That’s slow — maybe too slow. The world’s coral reefs are receding quickly, which has been one of the main motivations behind the project. “We set up our project to reveal the reefs of the world,” Vevers said, adding: “People don’t want to protect anything they can’t see.” However, Verers said showing off the beauty of coral reefs to the world is only “half the story.” The project has also been working on image recognition technologies, with the goal of mapping species and giving scientists around the world access to new material to work with. So why did Google get involved with the project? Foulkes said that it wasn’t driven by commercial motivations, but freely admitted that it was also about showing off the capabilities of Google Maps. One example: Vevers’ team uses Google’s business photos tool, which is meant to give stores the ability to upload panoramic photos, to create its underwater photospheres. Vevers’ plan is to capture and reveal all of the world’s coral reefs within the next three years. “We feel this is very much a race against time,” he said. That’s why the project now wants to enlist amateurs in its quest as well. Divers can simply use their cell phones in water-proof cases and then upload their photospheres to Google Maps. And he urged volunteers to become active soon: “What happens in the next ten years is likely going to affect our oceans fo the next 10,000 years.” Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.CES 2012: a recap and analysisSmart Grid Apps: Six Trends That Will Shape Grid EvolutionReport: An Open Source Smart Grid Primer    
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Did you hear about the new version of Android? No? That’s because there isn’t one, at least not in the traditional sense. Although it was widely expected that Google would introduce Android 4.3 during Wednesday’s Google I/O keynote this week, it didn’t happen. Instead, more than three hours were spent talking about new services — a music subscription and multiplayer gaming — with developer tools that tie Android and Chrome together. These services and new developer tools actually help Google to update Android many of the 900 million Android activated devices without adding more fragmentation challenges brought by new a new software version. Android enthusiasts are likely disappointed by any news on the Jelly Bean software front, leaving people like Computerworld’s JR Raphael wondering: What happened to Android? I try to be as platform-agnostic as possible, but I’m certainly considered a member of the Android enthusiast crowd. And like others, I was disappointed when no new Android version appeared. I also felt let down with a lack of new hardware, but that’s another story. But I’m a consumer, so these thoughts make sense. And Google I/O is a developer event; not a consumer conference. It turns out that every developer I’ve informally spoken with at Google I/O is actually relieved that Android 4.3 doesn’t exist yet. Note, it likely will arrive soon, as an updated Bluetooth stack for Android is coming arriving in the “coming months” with support for Bluetooth Smart and Smart Ready devices. So why would developers be happy there’s no new Android version? I can think of a couple of reasons. First, with a new Android version would come what Google calls an API level. Typically, new APIs and services are supported in the new version and these aren’t supported on devices with older software. But by offering new APIs and services now — which is exactly what Google did during day one of I/O — existing devices can take advantage of the new features. The new Hangouts app, Google Play Music All Access, and Google Cloud Messaging are good examples. Sure, some of these will require at least Android 4.0 but none of them require Android 4.3. Second, developers told me they’re tired of taking heat for their apps not being supported on certain versions of Android. Adding another version would only make things potentially worse in that area, not better. Simply put: the features that Android is lacking, according to developers, are getting added through the new services that Google is releasing. And these new functions aren’t adding to any lingering fragmentation challenges. Frankly, Google has iterated Android relatively quickly in order to make it comparable to iOS in terms of design and usability. That’s good, but it came at a great cost: The pace of software change has been faster than hardware change. I don’t mean in the power and functions of hardware: Chips of all kinds have improved just as quickly as software. But consumers don’t switch devices that quickly, often waiting 18 to 24 months to upgrade a phone, for example. Google can slow the pace of Android versions while improving the platform at the same time with this approach. And it can also allow more time for hardware makers and carriers push Android updates out, helping to get more users on the most current version of Android. While all this happens, consumers will also help the process, by upgrading to newer phones with Android 4.0 or better. Looking at the situation this way, it was actually a smart move for Google to focus less on the version of Android and instead improve the platform for developers and consumers with better APIs. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How to deliver the next-generation web experienceThe fourth quarter of 2012 in mobileWhat to watch in mobile in 2013    
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James Russell, a London based designer, took issue with my post Wednesday about the new Google+ design and how its aesthetic is different from Facebook. He argued that, well, the new Google+ still looks like Facebook and went on to make his case using visuals from both services. Basically, he thinks it is business as usual. I accept his criticism for his reasoning makes sense, but I just don’t agree. Photo courtesy: Leffot I don’t know James, but my sense from reading his post is that he approaches design through a visual lens. Unlike him, I am not a designer and so my way of thinking about design is influenced by not mere visual aspects, but also how things are constructed. I don’t just love the shoes because of how they look — though that matters — but I also look at where the leather comes from, how it is stitched together and what kind of craftsmanship has gone into it. From shoe trees to little patters to packaging to the font on the label, all of those little things add up to the design aesthetic. And that extends to other things, including website design. Yes, fonts matter, and the layouts matter, but so does the relative relationship to the kind of content, the speed of the web service and even the screen size and how it all correlated to me. So, using that lens, when I looked at Google+ and its new design, what I saw was that it was less social in the Facebook sort of a way. And by that I mean: it’s less about people, likes and shares being the action drivers on the page. Instead, I saw a design aesthetic defined by data and machines inferring relationships, the importance of content and the relative weight of all the elements on the page. The new super hashtag is a good example of what I am talking about — it surfaces a lot more information on those specific topics. As I pointed out in my post and also on my post about Google Maps’ redesign, we have moved into the world of data-informed applications and design too has to adapt to this reality. So, while there might be elements on the page might overlap on few occasions, the departure in the core philosophies that is reflected in the overall aesthetic is pretty clear to my eye. And as far as I can tell, that aesthetic is all about a philosophy and how it relates to senses. Google has always been about inferring and serving up information. Facebook is about implicit actions. The new Google+ design is an extension of that thinking. And as Google’s Senior Vice President of Google+ said: “We have put Google in Google+.” Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How consumer media will change in 2013Social 2013: The enterprise strikes backExamining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012    
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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s startup Jelly still hasn’t revealed a product — it hasn’t even hinted at a direction — but the startup has announced a good deal of news over the past month. On Thursday, the company announced in a blog post that it raised a Series A funding round for an undisclosed amount led by Spark Capital with investment from SV Angel. A wide variety of angel investors participated in the round, possibly emphasizing the “social good” concept Stone hinted at in his intial launch post. Stone, who co-founded Twitter, has only described Jelly as a company with an eye for “social good” that takes advantage of the proliferation of mobile devices. The investors include fellow Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, U2 musician and activist Bono, Greylock’s Reid Hoffman, former Vice President Al Gore, and Emmy-winning director Greg Yaitanes, among several others. “They work in divergent fields,” Stone wrote. “Knowledge diversity is something we prize highly and is also something that will be represented in our product.” Stone has been building up a good deal of ex-Twitter talent at the company, and the funding announcement noted that they would use the addition funding for hiring as they continue protyping a product before launch. Earlier this month, Stone announced that he added a COO in Kevin Thau, the Twitter executive who launched Twitter #music, and a co-founder and CTO in Ben Finkel, formerly engineering manager at Twitter in charge of user growth. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Themes for a connected world: GigaOM RoadMap reviewGigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013How HR can make the case for workforce analytics    
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With atmospheric carbon dioxide recently hitting a record 400 parts per million, the discovery of alternative renewable energy sources has taken on added urgency. One effort is the so-called “artificial leaf,” a photosynthetic system that uses light energy to split water molecules and produce hydrogen. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have recently published details of their new nanowire-based system that mimics the way plant chloroplasts transport charged particles. The artificial leaf’s titanium dioxide and silicon nanowires are arranged in an array that actually resembles a microscopic forest of straight pines. The key to achieving good solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency is the integration of the components — the nanowire semiconductors that absorb light, an interfacial layer, and co-catalysts for the water splitting reaction — in a structure that resembles and functions like a chloroplast. Plants are so efficient at turning sunlight into sugars partly because of what is termed the “Z-scheme”: the daisy chain of molecules that deliver a charged electron from a chloroplast to molecular energy production in the cell. The artificial leaf uses the Z-scheme, too, but with the silicon nanowires responsible for the hydrogen generation and the titanium dioxide nanowires contributing to the formation of by-product oxygen. The use of two semiconductor materials allows for a large part of the sunlight spectrum to be harnessed (the silicon works off visible light and the titanium dioxide uses UV), while the forest-like array of nanowires increases the surface area for the solar-to-fuel reactions, which are helped along by embedded catalysts. The artificial leaf has a conversion efficiency of 0.12 percent, comparable to that of natural photosynthesis. To be commercially viable, the efficiency number will have to get into the single digit percentages, and companies like MIT spin-off Sun Catalytix have already chosen to refocus their efforts away from artificial leaf tech. Replacing the current-limiting titanium dioxide anode in the system is the Berkeley researchers’ next target for improving conversion efficiency. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantechCleantech and investment in 2013The next generation of battery technology    
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One of the biggest gripes about Google Glass has been it doesn’t have any apps. Well, some of the biggest app developers and content providers in the world have decided to rectify that problem. On Thursday, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote and CNN and a handful of other content providers havee already created or are in the process of developing apps – dubbed “Glassware” — for Google’s new headgear. In a blog post, Twitter said you can now tweet photos from Glass to your feed – the update will include the hashtag “#throughglass” – and see your others tweets by turning on in-Glass notifications. The service is now available and can be activating the Twitter app on Google’s MyGlass portal. Facebook’s Glass implementation is also live, though for now you can only share photos, not post status updates or view your newsfeed. You can, however, set privacy levels add descriptions to photos you post using Glass’s speech recognition features. Evernote doesn’t yet have an app per se, but it is integrating with Glass’s sharing menu, allowing you to capture a picture or short video and save it as a note in your Evernote account. It is also giving users the options of sending notes (from its web app) to the Glass timeline so your grocery list or crib notes are right in your line of vision. At I/O Google revealed three other companies taking up shop on Glass. CNN’s app will put news alerts in front of your retinas. Elle is providing content from its magazines can be viewed in the Glass display or read aloud. Tumblr lets you post content to your personal blog and get updates from Tumblrs you follow. These companies join Path and the New York Times as the only official third-party apps on the Glass. For now Google is being rather conservative in its Glassware efforts, placing restrictions on the level of access to platform and banning ads or any other monetization scheme. Still, once Google fully opens up Glass, it likely won’t have any shortage of interest. Smaller developers are already clamoring to get on board. For instance, Open Garden wants Google to expose Glass’s networking functions so it can link the headgear to its crowdsourced mesh network. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Takeaways from mobile’s second quarterThe fourth quarter of 2012 in mobileWork media tools in 2012 and beyond    
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As student debt levels reach new highs – the total outstanding debt just topped $1 trillion – it’s hard to argue that the current model of financial aid isn’t in need of a fix. In the past couple of years, startups like Pave, Upstart, Campus Slice and CommonBond have started promoting crowdfunding platforms that give students a way to solicit microinvestments from friends, family and even strangers. But those approaches tend to target older students (in college or graduate school) who have already made — and potentially eliminated — college options based on their financial situation. And, in some cases, those startups require students to give up “equity” in themselves (which works like a loan, sometimes with interest), a model that may work for companies but has yet to prove itself when it comes to supporting individuals. Raise Labs, a San Francisco-based startup backed by the Imagine K-12 ed tech accelerator, is bringing another model into the mix: Instead of targeting students who have already made their college decision, it offers college hopefuls microscholarships they can earn over the course of their high-school careers. The money would come from colleges, corporations and foundations. “We’re rethinking how students access financial aid for college. The system is really complicated… And it happens at the end of high school, when it can be too late,” said founder and CEO Preston Silverman. Through Raise Labs, high-school students can set up an account and then earn scholarship money every week through school and community achievements. Sponsors, including corporations, universities and foundations, can award microscholarships for accomplishments like perfect attendance, community service, demonstrating leadership and improvement in grades. High-school students can obviously already earn scholarships and financial prizes that can help them pay for college. But Raise Labs gives students and sponsors a centralized platform for learning about and promoting awards while making more scholarships accessible to a larger pool of students. While Silverman declined at this time to provide specifics on the size of the microscholarships, he said the goal is to help students earn thousands of dollars. But given the rising cost of a college education, depending on where a student goes, a few thousand dollars may only make a small dent in the total cost. For the students, opening up the conversation earlier could motivate them o set goals for themselves and potentially achieve more. For the sponsors, it provides opportunities for cause marketing (for corporations) and enables more engagement and relationship-building with students. For now, Raise Labs is offering the program to a total of 20,000 students at range of schools. But it plans to open up the service to students nationwide this fall. Earlier this year, the company won a $100,000 grant after winning a top prize in an ed tech challenge sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Facebook, and it said that, so far, it’s secured $30 million in scholarship commitments. 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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There were a record number of solar panels installed in the U.S. on rooftops and on ground-mounted systems in 2012. Now both traditional financing companies and new types of investors are starting to get in on the trend of providing the funds for the high upfront costs of installing solar panels, in exchange for making some money back several years down the road. But the potential to make money in this way has only just started. On Thursday solar installer SolarCity announced that it has signed up Goldman Sachs, and other investors, to create a $500 million fund to support leases for solar panels for home and business owners. With that much money, SolarCity can install some 110 MW worth of solar panels. Solar leases are a contract between the building owner and SolarCity, whereby SolarCity pays the upfront cost of installing the system, owns and maintains the panels, and the building owner pays for the monthly electricity for the power from the panels over around 20 years. As Ucilia noted on GigaOM Pro today, the residential solar leasing market alone is expected to grow from $1.3 billion in 2012 to $5.7 billion in 2016, according to GTM Research. Some banks and even companies like Google have been willing to put hundreds of millions into these types of funds. SolarCity has been able to raise $1.7 billion in funding over its lifetime to finance installations from groups like U.S. Bancorp, Google, PG&E and Credit Suisse. Other solar financing companies — and the competition is now getting fierce — include Sungevity, OneRoof Energy, Sunrun and Clean Power Finance. There’s such a demand for solar leases and financing that even some companies are falling behind on getting funding for these businesses. SunPower said earlier this month that demand for its residential solar leases is far greater than the money available to finance them. Power company NRG Energy also wants to retry getting into this space, after trying out this market awhile back. It’s not just banks and corporate do-gooders that want the opportunity to make a decent return — some 10 to 12 percent in some cases. Crowd-funding is starting to appear as an interesting blip on the radar. Startup Solar Mosaic says that it’s now raised $1 million from its crowd-funders for its solar panel systems, which offer around a 4.5 percent annual yield. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that commercial‐scale solar panel systems can reach returns of 8 percent to 14 percent in states like Hawaii, Texas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. As big power players, upstart solar financiers and even everyday crowd-funders grow these funds and receive the returns, this market will start to expand significantly. As a boom of solar panels continues to hit the U.S., various parties can make significant money off this transition. Bloomberg New Energy Finance expects that residential solar panels could be installed on 2.4 percent of U.S. houses by 2020. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industryThe fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantechCleantech and investment in 2013    
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Google entered a crowded space when it launched its own music subscription service this week: Google Play Music All Access competes head-on with Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, Muve Music and a handful of other offerings, all of which offer more or less the same catalog for the same price. How can Google stand out from the crowd, and convince millions of consumers who haven’t warmed up to access models that they don’t need to own music to enjoy it? To find out, I’ve both tested the service since its launch Wednesday and met up with Paul Joyce, Lead Product Manager for Google Play Music on the sidelines of the Google I/O developers conference where the service was launched. Joyce politely declined to answer some of my questions, but the conversation gave me a good idea of what’s in store for the music service with the confusingly long name. Right now, it’s more or less like all the others Google’s premise for Play Music All Access is simple, and you’ve heard it before: Play millions of songs, on your desktop and on the go, for one low monthly fee. That’s what Spotify and all of its competitors have been offering for some time now, and Google doesn’t mess with the basic recipe. All Access costs $9.99 ($7.99 if you sign up before the end of June), and it offers streaming access to songs from all three majors and most significant indie labels. However, there’s one big difference: Google’s subscription music catalog seamlessly integrates with the company’s music locker, with which users can store up to 20,000 songs for free. That’s an interesting combination, and it hasn’t been offered by any of the other major subscription players before. It makes it possible to have Google generate smart radio stations based on your own music collection, or mix subscription tracks and CDs you ripped in custom playlists, and then access these on the go without having to worry that some of the tracks won’t be available. Joyce told me that the locker is especially good for tracks that aren’t available through the subscription offering, or even as MP3 sales – mashups, imports and other kinds of rarities. In the future, All Access will be a lot more social But All Access isn’t just about filling the gaps left by other services. It also wants to be better at engaging you – which has been one of the problems of existing services. “People sign up, and then they don’t know what to do afterwards,” Joyce said. Having millions of songs at your disposal doesn’t exactly make choice easy, and there is some evidence that a good chunk of users simply tune out. How does Google want to address this issue? Joyce gave me one hint: “There is more we can do to innovate in social,” he said. Play Music doesn’t offer much of a social integration today – but that could change soon. And we are not talking here’s a list of the unfortunate music choices of all the people you didn’t really care about in high school social, which has been Spotify’s original model of social discovery. “If you treat all your recommendations of all your friends the same, then that is a problem,” Joyce argued. However, he wasn’t convinced that the Rdio model – which is very much like Twitter in that it offers you to follow tastemakers – is the right approach either. It’s simply too much work to find the people who can give you good recommendations, he argued. So how is Google Music’s approach to social going to look? Joyce didn’t go into details, only telling me that the goal was to give you “the right music from the right people at the right time.” However, one has to assume that it would be powered by Google+, which gives us some idea of how it could work: You could get music recommendations from circles and communities, with the ability to share circles of influencers with others. Instead of just curating albums, Google Music’s editors could curate circles of influencers, and users could simply follow the 50 most influential indie rock bloggers with one click. What else does Google have up its sleeve? There have been ongoing reports that Google is going to launch a separate music subscription service on YouTube, which makes about as much sense as having four separate messaging apps from the same company (but that didn’t really stop Google, either). Joyce didn’t want to go into any specifics. “YouTube is a great asset for Google,” he told me, and then added: “We will find exciting things to go together.” Maybe it won’t be two separate services, after all? Google also plans to bring Play Music All Access to other countries “soon,” said Joyce. Countries that already have Google’s music cloud locker will be first on the list for an international expansion, and currently include the UK, France, Germany and Spain. And finally, there is iOS. Joyce’s lips were sealed when I asked him about the potential of bringing the service to the competing mobile platform, but it would make a lot of sense, and follow Google’s overall theme of unification across mobile and desktop platforms. Of course, this would be the first time that any Play service was available on iOS – but I predict that Google will have to take that step if it wants to seriously compete with Spotify and Co. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. 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Verizon Wireless figures if it’s a bit more generous with data spigot it can reel in more prepaid subscribers looking to get a smartphone but not get tied down by a contract. This week it boosted the data caps on its prepaid smartphone plans, making them available to existing customers. Its $60 and $70 prepaid plans still aren’t exactly cheap, but you get a lot more data value out of them. The $60 plan now includes 2 GB of data (up from 500 MB), while the $70 plan includes 4 GB (up from 2 GB). Both includes unlimited talk and text, but as with the previous plans prepaid customers don’t get access to the LTE network. If you want a 4G connection, you’ll have to sign a contract. I’ve noted before that Verizon is getting a lot more aggressive in the prepaid space – a market it has historically ignored. But Verizon has always been all over the premium smartphone subscriber, and increasingly those customers are moving away from contract plans to prepaid services. In the first quarter, nearly one-third of all smartphones activated landed on a prepaid plan, according to The NPD Group. While the bigger data buckets are only available to current prepaid customers, Verizon said it will extend them to new customers on June 6. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How to manage the signaling storm in 2013CES 2012: a recap and analysisUpdated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010-2015    
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Here’s something we often forget: Competition is good. The Microsoft that produced the Windows-Office monopoly let its products get fat, dumb and happy. The Microsoft that must contend with the Oracle database juggernaut puts out a pretty good database. That’s why the sudden influx of new public cloud riches exemplified by this week’s official launch of the Google Compute Engine, coming a few weeks after Microsoft launched its Windows Azure IaaS options, may be tough on the competitors but could be very good for smart IT consumers. Look for price cuts to continue, along with a flow of new services, and better APIs to access those services. While I haven’t parsed the instance-by-instance price comparison between GCE and AWS, Google’s decision to sell compute instances in sub-hour increments could lead to cost savings vs. Amazon, which prices by the full hour. Don’t be surprised if Amazon responds, however. We’ve already seen several price skirmishes in cloud including five or six price cuts in cloud storage in the span of a few weeks late last year between Google, AWS and Microsoft. Heck, even Rackspace, which touts its fanatical support rather than low prices, got into the act a little bit later. Look for this sort of one-upsmanship (one-downsmanship?) to continue as these extremely well-funded and highly motivated competitors angle to get your workloads on their respective clouds. For the discerning IT buyer, whether she’s at a startup or a Fortune 100 company, that is only good news. Photo courtesy of  Flickr user Official U.S. Navy Imagery Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Forecasting the future cloud computing marketThere is more to Node.js than buzzTakeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data    
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You probably don’t need to know how a calculator makes two plus two equal four, or how your favorite smartphone app works, but the way the background software is implemented can make a big difference to the output. Slight rounding errors or slow load times in these cases might be annoying, but when you scale up to big data modeling, for instance, you might want to take a closer look at the software running your calculations before you click go. Blind trust in black box, or click-and-run, software is a growing problem in science, according to a commentary published Thursday in the journal Science, and the concern extends beyond formal research to other domains that use high performance computing. The researchers who addressed the “troubling trend in scientific software use” were motivated by a growing unease that the abundance of powerful software is letting scientists derive answers without a thorough understanding of what the software is doing. Software snafus have been responsible for some high-profile data misinterpretations and retractions. This wouldn’t normally cause a blip on the average citizen’s radar, but now a lot of these scientific conclusions have real-world implications, from climate modeling and weather forecasting to high volume financial trading. In any domain using big data, misplaced trust in the power of software can be problematic, particularly when the decision makers don’t know what the software they are using is doing, said lead author Lucas Joppa of Microsoft Research. So what does ecology have to do with any of this? Joppa is an ecologist by training, and works on computational techniques in that field that may also have applications for big data more broadly. He and his colleagues surveyed scientists in a sub-field of ecology — species distribution modeling (SDM) — to find out how they choose software and how well they understand its inner workings. “Lots of SDM techniques are only available as computational methods, but there is a lot of discourse going on in the literature about whether the methods themselves are correct,” said Joppa. Scientists use SDM to forecast where plants and animals will be in the future given current numbers, known habitats, and climate change. It’s a niche area of research, but the disquieting survey results should be noted in any domain where forecasting is done by plugging data into software. Only 8 percent of the more than 400 scientists who responded had validated their modeling software against other methods. “The number speaks for itself,” said Joppa. “The real crux of the problem is the results from software being published in a peer-reviewed journal, versus the software itself having been peer-reviewed,” which is rare. Software packages, whether proprietary or not, are often black box systems that can’t be opened and inspected. Even if you can get under the proverbial hood, like with open source software, said Joppa, most people will still have no idea what they are looking at, or how to judge its quality. To top it all off, having confidence in what your software is doing results in a massive computational catch-22: how do you know the software is giving you the right answer, if you can’t get the answer without running the software? The level of confusion over what algorithms are doing in the SDM field is illustrated by a debate over which of two statistical techniques is superior. It turns out, Joppa explained, that the two techniques were mathematically equivalent, but the ways they were implemented in software resulted in big predictive differences. This sort of mix-up isn’t surprising given the messy nature of software development (if you can even call it that) in research environments. Joppa lauded efforts like Software Carpentry that teach scientists basic software fundamentals for better programming, and said the days of getting a doctorate by merely pushing a button are over. “Scientists themselves can learn a bare minimum of software engineering,” said Joppa. On the flip side, he said computer science students should have more exposure to scientific methods. “People with traditional software engineering training become uncomfortable with the way scientists want to work with software, where the design and specs are constantly changing. The way that scientific software is built is fundamentally different from consumer apps.” Developers of scientific software, like MathWorks or SAS, may want to watch this space. If Joppa’s suggestions are implemented, journals may start requiring that even proprietary software be opened up for inspection and peer-review. Nearly half of the surveyed ecologists report using free statistical language R as their primary software, so maybe there is hope yet, both for open, inspectable code, and for computational science becoming more accessible while yielding trustworthy, high impact results. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. 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If data journalism means the analysis of and reporting on data sets that already exist, sensor journalism goes a step further: Organizations and journalists using sensor technology to create their own real-time data and then report on it. But is sensor journalism feasible or sustainable? Columbia University plans to explore these issues, Emily Bell, director of the Columbia J-School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, said at Betaworks Betaday on Thursday. To that end, the Tow Center will run a weekend workshop on sensor journalism in June and will fund a few projects. And next year, Bell said, the Tow Center plans to run a “sensor newsroom classroom” in partnership with the architecture school. Some of the challenges are technical: How can journalists and newsrooms build their own low-cost sensing techniques? WNYC’s John Keefe, for instance, built a cicada tracker to figure out exactly when the expected cicada plague will hit New York City this summer. Can other organizations do the same thing? “How do you get the really efficient things from sense networks in a way that helps you do human reporting?” Bell said. The techniques also create ethical questions: “We are moving into this world where the line between transparency and privacy is constantly in tension. When you can survey everything, what do you report?” “Practically, we’re very close to being able to survey most of what people do most of the time,” Bell told Betaworks’ Andrew McLaughlin. “I come from Europe, where everything is solved by regulation, In America, the momentum is very much with business rather than the individual. [Google CEO] Eric Schmidt said at the journalism school the other day that privacy is all about making good judgment calls about what you put online. That’s just not true. You can’t make adequate judgment calls to control your own data. That’s only going to get worse.” Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.    
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Following Larry Page’s impromptu speech and Q&A session at Google I/O, long time Apple observer/writer John Gruber wrote a post entitled Google Versus, wherein he questioned Page’s feel-good commentary. Dave Winer also pointed out this double talk. Here are three comments by Page that got Dave and John riled up: Let’s be positive Every story I read about Google is us versus some other company or some stupid thing. Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero sum. Except Microsoft is not playing ball The Web is not advancing as fast as it should be. Certainly, we struggle with companies like Microsoft. We would like to see more open standards and more people involved in those ecosystems. I wouldn’t grade the industry well with where we have gotten to. And that other Larry is just greedy We’ve had a difficult relationship with Oracle, including having to appear in court. Money is obviously more important to them than any collaboration.” Google has been fighting with Microsoft for a while and well, Oracle is a tough adversary, especially when it comes to Java. While I am complete agreement with Page’s general sentiment about opportunities and the importance of being positive, I think Larry (and all other technology industry leaders) should actually practice what they preach if they want others to follow. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM ProWhat the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industryReport: How Mobile Cloud Computing Will Change Tech    
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Google’s effort to unify its messaging platforms isn’t done yet. The new Hangouts app, introduced on Wednesday at the Google I/O developer event, will soon see SMS integration. Community Manager for Hangouts and Chat, Dori Storbeck, confirmed in a Google+ thread that SMS support is “coming soon” and is one of the most requested features. The Verge also noted that the new Google Play Services supports SMS, likely to receive or send game play requests to other users. After installing the new Hangouts app for iOS and also using the service on my Chromebook Pixel, bringing Chat, Talk and Hangout features all together is a welcome experience. And one that’s long overdue as Google has had several overlapping message services not long after Android arrived on the scene. Oddly, at least to me, is that Google Voice hasn’t been talked about in any of the message unification efforts. This addition of SMS for Hangouts, which makes sense, is what has me wondering where Google Voice fits in to Google’s grand plans. Since it’s not a true VoIP service, maybe its outside the technical bounds of Hangouts. But traditional SMS is handled by cellular networks and it’s clearly in the scope of Hangouts if it’s coming soon. As a result, Google Voice still feels like the unloved child in Google’s family of services. I actually use Google Voice to make calls through my computer when working, which essentially are VoIP calls, at least for part of the transmission; the calls originate on my Chromebook over Wi-Fi or LTE. I do this through what used to be Google Talk — there’s a phone icon to place the call. Perhaps Google is simply leaving well enough alone with Google Voice until data networks mature further and voice over LTE takes root. For now, however, the service just seems left behind while all other Google messaging features are growing up. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The fourth quarter of 2012 in mobilePodcast: Mobile winners and losers in 2012 and what to expect in 2013Forecast: the converged mobile messaging market    
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It’s been almost two decades since Peter Shor came up with a a breakthrough algorithm for finding the prime factors of a number with a quantum computer, sparking great interest in quantum computing. But commercial adoption has been pretty much nonexistent. On Thursday, though, Google came forward with news that it’s launching a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab that will include a quantum computer, apparently making it the second company to pay for a quantum computer. The development suggests that quantum computing could finally be taking off. Earlier this year Lockheed Martin shared details of its implementation of a D-Wave Systems quantum computer, which reportedly cost $10 million: The contractor is using the computer to develop new aircraft, radar and space systems. Now Google is taking steps at incorporating more quantum computing into its operations with the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, which will be located at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Researchers from the Universities Space Research Association will be able to use the machine 20 percent of the time, Forbes reports. That could lead to lots of interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration. For Google, though, the goal of the initiative is to make strides in machine learning, according to a Thursday Google Research blog post. The best results could trickle down to end users, perhaps in search results and speech-recognition applications. Quantum computing could mean smarter smartphones Google has already assembled machine-learning algorithms that involve quantum elements, Hartmut Neven, a Google director of engineering, explained in the post: One produces very compact, efficient recognizers — very useful when you’re short on power, as on a mobile device. Another can handle highly polluted training data, where a high percentage of the examples are mislabeled, as they often are in the real world. It’s not hard to imagine how quantum computing could inform machine learning on a smartphone with just a drop of battery life left. It could be that a smarter smartphone one day will take a minuscule amount of input and determine with a high probability who a user wants to talk to or what information it needs right away, rather than forcing the user to cycle through a string of commands and risking the death of the battery altogether. The applications might have arisen after Google’s earlier partnership with D-Wave, which came to light in a different blog post from Neven in 2009. Google has already used machine learning to recognize faces and other things in photos and videos. New technology Google executives talked about at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco on Wednesday also appears to use machine learning to stitch together photos and clean them up. What Google has learned so far is the best results come from blending regular binary computing using ones and zeros with quantum style computing. Quantum computing accommodates the space between a one and a zero with quantum bits of information, or qubits. It can express likelihood as well as take shortcuts by approximating when handling certain kinds of workloads. Given what Google has observed thus far, it could decide to build hardware combining quantum and classical computing capabilities. For now, though, Google is diving deeper into quantum computing with the D-Wave machine. The move could kick off a sort of arms race for webscale companies to buy quantum computers and come up with new notions by way of probabilistic logic. In this way, Google could help push the development of quantum computing much like its invention of MapReduce changed the way firms do distributed data processing. In any case, quantum computing has a long way to go before reaching commercial viability. That could take decades (so far it has). But because the organization at the helm of the quantum research is Google and not IBM or Bell Labs, regular people could start seeing much more of the advantages in just a few years’ time, which in turn could drive commercialization. Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user pixeldreams.eu. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionTakeaways from the second quarter in cloud and dataGigaOM Euro 20: the European startups to watch    
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I read a great Tumblr post today. No idea who wrote it, but it’s an expression of extreme annoyance with Google, PayPal and other online behemoths that have grown way beyond the “startup” stage but that still don’t provide proper, human customer support because it’s hard to scale at low cost. “It’s easy to make big money when you get to keep all the profits,” the post points out, before complaining about the impact of these low-outlay ways on real people: “Relying on automated support systems is no longer adequate. As the amount of online fraud grows over the years, automated systems are becoming less efficient. There is no accurate measure for that, however it’s anecdotally known that it’s more common nowadays for Google to shut down perfectly well-standing and long-standing AdSense accounts for invalid activity without providing the actual reasons for shutdown. Ditto for PayPal withholding the funds of customers.” We all marvel at how quickly these companies grow and at their bounteous financials, but we don’t often enough sit back and consider why it is these companies can perform so well. A huge part of that is down to enabling technologies, from the web itself to cloud computing and, yes, natural language processing and other technologies that will make automated customer service more useful and reliable. But that’s only part of the picture. At this stage in the game, these companies are playing by different rules to everyone else. In the context of the post I mentioned above, customers are not customers: instead, they are users. If the exchange of money isn’t central to the relationship, as it is with an e-commerce operation such as Amazon, then customer support becomes an afterthought – after all, most of the users aren’t paying with anything more than their personal data anyway, so what should they expect? But that’s only one facet. Pull back, and this iconoclasm becomes even more concerning. Taxing times I’m not suggesting that Amazon, Google and Facebook are breaking any laws, but they certainly don’t pay much tax either, relative to their revenues. In Europe, this is becoming a big issue, which is unsurprising given our current age of austerity. After all, if small businesses are struggling in this economic and technological environment, is it really fair that the megacorps taking their business away (particularly in retail) are so big and international that they don’t have to play by the same rules? Bear in mind that Amazon is supposedly operating at a loss. The company’s margins are so low that it can destroy most competition, yet it somehow continues to expand. If the company paid taxes at the rate that small businesses need to, this situation would be entirely unsustainable. The economic benefits for anyone other than Amazon are sometimes hard to see. Small businesses that would have paid their taxes in full are going under, and those public revenues are not being replaced. Of course these web giants are based somewhere – usually the U.S. – but their money often goes through a dizzying series of countries before it finds some tax haven where it can rest quietly. And from the companies’ perspective, why not? They operate everywhere; they can pick and choose. That can sometimes lead to a sense that the web giants don’t feel beholden to any particular society. Consider these extraordinary quotes from Larry Page at yesterday’s Google I/O Q&A session: “The pace of change in the world is increasing… We haven’t adapted mechanisms to deal with that. Maybe some of our old institutions like the law and so on aren’t keeping up with the rate of change that we’ve caused through technology. The laws when we went public were 50 years old. The law can’t be right if it’s 50 years old, that’s before the internet… “We also haven’t built mechanisms to allow experimentation. There’s many exciting things you can do that you just can’t do because they’re illegal or against regulation. That makes sense, we don’t want our world to change too fast, but maybe we should set aside a small part of the world. I like going to Burning Man, for example, that’s an environment where people can try different things.” Some have mocked Page for “wanting to start his own country”, but that risks missing Page’s point. He just sees Google as a special case that should enjoy at least limited exemptions from the rules that apply to smaller, pre-internet-style concerns. “If your rules weren’t written for us,” he seemed to say, “they shouldn’t apply to us.” Competition I sympathize with this view to a very limited extent: the pace of technological change does mean that regulators and legislators need to speed up their own operations if they want to keep up. Where Page and I part company, though, is that he wants Google to be hassled less and I want to see, for example, new data privacy laws that put meaningful and practical limitations on what companies such as his can do. The great benefits of the free market system are supposed to be its enabling of genuine, merit-based competition and the resulting benefits to society. What we’re seeing here is a reduction in competition and variety, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few giants, and the rise of players so big as to feel untouchable. The lack of genuine customer service mentioned at the start of this article is both symptomatic of this situation and one of its many drivers. That sense of invulnerability and entitlement will affect us all, not only in terms of public finances, but in other fields too, such as data protection. These companies are worth more than many countries, and you can tell they know it. In short, I’m worried about where this industry is going. I’m all for progress – I’d have chosen a strange field of journalism if that wasn’t the case – but perhaps it’s time to aim for a wider evaluation of what’s going on here. It’s not about being positive or negative. It’s about making sure that the massive societal changes this industry is effecting work out for the benefit of society as a whole. After all, that’s why many of us are in this game to start with. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. 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A lot of people who own smartphones never bother to link them to their home Wi-Fi networks when available, according to virtual hotspot provider Devicescape. Since a good deal of smartphone usage occurs at home, tapping into home Wi-Fi would not only save these folks data plan charges, but more often than not, provide them with a faster more resilient connection than their operator’s 3G or 4G networks. The problem is there are a lot of people who don’t realize their phones will link to their home networks — they either can’t figure out how to configure their devices’ Wi-Fi settings or they’ve disabled their Wi-Fi from the get go. Devicescape on Thursday said it has developed a new bit of software that attempts to lure those customers onto their own home networks. Called Personal Curator, the smartphone client utilizes Devicescape’s radio management and network detection technologies, along with a machine-learning algorithm, to identify when a user is at home and a wireless network is available. If the smartphone’s Wi-Fi radio is disabled, Personal Curator will activate it and prompt the user to connect, walking them through the device configuration process. Devicescape claims that as many as 30 percent of smartphones never connect to an available home Wi-Fi network, which would mean an enormous quantity of traffic that could easily be shunted onto a cheap broadband connection is instead heading toward the cell towers. That number seems high, but it’s not entirely out of the question. I’ve configured the Wi-Fi settings of many a friend or relative who never bothered to do it themselves. Devicescape is selling Personal Curator to carriers, who would pre-install it on the smartphones they sell and have the biggest vested interest in coaxing customers on to as many Wi-Fi networks as possible. Devicescape estimates operators would save $631 in lifetime network data delivery costs for each subscriber that it can lure onto a home network. Frankly, that figure is a bit absurd. It assumes that customers who don’t use their home Wi-Fi today will wander the world blithely unaware of Wi-Fi for the rest of their lives. It also assumes all smartphone users are created equal (More technically savvy users who consume more data tend to be more aware of their device’s networking capabilities). Still, for Devicescape’s core customers, Personal Curator could be a very attractive service. The company’s whole business model is designed around the idea of providing cheap ubiquitous Wi-Fi to carriers. Through crowdsourcing, it has identified and mapped 12 million open access points around the world, and its client software automatically links to those nodes whenever they’re available. It counts among its customers MetroPCS (now part of T-Mobile USA and mobile virtual network operators like Republic Wireless, which offer subscribers cheap unlimited data plans. Any packet those operators ship over the unlicensed airwaves is a direct cost savings. And once connected to home Wi-Fi, smartphone owners would likely use the heck out of it. A recent Sandvine report shows that 20 percent of all traffic traversing home broadband connections comes from a phone or tablet. Devicescape has grown considerably in the last year. It now sells its products to eight carriers in North America and Europe (including U.S. Cellular and Bouygues Telecom). It has also struck deals with Intel and Microsoft to embed its software directly into the former’s Ultrabook and tablet connection manager and the latter’s WP8 software. Devicescape revealed today that it has now managing 1.5 billion Wi-Fi connections monthly, a 50 percent increase in 12 months. Based in San Bruno, Calif., Devicescape hopes to draw more attention to itself next week at North America’s biggest mobile trade show, CTIA Wireless. It’s releasing an Android app called Magnifi CTIA that will let anyone connected to thousands of Las Vegas access points in its curated virtual network for the duration of the show. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Mobile 2012 and beyond12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012CES 2012: a recap and analysis    
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Did you know that patients with heart stent surgeries who are depressed and don’t take their antidepressants triple their health care costs compared to similar patients who take their antidepressants? Our client did not. With databases full of conditions, treatments and patient characteristics, they had been busy examining other things. This particular question, with an interesting answer, had simply not been asked. For a real-world example of automatically evaluating a million variable combinations, see this case study with McKinsey that we are presenting at StrataRx. Excerpt: “From an analytical perspective, due to the large number of potential variable combinations, it is impossible to preconceive of and evaluate all of the potential hypotheses.” In traditional analytics, manual pattern evaluation is the weak link that slows speed-to-insight and risks overlooking key insights. In an hour, humans can only explore dozens out of the millions of potential patterns hidden in the data. In minutes, BeyondCore explores those millions of possibilities, conducts rigorous statistical tests and presents the most important insights, without the risk of human bias or error. Users then examine the short list to further refine the most relevant insights. Competitors who focus on building faster and more powerful tools for human experts to ask specific questions of their data are simply missing the point. BeyondCore’s automated algorithms test, rank and present the very best patterns your data has to offer. There is a fundamental difference between merely answering your questions and discovering questions with useful answers. BeyondCore identifies the best questions to ask.     
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